Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr

Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr

Note

-- On File Layout

Each 1ac below contains a different “fugitive poetic.” The explanation of that idea can be found in the 1ac Tremblay-McGraw evidence, which is located in almost every version of the 1ac. Thank you to Elijah Smith from Wake Forest, who originally found and produced this evidence at Wake Forest and whose vision and scholarship made creating this file possible.

Some of the 1acs utilize music as a form of poetics, such as the song “Cold War” by

Janelle Monae, “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone, “Ronald Reagan” by Killer Mike or

“Power” by Kanye West.

Other 1acs use different literary devices. The ‘Moten’ 1ac cites the story of Uncle

Tolliver to explain fugitivity, and “Black Privilege” plays a poem by Crystal Valentine.

Researching how different artists perform fugitivity was one of the most fun parts of this file. If you’d like to be creative and do this on your own there is a section called

‘Build Your Own 1ac’ that contains some of the various parts you would use to help you construct your argument.

-- On File Construction

Thank you to Tamara Morrison from U Prep who brought the idea to the lab and put in tons of extra hours in the library to make it happen. I think her note here is excellent and right to the point;

“This is a file that we put a lot of work, thought, and passion into so instead of miscategorizing the arguements you should try to meet up with one of the contributors to understand it more. Everyone is a fugitive in their own little way so you should try to find your own connection to it and capitalize on that.”

To follow Tamara’s advice, holler anytime with questions or ideas to any of these folks, who all did great work on this file;

Danielle Zitro from Austin SFA

Isaac Cui from Liberal Arts and Sciences (LBJ)

Kristina Curtiss from Traverse City Central

Nicolas Williams from Henderson

Riley Franklin from Dulles

Ragul Manoharan from Little Rock Central

Ross Fitzpatrick from Barstow

Simone Schwartz-Lombard from Notre Dame

Tamara Morrison from U Prep

**additional thanks to DJ Williams and Peyton Woods from Little Rock Central for their contributions as well, all the more impressive given that this was work they added on top of their work in their own lab.

1acs

1ac—Janelle Monae

~Janelle Monae - Cold War

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqmORiHNtN4

So you think I'm alone?

But being alone's the only way to be

When you step outside

You spend life fighting for your sanity

This is a cold war

You better know what you're fighting for

This is a cold war

Do you know what you're fighting for?

If you wanna be free?

Below the ground's the only place to be

Cause in this life

You spend time running from depravity

This is a cold war


This is a cold war


This is a cold war


This is a cold war


Bring wings to the weak and bring grace to the strong

May all evil stumble as it flies in the world

All the tribes comes and the mighty will crumble

We must brave this night and have faith in love

I'm trying to find my peace

I was made to believe there's something wrong with me

And it hurts my heart

Lord have mercy, ain't it plain to see?

This is a cold war


This is a cold war


KELLINDOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Do you know it's a cold, cold war?

Do you, do you... do you?

Bye, bye, bye, bye

Don't you cry when I say goodbye

~Janelle Monae - Cold War (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqmORiHNtN4)

With

her performance as a black women and her reference to the cold war Janelle creates a duality of everywhere-ness and concrete experience

REDMOND, 11

(Shana L. is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She received her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University.

Her research and teaching interests include the African Diaspora, Black political cultures, music and popular culture. "Marking the Margins: Janelle Monáe's 'Cold War' Landscape":“This Safer Space:

Janelle Monae’s´ "Cold War"”, Post45 Conference, Roundtable/Panel, Refereed Paper, Rock and Roll

Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, Post45, Spring 2011 )

"Cold War" facilitates and relies on a reimagining of the Cold War; it is no longer an international

struggle over the expansion of communism, nor is it fought in hidden theaters of influence abroad.

Monae´ s treatment locates the contest at the level of individual experience, confirming President

Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1953 statement that the Cold War was a battle for "the soul of man himself."

Monae's reinvention of the war makes the soul ánd struggles of interiority central to the ongoing battles fought anywhere within the reach of her voice. She accomplishes this revision through the use

of her body—a black, female, and explicitly working class body. Her black and white stage uniform may be stripped away in this scene but its imprint is everywhere present as we examine her flesh: a body made from the labors of a janitor mother and garbage-truck-driving father. This body is now the landscape for cold war battles and marks a new frontier in its debates. "On the one hand," according to McKittrick, raced and gendered geographies "reach far beyond the nation or existing maps, and on the other hand, rest on very specific locations such as black women's bodies, sexualities and

subjectivities" (2000b: 225). Monae´s spatial dislocation of the Cold War therefore does not fix it in any one locale but instead highlights its duality as a radical everywhere-ness and a concrete

experience by mapping its negotiation onto the nonnationalized body of the black woman.

Thus affirm the 1ac as a performance to counter-gaze the state.

Freedom isn’t fiat; it is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the location of the body or an abstract vision of social change.

Monae’s narrative creates a space that fosters different methods of state deconstruction.

REDMOND, 11





Monae´s questions to us throughout the song are met with definitive statements as she narrates a story of dispossession and alienation. Her second verse, which argues, "If you want to be free / below the ground's the only place to be / 'cause in this life / you spend time running from depravity," details a space not of death ("below the ground") but of safety that is shared by a self-selected group who choose freedom over flight ("running from depravity"). It is an underground, a shelter, where political

consciousness might best be fostered and utilized safe from the culture wars fought outside. Monae’ s spatial realignments signal a powerful departure from conventional narratives of black suffering; unlike much of the disaster and tourist photography of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which purports to display black reality without allowing the subject to speak, we are forced, through viewing her moving image, to brace ourselves for her next utterance as she looks us in the eye and uses her emotional intensity to displace our intentions for her body. Through this effort she becomes the subject through which the forces under consideration are elucidated. Raw emotion punctuates this possession; at the moment of revealing, "I was made to believe there's something wrong with me / And it hurts my heart," Monae´ s eyes well up with tears. She breaks character as the emotions escalate, missing the lines of her playback, and shaking her head and hands in acknowledgement of the emotions that originally inspired the song's composition and that are now replayed in the act of performance. This rupture dismisses the standard ventriloquism of music video lip synchronization in favor of vulnerability before a knowing audience, signaling her investment in using her own "Cold War" for new ends: it is no longer a contained project (war) or a historical object (music video) but it is, through her, an entire field of play and performative engagement that traverses period, ideology, and method. This radical act of self-exposure spurns the longstanding surveillance practices of the United States and offers an alternative to the subterfuge used by oppressed peoples.

Monae’s sound takes advantages of social movements and leave an opportunity for future one

REDMOND, 11





Monae´ has developed, within a relatively short period of time,a sound/sight corpus of black

feminist knowledges that take advantage of social movement methods—notably the use of her own experience as evidence—to inspire and instruct those around her. Her embodied protest challenges the popular black political cultures of the contemporary moment, which have been deftly disciplined by formal political structures like the Obama White House; in the process, these actors dismiss the rich heterogeneity of the black public sphere by conceding too much of their intellectual authority to those whose sociopolitical strategies long ago diverged from traditions of black struggle.

14

Monae s challenge to those who have forgotten, lost, or ignored their own voice and agency, and her maintenance of black diasporic arts traditions in which "the

cultural realm is always in play and already politically significant terrain," is a "fantastic" disruption to black political lethargy, and evidences an intelligent design rooted in black feminist

constructions that wed body to mind and experience to history (Iton). It is within these methods and conjunctions that the future spaces of political possibility might be realized

This space allows black women to not only deconstruct the state, but also patriarchy in order to combat oppression with alternative forms of performance.

REDMOND, 11





Monae´s performance refuses the acts of dissemblance that have long characterized black women's participation in the public sphere. Darlene Clark Hine argues that black women employed dissemblance throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a way to respond to rape, violence, and the threats thereof, thus "creat[ing] the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shield[ing] the truth of their inner lives" (912). These refusals produced a "self-imposed invisibility" that allowed them to "accrue the psychic space and harness the resources needed to hold

their own in the often one-sided and mismatched resistance struggle" (Hine 915). Monáe relies on invisibility in "Cold War," insisting that "Being alone's the only way to be / When you step outside /

you spend life fighting for your sanity."7 Her words echo the sentiments of Mary Church Terrell, who early in the twentieth century announced to her constituency in the National Association of Colored

Women's Clubs that "our peculiar status [as black women] in this country . . . seems to demand that we stand by ourselves" (Hine 917).Monae´s staging of interiority, however, is already undercut by her choice of ae' forum: it is not a platform from which she speaks only to other black women, but a music video that comprised both a sonic announcement to be replayed again and again, and a moving image that catalogs and exposes her for all time to anyone who would watch/listen. There is a dramatic tension here; while Mon´ acknowledges dissemblance as a strategy, she also forestalls its efficacy through that revelation, effectively lifting the veil of secrecy that allowed for black women's sociopolitical subterfuge.

This deconstruction allows us to question history as it affects present structures as well as promoting a free space that advocates for alternative discourse.

REDMOND, 11





Monae´s performative unveiling sensitizes us to questions of truth as the layers of history, identity, and resistance collapse on one another. Yet her engagement with and demand for the rights of access and voice are consistent throughout. Her performance makes the space to critique how dissemblance

may have "contributed to the development of an atmosphere inimical to realizing equal opportunity

or a place of respect"; yet the method of exposure—performance—signals another intervention (Hine

915). The music video, which has offered a platform for display and critique since the 1970s, is used by

Monae´ in "Cold War" as a confessional site, a shelter ae where the struggles of the ordinary black

women described by Hine, and embodied by Monae´ might be discussed and responded to. Too often safe spaces are limited in their availability for the disenfranchised, yet Monáe is able, through various creative and organizing techniques, to construct a "Cold War" free speech zone—a task and location little known during the historical moment that the song references. Her "Cold War" imagination therefore creates an alternative reality that is recognizably different from those of her

contemporaries within the shared "superpublic" described by Richard Iton, in which black bodies and

performances are conspicuous in the visual cultures grown from hip hop and the Internet. Monáe s willingness to challenge history situates her as a spectral figure representing the unfinished work of the past, even as she leads a cohort in the present and envisions a future beyond her own critique.8

Fugitivity exists in our use of language and it’s constant re-reading and re-use. Such a

“freedom” is utopian and fugitive

Tremblay McGraw 10

– Robin Tremblay-McGraw @University of California, Santa Cruz “Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive Recyclopedia of Harryette Mullen’s Writing” MELUS Volume 35, No.2 Summer

2010. Pp 71-94 (Article) Oxford University Press [E.Smith]

Harryette Mullen has published five books of original poetry—Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings

(1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002).

Additionally, she has published two books which reissue her earlier works: Blues Baby: Early Poems

(2002), which reprints Tree Tall Woman and also includes a previously unpublished collection; and

Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-consciously inherits and intervenes in what Kathy Lou Schultz calls the “legacy gone missing” of “avant-garde practice by

African-American women poets” (n. pag.). Mullen is actively engaged in recovering this legacy through her creative, scholarly, and editorial work.1 Poised in the dialectic of what I call “enclosure” (identity, history, and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and “run” (mobility, flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), Mullen’s work plies the tensions between these disparate but mutually dependent poles. From the negotiation of this tension, Mullen produces a formal strategy predicated on the communal participation of others and distinctive among innovative poets—the recyclopedia. Mullen’s writing creates texts that remain open to ambiguity, difficulty, and difference.

Her writing engages in political and social criticism with particular attention to race, gender, and the discourse of the commodity, while it delights in the pleasures of an infinite linguistic jouissance. Many of the critics who have written about Mullen’s work, including Elisabeth A. Frost, Juliana Spahr, Allison

Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex “mixtery” of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen’s attention to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen’s work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen’s work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullen’s “subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein’s] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs” (71). Frost demonstrates Mullen’s rare (“among recent avant-garde poets”) revamping of the

lyric and argues 72 that Mullen “constructs lyric otherwise—as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice” (466). While Spahr asserts that “what has interested me about Mullen’s work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy-

and identity-centered poetry’s concerns with community building and alliance” (115), Cummings points out that “Mullen’s work then has garnered critical adulation not only because it works to synthesize disparate traditions, but because it reflects on that synthesis explicitly” (24). Surveying

Mullen’s body of work as a whole and elaborating on Cummings’s assertion that Mullen selfconsciously refl ects her work’s synthesis of multiple discourses, I contend in addition that Mullen’s writing is characterized by a productive tension between “enclosure” and “run,” between an archive of cultural, linguistic, and historical references, images, and information and the fugitivity that is both a thematics and a formal strategy. Her archive manifests in the form of the palimpsest, or, to use a fi gure that Mullen herself foregrounds, her archive is a recyclopedia. She takes debased, erased, and forgotten histories and found discourses and runs with and recycles them; she invites the reader to participate in this educative process of conservation and production, enclosure and fugitive run. Her work articulates a need for a more equitable ecology, one of acknowledgment and memory, conservation and reuse; she and we as readers are caught up in her recyclopedia, an ongoing poetics of reuse that benefits from the multiple perspectives of a heterogeneous community. The concept of the fugitive in Mullen’s work is connected equally to the history of the United States, the global slave trade, historical strategies of escape for enslaved blacks, and formal methods for escaping and reinventing genre and poetic method. Furthermore, the fugitive is both critical and generative and intimately linked to Mullen’s concept of the recyclopedia. Mullen’s formal strategies explicitly reference the history of the fugitive slave laws. In an interview with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen delineates the connection of the fugitive to her own work: I wanted the poem to have that quality of quick movement from one thing to another, from one subject or thought to another, from one mood or emotion to another. Partly because I wanted things to be in flux, a state of flux, a state of change. If

you stand still too long, they will put chains on you, so you want to keep moving. This is one of the things that is most fascinating to me about the slave narratives I was studying while I was writing my dissertation. The true freedom in the slave narrative is at the point of deciding to escape and the journey north . . . the freedom that people experience is actually when they are on the road, in fl ight.

(par. 25)\ Mullen links the structure of her poetry to the fl ight of the fugitive slave and then connects these movements of fugitivity with freedom. Interestingly, Mullen simultaneously problematizes the effi cacy of such movement and the resultant freedom gained when she further locates the moment of “true freedom . . . at the point of [the slave’s] deciding to escape and . . . journey.” This quote suggests that freedom is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive rather than related

to the location of the body. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive. The diffi culties of fl ight and the frequency of slaves being returned to owners as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Act made the journey north dangerous, exhausting, and subject to failure. Furthermore, in the literature of passing Mullen surveys in her article “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” which explores how whites repress and suppress miscegenation and argues that the racial category of white is predicated on the black, she notes that in texts such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Death is better than slavery.” This is a “recurring refrain in Jacobs’s and other slave narratives, [that] acquires an ironic signifi cance when Benjamin [Jacobs’s lightskinned uncle] dies as a slave, vanishing into the

white race in his third and fi nal escape” (82). For some, freedom means leaving one’s family and community, effectively dying in order to take up a new life as a free person or as a black who passes for white. Historically, flight is a means of escape, but not an unproblematic or uncomplicated means.

Flight and travel (voluntary or not) undertaken by slaves, refugees, exiles, or nomads does not always erase histories but rather sometimes produces a palimpsestic and productive layering. In her doctoral dissertation, Mullen writes about Olaudah Equiano, the son of an African king who was taken into slavery and wrote from England in the eighteenth century. Discussing how “captivity disrupts his life, so that this African child fails to be ritually initiated [via scarifi cation] as an adult member of his tribe,”

Mullen notes that in Equiano’s own discursive production: the displaced African is no blank page, as his reconstruction of early memories goes to show. He is more like a palimpsest, or like the protean

“form of this Narrative.” . . . In the pages of Equiano’s prolifi c narrative, the black body retains its relation to a place of origin, but never acquires a fi xed signifi cation; instead layers of meaning accumulate as the character of the narrator evolves through a series of travels and adventures.

(“Gender” 59) According to Mullen, for Equiano “retrospectively this disruption of cultural continuity is figured as a divine providence that intervenes to open up a new identity and destiny—a destiny constructed out of the individual’s unique interaction with chance and continually changing environments— rather than a predetermined fate or fi xed identity” (60). For some individuals fl ight and “cultural disruption” will enable strategic redefi nitions or recycling and make possible an identity open to change and resignifi cation; flight can create a kind of open archive always sedimented and palimpsestic so that past traces are not erased but available and recontextualized, refi gured and thus open to the future. Individuals and texts constructed out of fugitive fl ight from the law or those that travel across multiple cultural communities constitute the “recyclopedias” of disparate experiences, ideologies, and discourses. In the recyclopedia, fugitive fl ight rewrites identity by enabling a return to and reappropriation of the past. The neologism recyclopedia in the title of Mullen’s collection of three of her previous books is a combination of recycle and encyclopedia. Recycle references reuse, suggesting “to use again in the original form,” and the taking of intractable “used” or “waste” material and making it suitable for something new. Pedia recalls encyclopedia and its Greek root, paideia, meaning education. Mullen’s neologism clearly articulates a project that is both process and product.

It entails a cyclical reuse of given materials and a process that takes dirty, contaminated, and worthless “waste” materials and turns them into something newly usable. Mullen’s recyclopedia suggests that the continual reuse of materials, even those that construct blacks as dirty, contaminated, and worthless, can serve to identify an original “use” (the racist construction of blacks as waste, for example); her writing enables the critical recycling of problematic materials to produce something new, something with different or oppositional value for writer, reader, history, and the future. Mullen’s recyclopedia constructs fugitive movement as a means of escape from arrest and as

a productive process of remembering and rewriting. Mullen includes in her recyclopedia many diverse materials, yet she is particularly attentive to bringing to the surface the unarticulated, marginalized, nearly lost, and invisible as well as the “used” or “waste” material. Mullen’s recyclopedia enables the sort of activity described by David Scott that opens up “vast possibilities not just of memory but of countermemory; the moral idiom and semiotic registers of remembering against the grain of the history of New World black deracination, subjection, and exclusion” (vi). Such a process entails both identifying and preserving histories and experiences elided and prohibited from official

discourses and simultaneously exposing such discourses’ bad faith. Rather than placing them under

lock and key in order to solidify, arrest, and exclude racist and sexist discourses, Mullen remakes the

encyclopedia—the discourse and its attendant pedagogies—through her recycling of its alphabets, grammars, metaphors, and other tropes. In the process, these discursive tigations reveal the often unmarked and unnamed structurings of various internecine ideologies.

The knowledge here is specifically key. It allows experimental ways of change

Warren and Fassett, 2004

[The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved Theatre Topics

14.2 (2004) 411-430John T. Warren is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and power. Deanna L. Fassett is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San

José State University, where she teaches courses in instructional communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies //liam]

Boal's argument that performance activists and teachers should work against the mystification process, not the myth; work against the struggles, not the hero, reminds us that this sort of performance work is significant precisely because it attempts to destroy not the white person, but rather the illusions, trappings, and power games that make whiteness so powerful. It is the process

of interactive performance that these kinds of workshops foreground that can allow a resistant white participant to engage in a critique of white power and privilege without lapsing into feelings of guilt or self-pity, which can too easily reduce con-versations of race and racism to individual actions without calling out the system that makes those actions possible. These kinds of performances allow the theories and engagements with critical race theory to move participants in ways that matter — through listening, understanding, and then recreating their qualities in ways that speak to them. This mode of embodiment moves theory through their bodies, effecting change in experiential ways.

The role of the ballot is to vote for the team that best creates a space of undercommons to deconstruct and overthrow anti-black structures of power

1ac—Moten

The history of domestic surveillance is inseparable from the history of slavery. Lists of human cargo, plantation inventories, and diaries were used by masters to govern slaves, to impose domination onto unwilling bodies. Disciplinary power utilizing information technology such as slave patrols or wanted posters functioned to create a racially stratified security system, imposing a compulsory visibility upon the black body as communicated through the literacy of the White body—it is from this that contemporary policing and surveillance arises. Simone Browne, in 2012, explains that…

Browne 2012

–

PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone; “Race and Surveillance”

“Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies”; Google Book; https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=F8nhCfrUamEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA72&dq=race+and+sur veillance+Simone+browne&ots=y_cvDcnYS0&sig=ZmhtR3WJI2mp_clVI6qwScZDZwQ#v=onepage&q=r ace%20and%20surveillance%20Simone%20browne&f=false; 7/5/15 || NDW)

According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be traced to the "simple accounts" of slave owners.

Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves.

One example involved the

"General Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the Negro that what you say is the result of reflection."

The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power

, as Michel Foucault tells us, is "exercised through its invisibility," while imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its targets. Disciplinary power

then operated on the enslaved as racialized surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to and that produced them as racial

, and therefore enslave able, subjects. Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system

, a system that relied on

, as Parenti lays out, three " information technologies: the written slave pass

, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters

for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes" when apprehended.

This security system

, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (black) illiteracy",

a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal.

The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were

primarily aimed at a white public

that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts, became a part of the aparatus of surveillance

, and the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating.

In detailing physical desacriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place."

For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for "a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: "sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception." Seth's, or Sall's, duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to self-

identify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white parent) or a "Quadroon Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery.

Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official with the first US federal census in 1790

. I will retun to the census as a technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an infoprmation technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that required constant policing and oversight

. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of countersurveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned "colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open." "Top eye" here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so as not to appear uppity To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken to." This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a "Technology of Whiteness".

Slaves were not, however, passive objects implicated within the play of this biopolitical endeavor. Consider the story of Uncle Toliver, as told in Leon Litwack’s

“Been in the Storm So Long”:

In Nansemond County, Virginia, a slave known as Uncle Toliver had been indiscreet enough to pray aloud for the Yankees. The master’s two sons ordered him to kneel in the barnyard and pray for the Confederacy. But this stubborn old man prayed even louder for a Yankee triumph. With growing exasperation, perhaps even bewilderment, the two sons took turns in whipping him until finally the slave, still murmuring something about the Yankees, collapsed and died. (Litwak 1979, 30)

1

One might conclude that Uncle Toliver’s death was a nihilistic, tragic event—that his state of subjugation was so entrenched that nothing meaningful could come from it.

Yet, the aporia of the slave’s unintelligible actions, of property’s critique against

Property, creates a bewilderment, a disorientation of the Master that allows for the possibility of agency. Fred Moten notes in 2004 that…

Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2004

(Fred, “Knowledge of

Freedom,” The New Centennial Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2004, p. 285-287, ProjectMUSE, IC)

But this is a simple passage, one designed to provide some sense of the violent imposition of silence that marks slavery and will have marked every disaster, every violent assault on or ritual destruction

1 Qtd. In Moten 2004, “Knowledge of Freedom,” p. 282

of the whole. We might gather from this simple recounting, this simple “objectivizing archivation,” that slavery is that institution—violent and ritual dehumanization is that event—wherein nothing can be said, whereof nothing can be said, which arrives for us, even now, enveloped in the silence that accompanies the absence of specificity, the lack of an immediate resonance. But to speak here of simplicity—of a text, a passage, that tells, simply, the barest story and unearths, simply, the smallest remnant of a life that gives us, simply, an indication of the nature of a mode of being—is a matter that is, of course, not so simple. The passage, which can only be called “Uncle Toliver,” is more than a subject and more than a text; and its transmission of the whole of Uncle Toliver to us is far from simple. It arrives through various arrangements of the story of Uncle Toliver, the story of a man who could not tell his story as a matter of law, and as a matter of the materiality of his life and death. But the mediation that gives us that story does not obscure the position and situation spoken through his silence. It is spoken so profoundly that the entirety of the Enlightenment tradition and its critical other is invoked, reopened, revised, improvised. The mediated and reconstructed voicing of the slave speaks through the vernacular and for freedom. The mediated and reconstructed voice of a man held as property arrives to us as a critique of Property. As the passage arrives once more, hear again its simplicity in a repetition that serves to further obl/iterate (ob/literate) that simplicity: the subject, the text—that which is more than the person and more than the text—of Uncle Toliver haunts and infuses us.

In Nansemond County, Virginia, a slave known as Uncle Toliver had been indiscreet enough to pray aloud for the Yankees. The master’s two sons ordered him to kneel in the barnyard and pray for the

Confederacy. But this stubborn old man prayed even louder for a Yankee triumph. With growing exasperation, perhaps even bewilderment, the two sons took turns in whipping him until finally the slave, still murmuring something about the Yankees, collapsed and died.

How is this strange arrival possible? What is its significance for us today in the midst of an attempt to provide a desperately needed re/presentation of liberation within an argument for the necessity of something other than either a rejection of, or an indifference to, or a convergence with the (old or given) Enlightenment?

Ensemble, figured in and improvised through the ethical mediation of the Enlightenment’s critical opening of the whole, is the improvisation of the singular identities of Litwack and Uncle Toliver, and the totality which is generated by lingering in the music that airily fills the space between them. They speak in ensemble and are written there in a moment at which we are given, through the mediation of improvisation, the whole of the history of the whole, and the whole of the history of singularist (and differentiated) totalizations of the whole. Uncle Toliver is, once more, the autobiography of ensemble and the history of an ensemble voicing and agency; it is not the recording of a differentiated, repressed, and oppressed ego by another ego in search of affirmation. Uncle Toliver is the reality which invocations of naive and idiomatic writing, or calls for a voicing-towards-agency, or overlordly assertions of the whole only imagine within the inevitable return to the best and worst of the

Enlightenment that poststructuralism and identity politics must make. Uncle Toliver prepares the ground for the real formulation of a more than discursive ethics; we are propelled toward that view of the world that allows our knowledge of the passage, a view that demands a particular way of being in the world. In other words, our attention to ensemble, as it exists in and as Uncle Toliver, activates and improvises—keeps faith with— ensemble. It is an attention that will have always moved through the

interminable attention to differentiating singularity or homogenizing totality that has always foreclosed the possibility of a genuine agency. Agency is in the tradition of Uncle Toliver.

Uncle Toliver’s narrative is part of a chain of recitation that moves from a never fully unveiled originary encounter to the specter of an impossible encounter to come, the encounter in the future that would mark the impossible justice of a strange, oppositional resolution. But the oppositional resolution that the bridge or passage would mark falls before its own form. Descent, not oscillation; descent, not the asymmetrical tensions and reemergent subjectivities of a gaze; descent, as in the future resonances of variations of an unknown tongue.

Vote affirmative to recognize the fugitive politics of Uncle Toliver.

Vote affirmative to acknowledge that the United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance of fugitive bodies.

Vote affirmative to endorse fugitivity.

Fugitivity is not simply opposition to or transgression of the social but, rather, functions in a zone of indeterminacy that disrupts the relationship between knowledge and resistance—it is through this space of unintelligibility that blackness can find social life within social death. Moten, in 2008, continues…


(Fred, “The Case of

Blackness,” Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2, Spring 2008, p. 178-179, ProjectMUSE, IC)

**gender modified

I’ll begin with a thought that doesn’t come from any of these zones, though it’s felt in them, strangely, since it posits the being of, and being in, these zones as an ensemble of specific impossibilities:

As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of “being for others,” of which

Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given enough attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw, that outlaws [interdit] any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man [person]. For not only must the black man [person] be black; he [they] must be black in relation to the white man [person].

Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that the proposition has a converse. I say that

this is false. The black man [person] has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man

[person].1

This passage, and the ontological (absence of) drama it represents, leads us to a set of fundamental questions. How do we think the possibility and the law of outlawed, impossible things? And if, as

Frantz Fanon suggests, the black cannot be an other for another black, if the black can only be an other for a white, then is there ever anything called black social life? Is the designation of this or that thing as lawless, and the assertion that such lawlessness is a function of an already extant flaw, something more than that trying, even neurotic, oscillation between the exposure and the replication of a regulatory maneuver whose force is held precisely in the assumption that it comes before what it would contain? What’s the relation between explanation and resistance? Who bears the responsibility of discovering an ontology of, or of discovering for ontology, the ensemble of political, aesthetic, and philosophical derangements that comprise the being that is neither for itself nor for the other? What form of life makes such discovery possible as well as necessary? Would we know it by its flaws, its impurities? What might an impurity in a worldview actually be? Impurity implies a kind of noncompleteness, if not absence, of a worldview. Perhaps that noncompleteness signals an originarily criminal refusal of the interplay of framing and grasping, taking and keeping—a certain reticence at the ongoing advent of the age of the world picture. Perhaps it is the reticence of the grasped, the enframed, the taken, the kept—or, more precisely, the reluctance that disrupts grasping and framing, taking and keeping—as epistemological stance as well as accumulative activity. Perhaps this is the flaw that attends essential, anoriginal impurity—the flaw that accompanies impossible origins and deviant translations.2

What’s at stake is fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic—a movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure. This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression. Part of what can be attained in this zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands a para-ontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance.3 This exchange between matters juridical and matters sociological is given in the mixture of phenomenology and psychopathology that drives Fanon’s work, his slow approach to an encounter with impossible black social life poised or posed in the break, in a certain intransitive evasion of crossing, in the wary mood or fugitive case that ensues between the fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black and as a slippage enacted by the meaning—or, perhaps too “trans-literally,” the (plain[-sung]) sense—of things when subjects are engaged in the representation of objects.

The narrative of Uncle Toliver is always already in the process of continual reinvention, oscillating between the planes of intelligibility and unintelligibility as it is passed down, translated, and transcribed. It is from this unstable and aporic space that we derive the knowledge of freedom and the subjectivity to assert that freedom




Noam Chomsky and others have begun to frame the fundamental questions concerning knowledge of language as an innate endowment activated in the cut (between speech and writing, between inner and outer speech, between silence and sound, between competence and performance, in the interstice that is and engenders rhythm, generated anew and improvised throughout from the strange combination of experience and n[othing]). Knowledge of freedom is also in that cut or hiatus; it’s where Mary Prince is—as if given by the mediating and improvisational force of de Law/d when that force is enacted in the improvised nonexclusionary expansion of humanity. Ellen Butler’s insight into our knowledge of prayer as a particular linguistic mode is also insight into our knowledge of freedom.

And Uncle Toliver’s prayer—uttered in an unknown tongue, given aloud and transmitted through narrative mediation and through a citation and recitation in the rhythmic interstice where ensemble fell—is a citation (one given under the collective name of the Workers of the Writers’ Program of the

Works Project Administration in the State of Virginia) which Litwack names, reigns, showing the mark of that unnamed flowing in his récit, his recitation. But, again, Litwack’s is not some predatory erasure, but the echo of that already extant loss inherent in intelligibility, translation, and transcription, whose presence is and allows the mediational “ethics” of ensemble. (Think of what is lost in the translation from Ellen Butler’s “dialect” to “standard English”: the constitutive cut that separates the Lord and de

Law/d and is transformed but retained in the chain of re-citation that marks the writing of oral history.) Uncle Toliver is the gain and loss in this recording at the end of the chain of recitations which is history, and which here is extended at the end of a chain of narratives, of the kind of narrative wherein knowledge of freedom is given to us and for us. The constellation of these recitations and narratives is where Orwell’s problem (how we know so little given so much evidence) and Plato’s problem (how we know so much given so little evidence) intersect.12 It’s where the questions concerning the law of genre, the strange institution called literature (where the law is lifted, where everything can be said), and the peculiar institution called slavery (where nothing could be said as a matter of a law broken, and reconstituted in the breaking and reconstitution of the law of genre, and the law of the law of genre, and their intersection) converge.

One story told in Nansemond County concerns Uncle Toliver, who had the indiscretion to pray aloud.

When rumor reached the great house that he had been praying for the Yankees, Tom and Henry, sons of the master, told the aged slave to kneel in the barnyard and pray for the Confederates. Uncle

Toliver prayed as loud as he could for a Yankee victory. All day long they kept him there, taking turns in lashing him, but he would not give in. At last he collapsed, still praying, his voice a mumbled jargon.

The only word that could be distinguished was Yankee. Sometime that night, while they were still lashing him, Uncle Toliver died (Negro in Virginia 1994, 209).

So you pause at the recitation of lost names and the mumbled jargon where the rest of Uncle Toliver’s utterance remains unheard. In the space that jargon opens (a space off to the side or out-from-theoutside; an appositional spacing or displacement of the encounter in the interest of a subjectivity whose presence remains to be activated; a space not determined by the zero encounter that ruptures the subject or the nostalgic return to an other subject before the encounter; a space where Uncle

Toliver speaks through Tom and Henry—the sons of the master—and through the Workers of the

Writers’ Project of the Works Project Administration of the State of Virginia, and through Leon Litwak to us: piercing and possessing, disabling and enabling mediation and meditation) the rest is what is left for us to say, the rest is what is left for us to do, in the broad and various echoes of that utterance, our attunement to which assures us that we are “in the tradition.”

Vote affirmative to steal from the academy. Moten and Harney explain in 2004 that…

Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, and Harney, Singapore

Management University professor, 2004

(Fred and Stefano, “The University and the

Undercommons: Seven Theses,” Social Text, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2004, p. 101-102, ProjectMUSE,

IC)

“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today.

This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.

Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history.

Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek

Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.

1ac—Nina Simone

Play – https://youtu.be/D5Y11hwjMNs?t=18s

It will start at: 0:18

Press pause/close tab at: 2:52

It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me.

Yeah, it's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me, ooooooooh...

And I'm feelin' good.

Fish in the sea, you know how I feel

River runnin' free, you know how I feel

Blossom on the tree, you know how I feel

It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me,

And I'm feelin' good

Dragonfly out in the sun, you know what I mean, don't you know,

Butterflies all havin' fun, you know what I mean.

Sleep in peace when day is done: that's what I mean,

And this old world is a new world and a bold world for me...

Stars when you shine, you know how I feel

Scent of the pine, you know how I feel

Yeah, freedom is mine, and I know how I feel…

It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me

And I'm feelin'... good.

-----

Nina Simone’s powerful articulation of freedom first rang out in 1965 but it has echoed as a haunting challenge to the dominant Western episteme of anti-black violence that birthed and sustains domestic surveillance.

We affirm Nina’s Simone’s “Feeling Good” as an act of fugitivity.

Our sampling of Simone is part of a fugitive poetics that joins artists who attempt to mobilize her tradition of social protest and self-definition, a fluid and complex challenge to anti-blackness that can serve as the basis for pedagogy among listeners

Modell, 12

—Amanda Renae, MA thesis in American Studies @ University of South Florida. “"You

Understand Me Now": Sampling Nina Simone in Hip Hop" (2012). Graduate Theses and Dissertations,

University of South Florida Scholar Commons http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4168 --BR

The overarching goal of this research is to explicate the implications of hip hop artists sampling Nina

Simone’s music in their work. By regarding Simone as a critical social theorist in her own right, one can hear the ways that hip hop artists are mobilizing her tradition of socially active self-definition from the

Civil Rights/Black Power era(s) in the post-2000 United States. By examining both the lyrics and the instrumental compositions of Lil Wayne, Juelz Santana, Common, Tony Moon, Talib Kweli, Mary J.

Blige and Will.I.Am, G-Unit and Timbaland, and bearing in mind the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality, this study concludes that the way that these artists employ Simone’s recorded voice in their works oftentimes corresponds to the degree to which they retain her figurative message. While many would assume that these tendencies would correspond with the subgenres of

“mainstream” and “conscious” hip hop, in fact the fluidity and complexity of these artists’ positions in subgenre refutes this essentialist notion. By engaging in an intersectional analysis of the political and personal implications of hip hop sampling, this essay provides a critical interpretation of the ways the cultural products of the “Civil Rights era” still operate in contemporary U.S. society. These operations

are integral to the human rights struggle in which we are all still very much engaged. In 2010,

William Morris Endeavor’s Global Finance and Distribution Group announced plans to produce a biopic of Nina Simone’s life, starring the contemporary “queen of hip hop soul” Mary J. Blige.1

Although production of the film has subsequently been delayed because of scheduling issues with other projects2 the prospect of the project raises an interesting proposition for cultural commentators and the movie-going and music-listening public alike. How is it that this current media superstar will assume the role of such an historically specific figure? Aside from the perfunctory acting classes, piano lessons and vocal training, what does it mean for a black woman in the post-2000 United States to assume the mantle of a cultural giant from the Civil Rights/Black Power era(s) like Nina Simone? In addition, how will the global corporate interests that fund this project shape its production, tone, promotion and reception? And what meaning will audiences gain from it? This is not the first time such questions could be posed of a virtual, intergenerational collaboration between Mary J. Blige and the late Nina Simone. On her 2005 release The Breakthrough Blige features a deceptively powerful track entitled “About You,”3 for which producer Will.I.Am samples Simone’s classic 1965 recording

“Feeling Good.”4 While the way that he samples from the track is fairly distinctive, Will.I.Am is far

from the only hip hop producer to draw from this recording, or Simone’s catalog in general.

Particularly since the singer’s death in 2003, the trend of sampling her music in hip hop has become somewhat pervasive. This trend is significant because Nina Simone articulated an ethic and aesthetic

of social activism and self-definition against controlling images throughout her life and work. This overarching framework ran as a consistent thread throughout her personal/professional life, her performance style, and her music. As a black female musician who grew up singing and playing in church in the rural South, Simone’s rise to fame would have fit neatly into an “authentic” blueswoman typology. However her extensive classical training and tenure at Julliard exploded this essentialist image for her audiences and the popular press during her career.5 Further, her virtuosity established her in circles of classical and jazz criticism, traditionally male-dominated “high culture.” By establishing a public persona outside of what was then acceptable for or expected of a black female singer, Nina

Simone succeeded in defining herself before the eyes and ears of the U.S. and the world. She used her cultural clout to leverage support for the black freedom struggle, performing at various times for the

Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress for Racial Equality, and the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Simone created a self-defined public persona as a black woman activist musician who did not conform to the prevailing images of how she “should” behave. This aesthetic and ethical articulation and practice comprise what I will refer to as Nina

Simone’s “grammar of cultural production,”6 or critical social theory. Although those in the traditional academe do not generally view musicians as intellectual theorists, regarding Nina Simone as a critical social theorist in her own right is essential to preserving the radical subjectivity that she fought so hard to articulate and maintain in her life and work.7 For a hip hop artist, choosing to sample Nina

Simone can be a political or aesthetic decision, or most often a combination of the two. Similarly, hearing a Nina Simone sample can be both a pedagogic and a sensual experience for the listener; as a

Signifyin(g) symbol, the hip hop sample carries only the meaning that a listener ascribes to it.8

However the manner in which these artists sample Simone’s work as well as the nature of the lyrics that accompany their beats can affect the extent to which her critical social theory remains intact. The hip hop artists that sample Simone’s work are mobilizing her tradition of social protest and self-

definition to varying degrees. By retaining Simone’s voice in ways more faithful to her original recordings, these artists also retain her figurative articulation of socially active self-definition against

the constraining matrix of domination. And when they silence or distort Simone’s voice very drastically, they are oftentimes also eschewing her social theory in favor of embodying and propagating the very controlling images that Simone spoke and acted against. The proliferation of these images in hip hop music begs important questions about who has the power to promote them and why. While it would be convenient to type these diverse artists as either “conscious” or

“commercial” rappers who work against or for the matrix of domination, the complexities and fluidities of their work and speech preclude this type of neat typology. Individual artists move fluidly between the sub-genres of “conscious”9 or “mainstream” rap, often in the same composition, and by doing so explode essentialist notions of two- dimensional hip hop voices.

We begin our discussion of domestic surveillance in the same way that domestic surveillance originally came to be in American society—from slavery—the original lists of human cargo, plantation inventories and diaries that were used by masters to govern slaves.

Fugitivity is a challenge to that power matrix—disciplinary power operates through the compulsory visibility of targets—the aff is a challenge to the framework of wanted posters and slave patrols that evolved into modern policing and the domestic surveillance apparatus

Browne 2012

–



According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be traced to the "simple accounts" of slave owners. Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves. One example involved the "General Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the Negro that what you say is the result of reflection." The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as Michel

Foucault tells us, is "exercised through its invisibility," while imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its

targets. Disciplinary power then operated on the enslaved as racialized surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to and that produced them as racial, and therefore enslave able, subjects.

Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system, a system that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three "information technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes" when apprehended. This security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (black) illiteracy", a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts, became a

part of the aparatus of surveillance, and the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place." For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for "a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state:

"sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception." Seth's, or Sall's, duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white parent) or a "Quadroon Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official with the first US federal census in 1790. I will retun to the census as a technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that required

constant policing and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned "colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open." "Top eye" here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so as not to appear uppity To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the gruesome beating and murder of 14year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken to." This notice records

Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a "Technology of

Whiteness".

Our performance is an act of poetics from a “legacy gone missing,” a strategy that both utilizes enclosure and run, that is here but is not here, that is there but is not

there, visible but not visible.

We begin with a radically different interpretation of freedom. Freedom from surveillance isn’t achieved when the NSA dissolves or the PATRIOT Act is reversed, nor is the fugitive simply imagined or demanded as a concept in the 1ac.

Fugitivity and freedom exists in our use of language and it’s constant re-reading and re-use as a way of knowing the world. Freedom isn’t achieved or experienced when a plan is fiated—it is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the location of the body or an abstract vision of social change.

Such a “freedom” is utopian and fugitive





(1991), (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002). Additionally, she has published two books which reissue her earlier works: Blues Baby: Early Poems (2002), which reprints

Tree Tall Woman and also includes a previously unpublished collection; and Recyclopedia: Trimmings,

S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-consciously inherits and intervenes in what

Kathy Lou Schultz calls the “legacy gone missing” of “avant-garde practice by African-American women poets” (n. pag.). Mullen is actively engaged in recovering this legacy through her creative, scholarly, and editorial work.1 Poised in the dialectic of what I call “enclosure” (identity, history, and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and “run” (mobility, flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), Mullen’s work plies the tensions between these disparate but mutually dependent poles. From the negotiation of this tension, Mullen produces a formal strategy predicated on the communal participation of others and distinctive among innovative poets—the recyclopedia. Mullen’s writing creates texts that remain open to ambiguity, difficulty, and difference. Her writing engages in

political and social criticism with particular attention to race, gender, and the discourse of the commodity, while it delights in the pleasures of an infinite linguistic jouissance. Many of the critics who have written about Mullen’s work, including Elisabeth A. Frost, Juliana Spahr, Allison Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex “mixtery” of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen’s attention to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen’s work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen’s work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to

Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullen’s “subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein’s] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs” (71). Frost demonstrates Mullen’s rare (“among recent avant-garde poets”) revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that Mullen “constructs lyric otherwise—as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice” (466). While Spahr asserts that “what has interested me about Mullen’s work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy-





to the location of the body. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive. The diffi culties of fl ight and the frequency of slaves being returned to owners as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Act made the journey north dangerous, exhausting, and subject to failure. Furthermore, in the literature of passing Mullen surveys in her article “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” which explores how whites repress and suppress miscegenation and argues that the racial category of white is predicated on the black, she notes that in texts such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Death is better than slavery.” This is a “recurring refrain in Jacobs’s and other slave narratives, [that] acquires an ironic signifi cance when Benjamin [Jacobs’s lightskinned uncle] dies as a slave, vanishing into the white race in his third and fi nal escape” (82). For some, freedom means leaving one’s family and community, effectively dying in order to take up a new life as a free person or as a black who passes for white. Historically, flight is a means of escape, but not an unproblematic or uncomplicated means.

Flight and travel (voluntary or not) undertaken by slaves, refugees, exiles, or nomads does not always

erase histories but rather sometimes produces a palimpsestic and productive layering. In her doctoral dissertation, Mullen writes about Olaudah Equiano, the son of an African king who was taken into slavery and wrote from England in the eighteenth century. Discussing how “captivity disrupts his life, so that this African child fails to be ritually initiated [via scarifi cation] as an adult member of his tribe,”






discourses and simultaneously exposing such discourses’ bad faith. Rather than placing them under lock and key in order to solidify, arrest, and exclude racist and sexist discourses, Mullen remakes the


1ac—Killer Mike

Killer Mike – Reagan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU

1:49 – 3:20

The end of the Reagan Era, I'm like number twelver

Old enough to understand the shit'll change forever

They declared the war on drugs like a war on terror

But it really did was let the police terrorize whoever

But mostly black boys, but they would call us "niggers"

And lay us on our belly, while they fingers on they triggers

They boots was on our head, they dogs was on our crotches

And they would beat us up if we had diamonds on our watches

And they would take our drugs and money, as they pick our pockets

I guess that that's the privilege of policing for some profit

But thanks to Reaganomics, prisons turned to profits

Cause free labor is the cornerstone of US economics

Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison

You think I am bullshitting, then read the 13th Amendment

Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits

That's why they giving drug offenders time in double digits

Ronald Reagan was an actor, not at all a factor

Just an employee of the country's real masters

Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama

Just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters

If you don't believe the theory, then argue with this logic

Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Qaddafi

We invaded sovereign soil, going after oil

Taking countries is a hobby paid for by the oil lobby

Same as in Iraq, and Afghanistan

And Ahmadinejad say they coming for Iran

They only love the rich, and how they loathe the poor

If I say any more they might be at my door

Who the * is that staring in my window

Doing that surveillance on Mister Michael Render

I'm dropping off the grid before they pump the lead

I leave you with four words: I'm glad Reagan dead

The problem of surveillance is bigger than the anecdote Killer Mike relates. The real questions are: Who does the surveilling, who is the target of that surveillance, why does that surveillance exist and how can it be curtailed?

American surveillance grew from slavery—the original lists of human cargo, plantation inventories and diaries were used by masters to govern slaves.

Disciplinary power operated through the compulsory visibility of targets, and fugitives became targets of additional layers of surveillance like wanted posters and slave patrols that evolved into modern policing and oversight

Browne 2012

–











Whiteness".




Fugitivity and freedom exists in our use of language and it’s constant re-reading and re-use as a way of knowing the world. Freedom isn’t fiat; it is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the location of the body or an abstract vision of social change. Such a “freedom” is utopian and fugitive











Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex “mixtery” of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen’s attention to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen’s work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen’s work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullen’s “subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein’s] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs” (71). Frost demonstrates Mullen’s rare (“among recent avant-garde poets”) revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that Mullen “constructs lyric otherwise—as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice” (466). While Spahr asserts that “what has interested me about Mullen’s work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy-

and identity-centered poetry’s concerns with community building and alliance” (115), Cummings

points out that “Mullen’s work then has garnered critical adulation not only because it works to synthesize disparate traditions, but because it reflects on that synthesis explicitly” (24). Surveying





Flight and travel (voluntary or not) undertaken by slaves, refugees, exiles, or nomads does not always erase histories but rather sometimes produces a palimpsestic and productive layering. In her doctoral

dissertation, Mullen writes about Olaudah Equiano, the son of an African king who was taken into slavery and wrote from England in the eighteenth century. Discussing how “captivity disrupts his life, so that this African child fails to be ritually initiated [via scarifi cation] as an adult member of his tribe,”








When slaves sang songs like “follow the drinking gourd” they were singing the steps and guides for fugitive slaves to navigate the underground railroad and escape the plantation. They could sing these songs publicly because their masters interpreted it as the delightful tone of slaves singing in the fields. It was at once visible but not visible, there but not there.

Rap and hip hop are now invisible due to public dismissal of mainstream songs with phrases like “hip hop is dead”.

This allows revolutionary rappers like Killer Mike to masquerade their songs as meaningless drivel. Vote Aff to speak out against social and institutional racism and construct an alternative community through poetic fugitivity.

Mesing 14 PhD (Dave Mesing – PhD in philosophy from Villanova University. “From R.A.P. Music to

Run the Jewels: Killer Mike and the Homonymity of the Idea” - March 9, 2014. Wordpress. Accessed

7/7/15. https://itself.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/from-r-a-p-music-to-run-the-jewels-killer-mikeand-the-homonymity-of-th-idea/ ) dortiz

However, Killer Mike and El-P, as Run the Jewels, conduct a conceptualization of what Run the Jewels means as well, and it’s a conceptualization that brings together the contrasting elements from Killer

Mike’s R.A.P. Music in a perfect harmony. Let me explicitly state here that I am not suggesting that El-

P’s production or collaboration somehow completes Killer Mike’s work, which would be a kind of racist white savior reading of what’s going on. I think the same type of analysis could be done from another angle, viewing El-P’s progression into Run the Jewels, but I’m more familiar with Killer Mike’s solo work, and so I’ve chosen it. The important thing for me here is that Run the Jewels comes to be a communally joyful expression of militant resistance to the status quo. This can be seen in two movements, first in the song “Get It,” and second in the final track, “A Christmas Fucking Miracle.”

Towards the end of “Get It,” both emcees set out blunt statements about who they are:

[Verse 3: El-P] My name is Jamie Meline I’m not chasing the green, I’m taking it Bosses don’t change a thing in the name of seemingly making it Servants’ll kiss the ring of whoever they think is paying ’em

You don’t deserve the spit that they hurdled up in your face and shit

[Verse 4: Killer Mike] My name is Michael Render And we are the new Avengers We’re here to tell you that all your false idols are just pretenders They’re corporation slaves indentured to all the lenders So even if you got seven figures, you still a n****

This song radicalizes the opposition to most contemporary rap music that seethes through the album.

It not only declares war on unnamed other figures in mainstream music, but it does so for the sake of resisting the contemporary powers that be. It is in this sense that we should understand Killer Mike’s proclamation that Run the Jewels are the new Avengers. More than the all-out assault on other rappers that pervades the album, this declaration boldly takes the mantle of truth and justice upon

Run the Jewels, as those fans of the Marvel Comic will know. In what sense are Run the Jewels the defenders of truth and justice? Quite simply, to the extent that they are successful in politicizing and militarizing a negation of the ruling powers in favor of the construction of an alternative

community. Killer Mike makes the former most clear with the following line on “Twin Hype”: “I’m no respecter of person, I’m no respecter of rules / I catch the Prince of England slipping, he goin’ to run me the jewels.” The sense in which the two are successfully brought together is most clear on the final track, whose expression I will leave to Killer Mike and El-P: Towards the conclusion of his chapter on homonyms, Agamben writes, “while the network of concepts continually introduces synonymous relations, the idea is that which intervenes every time to shatter the pretense of absoluteness in these relations, showing their inconsistency.” (76) If Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music introduces a set of synonyms, on Run the Jewels self-titled album, these synonyms become homonymous with respect to the idea

Run the Jewels. At the outset of The Coming Community, Agamben also tells us of the importance of love for the coming politics: “the movement that Plato describes as erotic anamnesis is the movement that transports the object not toward another thing or another place, but towards its own takingplace–toward the Idea.” (2) Run the Jewels, insofar as it successfully brings together a militant refusal to give in or bow a knee to the powers that be with a weaponization of love for the creation of alternative community, is such an Idea, and perhaps, an exemplar of the coming community.

1ac—Dark Twisted Pedagogy

Kanye West – Power

https://youtu.be/ieXMNNOYWXI?t=2m19s

2:19 – 3:02

the system broken, the school's closed, the prison's open we ain't got nothing to lose … we rollin huh?

… we rollin with some light skinned girls and some Kelly Rowland's in this white man's world we the ones chosen so goodnight cruel world, I'll see you in the mornin huh?

I see you in the mornin' this is way too much, I need a moment no one man should have all that power the clocks tickin' I just count the hours stop trippin' I'm tripping off the power til then, … that, the world's ours

…but is the world our’s? Who does the surveilling, who is the target of that surveillance, why does that surveillance exist and how can it be curtailed?

Our advocacy is that you should affirm Kanye West’s “Power” as a fugitive poetics to challenge the United States Federal Government’s domestic surveillance apparatus and anti-black violence.



Browne 2012

–






Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system, a system that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three "information technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were

illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes" when apprehended. This security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (black) illiteracy", a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts, became a





Whiteness".















Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex “mixtery” of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen’s attention to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen’s work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen’s work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullen’s “subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein’s] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs” (71). Frost demonstrates Mullen’s rare (“among recent avant-garde poets”) revamping of the

lyric and argues 72 that Mullen “constructs lyric otherwise—as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice” (466). While Spahr asserts that “what has interested me about Mullen’s work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy-





to the location of the body. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive. The diffi culties of fl ight and the frequency of slaves being returned to owners as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Act made the journey north dangerous, exhausting, and subject to failure. Furthermore, in the literature of passing Mullen surveys in her article “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” which explores how whites repress and suppress miscegenation and argues that the racial category of white is predicated on the black, she notes that in texts such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Death is better than slavery.” This is a “recurring refrain in Jacobs’s and other slave narratives, [that] acquires an ironic signifi cance when Benjamin [Jacobs’s lightskinned uncle] dies as a slave, vanishing into the

white race in his third and fi nal escape” (82). For some, freedom means leaving one’s family and community, effectively dying in order to take up a new life as a free person or as a black who passes for white. Historically, flight is a means of escape, but not an unproblematic or uncomplicated means.







discourses and simultaneously exposing such discourses’ bad faith. Rather than placing them under

lock and key in order to solidify, arrest, and exclude racist and sexist discourses, Mullen remakes the


If you’re thinking “lol Kanye West as fugitive poetics?” then the aff worked, and that’s why it can exist as both a visible protest and remain elusive in the face of targeting and surveillance.


Similarly, the hook from “Power” – no one man should have all that power – was easily interpreted by dominant powers as more Kanye egoism, another “I’m going to let you finish…” moment.

Deeper listeners heard the real message – Kanye speaks of being chosen in this white man’s world and that “no one man should have all that power” before envisaging a fugitive departure, a “beautiful death, jumping out the window, letting everything go.” The reference to power is an historical allegory to the police’s reaction to Malcolm X’s resistance to racialized police surveillance and government control that Kanye remixed as this generation’s rallying cry against white supremacy

– and, we’re gonna let you finish about the power of fiat, but Kanye’s message reached more people than any presidential speech of all time.

As an educator you should affirm a space away from surveillance, fugitive knowledge—in short, a Dark Twisted Pedagogy. Our classroom model is one that envelops students in opportunities to speak back and re-envisage the lines they’ve heard thousands of times as poetics but never thought of as useful knowledge as their own guide to critical consciousness through fugitivity

Garcia, 13

—Antero, Assistant Professor in the English department at Colorado State University,

“Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy: Kanye West and the Lessons of Participatory Culture,” Radical

Teacher, no 97 (Fall 2013), http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/radicalteacher/article/view/38/22 --BR

Over the fall of 2010, rapper Kanye West reimagined the way music was distributed. He did this by engaging in an online conversation with millions. For the greater part of that year, Kanye West was firmly present on the cultural radar. This was deliberate and done in a way that made his presence, his performances, and his music an ongoing conversation with his fans, with his past, and with a larger network of engaged online participants. Through demonstrating the affordances of participatory culture, West presents a framework for engagement and communication that critical educators can leverage even within the increasingly restrictive space of public education. Though the capitalist practices that led to his album spending more than six months on the Billboard 200 may not seem like the obvious place to search for liberatory educational pedagogy, I argue that the strategies developed and tested by West offer an important framework for guiding critical consciousness and fomenting

action within our classrooms. As a Hip Hop fan and former music journalist, I often infused my classroom with beats and rhymes. Whether it was the first Lupe Fiasco album encouraging my students to consider the blend between Hip Hop and skateboarder social groups on my campus or formally utilizing classics like Grandmaster Flash‟s “The Message” and Dead Prez‟s “Police State” as starting points for literary and critical analysis, Hip Hop played a formative part in my teaching practice. For the eight years that I spent teaching English and ELL courses at a public school in South

Central Los Angeles, my classroom breathed Hip Hop as well as music across genres to speak to the diverse youth population I worked with. Comprised of approximately 80% of my students identifying as Latino and 19% as Black and a dropout rate that rocketed above 60%, my school was characterized in the media by stereotypes of a failing school while my students exuded the passion to learn that showed me an optimism in transforming schools. Throughout this teaching time, I can see now how

Kanye West‟s music acted as a through line in my classroom. On a year-round schedule, my first year teaching allowed me to bring in West‟s infamous 2005 declaration that “George Bush doesn‟t care about Black people” during a Hurricane Katrina relief telethon. Meanwhile West‟s singles filtered into my classroom as music played by students or analyzed for various writing assignments. At the time that West revolutionized media distribution and opportunities for pedagogical growth in 2010, I was working with ninth grade students and exploring how mobile devices like iPods could help connect urban youth with civically engaging movements beyond the classroom (Garcia, 2012a). Just in time to be heralded critically by music publications ranging from XXL to Rolling Stone, Kanye West's fifth solo album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was released in the United States on November 22, 2010.

However, even by the time the album leaked through file sharing networks and torrents online, weeks before the official release date, its music was anything but surprising. Via his own music label,

G.O.O.D. (Getting Out Our Dreams), West leaked many of the tracks from his album as free downloads during the fall. A matter of a few clicks from his official website yielded more than snippets from the album. Releasing one song each week on “G.O.O.D. Fridays,” responding to challenges and criticism from fans via Twitter, West sustained interest and anticipation throughout the world. In addition to a slew of tracks from the album including the lead single "Power," West released numerous tracks that were subsequently never officially included in the final album.

Speculation of what would make the cut drove buzz around My Beautiful

Dark Twisted Fantasy rather than speculation about what kind of sound the album would take. By the end of 2010, fifteen different tracks were given away by West, including two of the lead singles from his album: a remix of “Power” and the cameo- filled “Monster.” Through use of simple and public media tools like Twitter, West moved popular hip-hop models of marketing beyond traditional mixtape culture and illustrated how participatory culture can help foment profit as well as awareness and social organization. Moving Beyond the Mixtape As far as Hip Hop is concerned, the role of mixtapes is one that dates back to the early days of Hip Hop in the late 70s (Westhoff, 2011). Splicing together popular rap verses with unreleased

Hip Hop beats, mixtapes were underground commodities traded and sold by the aficionados within an exclusive subculture. Though it has been years since mixtapes were widely

distributed as actual cassettes, the concept is still the same; otherwise unreleased or un-cleared samples are released non- commercially. Like electronic music's prevalent use of "white label", unofficial releases (Reynolds, 1999), to help build interest in a track, Hip Hop has incorporated mixtapes as more than underground productions by individuals and part of a larger marketing and distribution ecology. Transitioning from tapes to CDs and now to direct Internet downloads, mixtapes are used by mainstream rappers to sustain interest between album releases. Lil‟ Wayne, for example, has benefited from a plethora of mixtape releases that have helped garner radio play and online reviews long before his albums are available for media consumers (Westhoff, 2011). No longer are mixtapes simply an extension of the listening experience for rap fans. Instead, they act as previews and major marketing ploys for Hip Hop artists. Additionally, because they are steeped in the history of Hip Hop, they may signal an artist‟s credibility for some rap fans. However, where the mixtape largely succeeded in previewing a forthcoming album and playing with the expected commercial limitations of what could be released, Kanye West takes the model and deconstructs it. The recognition that today's media consumer is also a media producer means that sustaining interest means responsiveness. Instead of the mishmash of 40-70 minutes of free music usually released on a mixtape, West slowly strings along track after track over months at a time, responding and changing his music as responses are blogged and status-updated. In one notable example, teenidol Justin Bieber, upon hearing that Kanye liked his song “Runaway Love” tweeted, “@kanyewest it's not a so what moment for me. I'm 16 and a fan. I'm kinda hyped u are listening to my stuff. Thank u. Nice sunday morning" (Vilensky, 2010). Shortly afterwards, West responded to fomenting interest from online fans and released his remix of “Runaway Love” featuring both

West and Wu Tang rapper Raekwon. In terms of his album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy also built upon mixtape culture by reflecting the practice within the production of his album.

The silly mashup of unexpected artists that is typically reserved for mixtapes became a centerpiece for the album: soft- crooning indie musician Justin Vernon of the band Bon Iver is featured prominently in the album's penultimate song, "Lost in the World;" Vernon‟s lilting voice is paired earnestly with Hip Hop verses. No longer a mixtape novelty, West builds upon accepted underground Hip Hop practices and subverts what is expected within commercial Hip Hop. Amplification and the Participatory Culture of G.O.O.D. Fridays Though the mixtape formula was popular in subverting official release dates, West moved from the singular verses and cobbled together mixes of unreleased music to a model that placed agency and music decisions in the hands of his fans. In short, Kanye West released music in ways that utilized the connected culture of social media to invigorate enthusiasm and to build camaraderie with a continually building fan base. Henry Jenkins et al. (2009) describe the ways media as "participatory culture" shift “the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement.” Further, Jenkins et al. write, “Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways.” West‟s G.O.O.D. Friday releases, in responding to and encouraging dialogue with his fans, indicate a mass media application of participatory culture for profit. However, the general tenets of participatory culture typically wrest control of media distribution from traditional mass media outlets in ways that empower teens fluent with the tools on their laptops and smartphones. The recognition that today's media consumer is also a media producer means that sustaining interest means responsiveness. It wasn‟t enough, for instance, for West to thank Bieber for the Twitter shout out. The voice (and the thousands that followed echoing wishes to see a collaboration between the two musical stars) encouraged participation, remix and playfulness. YouTube is rife with tributes and parodies of West‟s songs. From a version of his song “Monster” that pays tribute to the food at Taco Bell (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnUKmk5Lz50) to one that is sung by Harry Potter‟s nemesis Voldermort

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA7leadDk9g), the digital tools online allow for new forms of participation and engagement. In my own research on how young people may be able to challenge existing power structures and dominant narratives via social tools, I have described the potential of participatory culture as an “amplifying” process (Garcia, 2012b).

In the public, persistent spaces of Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, for instance, comments youth make can be seen by anybody. However, within the educational world, the participatory culture of out-of-school time is frequently stifled by school and district policies that limit socialization (see Frey and Fisher,

2008). Further, like the central argument of this article: that a massively popular, wealthy rapper can provide meaningful pedagogical guidance for critical educators, I have also argued that the mainstream and profit-driven companies like MySpace and Facebook can build important socializing spaces for critical dialogue and student support (Garcia, 2008). Through reimagining his relationship with an audience of millions, West demonstrates ways to challenge traditional power structures─a

model that can be forged within today's classrooms. A year before the Occupy movement would capture America's consciousness and months before the Arab Spring more fully rolled across northern

Africa, Kanye West demonstrated the possibilities of social media as tools for knowledge building and sustained interest. Though critical educators should rightfully challenge West‟s capitalistic intentions, the pragmatic lessons of utility and philosophy with social media should not be disregarded. To date,

West's album has sold more than one million physical copies (Recording Industry Association of

America, 2013). His follow up tour a year later, co-headlined by collaborator Jay-Z, was the highest grossing Hip Hop tour of 2011, making more than $48 million in ticket sales (Lewis, 2011). To consider

West's popularity anything of an underground phenomenon would be ludicrous. It is important to recognize that West‟s lyrical content can lead to further disregard for the relevance of mainstream

Hip Hop within the classroom. And the public persona that West plays up does little to convince critical educators to consider the possibilities that West represents.

When West grabbed the microphone from Taylor Swift to decry that Beyonce did not win a 2009 MTV Award, even President Obama called West a “jackass” (BBC 2009). To be clear, I do not apologize or account for West‟s actions. Instead, the focus on the rapper‟s ability to expand the world of Hip Hop and the possibilities for critical educators mean looking beyond these actions; West‟s resources for engagement and community building offer myriad tools to encourage challenging and critiquing his non-critical work. Toward a Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy West’s every step in releasing the album, from ludicrous twitter messages to on-air blowups to banned album artwork meant that there was not a day that I was unable to catch up with the latest in the Kanye-verse. In all of these updates Kanye evolved the Hip Hop mixtape to its proper participatory-culture configuration: it is an “always- on” amalgam of music, personality, and hype. The pervasive nature of

Kanye‟s approach to marketing My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is something educators can lift. How can we deconstruct classroom pedagogy to move beyond traditional application of emergent technologies? Is it really the best we can do to simply duplicate textbooks and textbook practices when equipping students with iPads and mobile devices? This is essentially reducing the possibilities of screen and interfaces to a glowing page. Likewise, pedagogy must incorporate the persistent “always-on” nature of West‟s approach. His persistence and personality are what helped transfer knowledge, interest, and passion for his work. Critical educators, qualms about West aside, must evaluate how this approach may be adopted for classroom use. Teachers should ask themselves, how is my practice pervasive? How does the work that I do in my classroom transform students’ lives throughout the day?

A year before the Occupy movement would capture America's consciousness and months before the Arab

Spring more fully rolled across northern Africa, Kanye West demonstrated the possibilities of social

media as tools for knowledge building and sustained interest. I want to reiterate that what West accomplished was not some secret phenomenon. West made abundant profits from his efforts. At the same time West was mirroring widely adopted digital practices at a highly visible level: responding to tweets, sharing updates, hosting online Q&As and producing video and music content for others are all attributes of what youth can and do easily engage in while online. In essence, West‟s efforts mimic what young people regularly do on their own. He mimics the literacy and learning practices that take place outside the classroom. For educators, this is also an important reminder: classroom practices should mirror the real world settings that students will venture to after leaving our classrooms.

Students are already experts in media production and West reminds us to bring in these outside skills.

How can critical educators adjust their teaching practice in light of the work of Kanye West? Perhaps this may not seem the most astutely worded of education- related questions, but a necessary one nonetheless. West makes participating and communicating with fans fun, memorable, and engaging.

Classrooms can leverage similar tools to get young people excited, in conversation, and networking globally around classroom content. To be clear, I am not advocating co-opting youth practices within a classroom. On the contrary, I am speaking about a large- scale effort to update the classroom into the kinds of networked ecologies that are utilized for interaction everywhere except for in schools. As

Castells (2009) writes, “A network-based social structure is a highly dynamic, open system, susceptible to innovating without threatening its balance” (pp. 501-502). A Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy is one that envelops students in opportunities to engage with extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. It allows youth to speak back to the content and see work in dialogue. An instantiation of this pedagogy, despite the capitalistic intentions of its namesake, begins with “a dramatic reorganization of power

relationships” (Castells, 2009, pp. 502) and funnels classroom agency toward youth. It begins with youth interest and quickly amplifies key concepts that resonate within a classroom and well beyond.

Like West, this shift toward meaningful engagement is one that requires educators to remain attuned to the interests and cultural landmarks of youth culture as entre into dialogues about socially conscious curriculum. The corners of commercialism─video games, music videos on YouTube, series on MTV─are going to function as signals for how young people‟s attention is being drawn both outside of schools and in classrooms. Instead of merely challenging the messages, images, and intentions of these multimodal texts, this is a pedagogy that can use these as starting places for youthoriented production. Youth can remix and speak back to dominant texts not solely as classroom exercises but as public statements to be shared in the same social networks that they utilize daily. In this sense My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy illustrates ways transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, Ford and Green, 2013) and textual play can emerge fluidly with the many digital pathways enabled for youth.

Transmedia, as described here, are media products that unfold across multiple platforms: a narrative may be told via movie productions, video game plotlines, comic books, and cartoons (as is the case with The Matrix series, for example). Instead of looking at a novel as a singular and definitive version of a text, the notion of transmedia allows youth literacies to demonstrate the text as a hub for building upon and collaboration. How can the canonical text taught in a classroom extend learning from the context of the Shakespearean era to contemporary social issues for youth. We can see burgeoning examples of this now: a quick search on Facebook and it is clear I can friend dozens of Holden Caulfields and Othellos and

Katniss Everdeens: teachers and students alike are using today‟s tools to extend stories across various forms. These are not concepts presently being taught in teacher education programs and a Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy calls for intentionality in this respect. West‟s album ends with the song “Who Will Survive in America,” built primarily around an excerpt from a

1970 poem by Gil Scott Heron, “Comment #1.” This finds West not only recontextualizing a critique of leftist organizing in the late sixties and seventies for the modern day but also continuing a dialogue between West‟s and Heron‟s work that extended across several albums; in 2005, West sampled a different Heron poem for his song “My Way Home”; Heron responded with a sample of West‟s “Flashing Lights” for his final album, I’m New Here in 2010. West builds upon, reinterprets, and engages in conversation with Heron‟s work. The narrative and melodic dialogue spreads across three albums and invites listeners to rethink the lyrics, music, and context for both works. It is a transformative work that challenges critical new literacies to build upon the notion of the “meme” as an educational possibility (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006). With memes helping describe quickly spreading, “viral”, media across networks, literature on memes often credits Dawkins (1976) with imbuing the term as a unit that spreads cultural content over time. As not merely a delivery system of information, memes effectively write upon the world and change it. In their 1987 text, Freire and Macedo describe literacy as a process of reading the world and then reading the word. It is an order often lost in discussions of Freire‟s development of critical literacies: cultural, “worldly” experience imbue the process of reading texts. West illustrates how advances in technology allow the world to be written upon and the need for educators to renegotiate their pedagogical stance.

“No one man should have all that power”: The

Contradictions of Kanye In the lead single off of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, “Power,” West

raps that “No one man should have all that power.” It is a declaration that contributes to West‟s ongoing braggadocio. However, it is also a quote that is steeped in pedagogical meaning and

historical precedent. A near word-for-word iteration of this quote was printed in 1957 in the

Amsterdam News; a “stunned” police officer, noted about Malcolm X, “No one man should have that much power” (Marable, 2011, p. 128). It is likely that the quote was picked up by West in the 1992

Spike Lee directed biopic, X. This would not be the first time that Malcolm X is invoked in West‟s lyrics.

In “Good Morning” West claims he‟s “like the fly Malcolm X buy any jeans necessary.” Both invocations of the civil rights leader point back to the remixing and transmedia literacies that West demonstrates; they are necessary components of Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy. However, I want to also return to the line from “Power” and its implications both for reflecting on West and for classroom practice. As a self-critique, West’s statement points to the problematic ways his performance of the Hip Hop genre upholds individuals and capitalism in boasts that separate fans through recognizable power structures. However, it is a model that West also challenges in content: the song “Power” was shared in multiple mixes before its profitable release on West’s album with power and voice distributed (though not evenly) with his fans. From my own classroom experience, it is easy for critical educators to look at the realm of capitalism and disregard it wholesale; though I secretly indulged in West’s music, I would deride it in discussions with my 11th graders. And yet, while the content is a problematic perpetuation of marketing practices, the approaches themselves speak to the ways students are engaging, interacting, and approaching informal learning. Approaching the challenging domain of capitalism with a lens of pragmatic optimism, West illustrates the potential of participatory media as enacted by for-profit companies and illustrates ways these can be harnessed for wholesale social transformation. Finally, in returning to West‟s lyric, “No one man should have all that power,” it is important to notice that West distributes production, input, and narrative across various platforms with numerous points of input for others. It is a reflection of what radical educators classrooms can look like. The decentralization of the teacher as singular leader within the classroom is neither new nor revolutionary. However, in looking at the ways teacher- leaders, like West, can spark conversation, invite multimodal exploration, and direct connection with the community, the role of the teacher is not diminished as much as it is altered. Perhaps a problematic source for some, in terms of beginning a conversation of how critical pedagogy continues to shift in the 21st Century, Kanye

West‟s work illustrates practices our students are engaged in everyday. His work functions as a provocation for a redefinition of pedagogy that addresses the cultural shifts of participatory media. It

is messy, problematic, and─in the liberatory possibilities it signals─beautiful. It is a pedagogy of hope for the digital age.

https://youtu.be/RcNAxtM3b0E

Starts at 0:30, pause/close the tab at 1:05

1ac—NWA

* tha police

Comin straight from the underground

Young * got it bad 'cause I'm brown

And not the other color so police think

They have the authority to kill a minority

* that *, 'cause I ain't tha one

For a punk * with a badge and a gun

To be beatin on, and thrown in jail

We could go toe to toe in the middle of a cell

*’in with me 'cause I'm a teenager

With a little bit of gold and a pager

Searchin my car, lookin for the product

Thinkin every * is sellin narcota

You'd rather see me in the pen…

When NWA stepped forward in 1988 to challenge the police and the state of militarized law enforcement, it was a radical act that revealed both historical knowledge and unbelievable foresight regarding militarized violence – that echoes the forms of brutality that are still being practiced in the surveillance, targeting and killing of black bodies. Our choice to begin the 1ac with a fugitive poetic is a way of reinterpreting and challenging the original police state, the plantation—it’s a performance that breaks down the existing power hierarchies that govern over the structures that control our role and identities in society

Browne 2012

– PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone; “Race and Surveillance” “Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies”;

Google Book; https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=F8nhCfrUamEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA72&dq=race+and+surveillance+Simone+browne&ots=y_cvDcnYS0&sig=ZmhtR3

WJI2mp_clVI6qwScZDZwQ#v=onepage&q=race%20and%20surveillance%20Simone%20browne&f=false; 7/5/15 || NDW)

According to Christian Parenti,

the history of surveillance in America can be traced to

the "simple accounts" of

slave owners.

Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple

accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves.

One example involved the "General Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the Negro that what you say is the result of reflection."

The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power

, as Michel Foucault tells us,

is "exercised through its invisibility," while imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its targets. Disciplinary power

then

operated

on the enslaved

as racialized surveillance

that individuals were at once subjected to and that produced

them as racial, and therefore enslave able, subjects.

Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system

, a system

that relied on

, as Parenti lays out, three "information technologies: the written slave pass, organized

slave patrols, and wanted posters

for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes" when apprehended. This security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (black) illiteracy", a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal.

The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of

newspaper

advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves

and truant servants.

These texts

were primarily aimed at a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts,

became a part of the aparatus of surveillance

, and the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions,

the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place."

For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for "a Mulatto, or

Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: "sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception." Seth's, or Sall's, duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white parent) or a "Quadroon Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official with the first US federal census in 1790. I will retun to the census as a technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now,

the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that required constant policing and oversight.

However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned "colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open." "Top eye" here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so as not to appear uppity To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken to." This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a

"Technology of Whiteness".

NWA is uniquely positioned as a site to criticize the development of the plantation into the modern surveillance and prison system – it’s an act of aggression that disrupts the normality of white civil society. It is a fugitive art – it is both present on society but critiques it vehemently

McCann 2012

Contesting the Mark of Criminality: Race, Place, and the Prerogative of Violence in N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton , Critical Studies in

Media Communication, 29:5, 367-386, DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2012.676194

The Political Violence of ‘‘Fuck Tha Police’’ ‘‘

Fuck Tha Police’’

continues this

critique{s}

of

law enforcement

but raises the ante by centralizing police officers

as the sole focus of N.W.A.’s mockery and violent fantasizing

. No longer one of many in a series of potential enemies or the visual accompaniment of an otherwise a-political toast,

law enforcement officers function as the quintessential villain in N.W.A.’s cultural universe

.

The track begins by establishing the satirical courtroom scene that will structure the entire song

. In a reversal of the prevailing dynamics of law and order,

the criminalized members of N.W.A. place the police on trial for their transgressions.

The group delivers this opening portion over a soulful sample of brass horns, creating a sonic aesthetic reminiscent of 1950s and 1960s era crime shows (e.g., Dragnet), as if to parody such romantic narratives of law enforcement saving the day (N.W.A., 1988a). MC Ren begins by announcing, ‘‘Right about now, N.W.A. court is in full effect/Judge Dre presiding/In the case of N.W.A. vs. the Police Department;/Prosecuting attorneys are: MC Ren, Ice Cube, /And Eazy-motherfuckin’-E.’’ Apparently unfazed by his bailiff’s crass disregard for courtroom conduct, Dre ‘‘enters the courtroom’’ and declares, ‘‘Ice

Cube, take the motherfuckin’ stand/Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth/ And nothin’ but the truth so help your black ass?’’ Cube responds with an affirmative, ‘‘You god damn right!’’ and lays into the incendiary verbiage that would light a cultural fuse: Fuck the police comin’ straight from the underground/A young nigga got it bad cause I’m brown/And not the other color so police think/They have the authority to kill a minority/Fuck that shit, cause I ain’t the one/For a punk motherfucker with a badge and a gun/To be beatin’ on, and thrown in jail/We can go toe to toe in the middle of a cell/Fuckin’ with me cause I’m a teenager/With a little bit of gold and a pager/Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product/Thinkin’ every nigga is sellin’ narcotics.

Critiquing the prison-industrial complex

was nothing new in black popular culture at the end of the twentieth century (see Ogbar,

2007; Public Enemy, 1988). However,

after his initial take on law enforcement transgressions

, Cube threatens to ‘‘Beat a police out of shape/And

when I’m finished, bring the yellow tape/To tape off the scene of the slaughter.’’ Images of yellow tape typically mark scenes of ghastly crimes that heroic police officers intend to solve and prosecute

. But in Cube’s hands, it Contesting the Mark of Criminality 375 Downloaded by [] at 11:24 08 July 2015 denotes a scene of righteous vengeance against those very officers. After he is done with the humiliated law enforcer, Cube brags, he ‘‘Still can’t swallow bread and water.’’ Not content with forthright acts of violence, Cube also desires to castrate the hypermasculine expression of state power by affixing homophobic epithets to routine search procedures. He raps, ‘‘I don’t know if they fags or what/Search a nigga down, and grabbin’ his nuts.’’

While such language is obviously alarming, we should also be cautious about dismissing this derogatory tirade too quickly, as the mark of criminality is infused with gendered politics

.

The public fantasy of the archetypical black male predator portrays African

American men’s sexuality as something to be tamed, even exterminated

(Hill Collins, 2005).

Viewed as a threat to white civil society

, black males are particularly problematic to white masculinity. Kobena Mercer (1997) writes that

cultural discourses concerning African-American men are ‘‘acted out through white male rituals of racial aggression’’

(p. 290). Such acts of aggression manifest largely through the criminal justice system,

as archetypes of violent black masculinity on a rampage function to rationalize enhanced surveillance and incarceration

within primarily poor African-American communities (Jones, 2005). For example, George H.W. Bush won the White House in 1988 based in part on the now-infamous ‘‘Willie Horton Ad,’’

which capitalized on public fears of the fearsome black male predator on the hunt for a pure, white femininity

(see Jamieson, 1993). While Toya Like and Jody Miller (2006) claim that young African-American females experience a disproportionate amount of sexual violence compared to other populations, the middle-class white American female remains the quintessential gendered victim. Stacy De Coster and Karen Heimer (2006) make the important observation that ‘‘marginalized masculinities’’ such as those of poor and working class black men often view crime and violence as ‘‘resources for achieving or demonstrating masculinity’’ (p. 141) absent more hegemonic modes of articulating gendered identity. D. Marvin Jones (2005) argues that rap music functions as one such resource, writing,

These performances

...

are intended

at a deep level

as counternarratives

,

as resistance in the context of marginalized people attempting to represent themselves as potent, large, and in charge: predators rather than victims in a society where they have found themselves jobless, powerless, social victims languishing on street corners and in jails.

(pp. 5859) Viewed through such a prism,

Cube’s emasculation of law enforcement

becomes something more than outright homophobia*although it certainly qualifies as such. Instead, it

constitutes a parodic reversal of the gendered roles associated with the war on crime that had for far too long allowed his brethren to be humiliated

, ‘‘spreadeagle,’’ by the likes of the LAPD. The lyric is a flawed but nonetheless

salient attempt to appropriate the mark of criminality and recuperate masculinity that had been under threat of erasure since the days of slavery

.

N.W.A. also deploys the mark of criminality to fashion themselves as latter-day nationalist guerrillas defending their homeland from colonial invaders

. Ren raps, ‘‘Fuck the police and Ren said it with authority/Because the niggaz on the street is a majority.’’

This declaration echoes a central ethic of Black Nationalism: the belief that colonized people of color can find comfort and encouragement in the fact that they outnumber their oppressor

(see Campbell, 1971; Fanon,

1963; Hill Collins, 2006).

By imagining her- or himself as part of an urban majority, the listening youth can

, through Ren, assert, ‘‘Readin’ my rights and shit, it’s all junk.’’

The track

, in other words,

reveals

the potenti

a

l of

parody to articulate a protonationalist politics by mocking and, therefore, reversing the discursive power dynamics

of Compton.

Like Cube, Ren highlights the artificiality of law enforcement authority. Mocking the police, he raps, ‘‘Pullin’ out a silly club, so you stand/With a fake-assed badge and a gun in your hand/

But take off the gun so you can see what’s up/And we’ll go at it punk, and I’m-a-fuck you up!’’ Elaborating upon this theme Eazy-E joins in with a third verse, rapping, ‘‘Without a gun and a badge, what do ya got?/A sucker in a uniform waitin’ to get shot.’’ Eazy insists that the

police possess no authentic authority

in the ‘hood. Rather,

they are invaders rightfully vulnerable to the mockery and weaponry of N.W.A

. As I argue below, such

a

highly publicized parodic reversal of law enforcement’s prerogative of violence constituted an intolerable threat to the state’s institutional authority and cultural hegemony in the war on crime

.

Instead of attempting to sanitize the public image of the fearsome black male, N.W.A. enacts the mark of criminality as a playful conduit for framing black urban violence as righteous vengeance

,

replacing the ethical police officer with the savvy, Signifyin(g) gangsta guerrilla.

The tracks ‘‘Straight Outta Compton’’ and ‘‘Fuck Tha Police’’ intervened at a political and cultural moment when most Americans had been exposed to a particular narrative of the inner city that was void of irony, one in which law enforcement cleans the streets of drug dealers and violent gangsters.

These tracks and much of the rest of the album invert this dynamic not by refuting the criminal deeds that Reagan,

Bush, and other cultural figures crafted policy to supposedly combat, but by parodically redeploying the mark of criminality as a resource for heroic, playful masculinity and artistic mastery, while vilifying the colonizer police officer as an unwanted fool in the streets of

Compton.

Because SOC was a multi-platinum album inaugurating a new phase in music history, it represented a very potent threat to the discourses of criminality on which many had staked their political careers. The fallout following the record’s release revealed precisely how unamusing their challenge would be.

Fugitivity exists in our use of language and it’s constant re-reading and re-use.

Freedom isn’t fiat; it is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the location of the body or an abstract vision of social change.

Such a “freedom” is utopian and fugitive











Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex “mixtery” of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen’s attention to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen’s work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen’s work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in

relation to Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullen’s “subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein’s] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs” (71). Frost demonstrates Mullen’s rare (“among recent avant-garde poets”) revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that Mullen “constructs lyric otherwise—as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice” (466). While Spahr asserts that “what has interested me about Mullen’s work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy-





to the location of the body. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive. The diffi culties of fl ight and the frequency of slaves being returned to owners as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Act made the journey north dangerous, exhausting, and subject to failure. Furthermore, in the literature of passing Mullen surveys in her article “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” which explores how

whites repress and suppress miscegenation and argues that the racial category of white is predicated on the black, she notes that in texts such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Death is better than slavery.” This is a “recurring refrain in Jacobs’s and other slave narratives, [that] acquires an ironic signifi cance when Benjamin [Jacobs’s lightskinned uncle] dies as a slave, vanishing into the white race in his third and fi nal escape” (82). For some, freedom means leaving one’s family and community, effectively dying in order to take up a new life as a free person or as a black who passes for white. Historically, flight is a means of escape, but not an unproblematic or uncomplicated means.






a productive process of remembering and rewriting. Mullen includes in her recyclopedia many diverse materials, yet she is particularly attentive to bringing to the surface the unarticulated, marginalized, nearly lost, and invisible as well as the “used” or “waste” material. Mullen’s recyclopedia enables the sort of activity described by David Scott that opens up “vast possibilities not just of

memory but of countermemory; the moral idiom and semiotic registers of remembering against the grain of the history of New World black deracination, subjection, and exclusion” (vi). Such a process entails both identifying and preserving histories and experiences elided and prohibited from official



Vote aff in favor of embracing radical forms of public pedagogy that are key to teens like us to deconstruct corrupt politics and institutional violence

Giroux 2000

(The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence)

The organization and regulation of

culture by large corporations

such as Disney

profoundly influence children's culture and their everyday lives.

The concentration of control over the means of producing, circulating, and exchanging information has been matched by the emergence of new technologies that have transformed culture, especially

popular culture

, which

is the primary way in which youth learn about themselves, their relationship to others, and the larger world.

The

Hollywood film industry, television, satellite broadcasting technologies, the internet, posters, magazines, billboards, newspapers, videos, and other

media

forms and technologies

has transformed culture into a pivotal force, "shaping human meaning and behavior and regulat[ing] our social practices at every turn."

' Although the endlessly proliferating media sites seem to promise unlimited access to vast stores of information, such sites are increasingly controlled by a handful of multi- national corporations. Consider the Disney Company's share of the communication industry. Disney's numerous holdings include a controlling interest in twenty television stations that reach 25 percent of U.S. households; ownership of over twenty-one radio stations and the largest radio network in the United States, serving 3,400 stations and covering 24 percent of all households in the country; three music studios; the ABC television network; and five motion picture studios. Other holdings include, but are not limited to, television and cable channels, book publishing, sports teams, theme parks, insurance companies, magazines, and multimedia prod~ctions.~

Mass-produced images fill our daily lives and condition our most intimate perceptions and desires

. At issue for par- ents, educators, and others is how culture,

especially media culture

,

has become a

substantial, if not the

primary, educational force in regulating the meanings, values, and tastes that set

the

norms that offer up

and

legitimate

particular

subject positions

-what it means

to claim an identity as a male, female, white, black, citizen, noncitizen

.

T

he media culture defines childhood, the national past, beauty, truth, and social life.

~ The impact of new electronic technologies as teaching machines can be seen in some rather astounding statistics. It is estimated that "the average American spends more than four hours a day watching television. Four hours a day, 28 hours a week, 1456 hours a year."4 The American Medical Association reports that the "number of hours spent in front of a television or video screen is the single biggest chunk of time in the waking life of an American ~hild."Such statistics warrant grave concern, given that the pedagogical messages provided through such programming are shaped largely by a $130-billion-

a-year advertising industry, which sells not only its products but also values, images, and identities that are largely aimed at teaching young people to be consumers. It would be reductionist not to recognize that there is also some excellent programming that is provided to audiences, but by and large much of what is produced on television and in the big Hollywood studios panders to the lowest common denominator, defines freedom as consumer choice, and debases public discourse by reducing it to ~pectacle.~ Consider the enormous control that a handful of transnational corporations have over the diverse properties that shape popular and media culture: "51 of the largest

100 economies in the world are corporation^."^ Moreover, the U.S. media is dominated by fewer than ten conglomerates, whose annual sales range from $10 billion to $27 billion. These include major corporations such as Time-Warner, General Electric, Disney, Viacom, TCI, and Westinghouse. Not only are these firms major producers of much of the entertainment and news, culture, and information that permeates our daily lives, they also produce "media soft- ware and have distribution networks like television networks, cable channels and retail store^."^ Although this book focuses on the role that the Disney corporation in particular plays as an educational force in shaping American popular culture, it also makes clear that

the production of meaning, social practices, and desires-or what can be called public pedagogy-must be addressed as both an educational issue and a matter of politics and institutional power.

The use of popular culture and rap in educational spaces is key to creating a critical pedagogy

Powell 2015

(The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 60, No. 3, Socialization Forces Affecting the

Education of African American Youth in the 1990s (Summer, 1991), pp. 245

Conceptual Framework We initially considered how the two schools used

popular culture as critical pedagogy

and how our own practices reflected the philosophies of these schools. Critical pedagogy and popular media literature provided a context for our thinking about the schools’ critical engagements. Critical pedagogy

provides a way of seeing an unjust social order and revealing how this injustice has caused problems in the lives of

young

people

who live in impoverished conditions.

It offers an approach to education, through dialogue and reflection, whereby the effects of power can be interrogated and the needs of students met POPULAR MEDIA,

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, AND

INNER CITY

Youth

247 ȱȱȱ (Apple, 1990). Shor (1987) additionally illustrates the need to situate formal learning within students’ cultures. Through the process of

“unveiling … reality and thereby coming to know it critically” (Freire, 1996, p. 51) those who have been disenfranchised come to explore their own social and cultural realities, draw their own conclusions, and work toward appropriate responses.

ȱȱ

Critical pedagogy and cultural studies approaches offer understandings of how young people use popular cultural representations to construct and express the meaningfulness of their lives, identities, and cultures

(Giroux,

2001; Hall, 1997).

These approaches interrogate mainstream cultural representations and encourage youth to construct their own representations through understandings of their own realities.

Willis (1990) referred to the “extraordinary symbolic creativity of the multitude of ways in which young people use, humanise, decorate and invest meanings within their common and immediate life spaces and social practices” (p. 6).

Creative engagement with popular culture

allows youth “a sense that they are controlling their own representation, that they are in control of their own cultural identity, and are creatively shaping and moulding language, style, and self into something new”

(Carlson & Dimitriadis, 2003, p. 21). If schools are to become more relevant spaces for young people, it is useful to listen to the stories youth are telling educators through their use of popular culture. Graveline (1998) has added that “insisting on people representing their own voices, their own stories” as a “central pedagogical tool” is imperative in the classroom (p. 124). Lincoln and Denzin (2003) noted: “

We can study experience only through its representations, through the ways in which stories are told”

(p. 240

). Representation and narrative are useful concepts for developing better understandings of how young people draw from a variety of popular media to continually redefine and reposition themselves within the social contexts of their everyday lives.

1ac—Black Privilege

Black privilege - Crystal Valentine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rYL83kHQ8Y

Black Privilege is the hung elephant swinging in the room

Is the memory of a slave ship, preying for the Alzheimer’s to kick in

Black Privilege is me having already memorized my nephew’s eulogy,

My brother’s eulogy,

My father’s eulogy

My un-conceived child’s eulogy

Black Privilege is me thinking my sister’s name safe from this list

Black Privilege is me pretending to know Travyon Martin on a first name basis

Is me using a dead boy’s name to win a poetry slam

Is me carrying a mouth full of other people’s skeletons to use at my own convenience

Black Privilege is the concrete that holds my breath better than my lungs do

Black Privilege is always having to be the strong one,

Is having a crow bar for a spine,

Is fighting, even when you have no more blood to give

Even when you have lost sight of your bones

Even when your mother prayed for you

Even after they’ve prepared your body for the funeral

Black Privilege is being so unique that not even God will look like you,

Black Privilege is still being the first person in line to meet him

Black Privilege is having the same sense of humor as Jesus

Remember how he smiled on the cross?

The same way Malcolm X laughed at his bullet

And there I go again, asserting my Black Privilege, using a dead man’s name without his permission

I can feel his maggots congregating in my mouth

Black Privilege is a myth,

Is a joke, is a punchline

Is that time a teacher asked a little boy what he wanted to be when he grew up and he said alive

Is the way she laughed and said “there’s no college for that”

Ignorance is the only thing that won’t discrimination against you,

Is the only thing that don’t need a tombstone to learn your name

And it’s tiring, you know, for everything about my skin to be a metaphor

For everything black to be pun intended, to be death intended

Black Privilege is the applause at the end of this poem

Is me giving you a dead boy’s body and you giving me a ten 10

Is me being okay with that

I tired writing a love poem the other day, but my fingers wouldn’t move

My skin started to blister

Like it didn’t trust me any more

Like it thought I’ve forsaken it for something prettier

Something smoother to wrap around my bones

Like I was trading in my noose for a pearl necklace

Some days I’m afraid to look into the mirror

For fear that a bullet George Zimmerman-ed its way into my chest while I was asleep

The breath in my mouth is weapon enough to scare a courtroom

I’ll be lucky if I’m alive to make it to the stand

For some people, their trials live longer than they do

Black Privilege is knowing that if I die,

At least Al Sharpton will show up to my funeral

At least Al sharpen will mason jar my mother’s tears

Remind us that the only thing we are worthy of is our death

We are judged by the number of people it takes to carry our casket

Black Privilege is me think that’s enough

Is me thinking this poem is enough

Black Privilege is this

Is this breath in my lungs right now

Is me

Standing right here

With a crowd full of witnesses

To my heartbeat

Valentine began by defining Black Privilege as “the memory of a slave ship”. Black

Privilege begins with the beginning of surveillance: slavery.



Browne 2012

–







part of the aparatus of surveillance, and the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place." For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for "a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the role of fugitive slave notices,

and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state:




Whiteness".















Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex “mixtery” of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen’s attention to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen’s work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen’s work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullen’s “subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein’s] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs” (71). Frost demonstrates Mullen’s rare (“among recent avant-garde poets”) revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that Mullen “constructs lyric otherwise—as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice” (466). While Spahr asserts that “what has interested me about Mullen’s work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy-


Mullen’s body of work as a whole and elaborating on Cummings’s assertion that Mullen selfconsciously refl ects her work’s synthesis of multiple discourses, I contend in addition that Mullen’s writing is characterized by a productive tension between “enclosure” and “run,” between an archive

of cultural, linguistic, and historical references, images, and information and the fugitivity that is both a thematics and a formal strategy. Her archive manifests in the form of the palimpsest, or, to use a fi gure that Mullen herself foregrounds, her archive is a recyclopedia. She takes debased, erased, and forgotten histories and found discourses and runs with and recycles them; she invites the reader to participate in this educative process of conservation and production, enclosure and fugitive run. Her work articulates a need for a more equitable ecology, one of acknowledgment and memory, conservation and reuse; she and we as readers are caught up in her recyclopedia, an ongoing poetics of reuse that benefits from the multiple perspectives of a heterogeneous community. The concept of the fugitive in Mullen’s work is connected equally to the history of the United States, the global slave trade, historical strategies of escape for enslaved blacks, and formal methods for escaping and reinventing genre and poetic method. Furthermore, the fugitive is both critical and generative and intimately linked to Mullen’s concept of the recyclopedia. Mullen’s formal strategies explicitly reference the history of the fugitive slave laws. In an interview with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen delineates the connection of the fugitive to her own work: I wanted the poem to have that quality of quick movement from one thing to another, from one subject or thought to another, from one mood or emotion to another. Partly because I wanted things to be in flux, a state of flux, a state of change. If












Asserting Black Privilege through Fugitivity is the alternative to status quo racism.


Similarly, Valentine’s challenge of current racial constructs is a form of fugitivity through poetics. Her contrasting definitions of Black Privilege mirror the contradictory nature of the social role of black bodies and the difficulties of maintaining Black Identity. Additionally, the different interpretations of her poem her radical message to exist under the master’s proverbial nose.

She gives voice to the voiceless in order to instill and embrace change

ARIEL 6/11 (Amani Ariel – writer at Blavity. “This Poet Explains Exactly What Black Privilege Is” –

6/11/15. Blavity – the Voice of Black Millennials. Accessed 7/7/15. http://blavity.com/this-poetexplains-exactly-what-black-privilege-is/) dortiz

Crystal is the current two-time Grand Slam Champion of NYU’s poetry slam team, is the 2015 NYC

Youth Poet Laureate, has won first place atCUPSI in both 2013 and 2015, and was a member of the

2014 Urban Word youth slam team. She has been featured on the Melissa Harris-Perry show, as well as theBrian Lehrer Radio talk show, and has performed at venues such as the Lincoln Center and the

Apollo Theater. During her time at New York University, when she’s not immersed in work for her creative writing and adolescent mental health studies courses, Valentine continues to use her talents to give voice to the narratives of, and to be an advocate for, Black and brown people whose stories are so often silenced. This summer, with the support of her devoted fans (i.e. YOU!), she hopes to continue pursuing her passion for writing in Paris. While away, Crystal will have the opportunity to immerse herself in the experiences of a different culture while also discovering new literary devices to better articulate the messages, pains, struggles and triumphs of the Black and brown communities for which she advocates. In the words of this dynamic Black female poet, Crystal “believes in poetry’s ability to instill change in those who embrace it”

Vote aff to affirm our use of poetic fugitivity to break down social constructs of race and surveillance.

Build Your Own 1ac

Epistemology

Voting aff affirms the creation of a an entire body of knowledge that isn’t included in their episteme—it’s a pre-requisite to affirming any alternative existence that can strive towards freedom

Dillon 13

assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in

American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of

Minnesota. (Stephen, “Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State “,A

DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF

MINNESOTA , May 2013 //SRSL)

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of two new voices within national debates about racism, imperialism, poverty, and civil rights—the prisoner and the fugitive.

As more and more members of the 1960s

liberation movements were imprisoned or went underground, a new body of knowledge emerged from both of these figures that negated national narratives of progress, equality, and justice

.

While Fugitive Life tells a story about post-civil rights feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism, it focuses on these two figures and two corresponding spaces: the prison and the underground. In response to police repression in the form of incarceration, sabotage, and assassination, and in order to deploy illegal tactics, hundreds of activists in the 1970s left behind families, friends, jobs, and their identities in order to disappear into a vast network of safe houses, under-the-table jobs, and transportation networks

. In fact, before she was imprisoned, Davis herself spent many months underground in order to hide from the FBI. While there has been a resurgence of interest in many of these groups (prompted by and reflected in the anxiety about Obama’s connections to Weather Underground member Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential election), their significance to the post-civil rights landscape—as structured by the prison and neoliberalism—has only begun to be explored. The books of imprisoned authors like Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, and

Malcolm X (which sold hundreds of thousands of copies) exposed something about the United States that only they could know. In the original introduction to Jackson’s Soledad Brother, Jean Genet wrote that Jackson’s prison writing exposed “the miracle of truth itself, the naked truth revealed.”

20 For Genet and many readers of this literature,

the prisoner had access to a unique formation of knowledge which led to alternative ways of seeing and knowing the world

. Indeed, scholars like Dylan Rodríguez, Michael-Hames Garcia, and Joy James have argued that the knowledge produced by the prisoner exposes a truth about the United States that cannot be accessed from elsewhere.21 The prisoner could name what others could not even see. At the same time, thousands of political fugitives wrote devastating critiques of the United States as they bombed and robbed their way to what they hoped would be a better world.

Underground organizations like the Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, and George

Jackson Brigade did more than attack symbols of state violence; they also wrote poetry, stories, memoirs, communiqués, magazines, and made films. These groups understood culture as foundational to the production and survival of alternatives to things as they were. In this way, culture became a site for the emergence of alternative forms of knowledge.

DS Grew from Slavery



Browne 2012

–



According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be traced to the "simple accounts" of slave owners.

Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves.

One example involved the

"General Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the Negro that what you say is the result of reflection."

The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power

, as Michel Foucault tells us, is "exercised through its invisibility," while imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its targets. Disciplinary power

then operated on the enslaved as racialized surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to and that produced them as racial

, and therefore enslave able, subjects. Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system

, a system that relied on

, as Parenti lays out, three " information technologies: the written slave pass

, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters

for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes" when apprehended.

This security system

, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (black) illiteracy",

a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal.

The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were

primarily aimed at a white public

that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts, became a part of the aparatus of surveillance

, and the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating.

In detailing physical desacriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place."

For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for "a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: "sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception." Seth's, or Sall's, duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to selfidentify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white parent) or a "Quadroon Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery.

Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official with the first US federal census in 1790

. I will retun to the census as a technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an infoprmation technology

demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that required constant policing and oversight

. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of countersurveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned "colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open." "Top eye" here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so as not to appear uppity To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken to." This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a "Technology of Whiteness".

Fugitivity









Recyclopedia: Trimming, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-consciously inherits and intervenes in what Kathy Lou Schultz calls the “legacy gone missing” of “avant-garde practice by African-American women poets” (n. pag.). Mullen is actively engaged in recovering this legacy through her creative, scholarly, and editorial work.1 Poised in the dialectic of what I call “enclosure” (identity, history, and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and “run” (mobility, flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), Mullen’s work plies the tensions between these disparate but mutually dependent poles. From the negotiation of this tension, Mullen produces a formal strategy predicated on the communal participation of others and distinctive among innovative poets—the recyclopedia.

Mullen’s writing creates texts that remain open to ambiguity, difficulty, and difference. Her writing engages in political and social criticism with particular attention to race, gender, and the discourse of the commodity, while it delights in the pleasures of an infinite linguistic jouissance. Many of the critics who have written about Mullen’s work, including Elisabeth A. Frost, Juliana Spahr, Allison Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex “mixtery” of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen’s attention to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen’s work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen’s work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to

Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullen’s “subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein’s] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs” (71). Frost demonstrates Mullen’s rare (“among recent avant-garde poets”) revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that Mullen “constructs lyric otherwise—as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice” (466). While Spahr asserts that “what has interested me about Mullen’s work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy-


Mullen’s body of work as a whole and elaborating on Cummings’s assertion that Mullen self-

consciously refl ects her work’s synthesis of multiple discourses, I contend in addition that Mullen’s writing is characterized by a productive tension between “enclosure” and “run,” between an archive of cultural, linguistic, and historical references, images, and information and the fugitivity that is both a thematics and a formal strategy. Her archive manifests in the form of the palimpsest, or, to use a fi gure that Mullen herself foregrounds, her archive is a recyclopedia. She takes debased, erased, and forgotten histories and found discourses and runs with and recycles them; she invites the reader to participate in this educative process of conservation and production, enclosure and fugitive run. Her work articulates a need for a more equitable ecology, one of acknowledgment and memory, conservation and reuse; she and we as readers are caught up in her recyclopedia, an ongoing poetics of reuse that benefits from the multiple perspectives of a heterogeneous community. The concept of the fugitive in Mullen’s work is connected equally to the history of the United States, the global slave trade, historical strategies of escape for enslaved blacks, and formal methods for escaping and reinventing genre and poetic method. Furthermore, the fugitive is both critical and generative and intimately linked to Mullen’s concept of the recyclopedia. Mullen’s formal strategies explicitly reference the history of the fugitive slave laws. In an interview with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen delineates the connection of the fugitive to her own work: I wanted the poem to have that quality of quick movement from one thing to another, from one subject or thought to another, from one mood or emotion to another. Partly because I wanted things to be in flux, a state of flux, a state of change. If












Fugitivity arises out of the inadequacy of society in its attempts to calculate and enframe blackness—while blackness is constitutive of societal relations and is always-already criminal, it doesn’t bar the creation of undercommon spaces of disorder




So I’m interested in how the ones who inhabit the nearness and distance between Dasein and things

(which is off to the side of what lies between subjects and objects), the ones who are attained or accumulated unto death even as they are always escaping the Hegelian positioning of the bondsman, are perhaps best understood as the extra-ontological, extra-political constant—a destructive, healing agent; a stolen, transplanted organ always eliciting rejection; a salve whose soothing lies in the abrasive penetration of the merely typical; an ensemble always operating in excess of that ancient juridical formulation of the thing (Ding), to which Kant subscribes, as that to which nothing can be imputed, the impure, degraded, manufactured (in) human who moves only in response to inclination, whose reflexes lose the name of action. At the same time, this dangerous supplement, as the fact out of which everything else emerges, is constitutive. It seems to me that this special ontic-ontological fugitivity of/in the slave is what is revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon. So that in contradistinction to Fanon’s protest, the problem of the inadequacy of any ontology to blackness, to that mode of being for which escape or apposition and not the objectifying encounter with otherness is the prime modality, must be understood in its relation to the inadequacy of calculation to being in general. Moreover, the brutal history of criminalization in public policy, and at the intersection of biological, psychological, and sociological discourse, ought not obscure the already existing onticontological criminality of/as blackness. Rather, blackness needs to be understood as operating at the nexus of the social and the ontological, the historical and the essential. Indeed, as the ontological is moving within the corrosive increase that the ontic instantiates, it must be understood that what is now meant by ontological requires special elucidation. What is inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies. The lived experienced of blackness is, among other things, a constant demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of dehiscence, a para-ontology whose comportment will have been

(toward) the ontic or existential field of things and events. That ontology will have had to have operated as a general critique of calculation even as it gathers diaspora as an open set—or as an openness disruptive of the very idea of set—of accumulative and unaccumulable differences, differings, departures without origin, leavings that continually defy the natal occasion in general even as they constantly bespeak the previous. This is a Nathaniel Mackey formulation whose full implications will have never been fully explorable.12 What Fanon’s pathontological refusal of blackness leaves unclaimed is an irremediable homelessness common to the colonized, the enslaved, and the enclosed. This is to say that what is claimed in the name of blackness is an undercommon disorder that has always been there, that is retrospectively and retroactively located there, that is embraced by the ones who stay there while living somewhere else. Some folks relish being a problem.

As Amiri Baraka and Nikhil Pal Singh (almost) say, “Black(ness) is a country” (and a sex) (that is not one).13 Stolen life disorders positive value just as surely as it is not equivalent to social death or absolute dereliction.

So if we cannot simply give an account of things that, in the very fugitivity and impossibility that is the essence of their existence, resist accounting, how do we speak of the lived experience of the black?

What limits are placed on such speaking when it comes from the position of the black, but also what constraints are placed on the very concept of lived experience, particularly in its relation to the black when black social life is interdicted? Note that the interdiction exists not only as a function of what might be broadly understood as policy but also as a function of an epistemological consensus broad enough to include Fanon, on the one hand, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, on the other—encompassing formulations that might be said not only to characterize but also to initiate and continually re-initialize the philosophy of the human sciences. In other words, the notion that there is no black social life is part of a set of variations on a theme that include assertions of the irreducible pathology of black social life and the implication that (non-pathological) social life is what emerges by way of the exclusion of the black or, more precisely, of blackness. But what are we to make of the pathological here? What are the implications of a social life that, on the one hand, is not what it is and, on the other hand, is irreducible to what it is used for? This discordant echo of one of Theodor W. Adorno’s most infamous assertions about jazz implies that black social life reconstitutes the music that is its phonographic.14 That music, which Miles Davis calls “social music,” to which Adorno and Fanon gave only severe and partial hearing, is of interdicted black social life operating on frequencies that are disavowed—though they are also amplified—in the interplay of sociopathological and phenomenological description. How can we fathom a social life that tends toward death, that enacts a kind of being-toward-death, and which, because of such tendency and enactment, maintains a terribly beautiful vitality? Deeper still, what are we to make of the fact of a sociality that emerges when lived experience is distinguished from fact, in the fact of life that is implied in the very phenomenological gesture/analysis within which Fanon asserts black social life as, in all but the most minor ways, impossible? How is it that the off harmony of life, sociality, and blackness is the condition of possibility of the claim that there is no black social life? Does black life, in its irreducible and impossible sociality and precisely in what might be understood as its refusal of the status of social life that is refused it, constitute a fundamental danger—an excluded but immanent disruption—to social life? What will it have meant to embrace this matrix of im/possibility, to have spoken of and out of this suspension?

What would it mean to dwell on or in minor social life? This set of questions is imposed upon us by

Fanon. At the same time, and in a way that is articulated most clearly and famously by W. E. B. Du

Bois, this set of questions is the position, which is also to say the problem, of blackness.

Fugitivity is the only resistance

Moten 8

Fred, OG, Member of the Undercommons. "Black optimism/Black operation". PMLA, October 2008. Pgs. 1743–1747. PWoods.

My field is black studies. In that field, I’m trying to hoe the hard row of beautiful things. I try to study them and I also try to make them. Elizabeth Alexander says “look for color everywhere.” For me, color + beauty = blackness which is not but nothing other than who, and deeper still, where I am.

This shell, this inhabitation, this space, this garment—that I carry with me on the various stages of my flight from the conditions of its making—is a zone of chromatic saturation troubling any ascription of impoverishment

of any kind however much it is of, which is to say in emergence from, poverty (which is, in turn, to say in emergence from or as an aesthetics or a poetics of poverty). The highly cultivated nature of this situated volatility, this emergent poetics of the emergency, is the open secret that has been the preoccupation of black studies.

But it must be said now—and I’ll do so by way of a cool kind of accident that has been afforded us by the danger and saving power that is power point—that there is a strain of black studies that strains against black studies and its object, the critique of western civilization, precisely insofar as it disavows its aim (blackness or the thinking of blackness, which must be understood in what some not so strange combination of Nahum Chandler and Martin Heidegger might call its paraontological distinction from

black people).

There was a moment in Rebecca’s presentation when the image of a black saxophonist (I think, but am not sure, that it was the great Chicago musician Fred Anderson) is given to us as a representative, or better yet a denizen (as opposed to citizen), of the “space of the imagination.” What’s cool here, and what is also precisely the kind of thing that makes practitioners of what might be called the new black studies really mad, is this racialization of the imagination which only comes fully into its own when it is seen in opposition, say, to that set of faces or folks who constituted what I know is just a part of Lauren’s tradition of Marxist historiographical critique. That racialization has a long history and begins to get codified in a certain Kantian discourse, one in which the imagination is understood to “produce nothing but nonsense,” a condition that requires that “its wings be severely clipped by the imagination.” What I’m interested in, but which I can only give a bare outline of, is a two-fold black operation—one in which Kant moves toward something like a thinking of the imagination as blackness that fully recognizes the irreducible desire for this formative and deformative, necessarily supplemental necessity; one in which black studies ends up being unable to avoid a certain sense of itself as a Kantian, which is to say anti-Kantian and ante-Kantian, endeavor.

The new black studies, or to be more precise, the old-new black studies, since every iteration has had this ambivalence at its heart, can’t help but get pissed at the terrible irony of its irreducible

Kantianness precisely because it works so justifiably hard at critiquing that racialization of the imagination and the racialized opposition of imagination (in its lawless, nonsense producing freedom) and critique that turns out to be the condition of possibility of the critical philosophical project. There is a voraciously instrumental anti-essentialism, powered in an intense and terrible way by good

intentions, that is the intellectual platform from which black studies’ disavowal of its object and aim is launched, even when that disavowal comes in something which also thinks itself to be moving in the direction of that object and aim. I’m trying to move by way of a kind of resistance to that antiessentialism, one that requires a paleonymic relation to blackness; I’m trying to own a certain dispossession, the underprivilege of being-sentenced to this gift of constantly escaping and to standing in for the fugitivity

(to echo Natahaniel Mackey, Daphne Brooks and Michel Foucault) (of the imagination) that is an irreducible property of life, persisting in and against every disciplinary technique while constituting and instantiating not just the thought but that actuality of the outside that is what/where blackness is—as space or spacing of the imagination

, as condition of possibility and constant troubling of critique.

It’s annoying to perform what you oppose, but I just want you to know that I ain’t mad. I loved these presentations, partly because I think they loved me or at least my space, but mostly because they were beautiful. I love Kant, too, by the way, though he doesn’t love me, because I think he’s beautiful too and, as you know, a thing of beauty is a joy forever

. But even though I’m not mad, I’m not disavowing that strain of black studies that strains against the weight or burden, the refrain, the strain of being-imaginative and not-being-critical that is called blackness and that black people have had to carry. Black Studies strains against a burden that, even when it is thought musically, is inseparable from constraint. But my optimism,

black optimism, is bound up with what it is to claim blackness and the appositional, runaway black operations that have been thrust upon it. The burden, the constraint, is the aim, the paradoxically aleatory goal that animates escape in and the possibility of escape from.

Here is one such black op—a specific, a capella instantiation of strain, of resistance to constraint and instrumentalization, of the propelling and constraining force of the refrain, that will allow me to get to a little something concerning the temporal paradox of, and the irruption of ecstatic temporality in, optimism, which is to say black optimism, which is to say blackness

. I play this in appreciation for being in Chicago, which is everybody’s sweet home, everybody’s land of California, as Robert Johnson puts it. This is music from a Head Start program in Mississippi in the mid-sixties and as you all know Chicago is a city in Mississippi, Mississippi a (fugue) state of mind in Chicago. “Da Da Da Da,” The Child Development Group of Mississippi,

Smithsonian Folkways Records, FW02690 1967

The temporal paradox of optimism—that it is, on the one hand, necessarily futurial so that optimism is an attitude we take towards that which is to come; but that it is, on the other hand, in its proper Leibnizian formulation, an assertion not only of the necessity but also of the rightness and the essential timelessness of the always already existing, resonates in this recording. It is infused with that same impetus that drives a certain movement, in Monadology, from the immutability of monads to that enveloping of the moral world in the natural world that Leibniz calls, in

Augustinian echo/revision, “the City of God.”

With respect to C. L. R. James and José (Muñoz), and a little respectful disrespect to Lee Edelman, these children are the voices of the future in the past, the voices of the future in our present. In this recording, this remainder, their fugitivity, remains, for me, in the intensity of their refrain, of their straining against constraint, cause for the optimism they perform. That optimism always lives, which is to say escapes, in the assertion of a right to refuse

, which is, as Gayatri Spivak says, the first right: an instantiation of a collective negative tendency to differ, to resist the regulative powers that resistance, that differing, call into being. To think resistance as originary is to say, in a sense, that we have what we need, that we can get there from here, that there’s nothing wrong with us or even, in this regard, with here, even as it requires us still to think about why it is that difference calls the same, that resistance calls regulative power, into existence, thereby securing the vast, empty brutality that characterizes

here and now.

Nevertheless, however much I keep trouble in mind, and therefore, in the interest of making as much trouble as possible, I remain hopeful insofar as I will have been in this very collective negative tendency, this little school within and beneath school that we gather together to be. For a bunch of little whiles, this is our field (i.e., black studies), our commons or undercommons or underground or outskirts and it will remain so as long as it claims its fugitive proximity to blackness

, which I will claim, with ridiculousness boldness,

is the condition of possibility of politics.

We must accept fugtitivity to create a “space of acceptance” – this is the only way to escape the state’s labels reflecting institutionalized racism

Dillon 13 assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in





In her essay “Reflections of Being Buried Alive,” Susan Rosenberg describes her first time entering the

Lexington High Security Unit for Women—a small underground prison in Lexington, Kentucky, that held Rosenberg and other women involved in 1970s revolutionary movements from 1986 until 1988.

Rosenberg, a white lesbian and member of a number of feminist and anti-racist revolutionary groups in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, writes: We stood at the electronically controlled metal gate under the eye of one of eleven security cameras, surrounded by unidentified men in business suits.

We were wearing newly issued beige short sleeved shirts, culottes, and plastic slippers. We were in handcuffs.

An unidentified man had ordered us placed in restraints while walking from one end of the basement to the other. The lights were neon fluorescent burning and bright, and everything was snow white— walls, floors, ceilings. There was no sound except the humming of the lights, and nothing stirred in the air.

Being there at that gate looking down the cell block made my ears ring, and my breath quicken. 429 What is remarkable about Rosenberg’s writing from

Lexington is how her attention to the banality of the unit captures the ways torture and terror became inscribed in the ordinary. A white room. Plastic Slippers.

Men in suits. The humming of lights. Eleven cameras. Dead air. Her ears rang and her breath was lost, not at the spectacle of it, but at its normality, its routineness, its technological perfection. The unimaginable violence of this new form of incarceration was cloaked in a new visual episteme. The unit was clean, quiet, modern, rational, and orderly. It helped inaugurate a variety of psychological and physical contortions of the human mind and body that are now so routine that they remain invisible in their banality.

Addressing the logics behind the unit would necessitate an epistemology that could confront the rationality and mundaneness of modern terror.

The Control Unit at

Lexington embodied a new type of penal rationality that, once it was shut down in 1988 after Amnesty International declared it “deliberately and gratuitously oppressive,” has spread to over 60 prisons across the country and the world.430 In these High Security Units (or Control Units)—what amount to prisons within prisons—thousands of people are held in solitary confinement and are subjected to extreme sensory deprivation for 23 hours a day, often indefinitely

. The last forty years of neoliberal economics has not only witnessed the exponential growth the prison as system of racialized governance, but this period of economic restructuring has also seen the rise of a new method of containment and bodily incapacitation in the form of the control unit

. Anti-racist, feminist, and queer activists in the 1970s and ‘80s were subjected to this new form of carceral state violence before it rose to dominance in the 1990s.

We can turn to their writings as a critique of not only the broad contours of neoliberal-carceral state, but also the micro-politics of its operation as practiced in the control unit.

In addition, the writings embody what I have been describing as a politics of anticipation—when Rosenberg looked down the cellblock, she saw something she couldn’t yet describe— indeed, something prisoners continue to say is indescribable. She knew something was coming. And what she saw made her senses fail. Lexington set the stage for the expansion of the control unit as the prevailing domestic model of neoliberal containment and immobilization. But under the “war on terror,” the control unit of the 1970s and ‘80s has since extended its reach transnationally. Scholars like Avery Gordon, Michelle Brown, Colin Dayan, and Caleb Smith have observed that the living death of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation at Guantánamo and elsewhere was first created in supermax prisons in the United States.431 This work opens up opportunities for considering the connections between the imprisonment of 1970s radicals and the detention of an unknown number of people in the carceral archipelago created under the “war on terror.” Indeed, Ivan Greenberg has argued that the FBI’s production of the domestic terrorist in the 1970s acted as the template for the creation of “the terrorist” in the “war on terror.” In fact, it was during the 1970s that domestic terrorism first emerged as a major public policy and policing issue.

432 The ways that the category of terrorism was shaped around groups like the Black

Liberation Army and Weather Underground created a legal apparatus and a set of discourses that would rise again in the U.S. government’s response to the attacks of September 11th.

What Rosenberg and other imprisoned radicals (who were often categorized as “terrorists”) experienced thirty years ago set the conditions for a global prison regime driven by an imperial politics of “permanent abandonment.”433 In this chapter, I examine the history of Lexington and the writings of the women detained there to consider

the connections between the carceral politics of the neoliberal state and what has become a global prison regime under the “war on terror.” An engagement with the gender and sexual politics of the control unit at Lexington can lead to a different understanding of the forms of power inaugurated at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. Lexington is unique among the control units that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s because it was designed specifically for women and ended up holding a number of women who identified as lesbians.

Focusing on Lexington as central to the emergence of the

“space of exception” in Iraq and Guantánamo, as well as the neoliberal state, reveals a network of institutional, discursive, and affective connections that traverse space, time, race, gender, and sexuality

. Such an investigation can make clear the relationship between the neoliberal-carceral state and the permanent warfare state, as well as the ways that these changing formations were built on the bodies contained within new formations of captivity.

Activists and prisoners confronting the emergence of the neoliberal-carceral state anticipated the emergence of that formation; further, their writings reveal a critique of the forms of torture and terror constitutive of what Brown calls the

“global prison-industrial complex.”

434

Unintelligibility is the only way to combat the state—writing is a tool to combat state violence that the usfg itself cant register






Before being placed at Lexington, Rosenberg and Torres were held in a men’s prison in Tucson, Arizona. They were two of five women held there.513

Before being moved to administrative segregation units (or isolation cells) on the women’s side of the prison at Tucson, both women were held in solitary confinement with men.

This meant they were subjected to on-going, incessant sexual harassment from male prisoners and guard s. It was here that they were told they would soon be transferred to Lexington. Guards taunted them with the unimaginable forms of violence and terror they would be subjected to at the unit. Part of the transfer process to Lexington involved a strip search and cavity search performed by a male guard. Rosenberg writes of this experience: We were all standing in the hall and then the captain and the associate warden showed up. The captain had papers in his hand; he shoved them at us.

I saw the heading

“Permission/Notification for High Security Contraband Search” and boxes with writing next to them.

The first box that was checked was “cavity search” and the was second was “rectal.” They wanted us to sign the forms

. Alex said, “You can do an X-ray in stead.” The captain laughed. “No, we don’t have to and we won’t. You are going to a control unit and it’s our call on this. We have the right to do it. Rosenberg and Torres were then forcibly separated. Rosenberg heard Torres screaming: Five CO’s pushed me in an examining room…I went crazy. I started hitting and kicking with every ounce of my being. I might have to do it, but I would not do it easy. The y overpowered me, pushed my head down onto the examining table, pinned me there, and pulled down my pants. I kept kicking backward until they held my legs.

I was cursing and yelling. “

This is rape. You’re fucking raping me! You could do an X-ray. You know we don’t have contraband. The physician’s assistant took his fist and rammed it up my anus, and then he took it out and did the same thing up my vagina. He didn’t “look” for anything. The woman officer who had talked to me had to leave the room…They half carried, half walked me down the hall of the building into receiving and discharge. Alex was sitting on the floor against the wall. She was shackled with full chains. When the marshals came to transport us and I stood up, there was blood on the floor

. They wouldn’t let me change my uniform or get medical attention. It was just policy.514

Many accounts of sexual violence committed against women in prison concern exceptional cases where a guard violated the law or other inmates perpetrate the violation. In this the case, sexual violence was performed by the state in the name of the safety of the state.

As the captain put it, the state simply has the right to sexually assault those in their custody. Whether the cavity search is authorized by the consent of the prisoner or not, consent is not available to the captive who is always already subject to the systems of violence and force available to the prison. As Angela Davis observes, if strip searches and cavity searches were performed by men in plain clothes on the street, there would be no question that an act of sexual violence was taking place.515 Yet, the body of the prisoner is ontologically a threat to the state and the public, and thus violence performed on the captive body preempts the violence the prisoner is perpetually waiting to unleash. Simply, a rape is not a rape—it is safety and security.

This particular act of state violence did not occur because prisoners are “juridical non-people” as Dylan

Rodríguez would have it.516 Instead, sexual violence was authorized and performed by the law and through the law.

The women were even given the non-choice of signing a legal document authorizing the terror that was coming regardless of their forced consent. Torres and Rosenberg were viewed as legal subjects who could authorize their own violation. For example, when Amnesty International wrote the FBP about the assault, the Associate Director responded: Regarding the particular search conducted of Ms. Torres and Susan Rosenberg prior to their transfer to Lexington, our careful review indicates that the search was not punitive nor outside of agency policy.

This very isolated occurrence involved a search that was performed in a professional manner by a qualified physician’s assistant.517

The sexual assault was the law, policy, and procedure of the prison. It was professional and part of the larger system of the prison’s humane care of the prisoner.

Like the unimaginable violence at Guantánamo, the women at

Lexington were not beyond the safety of the law—they were possessed by it. Rosenberg countered state violence and terror: “I found a new way to survive by reading and writing and thinking with purpose.”518

Her lawyer told her to write down the forms of violation, pain, and horror that were too numerous to catalogue during their visits, were so unimaginable they could not be conveyed by speech, or were simply unspeakable.

Rosenberg’s lawyer framed this process as building an archive that would contradict the state’s account of Lexington and thus would produce a different conception of the truth. Rosenberg writes: “Write it down, for the record. I half believed that keeping a record was a futile effort, and she half believed it would be of use in fighting for justice, but that sentence became a signal between us, a way to reference acts of violence too difficult to discuss.”

519 The “record” in this formulation was a legal account that could potentially contest the state in court, but it was also an alternative record of events that could live on in places and times beyond the state’s determination of what is real and true. In this way, writing became a way of producing an epistemology that haunts the neoliberal-carceral state’s discourses of freedom, equality, and justice.

Writing became a way to document the violence of the law—violence the law itself could not register.

Guerilla Communication

Our act of poetics is a form of guerillia communication that allows for new modes of being human. Only these acts are capable of resisting colonialism within current academic spaces

Gagne, 2006

- PhD and MA from the Department of Historical Sociology @ Binghamton University, in New York (Karen M.; “Fighting Amnesia as a Guerilla Activity: Poetics for a New Mode of Being

Human ”; Dissertation; Pg. 260-262; http://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1135&context=humanarchitecture; DOA:

7/7/15 || NDW)

It was through “autopoesis” that another new mode of being human

—that of the bourgeois man— was ignited from the 16th century

onward to the present.

And, it will be through an “autopoesis” of equal or greater magnitude that we will be able to leave this mode of being human. Poetry, Wynter writes, is the means by which humans name the world. By calling themselves into being, humans invent their

“humanness.”

She argues, to name the world is to conceptualize the world; and to conceptualize the world is an expression of an active relation: “

A poem is itself and of man’s creative relation to his world; in humanizing this world through the conceptual/ naming process

(neither comes before the other like the chicken and the egg) h e invents and reinvents himself as human

” (1976: 87). Indigenist “ autopoesis” has been and will be central to work of dismantling the bourgeois/Western mode of “Human

”—a framework in which everyone remains confined. If the idea of the savage was a European invention, and it was made possible only as the negative concept of and the simultaneous invention of the European Self to be known as Man, this could only occur by suppressing whole areas of his Being.

This mode of cognition, Wynter argues, which we remain aware of only through poetry. The exploration of an alternative

FIGHTING AMNESIA AS A GUERILLA

ACTIVITY 261 HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, IV, SPECIAL ISSUE, SUMMER 2006 mode of cognition, still ideologically suppressed in everyone, becomes the salvaging of indigenous selves, and the reclamation of vast areas of our being

(1976, 83).

The power of this poetry lies in its noise

,10 in the disruption it causes to our present episteme. This poetry

, then, i s not “for art’s sake,” but offers a

“counter effect” to the project of colonialism

(Grayson, 5); it is “disenchanting.” In it, we are able to see how pre-colonial and pre-enslavement ways of knowing are as important as postcolonial and postenslavement systems of knowledge

, if not more so. The significance of the circle in pre-colonial America and in pre-colonial

Africa is illustrated in such a way that cannot be duplicated by any “sociological” or “anthropological” study.

Fighting against amnesia, restoring memory and reconnection to the past are key to true freedom in the present and future. The difficult but necessary process of restoring memory and reconnection is proposed as crucial to collective resistance of colonized peoples.

This perspective should be undertaken more seriously by all

“theorists and activists and clear thinkers and doers of the warrior clan,” to quote Bambara in The Salt Eaters (1980), in order to counter the continuation of slavery and colonialism in the present.

That it is not followed more closely, however, speaks to the depth of this cultural amnesia that marks the path of academics and of upward mobility (Cooper, 1991: 81)—or rather, our cultural systemic consciousness, as Sylvia Wynter calls it —that continues to be enforced and reproduced globally, particularly in academia, by the very disciplines that “research” and write about such events and social relationships of the “past.”

Ultimately, this poesis is an exercise in that “After” that Wynter writes about. It is to imagine the deconstruction of “our present memory of Man”

as Wynter puts it and the end of all things European in the Americas, as Silko puts it.

The proposed project for the 21st century is to move outside this field, and should be, Wynter argues, as with any poetic text, to deconstruct “the order of consciousness and mode of the aesthetic to which this conception of being human leads and through which we normally think, feel and behave…to redefine

the human on the basis of a new iconography

” (Wynter, 2000a: 26). It is my premise—as is that of the many writers with whom I mention in this article, particularly Marshall, Bambara, Brodber, and Dash—that through academia, people become SO far removed from the community that they lose the power to affect that community.11 In order to regain that power, as witnessed in the writing, a process of “unlearning”—an exorcism, if you will— and a regaining of consciousness must take place.

Engaging this “revelatory” work as witness and prophesy, as almanacs, and Anzaldúa, Wynter, Silko, Bambara, and Dash as cultural workers who have been engaged in such anti-hegemonic discourse for decades, actively writing “new facts into being,” is of considerable urgency.

To do so would confront the artificial separation between the activist and the scholar, the purely Western-European mind/body/spirit split, and the fake debate between the artist and the politician/historian/scientist. One cannot be committed to truth and revolutionary struggle unless one is willing to follow one’s own words.

So, with regard to my dissertation project in sociology, to citeNancy Welch, et al, editors of The Dissertation and The Discipline (2002), in order to change the field, one must refuse to renounce the course that one’s dissertation would necessarily take. It is at the level of the dissertation that “the disciplines” are produced and reproduced. It is where “we find our most profound, persistent beliefs about what it means to write and teach” (viii). So, if I want to change how writing gets carried out, and to resist replicating the status quo, then I must “see the dissertation as a site where the discipline is not just reproduced but could be reinvented” (viii)— or even dismantled.

Performing Freedom

*note—used elsewhere, including A2 no safe spaces, etc.

We must perform freedom, even when unsure of an audience – Only these acts of fugitivity refuse the possibility of dispossession and allow the black subject to be posited not as slave or criminal, but as human.

Browne, 2012

- PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone; “EVERYBODY'S GOT A

LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN: Black luminosity and the visual culture of surveillance”; Article; Pg 551-

555; DOA: 7/5/15 || NDW)

‘

Moment by moment’ is the experience of surveillance in urban life

, as David Lyon observes, where the city dweller expects to be ‘constantly illuminated’

(2001, p. 5153

). It is how the city dweller contends with this expectation that is instructive. To examine closely the performance of freedom, a performative practice that

I suggest that those named fugitive in the Board of Inquiry arbitration hearings made use of

, I borrow Richard Iton’s ‘visual surplus’ and its b-side

‘performative sensibility’ (2009, p. 105). What Iton suggests is that we come to internalize an expectation of the potential of being watched and with this emerges a certain ‘performative sensibility’.

Coupled with this awareness of an overseeing surveillance apparatus was ‘the conscious effort to always give one’s best performance and encourage others to do the same, and indeed to perform even when one is not sure of one’s audience (or whether there is in fact an audience)’ (p. 105).

Iton employs the term visual surplus to think about the visual media of black popular culture

(graffiti, music videos) made increasingly available to the public through the rise of hip-hop in the five boroughs of New York

City in the 1970s and the uses of new technologies (cellular phones, handheld cameras, the Internet, DVDs) to record and distribute performances.

Applied to a different temporal location,Iton’s analyses of visual surplus and performative sensibility are useful for how we think about fugitive acts, black expressive practices and the regulation of black mobilities in colonial New

York City 200 years earlier. What I am suggesting here is that for the fugitive in eighteenth century

New York such a sensibility would encourage one to perform

i n this case perform freedom even when one was not sure of one’s audience. Put differently, these performances of freedom were refusals of dispossession, constituting the black subject not as slave or fugitive, nor commodity but as human. For the black subject, the potentiality of being under watch was a cumulative effect of the large scale surveillance apparatus in colonial New York City and beyond stemming from transatlantic slavery, specifically fugitive slave posters and print news advertisements, blackbirders and other freelancers who kidnapped free blacks to transport them to other sites to be enslaved, slave catching and through the passing of repressive black codes, such as those in response to the slave insurrection of 1712.

April 1712 saw an armed insurrection in New York City where over two dozen black slaves gathered in the densely populated East Ward of the city to set fire to a building, killing at least nine whites and wounding others. In the end over

70 were arrested, with many coerced into admissions of guilt. Of those, 25 were sentenced to death and 23 of these death sentences were carried out. Burned at the stake, hanged, beheaded and their corpses publicly displayed and left to decompose, such spectacular corporal punishment served as a warning for the city’s slave population and beyond. With these events and the so-called slave conspiracy to burn the city in 1741, the black code governing black city life consolidated previously enacted laws that were enforced in a rather discretionary fashion.6 Some of these laws spoke explicitly to the notion of a visual surplus and the regulation of mobility by way of the candle lantern. On 14 March 1713, the Common Council of New York City passed a ‘Law for Regulating Negro or Indian Slaves in the Nighttime’ that saw to it that ‘no Negro or Indian Slave above the age of fourteen years do presume to be or appear in any of the streets’ of New York City ‘on the south side of the fresh water one hour after sunset without a lantern or a lit candle’ (New York Common Council, Volume III). ‘Fresh water’ here referring to the Fresh Water Pond found in lower Manhattan, slightly adjacent to the Negroes Burial Ground and that supplied the city with drinking water at the time. Again, this law regulating mobility and autonomy through the use of the technology of the candle lantern was amended on 18 November 1731 where ‘no negro, mulatto or Indian slave above the age of fourteen years’ unless in the company of some white person ‘or white servant belonging to the family whose slave he or she is, or in whose service he or she there are’ was to be without a light that could be plainly seen or it was then ‘lawful for any of his Majesty’s Subjects within the said City to apprehend such slave or slaves’ and ‘carry him, her or them before the Mayor or Recorder or any of the Aldermen of the said City who are hereby authorized upon proof of offense to commit such slave or slaves to the 552

CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Common Gaol’ (New York Common Council, Volume IV). Any slave convicted of being unlit after dark was sentenced to a public whipping of no more than 40 lashes, at the discretion of the master or owner before being discharged. Later this punishment was reduced to no more than 15 lashes. Such discretionary violence made for an imprecise mathematics of torture. Mostly, punishment for such transgression was taken into the hands of the slave owner. In 1734 a male slave of John van Zandt was found dead in his bed. The dead man was said to have ‘absented himself’ from van Zandt’s dwelling in the nighttime (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Although it was first reported that the slave was horsewhipped to death by Van Zandt for being caught on the streets after dark by watchmen, a coroner’s jury found Van

Zandt not negligent in this death, finding instead that ‘the correction given by the Master was not the cause of death, but that it was by the visitation of God’ (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Other laws put into place around light and black mobilities in New York City stipulated that at least one lantern must be carried per three negroes after sunset, more tightly regulated curfews and in 1722 the Common Council relegated burials by free and enslaved blacks to the daytime hours with attendance of no more than 12, plus the necessary pallbearers and gravediggers, as a means to reduce opportunities for assembly and to prevent conspiracy hatching. In recounting physician Alexander Hamilton’s narrative about his travels through New York City in July of 1744, Andy Doolen details that one outcome of the alleged conspiracy of 1741 was the ruining, according to Hamilton, of the traditional English cup of tea (2005). It was thought by Hamilton that: they have very bad water in the city, most of it being hard and brackish. Ever since the negroe conspiracy, certain people have been appointed to sell water in the streets, which they carry on a sledge in great casks and bring it from the best springs about the city, for it was when the negroes went for tea water that they held their caballs and consultations, and therefor they have a law now that no negroe shall be seen upon the streets without a lanthorn after dark. (Hamilton 1948, p. 88) We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to dawn, made knowable, locatable and contained within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a simple device made for a visual surplus where technology met surveillance, made the business of tea a white enterprise and encoded white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law. Of course, unsupervised leisure, labour, travel, assembly and other forms of social networking past sunset by free and enslaved black New Yorkers continued regardless of the enforcement of codes meant to curtail such things. BLACK LUMINOSITY AND SURVEILLANCE 553 Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July

2015 Oftentimes social networking by free and enslaved black New Yorkers took place right under the surveillant gazes of the white population, in markets and during Sabbath and holiday celebrations. In these spaces of sometimes interracial and cross-class commerce and socializing, black performative practices of drumming, dancing and chanting persisted. During celebrations of Pinkster marking the feast of Pentecost of the Dutch Reformed

Church, amongst the rituals, free and enslaved blacks elected a governor who would serve as a symbolic leader resolving disputes and collecting tributes, making this holiday an event for white spectatorship of black cultural and political production, although for many such celebratory resistance made this ‘a festival of misrule’ (Harris 2003, p. 41). So much so that the Common Council of Albany, New York, banned Pinkster celebrations in 1811, for reasons including a resentment of the space that it opened up for unsettling exchanges between blacks and whites (Lott 1993; McAllister 2003; White 1989). The most controversial incorporation of black performativity into

Pinkster was the Totau. On the Totau, McAllister writes: a man and a woman shuffle back and forth inside a ring, dancing precariously close without touching and isolating most of their sensual movement in the hip and pelvic areas. Once the couple dances to exhaustion, a fresh pair from the ring of clapping dancers relieves them and the Totau continues. (McAllister 2003, p. 112) That such a performative sensibility was engaged by black subjects in colonial New York City approximately 200 years before the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx, New York City, is of much significance. The Totau, and later, the Catharine Market breakdown reverberate in the cypher of b-boys and b-girls. In Eric Lott’s discussion of black performances he cites Thomas De Voe’s eyewitness account of the Catharine Market breakdown in the early nineteenth century New York City. De Voe writes: This board was usually about five to six feet long, of large width, with its particular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end. Their music or time was usually given by one of their party, which was done by beating their hands on the sides of their legs and the noise of the heel. The favorite dancing place was a cleared spot on the east side of the fish market in front of Burnel Brown’s Ship Chandlery. (De Voe 1862, cited in

Lott 1993, pp. 4142) In this instance, the breakdown is performed in a market, allowing for white spectatorship and patronage in a space that is already overdetermined as a site of commerce within the economy of slavery.

Later, DeVoe recalls ‘public 554 CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 negro dances’ at Catharine Market in an 1889 New York Times article where he is quoted as saying that the dancers ‘would bring roots, berries, birds, fish, clams, oysters, flowers, and anything else they could gather and sell in the market to supply themselves with pocket money’ (28 April 1889).

Sylvia Wynter’s ‘provision ground ideology’ in instructive here for an understanding of solidarity, survival and the role of folkculture as resistance to the ‘dehumanization of Man and Nature’

(1970, p. 36).

Out of the provision grounds came the cultivation of ceremonial practices, including dance, that were, as Wynter tells us, ‘the cultural guerilla resistance against the Market economy’

(1970, p. 36).7

The remains of the Catharine Market breakdown can be found in the cardboard and turntables of the breakdancing cypher. Then and now cultural production and expressive practices offer moments of living with, refusals and alternatives to routinized surveillance within a visual surplus

. In so being

, they allow for us to think differently about the predicaments, policies and performances constituting surveillance. Colonial New York City was a space of both terror and promise for black life. Lantern laws, fugitive slave notices, public whippings and the discretionary uses of violence by ‘his Majesty’s subjects’ rendered the black subject as always already unfree yet acts, like the breakdown, that were constitutive of black freedom persisted. It is under this context where certain humans came to be understood by many as unfree and the property of others while at the same time creating practices that maintained their humanity by challenging the routinization of surveillance, that we should read the 1783 Board of Inquiry hearings at Fraunces

Tavern.

Unintelligibility

Fugitivity is not simply opposition or transgression to the social but, rather, functions in a zone of indeterminacy that disrupts the relationship between knowledge and resistance—it is through this space of unintelligibility that blackness can find social life within social death





As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of “being for others,” of which

Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given enough attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw, that outlaws [interdit] any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man [person]. For not only must the black man [person] be black; he [they] must be black in relation to the white man [person].

Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man [person] has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man

[person].1


Frantz Fanon suggests, the black cannot be an other for another black, if the black can only be an other for a white, then is there ever anything called black social life? Is the designation of this or that thing as lawless, and the assertion that such lawlessness is a function of an already extant flaw, something more than that trying, even neurotic, oscillation between the exposure and the replication of a regulatory maneuver whose force is held precisely in the assumption that it comes before what it would contain? What’s the relation between explanation and resistance? Who bears the responsibility of discovering an ontology of, or of discovering for ontology, the ensemble of political, aesthetic, and philosophical derangements that comprise the being that is neither for itself nor for the other? What form of life makes such discovery possible as well as necessary? Would we know it by its flaws, its impurities? What might an impurity in a worldview actually be? Impurity implies a kind of noncompleteness, if not absence, of a worldview. Perhaps that noncompleteness signals an originarily criminal refusal of the interplay of framing and grasping, taking and keeping—a certain reticence at the ongoing advent of the age of the world picture. Perhaps it is the reticence of the grasped, the enframed, the taken, the kept—or, more precisely, the reluctance that disrupts grasping and framing, taking and keeping—as epistemological stance as well as accumulative activity. Perhaps this is the flaw that attends essential, anoriginal impurity—the flaw that accompanies impossible origins and deviant translations.2

What’s at stake is fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic—a movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure. This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression. Part of what can be attained in this zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands a para-ontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance.3 This exchange between matters juridical and matters sociological is given in the mixture of phenomenology and psychopathology that drives Fanon’s work, his slow approach to an encounter with impossible black social life poised or posed in the break, in a certain intransitive evasion of crossing, in the wary mood or fugitive case that ensues between the fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black and as a slippage enacted by the meaning—or, perhaps too “trans-literally,” the (plain[-sung]) sense—of things when subjects are engaged in the representation of objects.

Dance With the Dead

Embrace nothingness, dance with the dead

Moten 13

Fred Moten, Member of the Undercommons. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)”. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 112:4, Fall 2013. Pgs. 736-739.

PWoods.

Over the course of this essay, we’ll have occasion to consider what that means, by way of a discussion of my preference for the terms life and optimism over death and pessimism and in the light of Wilderson’s and Sexton’s brilliant insistence not only upon the preferential option for blackness but also upon the requirement of the most painstaking and painful attention to our damnation, a term I prefer to wretchedness, after the example of Miguel Mellino, not simply because it is a more literal translation of Fanon

(though often, with regard to

Fanon, I prefer the particular kinds of precision that follow from what some might dismiss as mistranslation) but also because wretchedness emerges from a standpoint that is not only not ours, that is not only one we cannot have and ought not want, but that is

, in general, held within the logic of im/possibility that delineates what subjects and citizens call the real world

(Mellino 2013). But this is to say, from the outset, not that I will advocate the construction of a necessarily fictive standpoint of our own but that

I will seek to begin to explore not just the absence but the refusal of standpoint, to actually explore and to inhabit and to think what

Bryan

Wagner

(2009: i) calls “existence without standing” from no standpoint because this is what it would truly mean to remain in the hold of the ship (when the hold is thought with properly critical, and improperly celebratory, clarity).

What would it be, deeper still, what is it, to think from no standpoint; to think outside the desire for a standpoint?

What emerges in the desire that constitutes a certain proximity to that thought is not (just) that blackness is ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that is supposed to have brought it into existence but that blackness is prior to ontology; or, in a slight variation of what Chandler would say, blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space.

This is to say that what I do assert, not against, I think, but certainly in apposition to Afro-pessimism, as it is, at least at one point, distilled in Sexton’s work, is not what he calls one of that project’s most polemical dimensions, “namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death” (Sexton 2ollb: 28). What I assert is this: that black life—which is as surely to say lf as black thought is to say thought—is irreducibly social; that, moreover, black life is lived in political death or that it is lived, if you will, in the burial ground of the subject by those who, insofar as they are not subjects, are also not, in the interminable (as opposed to the last) analysis, “death-bound,”

as Abdul Jan Mohamed (2005) would say. In this, however,

I also agree with Sexton insofar as I am inclined to call this burial ground “the world” and to conceive of it and the desire for it as pathogenic. At stake

, now, will be what the difference is between the pathogenic and the pathological, a difference that will have been instantiated by what we might think of as the view, as well as the point of view, of the pathologist. I don’t think I ever claimed, or meant to claim, that Afro-pessimism sees blackness as a kind of pathogen.

I think I probably do, or at least hope that it is, insofar as I bear the hope that blackness bears or is the potential to end the world.The question concerning the point of view, or standpoint, of the pathologist is crucial but so is the question of what it is that the pathologist examines.

What

, precisely, is the morbid body upon which Fanon, the pathologist, trains his eye? What is the object of his “complete lysis”

(Fanon 2008: xiv)? And if it is more proper, because more literal, to speak of a lysis of universe, rather than body, how do we think the relation between transcendental frame and the body, or nobody, that occupies, or is banished from, its confines and powers of orientation? What I offer here as a clarification of Sexton’s understanding of my relation to Afro-pessimism emerges from my sense of a kind of terminological dehiscence in Orlando Patterson’s (1982) work that emerges in what I take to be his deep but unacknowledged affinity with and indebtedness to the work of Hannah Arendt, namely, with a distinction crucial to her work between the social and the political.

The “secular excommunication” that describes slavery for Patterson

(1982: 5) is more precisely understood as the radical exclusion from a political order,

which is tantamount, in Arendt’s formulation, with something on the order of a radical relegation to the social. The problem with slavery, for Patterson, is that it is political death, not social death; the problem is that slavery confers the paradoxically stateless status of the merely, barely living; it delineates the inhuman as unaccommodated bios.

At stake is the transvaluation or, better yet, the invaluation or antivaluation, the extraction from the sciences of value (and from the very possibility of that necessarily fictional, but materially brutal, standpoint that Wagner [2009:1] calls “being a party to exchange”). Such extraction will, in turn, be the very mark and inscription (rather than absence or eradication) of the sociality of a life, given in common, instantiated in exchange.

What I am trying to get to

, by way of this terminological slide in Patterson, is the consideration of a radical disjunction between sociality and the state-sanctioned, state-sponsored terror of power-laden intersubjectivity, which is, or would be, the structural foundation of Patterson’s

epiphenomenology of spirit.

To have honor, which is, of necessity, to be a man of honor, for Patterson, is to become a combatant in transcendental subjectivity’s perpetual civil war. To refuse the induction that Patterson desires is to enact or perform the recognition of the constitution of civil society as enmity, hostility, and civil butchery.

It is,

moreover, to consider that the unspoken violence of political friendship constitutes a capacity for alignment and coalition that is enhanced by the unspeakable violence that is done to what and whom the political excludes.

This is to say that, yes,

I am in total agreement with the Afro-pessimistic understanding of blackness as exterior to civil society and, moreover, as unmappable within the cosmological grid of the transcendental subject. However, I understand civil society and the coordinates of the transcendental aesthetic—cognate as they are not with the failed but rather with the successful state and its abstract, equivalent citizens—to be the fundamentally and essentially antisocial nursery for a necessarily necropolitical imitation of life.

So that if

Afro-pessimists say that social life is not the condition of black life but is, rather, the political field that would surround it, then that’s a formulation with which I would agree. Social death is not imposed upon blackness by or from the standpoint or positionality of the political; rather, it is the field of the political, from which blackness is relegated to the supposedly undifferentiated mass or blob of the social, which is, in any case, where and what blackness chooses to stay. This question of the location and position of social death is

, as Sexton has shown no more rigorously than I could ever hope to do, crucial. It raises again that massive problematic of inside and outside that animates thought since before its beginning as the endless end to which thought always seeks to return

. Such mappability of the space-time or state of social death would, in turn, help us better understand the positionalities that could be said, figuratively, to inhabit it.

This mass is understood to be undifferentiated precisely because from the imaginary perspective of the political subject—who is also the transcendental subject of knowledge, grasp, ownership, and self- possession—difference can only be manifest as the discrete individuality that holds or occupies a standpoint. From that standpoint, from the artificial, officially assumed position, blackness is nothing, that is, the relative nothingness of the impossible, pathological subject and his fellows.

I believe it is from that standpoint that Afro-pessimism identifies and articulates the imperative to embrace that nothingness which is, of necessity, relative.

It is from this standpoint, which Wilderson defines precisely by his inability to occupy it, that he, in a painfully and painstakingly lyrical tour de force of autobiographical writing, declares himself to be nothing and proclaims his decision which in any case he cannot make, to remain as nothing, in genealogical and sociological isolation even from every other nothing.

Now, all that remains are unspoken scraps scattered on the floor like Lisa’s grievance. I am nothing, Naima, and you are nothing: the unspeakable answer to your question within your question. This is why I could not— would not—answer your question that night. Would I ever be with a Black woman again? It was earnest, not accusatory—I know. And nothing terrifies me more than such a question asked in earnest. It is a question that goes to the heart of desire, to the heart of our black capacity to desire. But if we take out the nouns that you used (nouns of habit that get us through the day), your question to me would sound like this: Would nothing ever be with nothing again? (Wilderson 2008: 265) When one reads the severity and intensity of Wilderson’s words—his assertion of his own nothingness and the implications of that nothingness for his reader—one is all but overwhelmed by the need for a kind of affirmative negation of his formulation.

It’s not that one wants to say no,

Professor Wilderson, you are, or I am, somebody; rather, one wants to assert the presence of something between the subjectivity that is refused and which one refuses and nothing, whatever that is. But it is the beauty—the fantastic, celebratory force of Wilderson’s and Sexton’s work, which study has allowed me to begin more closely to approach—of Afro-pessimism that allows and compels one to move past that contradictory impulse to affirm in the interest of negation and to begin to consider what nothing is

, not from its own standpoint or from any standpoint but from the absoluteness of its generative dispersion of a general antagonism that blackness holds and protects in as critical celebration and degenerative and regenerative preservation.

That’s the mobility of place, the fugitive field of unowning, in and from which we ask, paraontologically, by way of but also against and underneath the ontological terms at our disposal:

What is nothingness? What is thingli-ness? What is blackness? What’s the relationship between blackness, thingli-ness, nothingness and the (de/re)generative operations of what Deleuze might call a life in common?

Where do we go, by what means do we begin, to study blackness? Can there be an aesthetic sociology or a social poetics of nothingness? Can we perform an anatomy of the thing or produce a theory of the universal machine?

Our aim, even in the face of the brutally imposed difficulties of black life, is cause for celebration.

This is not because celebration is supposed to make us feel good or make us feel better, though there would be nothing wrong with that. It is, rather, because the cause for celebration turns out to be the condition of possibility of black thought, which animates the black operations that will produce the absolute overturning, the absolute turning of this motherfucker out. Celebration is the essence of

black thought, the animation of black operations, which are, in the first instance, our undercommon, underground, submarine sociality. In the end, though life and optimism are the terms under which I speak, I agree with Sexton—by way of the slightest, most immeasurable reversal of emphasis—that

Afro-pessimism and black optimism are not but nothing other than one another.

I will continue to prefer the black optimism of his work just as, I am sure, he will continue to prefer the Afro-pessimism of mine. We will have been interarticulate, I believe, in the field where annihilative seeing, generative sounding, rigorous touching and feeling, requires an improvisation of and on friendship, a sociality of friendship that will have been, at once, both intramural and evangelical. I’ll try to approach that field, its expansive concentration, by way of Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell’s (1982) extended meditation on nothingness; by way of Fanon’s and Peter Line- baugh’s accounts of language in and as vehicularity; by way of Foucault’s meditations on the ship of fools and Deleuze’s consideration of the boat as interior of the exterior when they are both thoroughly solicited by the uncharted voices that we carry; by way, even, of Lysis and Socrates; but also, and in the first instance, by way of Hawk and Newk, just friends, trading fours. Perhaps I’m simply deluding myself, but such celebratory performance of thought, in thought, is as much about the insurgency of immanence as it is about what Wagner (2009: 2) calls the “consolation oftranscen- dence.” But, as

I said earlier,

I plan to stay a believer in blackness, even as thingliness, even as (absolute) nothingness, even as imprisonment in passage on the most open road of all, even as—to use and abuse a terribly beautiful phrase of Wilderson’s (2010: xi)—fantasy in the hold

Parontology

Modernity was created by transatlantic slavery and is inextricably haunted by it – we embrace the paraontology of blackness in order to end the world

Moten et al 13

Fred Moten, Member of the Undercommons. 2013. “Undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study”. Pgs. 8-11, 26-28, 87-88,

92-97. PWoods.

Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what they term “the call to order.” And what would it mean, furthermore, to refuse to call others to order, to refuse interpellation and the reinstantiation of the law. When we refuse

, Moten and Harney suggest, we create dissonance and more importantly, we allow dissonance to continue – when we enter a classroom and we refuse to call it to order, we are allowing study to continue, dissonant study perhaps, disorganized study, but study that precedes our call and will continue after we have left the room.

Or, when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when we refuse the call to order – the teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening the noose – we refuse order as the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth.

These kinds of examples get to the heart of Moten and Harney’s world of the undercommons

– the undercommons is not a realm where we rebel and we create critique; it is not a place where we “take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them.” The undercommons is a space and time which is always here.

Our goal – and the “we” is always the right mode of address here – is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed.

Moten and Harney refuse the logic that stages refusal as inactivity, as the absence of a plan and as a mode of stalling real politics.

Moten and Harney tell us to

listen to the noise we make and to refuse the offers we receive to shape that noise into “music.” In the essay that many people already know best from this volume, “The University and the Undercommons,” Moten and Harney come closest to explaining their mission.

Refusing to be for or against the university and in fact marking the critical academic as the player who holds the “for and against” logic in place,

Moten and Harney lead us to the “Undercommons of the Enlightenment” where subversive intellectuals engage both the university and fugitivity: “where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.” The subversive intellectual

, we learn, is unprofessional, uncollegial, passionate and disloyal. The subversive intellectual is neither trying to extend the university nor change the university, the subversive intellectual is not toiling in misery and from this place of misery articulating a “general antagonism.”

In fact, the subversive intellectual enjoys the ride and wants it to be faster and wilder; she does not want a room of his or her own, she wants to be in the world, in the world with others and making the world anew.

Moten insists: “

Like Deleuze. I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that.

And I plan to stay a believer

, like Curtis Mayfield.

But that’s beyond me, and even beyond me and Stefano, and out into the world, the other thing, the other world, the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the undercommon refusal of the academy of misery.” The mission then for the denizens of the undercommons is to recognize that when you seek to make things better, you are not just doing it for the Other, you must also be doing it for yourself. While men may think they are being “sensitive” by turning to feminism, while white people may think they are being right on by opposing racism, no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing “this shit down” until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us. Gender hierarchies are bad for men as well as women and they are really bad for the rest of us. Racial hierarchies are not rational and ordered, they are chaotic and nonsensical and must be opposed by precisely all those

who benefit in any way from them

. Or, as Moten puts it: “

The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?” The coalition unites us in the recognition that we must change things or die. All of us. We must all change the things that are fucked up and change cannot come in the form that we think of as “revolutionary”

– not as a masculinist surge or an armed confrontation.

Revolution

will come in a form we cannot yet imagine. Moten and Harney propose that we prepare now for what will come by entering into study. Study, a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you, prepares us to be embedded

in what Harney calls

“the with and for” and allows you to spend less time antagonized and antagonizing. For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, we must make common cause with those desires and

(non) positions that seem crazy and unimaginable: we must

, on behalf of this alignment, refuse that which was first refused to us and in this refusal reshape desire, reorient hope, reimagine possibility and do so separate from the fantasies nestled into rights and respectability.

Instead, our fantasies must come from what

Moten and Harney citing Frank B. Wilderson III call “the hold”: “And so it is we remain in the hold, in the break, as if entering again and again the broken world, to trace the visionary company and join it.” The hold here is the hold in the slave ship but it is also the hold that we have on reality and fantasy, the hold they have on us and the hold we decide to forego on the other, preferring instead to touch, to be with, to love. If there is no church in the wild, if there is study rather than knowledge production, if there is a way of being together in brokenness, if there is an undercommons, then we must all find our way to it. And it will not be there where the wild things are, it will be a place where refuge is not necessary and you will find that you were already in it all along. [CONTINUED PAGE 26.]The Only Possible Relationship to the

University Today is a Criminal One

. “

To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal

,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us.

This is the only possible relationship to the American university today.

This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment

. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can.

To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university

. Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or

Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love

.

Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome

. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears.

She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong

. What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching

, one would be performing the work of the university

.

Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of what Jacques Derrida calls the onto-

/auto-encyclopedic circle of the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it

. It is not teaching then that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in

. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened. The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually, one should not teach for food. If the stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and

teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the sociopathological labor of the university

. Kant interestingly calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it with having the “determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.” “Have the courage to use your own intelligence.”

But what would it mean if

teaching or rather what we might call “ the beyond of teaching” is precisely what one is asked to get

beyond, to stop taking sustenance

?

And what of those minorities who refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond2 (that which is beyond “the beyond of teaching”), as if they will not be subjects, as if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste. But their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of the Enlightenment

. The waste lives for those moments 102

Moten/Harneybeyond2 teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase— unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower of the Enlightenment truly better than this? Perhaps the biopower of the Enlightenment know this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must

. But even as it depends on these moles, these refugees, they will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional

. And one may be given one last chance to be pragmatic—why steal when one can have it all, they will ask. But if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the underground of the university, into the

Undercommons—this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act. And it is at the same time, the only possible act

. In that Undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualization of research

. To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons

. What the beyond2 of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that predicts its own organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the

Undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. The Undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood.

[CONTINUED ON PGS. 87--97]

To work today is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without purpose, to connect without interruption.

Only a short time ago many of us said work went through the subject to exploit our social capacities, to wring more labor power from our labor. The soul descended onto the shop floor as F ranco ‘Bifo’ Berardi wrote, or ascended like a virtuoso speaker without a score as Paolo Virno suggested. More prosaically we heard the entrepreneur, the artist, and the stakeholder all proposed as new models of subjectivity conducive to channeling the general intellect. But today we are prompted to ask: why worry about the subject at all, why go through such beings to reach the general intellect?

And why limit production to subjects, who are after all such a small part of the population, such a small history of mass intellectuality? There have always been other ways to put bodies to work, even to maintain the fixed capital of such bodies

, as Christian Marrazi might say. And anyway for capital the subject has become too cumbersome, too slow, too prone to error, too controlling, to say nothing of too rarified, too specialized a form of life.

Yet it is not we who ask this question.

This is the automatic, insistent, driving question of the field of logistics. Logistics wants to dispense with the subject altogether. This is the dream of this newly dominant capitalist science.

This is the drive of logistics and the algorithms that power

that dream, the same algorithmic research that Donald Rumsfeld was in fact quoting in his ridiculed unknown unknowns speech, a droning speech that announced the conception of a drone war.

Because drones are not un-manned to protect American pilots. They are unmanned because they think too fast for American pilots.

Today this field of logistics is in hot pursuit of the general intellect in its most concrete form, that is its potential form, its informality, when any time and any space and anything could happen, could be the next form, the new abstraction. Logistics is no longer content with diagrams or with flows, with calculations or with predictions.

It wants to live in the concrete itself in space at once, time at once, form at once. We must ask where it got this ambition and how it could come to imagine it could dwell in or so close to the concrete, the material world in its informality, the thing before there is anything. How does it proposes to dwell in nothing, and why

? The rise of logistics is rapid.

Indeed, to read today in the field of logistics is to read a booming field, a conquering field. In military science and in engineering of course, but also in business studies, in management research

, logistics is everywhere.

And beyond these classic capitalist sciences, its ascent is echoed ahistorically in the emerging fields of object-oriented philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, where the logistical conditions of knowledge production go unnoticed, but not the effects.

In military science the world has been turned upside down. Traditionally strategy led and logistics followed. Battle plans dictated supply lines. No more.

Strategy, traditional ally and partner of logisitics, is today increasingly reduced to collateral damage in the drive of logistics for dominance. In war without end, war without battles, only the ability to keep fighting, only logistics, matters. Where did logistics get this ambition to connect bodies, objects, affects, information, without subjects, without the formality of subjects, as if it could reign sovereign over the informal, the concrete and generative indeterminacy of material life? The truth is, modern logistics was born that way. Or more precisely it was born in resistance to, given as the acquisition of, this ambition, this desire and this practice of the informal. Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against the Atlantic slave.

Breaking from the plundering accumulation of armies to the primitive accumulation of capital, modern logistics was marked, branded, seared with the transportation of the commodity labor that was not, and ever after would not be, no matter who was in that hold or containerized in that ship.

From the motley crew who followed in the red wakes of these slave ships, to the prisoners shipped to the settler colonies, to the mass migrations of industrialisation in the

Americas, to the indentured slaves from India, China, and Java, to the trucks and boats leading north across the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande, to oneway tickets from the Philippines to the Gulf States or Bangladesh to Singapore, logistics was always the transport of slavery, not ‘free’ labor. Logistics remains, as ever, the transport of objects that is held in the movement of things. And the transport of things remains, as ever, logistics’ unrealizable ambition.

Logistics could not contain what it had relegated to the hold. It cannot. Robert F. Harney, the historian of migration ‘from the bottomup,’ used to say once you crossed the Atlantic, you were never on the right side again. B Jenkins, a migrant sent by history, used to turn a broken circle in the basement floor to clear the air when welcoming her students, her panthers. No standpoint was enough, no standpoint was right. She and their mothers and fathers tilled the same fields, burned up the same desert roads, preoccupied the same merely culinary union. Harney kept in mind the mass migrations from Southern and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th century, beside themselves in the annunciation of logistical modernity. No standpoint.

If commodity labor would come to have a standpoint, the standpoint from which one’s own abolition became necessary, then what of those who had already been abolished and remained? If the proletariat was located at a point in the circuits of capital, a point in the production process from which it had a peculiar view of capitalist totality, what of those who were located at every point, which is to say at no point, in the production process? What of those who were not just labor but commodity, not just in production but in circulation, not just in circulation but in distribution as property, not just property but property that reproduced and realized itself? The standpoint of no standpoint, everywhere and nowhere, of never and to come, of thing and nothing. If the proletariat was thought capable of blowing the foundations sky high, what of the shipped, what of the containerized? What could such flesh do? Logistics somehow knows that it is not true that we do not yet know what flesh can do. There is a social capacity to instantiate again and again the exhaustion of the standpoint as undercommon ground that logistics knows as unknowable, calculates as an absence that it cannot have but always longs for, that it cannot, but longs, to be or, at least, to be around, to surround. Logisitics senses this capacity as never before – this historical insurgent legacy, this historicity, this logisticality, of the shipped. Modernity is sutured by this hold. This movement of things, unformed objects, deformed subjects, nothing yet and already. This movement of nothing is not just the origin of modern logistics, but the annunciation of modernity itself, and not just the annunciation of modernity itself but the insurgent prophesy that all of modernity will have at its heart, in its own hold, this movement of things, this interdicted, outlawed social life of nothing.

The work of Sandro Mazzadra and

Brett Neilson on borders for instance reminds us that the proliferation of borders between states, within states, between people, within people is a proli feration of states of statelessness. These borders grope their way toward the movement of things, bang on containers, kick at hostels, harass camps, shout after fugitives, seeking all the time to harness this movement of things, this logisticality. But this fails to happen, borders fail to cohere, because the movement of things will not cohere. This logisticality will not cohere . It is, as Sara Ahmed says, queer disorientation, the absence of coherence, but not of things, in the moving presence of absolutely nothing. As Frank B. Wilderson III teaches us, the improvisational imperative is, therefore, “to stay in the hold of the ship, despite my fantasies of flight.” But this is to say that there are flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship. The ordinary fugue and fugitive run of the language lab, black phonography’s brutally experimental venue. Paraontological totality is in the making. Present and

unmade in presence, blackness is an instrument in the making.

Quasi una fantasia in its paralegal swerve, its mad-worked braid, the imagination produces nothing but exsense in the hold.

Do you remember the days of slavery?

Nathaniel Mackey rightly says “The world was ever after/elsewhere,/no/way where we were/was there.” No way where we are is here. Where we were, where we are, is what we meant by “mu,” which Wilderson would rightly call “ the void of our subjectivity.” And so it is we remain in the hold, in the break, as if entering again and again the broken world, to trace the visionary company and join it. This contrapuntal island, where we are marooned in search of marronage, where we linger in stateless emergency, in our lysed cell and held dislocation, our blown standpoint and lyred chapel, in (the) study of our sea-born variance, sent by its pre-history into arrivance without arrival, as a poetics of lore, of abnormal articulation, where the relation between joint and flesh is the folded distance of a musical moment that is emphatically, palpably imperceptible and, therefore, difficult to describe.

Having defied degradation the moment becomes a theory of the moment, of the feeling of a presence that is ungraspable in the way that it touches. This musical moment – the moment of advent, of nativity in all its terrible beauty, in the alienation that is always already born in and as parousia – is a precise and rigorous description/theory of the social life of the shipped, the terror of enjoyment in its endlessly redoubled folds. If you take up the hopelessly imprecise tools of standard navigation, the deathly reckoning of difference engines, maritime clocks and tables of damned assurance, you might stumble upon such a moment about two and a half minutes into “Mutron,” a duet by Ed Blackwell and Don Cherry recorded in 1982.

You’ll know the moment by how it requires you to think the relation between fantasy and nothingness: what is mistaken for silence is, all of a sudden, transubstantial. The brutal interplay of advent and chamber demands the continual instigation of flown, recursive imagining; to do so is to inhabit an architecture and its acoustic, but to inhabit as if in an approach from outside; not only to reside in this unlivability but also to discover and enter it

. Mackey, in the preface to his unbearably beautiful Splay Anthem, outlining the provenance and relationship between the book ’s serial halves (“Each was given its impetus by a piece of recorded music from which it takes its title, the Dogon ‘Song of the

Andoumboulou,’ in one case, Don Cherry’s [and Ed Blackwell’s] ‘Mu’ First Part and ‘Mu’ Second Part in the other”) speaks of mu in relation to a circling or spiraling or ringing, this roundness or rondo linking beginning and end, and to the wailing that accompanies entrance into and expulsion from sociality.

But his speaking makes you wonder if music, which is not only music, is mobilized in the service of an eccentricity, a centrifugal force whose intimation Mackey also approaches, marking sociality’s ecstatic existence beyond beginning and end, ends and means, out where one becomes interested in things, in a certain relationship between thingliness and nothingness and blackness that plays itself out in unmapped, unmappable, undercommon consent and consensuality. Blackness is the site where absolute nothingness and the world of things converge.

Blackness is fantasy in the hold and Wilderson’s access to it is in that he is one who has nothing and is, therefore, both more and less than one. He is the shipped. We are the shipped, if we choose to be, if we elect to pay an unbearable cost that is inseparable from an incalculable benefit. How would you recognize

the antiphonal accompaniment to gratuitous violence

– the sound that can be heard as if it were in

response to that violence, the sound that must be heard as that to which such violence responds?

The answer, the unmasking, is mu not simply because in its imposed opposition to something, nothing is understood simply to veil, as if some epidermal livery, (some higher) being and is therefore relative

as opposed to what Nishida Kitaro, would call absolute; but because nothing

(this paraontological interplay of blackness and nothingness, this aesthetic sociality of the shipped, this logisticality) remains unexplored, because we don’t know what we mean by it, because it is neither a category for ontology nor for socio-phenomenological analysis. What would it be for this to be understood in its own improper refusal of terms, from the exhausted standpoint that is not and that is not its own?

“We attach,” Fanon says,

“a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language and consequently consider the study of language essential for providing us with one element in understanding the black man’s dimension of being-for-others, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.” He says, moreover, that “[t]he black man possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites.” But this is not simply a question of perspective, since what we speak of is this radical being beside itself of blackness, its off to the side, off on the inside, out from the outside imposition.

The standpoint, the home territory, chez lui – Markman’s off the mark, blind but insightful, mistranslation is illuminative, among his own, signifying a relationality that displaces the already displaced impossibility of home. Can this being together in homelessness, this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, this undercommon appositionality, be a place from which emerges neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question? Not simply to be among his own; but to be among his own in dispossession, to be among the ones who cannot own, the ones who have nothing and who, in having nothing, have everything

. This is the sound of an unasked question. A choir versus acquisition, chant and moan and Sprechgesang, babel and babble and gobbledygook, relaxin’ by a brook or creek in Camarillo, singing to it, singing o f it, singing with it, for the bird of the crooked beak, the generative hook of le petit negre, the little nigger’s comic spear, the cosmic crook of language, the burnin’ and lootin’ of pidgin, Bird’s talk, Bob’s talk, bard talk, bar talk, baby talk, B talk, preparing the minds of the little negro steelworkers for meditation.

Come on, get to this hard, serial information, this brutally beautiful medley of carceral intrication, this

patterning of holds and what is held in the holds’ phonic vicinity

. That spiraling Mackey speaks of suffers brokenness and crumpling, the imposition of irrationally rationalized angles, compartments bearing nothing but breath and battery in hunted, haunted, ungendered intimacy. Is there a kind of propulsion, through compulsion, against the mastery of one’s own speed, that ruptures both recursion and advance

? What is the sound of this patterning? What does such apposition look like? What remains of eccentricity after the relay between loss and restoration has its say or song? In the absence of amenity, in exhaustion, there’s a society of friends where everything can fold in dance to black, in being held and flown, in what was never silence. Can’t you hear them whisper one another’s touch?

Poetics

Shantel Honeyghan - "Speak"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b19h3NxXQPw

"it was the silence of my presence was the most deadly"

Pat's Justice- "Innocent Criminal"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xYJ_YPB5gI&list=WL&index=2

“life’s a bitch from the start that’s why you come out your momma crying”

“and if he (god) spend me to hell, oh well, because I just spent 19 years in the ghetto as a black male and it can’t get much harder than that”

“what I wasn’t taught in school” – word on the curb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNfH41-LI4w

alternate names for black boys

BY DANEZ SMITH

1. smoke above the burning bush

2. archnemesis of summer night

3. first son of soil

4. coal awaiting spark & wind

5. guilty until proven dead

6. oil heavy starlight

7. monster until proven ghost

8. gone

9. phoenix who forgets to un-ash

10. going, going, gone

11. gods of shovels & black veils

12. what once passed for kindling

13. fireworks at dawn

14. brilliant, shadow hued coral

15. (I thought to leave this blank

but who am I to name us nothing?)

16. prayer who learned to bite & sprint

17. a mother’s joy & clutched breath

Black privilege - Crystal Valentine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rYL83kHQ8Y

Black Privilege is the hung elephant swinging in the room

Is the memory of a slave ship, preying for the Alzheimer’s to kick in

Black Privilege is me having already memorized my nephew’s eulogy,

My brother’s eulogy,

My father’s eulogy

My un-conceived child’s eulogy

Black Privilege is me thinking my sister’s name safe from this list

Black Privilege is me pretending to know Travyon Martin on a first name basis

Is me using a dead boy’s name to win a poetry slam

Is me carrying a mouth full of other people’s skeletons to use at my own convenience

Black Privilege is the concrete that holds my breath better than my lungs do

Black Privilege is always having to be the strong one,

Is having a crow bar for a spine,

Is fighting, even when you have no more blood to give

Even when you have lost sight of your bones

Even when your mother prayed for you

Even after they’ve prepared your body for the funeral

Black Privilege is being so unique that not even God will look like you,

Black Privilege is still being the first person in line to meet him

Black Privilege is having the same sense of humor as Jesus

Remember how he smiled on the cross?

The same way Malcolm X laughed at his bullet

And there I go again, asserting my Black Privilege, using a dead man’s name without his permission

I can feel his maggots congregating in my mouth

Black Privilege is a myth,

Is a joke, is a punchline

Is that time a teacher asked a little boy what he wanted to be when he grew up and he said alive

Is the way she laughed and said “there’s no college for that”

Ignorance is the only thing that won’t discrimination against you,

Is the only thing that don’t need a tombstone to learn your name

And it’s tiring, you know, for everything about my skin to be a metaphor

For everything black to be pun intended, to be death intended

Black Privilege is the applause at the end of this poem

Is me giving you a dead boy’s body and you giving me a ten 10

Is me being okay with that

I tired writing a love poem the other day, but my fingers wouldn’t move

My skin started to blister

Like it didn’t trust me any more

Like it thought I’ve forsaken it for something prettier

Something smoother to wrap around my bones

Like I was trading in my noose for a pearl necklace

Some days I’m afraid to look into the mirror

For fear that a bullet George Zimmerman-ed its way into my chest while I was asleep

The breath in my mouth is weapon enough to scare a courtroom

I’ll be lucky if I’m alive to make it to the stand

For some people, their trials live longer than they do

Black Privilege is knowing that if I die,

At least Al Sharpton will show up to my funeral

At least Al sharpen will mason jar my mother’s tears

Remind us that the only thing we are worthy of is our death

We are judged by the number of people it takes to carry our casket

Black Privilege is me think that’s enough

Is me thinking this poem is enough

Black Privilege is this

Is this breath in my lungs right now

Is me

Standing right here

With a crowd full of witnesses

To my heartbeat

Dear White America – Danez Smith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSp4v294xog

I have left Earth in search of darker planets, a solar system that revolves too near a black hole. I have left a patch of dirt in my place & many of you won’t know the difference; we are indeed the same color, one of us would eventually become the other. You may give it my name if it makes you feel better while running your hands through its soiled scalp. I have left Earth in search of a new God. I do not trust the God you have given us. My grandmother’s hallelujah is only outdone by the fear she nurses every time the blood-fat summer swallows another child who used to sing in the choir. Take your God back, though his songs are beautiful, his miracles are inconsistent. I want the fate of Lazarus for Renisha, I want Chucky, Bo, Meech, Trayvon, Sean & Jonylah risen three days after their entombing, their ghost re-gifted flesh & blood, their flesh & blood re-gifted their children. I have left

Earth, I am equal parts sick of your ‘go back to Africa’ as I am your ‘I just don’t see color’ (neither did the poplar tree). We did not build your boats (though we did leave a trail of kin to guide us home). We did not build your prisons (though we did & we fill them too). We did not ask to be part of your

America (though are we not America? Her joints brittle & dragging a ripped gown through Oakland?). I can’t stand your ground. I am sick of calling your recklessness the law. Each night, I count my brothers. & in the morning, when some do not survive to be counted, I count the holes they leave. I reach for black folks & touch only air. Your master magic trick, America. Now he’s breathing, now he don’t. Abra-cadaver. White bread voodoo. This systemic sorcery you claim not to practice, but have no problem benefitting from. I tried, white people. I tried to love you, but you spent my brother’s funeral making plans for brunch, talking too loud next to his bones. You interrupted my black veiled mourning with some mess about an article you read on Buzzfeed. You took one look at the river, plump with the body of boy after boy after boy & asked ‘why does it always have to be about race?’

Because you made it so! Because you put an asterisk on my sister’s gorgeous face! Because you call her pretty (for a black girl)! Because black girls go missing without so much as a whisper of where?! Because there is no Amber Alert for the Amber Skinned Girls! Because our heroes always end up shot or shootin-up! Because we didn’t invent the bullet! Because crack was not our recipe!

Because Jordan boomed. Because Emmitt whistled. Because Huey P. spoke. Because Martin preached.

Because black boys can always be too loud to live. Because this land is scared of the Black mind.

Because they have sold the Black body & appropriated Soul. Because it’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brother’s & my sister’s time, my niece’s & my nephew’s time … how much time do you want for your progress? I have left Earth to find a land where my kin can be safe. I will not rest until black people ain’t but people the same color as the good, wet earth, until that means something, until our existence isn’t up for debate, until it is honored & blessed & loved & left alone, until then I bid you well, I bid you war, I bid you our lives to gamble with no more. I have left

Earth & I am touching everything you beg your telescopes to show you. I am giving the stars their right names. & this life, this new story & history you cannot own or ruin

This, if only this one, is ours.

When a Black Man Walks – Neiel Israel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsC0Li4S6LQ

“There are prayers in a black man’s walk. Don’t let them shoot me down where I’m standing”

How to Survive Being a Black Girl – Raven Taylor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3Dfav7Ysv0

“remember your backbone, put the bass in your voice and tell him no”

“you taste sweet on everyone’s lips but they’ll still try to whitewash you down”

“remember that when you are a black girl, every day that you exist in your body without apologizing is activism”

Poetics solve






Rosenberg’s description of first entering the control unit at Lexington challenges any notion that the control unit was exceptional: As I looked down the hallway, my mind filled up with images of other places that were centers of human suffering: death rows in Huntsville, Angola, and Comstock; white cells and dead wings in West Germany where captured enemies of the state experience the severest effects of isolation; the torture center on Robbin Island in South Africa and the La

Libertad in Uruguay. All these images rose and fell, my ideas and goals— my whole life—passed before me. I began to disassociate from myself.520 Rosenberg’s writing has profound implications for how we think about incarceration under the “war on terror.” Instead of beginning a critique of Guantánamo from the post-

September 11th moment, Rosenberg’s writing forces a retheorization of the genealogy of power that makes Guantánamo possible. She situates the forms of legal violence at Lexington within a more expansive imaginary of carceral technologies across time and space. For Rosenberg, Lexington existed on a transnational continuum, a continuum she has since placed Guantánamo within since Lexington has “become standard.”521 In this way,

Rosenberg is part of a genealogy of thought I have been exploring throughout Fugitive Life. When Lexington was shut down, Rosenberg and others insisted it wasn’t a victory signifying the end of the era of the control unit—instead they warned that the control unit was a new norm, one that would expand and intensify.

Indeed, what has changed in the last few decades is not the powers that make incarceration possible, but rather the magnitude of the control unit as a model of human incapacitation. In the above passage, Rosenberg describes entering the unit as a type of death—her life passed before her eyes, she lost her sense of self, she was alive but nowhere at all

. Yet, as she insists throughout her memoir and other writings, she wasn’t living a death in life outside the law, she was dead within the law, killed by its banality.

This understanding forces a reconsideration of how to end the violence of incarceration inside the United States and beyond.

Throughout Precarious Life, Butler argues that the solution to the execution of state violence and terror at Guantánamo is to expand the category of the human.

For Butler, if exceptional lawlessness and illegitimate power are to continue, we will fail to “radically redistribute rights of recognition governing who may be treated according to the standards that ought to govern the treatment of humans. We have yet to become human, it seems, and now that prospect seems even more radically imperiled, if not, for the time being, indefinitely foreclosed.”522 For Butler, if some lives are subjected to pain and death because they are not recognized as human, then the optics of recognition must be expanded to envelope more lives within the safety and security of the human and human rights.

But the prison arose out of calls for humanity; it is a product of reform, designed to be humane, to recognize the humanity of its captives. The call for human rights seeks to humanize subjects through the very law that has rendered them dead. People in prison are not beyond the safety and security of the embrace of the law—they are deadened by it.523 Indeed, if the prison was built as a monument of humanity (to be more human in contrast to the barbarity of the Middle

Ages), but still produces sexual violence, living, social, civil, and biological death on a massive scale, it is not enough to expand the human. Indeed, that is how the prison came into being the first place. We can turn to a poem written by an anonymous detainee at Guantánamo to consider the politics that emerge from spaces of social death. In “O Prison Darkness” the author/captive who goes by the name “Abulaziz” writes: O prison darkness, pitch your tent. We love the darkness. For after the dark hours of night, Pride’s dawn will rise. Let the world, with all its bliss, fade away— So long as we find favor with God. A boy may despair in the face of a problem, But we know God has a design. Even though the bands tighten and seem unbreakable, They will shatter. Those who persist will attain their goal;

Those who keep knocking shall gain entry. O crisis, intensify! The morning is about to break

forth.524 If we follow the metaphors of the poem, unlike Butler’s call to shine the light of humanity onto the figure of the prisoner thereby saving her from the terror of the night, “Abulaziz” embraces the darkness, invites it in, and learns to love it.

This logic embodies what Avery Gordon calls “the prisoner’s curse.” As Gordon writes,

“The curse delivers to you a vision of your own deathly existence laid bare” because “[t]he prisoner’s fate is always bound up with those of us who are not yet captured, regardless of whether this relation is acknowledged.”525 Indeed, “Abulaziz” does not just invite the prison’s violence to expand; he hopes it possesses the world, taking away bliss and contentment. The prisoner’s curse, for Gordon, is a type of subjugated knowledge that can alter the course of events. The prisoner’s curse can send reality reeling in a direction no one expected, sending the time of progress to unimaginable places

. It is a way of ensuring that regardless of whether anyone is listening, no one will ever forget that “your world is dead.”526

There is a politics of temporality embedded in the poem by “Abulaziz.”

Like Rosenberg’s anticipatory assertion twenty years ago that Lexington was only the beginning of something that was coming, “Abulaziz” sees the crisis of Guantánamo intensifying. More so, he desires its intensification and accumulation. Like Rosenberg,

“Abulaziz” knows that the social death of the prisoner is not just a lesson about the prison; it is also a lesson for the rest of us, the ones who imagine we are alive, the ones who sometimes feel freedom where there is only the prison. “O crisis, intensify! The morning is about to break forth.”

Refusal of Order

Our refusal of their call to order is how we have spill over because that disorder will continue when we leave

Halberstam, 13

(Judith Halberstam, also known as Jack Halberstam, is the Professor of English and

Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California. “The

Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten)

The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In The Undercommons if we begin anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you.

Citing Gayatri Spivak, Moten and Harney call this refusal the "first right" and it is a game-changing kind of refusal in that it signals the refusal of the choices as offered. We can understand this refusal in terms that Chandan Reddy lays out in

Freedom With Violence (2011) - for Reddy, gay marriage is the option that cannot be opposed in the ballot box. While we can circulate multiple critiques of gay marriage in terms of its institutionalization of intimacy, when you arrive at the ballot box, pen in hand, you only get to check "yes" or "no" and the no, in this case, could be more damning than the yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as offered.

Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what they term "the call to order." And what would it mean, furthermore, to refuse to call others to order, to refuse interpellation and the reinstantiation of the law. When we refuse, Moten and Harney suggest, we create dissonance and more importantly, we allow dissonance to continue - when we enter a classroom and we refuse to call it to order, we are allowing study to continue, dissonant study perhaps, disorganized study, but study that precedes our call and will continue after we have left the room. Or, when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when we refuse the call to order - the teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening the noose - we refuse order as the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth.

Case Blocks

A2 Resistance/Opposition Fails**

They missed the mark – it is not that resistance must be oppositional but rather, appositional—black life itself, as fugitive and unknowable, functions to disrupt and haunt the oppressor through life within death




While Fanon would consider the zealous worker in a colonial regime a quintessentially pathological case, remember that it is in resistance to colonial oppression that the cases of psychopathology with which Fanon is concerned in The Wretched of the Earth—in particular, those psychosomatic or cortico-visceral disorders—emerge. What’s at stake is Fanon’s ongoing ambivalence toward the supposedly pathological. At the same time, ambivalence is itself the mark of the pathological. Watch

Fanon prefiguratively describe and diagnose the pathological ambivalence that he performs:

The combat waged by a people for their liberation leads them, depending on the circumstances, either to reject or to explode the so-called truths sown in their consciousness by the colonial regime, military occupation, and economic exploitation. And only the armed struggle can effectively exorcise these lies about man that subordinate and literally mutilate the more conscious-minded among us.

How many times in Paris or Aix, in Algiers or Basse-Terre have we seen the colonized vehemently protest the so-called indolence of the black, the Algerian, the Vietnamese? And yet in a colonial regime if a fellah were a zealous worker or a black were to refuse a break from work, they would be quite simply considered pathological cases. The colonized’s indolence is a conscious way of sabotaging the colonial machine; on the biological level it is a remarkable system of self-preservation and, if nothing else, is a positive curb on the occupier’s stranglehold over the entire country. (220)

Is it fair to say that one detects in this text a certain indolence sown or sewn into it? Perhaps, on the other hand, its flaws are more accurately described as pathological. To be conscious-minded is aligned with subordination, even mutilation; the self-consciousness of the colonized is figured as a kind of wound at the same time that it is also aligned with wounding, with armed struggle that is somehow predicated on that which it makes possible— namely, the explosion of so-called truths planted or woven into the consciousness of the conscious-minded ones. They are the ones who are given the task of repairing (the truth) of man [humanity]; they are the ones who would heal by way of explosion, excision, or exorcism. This moment of self-conscious selfdescription is sewn into Fanon’s text like a depth charge. However, authentic upheaval is ultimately figured not as an eruption of the unconscious in the conscious-minded but as that conscious mode of sabotage carried out every day—in and as what had been relegated, by the conscious-minded, to the status of impossible, pathological sociality—by the ones who are not, or are not yet, conscious. Healing wounds are inflicted, in other words, by the ones who are not conscious of their wounds and whose wounds are not redoubled by such consciousness. Healing wounds are inflicted appositionally, in small, quotidian refusals to act that make them subject to charges of pathological indolence. Often the conscious ones, who have taken it upon themselves to defend the colonized against such charges, levy those charges with the greatest vehemence. If Fanon fails to take great pains to chart the tortured career of rehabilitative injury, it is

perhaps a conscious decision to sabotage his own text insofar as it has been sown with those so-called truths that obscure the truth of man.

This black operation that Fanon performs on his own text gives the lie to his own formulations. So when Fanon claims, “The duty of the colonized subject, who has not yet arrived at a political consciousness or a decision to reject the oppressor, is to have the slightest effort literally dragged out of him,” the question that emerges is why one who is supposed yet to have arrived at political consciousness, one who must be dragged up out of the pit, would have such a duty (220). This, in turn, raises the more fundamental issue, embedded in this very assertion of duty, of the impossibility of such non-arrival. The failure to arrive at a political consciousness is a general pathology suffered by the ones who take their political consciousness with them on whatever fugitive, aleatory journey they are making. They will have already arrived; they will have already been there. They will have carried something with them before whatever violent manufacture, whatever constitutive shattering is supposed to have called them into being. While noncooperation is figured by Fanon as a kind of staging area for or a preliminary version of a more authentic “objectifying encounter” with colonial oppression (a kind of counter-representational response to power’s interpellative call), his own formulations regarding that response point to the requirement of a kind of thingly quickening that makes opposition possible while appositionally displacing it. Noncooperation is a duty that must be carried out by the ones who exist in the nearness and distance between political consciousness and absolute pathology. But this duty, imposed by an erstwhile subject who clearly is supposed to know, overlooks (or, perhaps more precisely, looks away from) that vast range of nonreactive disruptions of rule that are, in early and late Fanon, both indexed and disqualified. Such disruptions, often manifest as minor internal conflicts (within the closed circle, say, of Algerian criminality, in which the colonized

“tend to use each other as a screen”) or muscular contractions, however much they are captured, enveloped, imitated, or traded, remain inassimilable (231). These disruptions trouble the rehabilitation of the human even as they are evidence of the capacity to enact such rehabilitation.

Moreover, it is at this point, in passages that culminate with the apposition of what Fanon refers to as

“the reality of the ‘towelhead’ ” with “the reality of the ‘nigger,’ ” that the fact, the case, and the lived experience of blackness—which might be understood here as the troubling of and the capacity for the rehabilitation of the human—converge as a duty to appose the oppressor, to refrain from a certain performance of the labor of the negative, to avoid his economy of objectification and standing against, to run away from the snares of recognition (220). This refusal is a black thing, is that which Fanon carries with(in) himself, and in how he carries himself, from Martinique to France to Algeria. He is an anticolonial smuggler whose wares are constituted by and as the dislocation of black social life that he carries, almost unaware. In Fanon, blackness is transversality between things, escaping (by way of) distant, spooky actions; it is translational effect and affect, transmission between cases, and could be understood, in terms Brent Hayes Edwards establishes, as diasporic practice.28 This is what he carries with him, as the imagining thing that he cannot quite imagine and cannot quite control, in his pathologizing description of it that it—that he—defies. A fugitive cant moves through Fanon, erupting out of regulatory disavowal. His claim upon this criminality was interdicted. But perhaps only the dead can strive for the quickening power that animates what has been relegated to the pathological.

Perhaps the dead are alive and escaping. Perhaps ontology is best understood as the imagination of this escape as a kind of social gathering; as undercommon plainsong and dance; as the fugitive,

centrifugal word; as the word’s auto-interruptive, auto-illuminative shade/s. Seen in this light, black(ness) is, in the dispossessive richness of its colors, beautiful.

Fugitivity emerges not in radical acts of resistance, but rather, in quotidian yet ubiquitous ruptures in the ordinary—our resistance through the play of language functions to nurture a stolen life




If “the distinction between the surface of a discursive event and the depth of its meaning” is constitutive for modern thought, then the reduction of (phonic) materiality is modern thought’s most fundamental protocol, an ordinance that protects the exclusionary universality of a totality that cannot stand, in its orderedness, in the face of the rough non-sense or extra-sense—the nonreduction of sense that is more than sense—of the surface in its ordinary serrations. It is no accident that irruptions on the surface of the event, that irruption as (the surface of) the event, will have constituted the severest challenge to that Kantian notion of freedom that depends upon smooth containment. The Romanticism of the black radical tradition, if you will, is at issue here, and, as I hope to show, both are played out—in and as surface, in and as irruptive, uncontainable, fugitive, phonic materiality—on the plain of the ordinary. One way to think of that plain or field is as the domain of J.

L. Austin (1975), whose work was devoted to the proposition that the proper object and methodological apparatus for philosophy was ordinary language—the material, as it were, of everyday discursive events or, in his parlance, speech acts. However, when Austin sets out on the path toward a general theory of language, he moves along lines determined by the paradigmatic opposition of material surface and semantic depth. Austin anticipates the enterprise of deconstruction in his comportment towards the critique of what he calls “false alternatives”; but, like Jacques Derrida after him and Ferdinand de Saussure before him, the desire for universality in language and in the theory of language requires the reduction of phonic substance (in Saussure’s terms) or the dismissal of the

“merely phonetic” (in Austin’s). Still, Austin’s anticipation of deconstruction comes upon an effect that, perhaps efficaciously, is never fully crystallized as method. He submits his own work (his own logical direction, his own diegetic comportment) to that effect—a liberating cascade of breakdowns in which linguistic categories are cut by the everyday events of speech so that, within the plain of the ordinary, the distinctions between words and gestures and between words and sounds emerge and recede in order to let us know that the extraordinary is the always surprising path through the ordinary that is made by way of the montagic, transversal sequencing of events. That sequence is, in turn, structured by the logic of the surprising, multiple singularity of the event—that it is unprecedented, that it is infused with the plexed singularity of its fellows. The event in question is the criminal, repeating head of a step aside; the object at hand is the lawless choreophonography of stolen light, stolen life. Such movement in sound and light, such dispossessed and dispossessive fugitivity, in its very anticipation of the regulative and disciplinary powers to which it responds, reminds us, along with Foucault, that “It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them.” (Foucault 1978, 143)

A2 Aff Fails bc Backlash

Surveillance inevitably marks black bodies as suspects and fugitives but that doesn’t prevent meaningful possibilities for resistance within confinement

Goffman, 14

– Sociology Prof @ UW-Madison, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, p –7-8

BR

The first chapters of the book concern the dirty world: the young men spending their teens and early twenties running from the police, going in and out of jail, and attempting to complete probation and parole sentences. These chapters reflect my attempt to understand this world through the eyes of

Mike and Chuck and their friends—young men living with the daily fear of capture and confinement.

Because the reach of the penal system goes beyond the young men who are its main targets, later chapters take up the perspective of girlfriends and mothers caught between the police and the men in their lives; of young people who have found innovative ways to profit from the legal misfortunes of their neighbors; and finally of neighborhood residents who have managed to steer clear of the penal system and those enmeshed therein. The appendix recounts the research on which this work is based, along with some personal reflection about the practical and ethical dilemmas of a middle-class white young woman reporting on the experiences of poor Black young men and women. Together, the chapters make the case that historically high imprisonment rates and the intensive policing and surveillance that have accompanied them are transforming poor Black neighborhoods into communities of suspects and fugitives. A climate of fear and suspicion pervades everyday life, and many residents live with the daily concern that the authorities will seize them and take them away. A new social fabric is emerging under the threat of confinement: one woven in suspicion, distrust, and the paranoiac practices of secrecy, evasion, and unpredictability. Still, neighborhood residents are carving out a meaningful life for themselves betwixt and between the police stops and probation meetings. The scope of punishment and surveillance does not prevent them from constructing a moral world in which they can find dignity and honor; and the struggles of young men and women to negotiate work, family, romance, and friendship in this hyper-policed zone, under threat of confinement, constitute as much of the story as the late-night raids or full-body searches.

A2 Can’t Abolish Prisons

The neoliberal narrative is described as the “home of the free,” but is rather an extension of the prison—it connects the powers of market under slavery to the powers of the market under neoliberalism—embracing fugitivity is key

Dillon 13

assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of




In her 1978 essay “Women in Prison: How We Are,” Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur wrote: For many, prison is not that much different from the street…For many cells are not that different from the tenements…and the welfare hotels they live in on the street…The fights are the same except they are less dangerous. The police are the same. The poverty is the same. The alienation is the same. The racism is the same. The sexism is the same. The drugs are the same and the system is the same.

24 For Shakur

, the regulations of a burgeoning neoliberalcarceral state possessed life in ways that rendered the free world an extension of the prison.

An assemblage of race, gender, capital, policing, and penal technologies produced a symbiosis between the de- industrialized landscape of the late 20th century urban United States and the gendered racisms of an emerging prison-industrial complex.

Diffuse structural networks of racism and sexism mimicked the steel bars of a cage. This is the complicity between freedom and captivity, the entanglements between t he living and the living dead, and the hemorrhaging of a buried past into the imagined progress of the present. For Shakur, prison looked like and felt like nineteenth century chattel slavery: “We sit in the bull pen. We are all black. All restless. And we are all freezing.”25 In the essay, affect continually forces the past to open directly onto the present.26 The sensations and feelings of frozen skin speaks in a way that words cannot. In prison, shivering black flesh weighted with chains looked like slavery to Shakur. As a fugitive who now has political asylum in Cuba, she understands herself as a twenty-first century runaway slave, a “maroon woman.”27 Although

Shakur’s essay

does not name neoliberalism explicitly, we can read it as a black feminist theorization of neoliberalism at the very moment of its emergence.

Indeed, it is a narration of the drastic racialized and gendered restructurings of social and economic life in the 1970s United States from the perspective of someone detained for resisting those changes.

Written by a captured member of the underground black liberation movement, the text names the discourses and (state) violence neoliberalism requires yet erases. Neoliberalism is most certainly an economic doctrine that prioritizes the mobility and expansion of capital at all costs, but its mechanisms exceed the liberation of the market from the repression of the state. As Shakur indicates, one of the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the neoliberal state is the kinship shared between the free world and the prison—an affinity structured and produced by an anti- blackness inaugurated under chattel-slavery. More over, as

Shakur argues throughout the essay, the technologies of immobilization utilized by the neoliberal state specifically target black women, a process connected to the emergence of the black feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

By reading black feminist texts from the 1970s as implicit theories of neoliberalism, we can come to understand the formation and implementation of neoliberalism in a new light. Shakur not only connects an emergent neoliberalism to a rapidly expanding prison regime, she also links the contemporary prison to chattel slavery—an institutional, affective, and discursive connection apprehended by Angela Davis’s phrase, “From the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison.”28 The connections made by Shakur between the prison and neoliberalism, and between slavery and the prison, have been thoroughly explored by many scholars.29 Indeed, during the past two decades, a growing body of scholarship has affirmed and extended Shakur’s analysis of blackness, slavery, and the prison by exploring what Saidiya

Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.”30 By centering racial terror in a genealogy of the prison, scholars have come to understand the barracoons, coffles, slave holds, and plantations of the Middle Passage as spatial, discursive, ontological, and economic analogues of modern punishment that have haunted their way into the present.31 If the carceral becomes a functional surrogate for slavery’s production of social and living death, then

Shakur’s text also hints at another connection that has garnered less attention—slavery’s haunting possession of neoliberalism. While the prison’s connection to slavery and the market has been well explored, the contemporary market’s relationship to chattel slavery has largely been overlooked. If slavery’s anti- black technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live on in the operations of the market? What is the relationship between an anti-blackness inaugurated under the Atlantic slave trade and the methods of population management used under neoliberalism? How does the absence, death, and loss left behind by slavery connect to the formation of the contemporary neoliberal-carceral state? What is the connection between the necropolitics of chattel-slavery and the biopolitics of neoliberalism? To answer these questions, I read two texts written by captive black women in the 1970s United States: Assata Shakur’s "Women in Prison: How We Are” and Angela Davis's "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves." Both texts were composed at the very m oment of the neoliberal-carceral state’s emergence and index the ways that black feminism developed under and critiqued this formation. Throughout the chapter, I examine how Shakur and Davis theorize the relationship between the carceral, the market, the population, and the body. While Davis’s essay explores black women’s experiences of terror and resistance under chattel slavery in order to contest the discourse of the black matriarch, Shakur’s essay describes black women’s experiences of gender, sexuality, race, violence, and incarceration in the early 1970s. I also include a discussion of Sherley Anne Williams’s 1986 novel Dessa Rose. Although the novel was written in the mid-1980s, in the author's note, Williams cites Davis's essay—and the rise of the prison in the 1970s—as providing the inspiration for the novel. Williams uses fiction to recover the histories of enslaved black women Davis could not discover in the written record. Williams turns Davis's brief description of a uprising on a slave coffle led by a pregnant black woman into a novel that theorizes the racialized, gendered, affective, and economic politics of chattel slavery and its regimes of incarceration, torture, and terror. All three texts emerge from the late twentieth-century prison (and an emergent neoliberal state) in order to theorize chattel slavery as a history of our social, political, and economic present.

Yet the texts do not undo normative conceptions of time by deploying the conventions of fact; rather, they use fiction, memory, and imagination to connect the forgotten, the lost, and the dead to the now.

These texts insist that the absence of memory shapes the contours of the present. While many projects on the legacy of slavery utilize demographic data to measure slavery’s extension into our present in concrete terms, I attempt to engage the past through it’s forgetting. I leave behind the world of facts, proof, and Truth in order to connect the powers of the market across time and space through non-normative epistemologies that rely on affect, memory, and imagination. As a matter of fact, it was the reason and rationality of mathematics, demographics, and insurance that produced millions of corpses in the service of making millions of commodities. To be clear, this chapter has three goals. First, it connects the powers of market under slavery to powers of the market under neoliberalism by exploring how black feminists made sense of the afterlife of slavery under an emergent neoliberal state. Second, it uses black feminist engagements with loss, to assert that death and loss undo to the progress of time so that the past lives on, and possesses the present

. By engaging death, loss, and forgetting, the texts I analyze connect penal and economic technologies in the 1970s United States to the carceral

nature of the market under chattel slavery. Finally, by constructing a critical genealogy of the market through the writings of black feminists working within and under the neoliberal-carceral state, I argue that under neoliberalism, the market supplements and mimics the prison.

A2 Can’t Escape

**note – also in S—Fugitivity

Fugitivity arises out of the inadequacy of society in its attempts to calculate and enframe blackness—while blackness is constitutive of societal relations and is always-already criminal, it doesn’t bar the creation of undercommon spaces of disorder




So I’m interested in how the ones who inhabit the nearness and distance between Dasein and things

(which is off to the side of what lies between subjects and objects), the ones who are attained or accumulated unto death even as they are always escaping the Hegelian positioning of the bondsman, are perhaps best understood as the extra-ontological, extra-political constant—a destructive, healing agent; a stolen, transplanted organ always eliciting rejection; a salve whose soothing lies in the abrasive penetration of the merely typical; an ensemble always operating in excess of that ancient juridical formulation of the thing (Ding), to which Kant subscribes, as that to which nothing can be imputed, the impure, degraded, manufactured (in) human who moves only in response to inclination, whose reflexes lose the name of action. At the same time, this dangerous supplement, as the fact out of which everything else emerges, is constitutive. It seems to me that this special ontic-ontological fugitivity of/in the slave is what is revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon. So that in contradistinction to Fanon’s protest, the problem of the inadequacy of any ontology to blackness, to that mode of being for which escape or apposition and not the objectifying encounter with otherness is the prime modality, must be understood in its relation to the inadequacy of calculation to being in general. Moreover, the brutal history of criminalization in public policy, and at the intersection of biological, psychological, and sociological discourse, ought not obscure the already existing onticontological criminality of/as blackness. Rather, blackness needs to be understood as operating at the nexus of the social and the ontological, the historical and the essential. Indeed, as the ontological is moving within the corrosive increase that the ontic instantiates, it must be understood that what is now meant by ontological requires special elucidation. What is inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies. The lived experienced of blackness is, among other things, a constant demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of dehiscence, a para-ontology whose comportment will have been

(toward) the ontic or existential field of things and events. That ontology will have had to have operated as a general critique of calculation even as it gathers diaspora as an open set—or as an openness disruptive of the very idea of set—of accumulative and unaccumulable differences, differings, departures without origin, leavings that continually defy the natal occasion in general even as they constantly bespeak the previous. This is a Nathaniel Mackey formulation whose full implications will have never been fully explorable.12 What Fanon’s pathontological refusal of blackness leaves unclaimed is an irremediable homelessness common to the colonized, the enslaved, and the enclosed. This is to say that what is claimed in the name of blackness is an undercommon disorder that has always been there, that is retrospectively and retroactively located there, that is

embraced by the ones who stay there while living somewhere else. Some folks relish being a problem.

As Amiri Baraka and Nikhil Pal Singh (almost) say, “Black(ness) is a country” (and a sex) (that is not one).13 Stolen life disorders positive value just as surely as it is not equivalent to social death or absolute dereliction.

So if we cannot simply give an account of things that, in the very fugitivity and impossibility that is the essence of their existence, resist accounting, how do we speak of the lived experience of the black?

What limits are placed on such speaking when it comes from the position of the black, but also what constraints are placed on the very concept of lived experience, particularly in its relation to the black when black social life is interdicted? Note that the interdiction exists not only as a function of what might be broadly understood as policy but also as a function of an epistemological consensus broad enough to include Fanon, on the one hand, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, on the other— encompassing formulations that might be said not only to characterize but also to initiate and continually re-initialize the philosophy of the human sciences. In other words, the notion that there is no black social life is part of a set of variations on a theme that include assertions of the irreducible pathology of black social life and the implication that (non-pathological) social life is what emerges by way of the exclusion of the black or, more precisely, of blackness. But what are we to make of the pathological here? What are the implications of a social life that, on the one hand, is not what it is and, on the other hand, is irreducible to what it is used for? This discordant echo of one of Theodor

W. Adorno’s most infamous assertions about jazz implies that black social life reconstitutes the music that is its phonographic.14 That music, which Miles Davis calls “social music,” to which Adorno and

Fanon gave only severe and partial hearing, is of interdicted black social life operating on frequencies that are disavowed—though they are also amplified—in the interplay of sociopathological and phenomenological description. How can we fathom a social life that tends toward death, that enacts a kind of being-toward-death, and which, because of such tendency and enactment, maintains a terribly beautiful vitality? Deeper still, what are we to make of the fact of a sociality that emerges when lived experience is distinguished from fact, in the fact of life that is implied in the very phenomenological gesture/analysis within which Fanon asserts black social life as, in all but the most minor ways, impossible? How is it that the off harmony of life, sociality, and blackness is the condition of possibility of the claim that there is no black social life? Does black life, in its irreducible and impossible sociality and precisely in what might be understood as its refusal of the status of social life that is refused it, constitute a fundamental danger—an excluded but immanent disruption—to social life? What will it have meant to embrace this matrix of im/possibility, to have spoken of and out of this suspension? What would it mean to dwell on or in minor social life? This set of questions is imposed upon us by Fanon. At the same time, and in a way that is articulated most clearly and famously by W. E. B. Du Bois, this set of questions is the position, which is also to say the problem, of blackness.

A2 Didn’t Interpret Poems

Poetry does not impose a particular meaning, but opens up space for multiple potential interpretations

Fernando 10

--- Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, Research Fellow at the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social

Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

(Jeremy, “The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death,” ATROPOS PRESS, pg 170-171)//RAW

Hence, whenever there is a statement of relationality, one can never fully legitimise this relationality,

not because there is a subjective bias in making the statement – ‘I want there to be a relationality so there will be one' – but as there is always already an unknowability within this very relationality. This is a structural assumption, a structural condition. And it is this very assumption that both allows the statement of relationality to be made, and which also never allows the statement to be fully legitimate. It is for this reason that "______ is like ______" is a descriptive statement, one that never reaches the status of a definition, and is never a definitive statement.

Hence, “______ is like ______” is a claim. In fact, one can no longer even discern whether the claim made is true or false as such – one can no longer differentiate whether it is a performative or a constative statement

as there is no external referent. Referentiality is precisely the assumed relationality of language itself. In this we find an echo of Paul Celan, who on March 26, 1969, wrote this about poetry: "La poésis ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose" (

Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself

).20 Perhaps then, relationality can at best only be a poetic relationality;

one that does not impose a frame, impose a particular meaning, does not efface the singularity of the relationality, but instead only seeks to be open, exposes itself, to the potentiality of relationality.

Poetry eludes capture – an (enigmatic) gift

Fernando 10




The poet

, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy

– a being who since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy

. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes. If we recall the words of Paul Cenan, the words that we turned to earlier, that of “ poetry does not impose itself, it exposes itself

,” one’s instinctive reaction – the thought that comes to mind without thinking, without knowing – is the question ‘expose itself to what?’

Whilst it is easy, too easy, to dismiss a naïve question like that, it would be to our detriment if we choose not to attend it, not to attend a possibility that sometimes lies in the simplest of questions, the silly questions, as it were. After all, if one exposes oneself, it can only be so if there was something, or someone to expose oneself to. There has to be a witness to the exposure, otherwise there would not be one at all. Hence, exposure is always a state of establishing a relationality with another

. It is not a relationality that seeks to impose a particular, single, meaning, reading upon another.

And this is why poetry continues to menace the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge; without an imposition, the borders are not drawn, the limits are not set

. And whilst not forgetting the registers that Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida opened earlier – yes there are only always rules to seeing, and we are always already in grammar, always bounded by grammar – the lack of a boundary also always opens more possibilities than we can account for

. One may not even be overstating if one claims that at this point, all accounting systems which are set up to predict, to control, via graphs, curves, probabilities – fail.

Whilst exposing itself, and hence, opening itself to response, any response, poetry “always risks what it cannot avoid appealing to in reply, namely, recompense and retribution. It risks the exchange that it might expect but is at the same time unable to count on.

Once the poem is sent off, set off, one can only hope for a response. In fact, one always gets a response; even a non-response, a complete ignoring of the poem, is a form of response.

It is just that one can never know what kind of response one is

going to get. Once the poem is set of, the poet remains completely blind to its effects. Once the bomb is set off, the suicide bomber s completely blind to its effects. It is probably of no coincidence that the suicide bomber is usually constituted as one who is completely irrational, cast as a complete idiot; the most common question heard whenever there is an instance of a suicide bombing is ‘why would one give up her life when she has so much to live for?

All attempts to provide an answer to the question are banal, as the very person that the answer attempt to address is dead; hence all answers are unverifiable.

One has no choice but to admit that all reason eludes, escapes, is beyond one, is beyond the limits of one’s cognition, is at the beyond of knowledge

. Perhaps the only thing we can say is that she gives up her life in spite of the fact that she has so much to live for; after all, it is she who chooses to do so. Whilst this does not provide any answer to the question, provide any comfort that we finally understand her, this is all we can say. Perhaps it is the fact that she remains an enigma that is her gift to us

.

It is the refusal to be understood, to be subsumed under any existing conception, to be flattened, exchanged, reproduced, that is her gift.

And in that same spirit

, it is not a gift that can be understoo d – this is not a gift that one can bring to the return-counter at the shop, to be exchanged for something else, something more palatable, something easier, something more comfortable, more comforting.

This is a gift that is unknowable, in full potential, always possible

; perhaps always a gift that is to come. What continues to trouble us is that this gift – as with all gifts – comes with an obligation to reciprocate, an obligation to respond. So even though this is an objectless gift – and to compound it a gift that we might not even begin to comprehend, or even know is present – we are always already within the realm of reciprocation.

This is the point where the eternal question of the serpent, that of ‘what did she mean’, returns to haunt us, along with the other question of responding, and attempting an appropriate response at that; the question of Lenin, that of “what is to be done?” If we attempt the question of Lenin, that of “what is to be done?” If we attempt to answer the question, to provide a prescription, then we are back to the situation of effacement. Perhaps then the task that we are faced with is that of reconstituting Lenin in and within a situation. If the question of ‘what is to be done’ is a situational question, there can be no answer outside of the situation – at the point of uttering both the question and the answer, we are always immanent to the story, in the making, even when we are the ones telling the story to the other – and more than that, each answer is at best a provisional answer. However, the fact that one can even attempt an answer suggests that at least momentarily, one must be able to “step back” as it were, be exterior to the question, to situation. Hence, each answer, each definition to the question can only be accomplished as a more or less provisory, more or less violent arresting of a dynamic that is interminable, but never simply interminable or infinite.

For a dynamic such as this can only be conceived as a series of highly conflictual determinations,

as a movement of ambivalence, in which the other is always being seized as a function of the same, all the while eluding this capture

.

The other becomes the intimate condition of the possibility of the game, remaining all the while out of bounds.

A2 Disconnected Narrative

The aesthetics of fugitivity is a refusal of ‘convention’ in favor of lived experience—it is through the refusal to be limited that black writing can strive for liberation and consciousness that transcends temporality

Bradley, Emory assistant professor, and Marassa, Duke graduate student, 2014

(Rizvana and Damien-Adia, “Awakening to the World: Relation, Totality, and Writing from Below,”

Discourse, Vol. 36, No. 1, Winter 2014, p. 119-121, ProjectMUSE, IC)

Black writing, in the example of the slave narrative and Baquaqua’s general exemplification of its complex registers, thus demonstrates the ways in which black writing proceeds toward liberation through fugitivity rather than transparency and mastery. Hortense Spillers has asserted that “black writers, whatever their location . . . , retool the languages they inherit,” opening the way to a

“logological refashioning”34 of writing. In observing Baquaqua’s multiple literacies, there is a grammatology of black writing that is called into being that unmasters the conventions of writing for the sake of tradition.

The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua is a text that surpasses the conditions of its own documentary evidence: the fullness and fragmentary incompleteness of origins held forth even in the biographer’s own name, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, seem to suggest a trespassing of the injunctions and prohibitions of nomenclature. Baquaqua’s text is of “a life” irreducible to the converging ideas and exigencies that shape the slave narrative as abolitionist text. Its narrative precedes and extends beyond the horizon of any singular readership. The narrative is of “a life” in the sense of Gilles Deleuze’s formulation of “pure immanence” as “a life and nothing else.”35 If, as Frantz

Fanon argues, “Black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes,”36 Baquaqua’s writing is a life/writing that reflects this immanent fold of black consciousness.

Baquaqua’s biography opens a sacred geometry of black life that gathers Islam, Christianity, and other

African faith practices into the fold of his diasporic life, producing a vertiginous subtext, a submerged textuality or invisible ink that flows through all black letters. The traces, trails, bereavements, and victories woven together in the recitations, annotations, recollected letters, and disparate tellings of

Baquaqua’s auto/biography conjure the ontological complexity that Wole Soyinka describes in Myth,

Literature, and the African World as the “fourth stage”: “the no man’s land of transition between . . . the ancestor’s [past], the present [of] the living, and the future of the unborn” with the invisible forces, divinities, or “orishas.”37 Together, these modes of experience form the totality of cosmic life reflected in black consciousness. This cosmic totality in the Yoruba worldview is reflective of larger patterns of African thought and belief throughout the archipelago, wherein social life consists of a dynamic cosmic environment that comprises the “total spiritual community of living and dead.”38 The immanent gesture of black writing glimpses the spiritual totality that obtains between ancestors, texts, and black writers and extends through a distribution and sharing of sacred resources among poets, philosophers, and fugitives.

In this view, The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua is a constellation of more than just a life, as it constellates a set of cartographic, poetic, and historiographical resources that have grounded and extended the fugitive passage of black letters through underground networks, railroads, and

communities. To echo Jacques Derrida, within the communities gathered by black writing, we “[learn] to live . . . in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce, of ghosts, [spirits, and ancestors]. . . . And this being-with specters would also be .

. . a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.”39 Black writing emerges from this cosmic milieu as an ecological signature of a people formed from the refusal of structured limitations—a people given forth from the ocean to the geographic path, way, or movement of archipelago in a sociality beyond the ken of social life.

A2 Gitmo

The concept of “there but not” is especially consistent with Guantanamo--

Guantánamo is an exception to the presumably normal procedures that constitute the domestic. It is the spectacular terror contrasted to the normal operations of law and power within the formal boundaries of the United States






In the last decade, a critique of the carceral systems deployed in the “war on terror” has become central to debates across a number of disciplines about sovereignty, biopolitics, and the state of exception.

For example, in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler argues that the forms of detention inaugurated at Guantánamo Bay created a new form of state sovereignty manifested by the suspension of the law. At Guantánamo and elsewhere, the suspension of the rule of law produces collusion between biopolitical forms of governance and the will of the sovereign.

In this way, the extra-legal “new war prison” redefines Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between sovereignty and governmentality so that “sovereignty emerges within the field of governmentality” where it is defined as the power to withdraw and suspend the law.

435 Thus, sovereignty is a ghostly but forceful presence within new forms of racialized population management. This suspension of the law also produces a new mode of sovereignty that means that the bodies of detainees act as the raw material for the production of a new form of power

.436 The danger of indefinite detention, according to Butler, is that it creates the condition of possibility for the exercise of indefinite extra-legal state power. As she puts it, “Indefinite detention thus extends lawless power indefinitely.”

437 The state of emergency is not spatially and temporally contained, but rather, rushes toward a never-ending future. The future is produced as a time beyond the safety and security of the law. In this way, indefinite detention is not an exception to the norm, but is central to redefining the norm in the present and the future.

This rupturing of the norm by the exception renders the human beings detained at Guantánamo into

“animated flesh,” producing “humans who are less than chattel” and who embody what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.”438 Butler’s critique is deeply indebted to the work of Agamben, who argues that indefinite detention is a mode of biopolitical power where the law envelopes the bodies of captives through its own suspension.439 This situation creates a “legally unnamable and unclassifiable being” whose only historical analog are Jewish people under the Nazi regime.440 In this “zone of indifference” no law is the law.441 The new war prison derealizes the humanity of its captives who might otherwise belong to a community of laws and recognition.442 This creates “populations that are not regarded as subjects, humans who are not conceptualized with in the frame of a political culture in which human lives are underwritten by legal entitlements, law, and so humans who are not humans.”443

The law defines the human and so to be outside the boundaries of the law is to be exposed to a form of illegal barbarism that renders one inhuman. The law is central to Butler’s concern with Guantánamo and to her understanding of the carceral apparatuses used in the “war on terror.”

As she writes, “[W]hereas we expect the prison to be tied to law—to trial, to punishment, to the rights of prisoners—we see presently an effort to produce a secondary judicial system and sphere of non-legal detention that effectively produces the prison itself as an extra-legal sphere.”444 In Butler’s theory, the forms of social death, sovereignty, and governmentality produced at Guantánamo are the result of the absence of the law. The law is a site of security and safety, and its undoing opens up unprecedented spaces of living death and extra-legal terror. Critically, this break with space, subjectivity, and normative modes of power is also a break with time. Guantánamo, for

Butler, has created a time that is unfamiliar, backwards, and archaic. As she writes, “The historical time that we thought was past turns out to structure the contemporary field with a persistence that gives the lie to history as chronology.”445

The appearances of sovereignty at

Guantánamo are “anachronistic resurgences” that confound normative conceptions of temporality.

Diana Taylor tells a similar story about time and torture, one where “we have embarked on an extrajuridical power trip with no limits and no foreseeable end” because we have taken a road we should not have walked.446 By entering a time that is endless and anachronistic, Guantánamo marks a departure from the norm. The torture performed there “crosses the limit” and “suspends the rules” so that Guantánamo becomes a space of aberration and a time of distortion, confusion, and illegibility.447 In this way, Guantánamo is not only a break with the law, but also with time. It rewrites the time of chronological progress in favor of Ian Baucom’s “time as accumulation.”448

The irrationality and barbarism of the past resurges in this space beyond

the law. A past that is not a past returns in the space of exception. And like the backward march of time, the norm undoes itself in a process of reversal and suspension so that it too returns to an otherworldly place once left behind

. For Butler and many others, Guantánamo is an exception to the presumably normal procedures that constitute the domestic. It is the spectacular terror contrasted to the normal operations of law and power within the formal boundaries of the United States.

Such understandings of Guantánamo as a monstrous aberration from the domestic have been common among scholars, activists, and journalists. The arguments advanced by Butler and Agamben have not gone without criticism. Joshua Comaroff argues that “it is not the exceptional, the supra- or extralegal that defines Guantánamism, but rather its conditional existence within the law, the intentional contortions made possible by…spatial and temporal contradictions inherent in the judicial system.”449 Guantánamo is not outside the law; rather, it is made possible by the law and the law’s ability to contort its application through “spatialtemporal disarticulations” that open up new possibilities of legal action.450 For Comaroff, it is not Guantánamo that is a “nonplace,” it is Agamben’s theory that is ahistorical and ageographical in its effacement of Guantánamo’s colonial history and location.451 Nassir Hussain similarly argues that at Guantánamo one does not find not an emptying out of law but an “abundant use of technical distinctions, differing regulations, and multiple invocations of authority.”452 If Guantánamo is understood as a space outside the law, then the presumed solution is the application of more laws and regulations. Yet, Guantánamo is not a space of suspensions, outsideness, and exclusions—it is a space of hyperlegality. It operates on a continuum where the norm and exception have become indistinguishable and “points to a desire for and an attempt at a zone that operates not as an exception but as a parallel in a modern administrative legality.”453 And as Hussain and others observe, among the detainees held in Guantánamo, there are people who have been declared non–enemy combatants, but due to their stateless status continue to be imprisoned in Guantánamo, as they would in any immigration jail in the United

States.454 Thus, the space of domestic detention and incarceration provides a genealogy of the forms of terror and violence that operate as the norm at

Guantánamo and elsewhere. The control unit is one such space. Unprecedented as the legal machinations employed at Guantánamo may seem, as Colin Dayan documents, they rely on the last thirty years of Supreme Court decisions that have abolished the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.”455 Further, as Dayan and Caleb Smith argue, the social, civic, and biological death produced in the “new war prison” is also central to the institutionality of the domestic prison. From its inception as an institution of humanity, civilization, and reform, its designers understood the prison as a place of

“deliberate mortification.”456 Early prison reformers in the 18th and 19th centuries specifically designed the prison as a place where human beings would be rendered civically and socially dead—both dead to the law in that they were divested of any rights and dead to the social world in that they were severed from its affective ties. Stripped of citizenship and subjectivity, the prisoner became a specter, an “animate corpse” in the eyes of the law.457 In the words of 18th century reformers, the prison was a “living tomb,” a “space of terror” and “ghostly half- life.”458 Before the

1970s, the goal of incarceration was to rehabilitate the captive. But to be reborn, one first had to be spiritually and legally killed in the name of reanimation.

The reformer Benjamin Rush described the convict as one who “was lost and is found— was dead and is alive.”459 Dehumanization is not an exception to the rehabilitative intentions of confinement; it is the sole purpose of the modern prison, making death central to the spatial and temporal politics of incarceration. Death, physic disintegration, and the undoing of subjectivity are built into the discursive and material architecture of the prison. This is more than a metaphor; countless prisoners over the last three centuries recount how the prison produces claustrophobia, chronic rage, panic, depression, blindness, hallucinations, weight loss, dizziness, and heart palpitations.

These states of psychic and physical duress made it so the walls of the prison whisper, scream, vibrate, and close in; cement, steel, and space become animated by the necropolitical institutionality of the prison

. For example, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, inmates in Soledad prison “composed inside and smuggled out” handwritten poems, essays, and letters in order to construct a book titled, Words From the House of the Dead. Many of the authors understood themselves as trying to breach a dividing line between the living and the living dead

. One essay in particular, “How to Develop a Mentally Unhealthy Individual,” describes how the prison apprehends “subjects” engaging in non-normative behaviors (“loving a prostitute,” using drugs, or other “insidious behaviors”) because they are a threat to the social order.460 The prison abolishes “his identity and future” and then systematically produces psychic debility and incapacity in the form of mental illness. The prisoner, forgotten by the world they threatened, lives a

“half-life” of mind-numbing repetition and “omnipresent” control, regulation, “punishment and degradation.”4

61 When George Jackson wrote in 1970 that “capture is the closest thing to being dead that one is likely to experience in this life,” he was not being hyperbolic.462 He was articulating the historical fact that the modus operandi of the temporality of incarceration, and the prison itself, is to produce premature death. This process is not exceptional to the operation of the norm—it is how the norm comes into being. In the words of Smith, “prisoners do not occupy a zone of exile outside the circle of juridical and philosophical humanity: the prison that holds them is one of the primary sites through which the very idea of modern humanity is imagined and contested.”463 Like slavery and settler- colonialism, the prison is a foundational site for the reproduction of liberalism’s freedom. The criminal, like the slave, was already dead, expelled outside the realm of legal and extra-legal concern, empathy, and embrace.

The diseased body of the criminal had to be expunged from civil society and “once expelled became the visible record of the sacrifice on which civilization maintained itself.

”464 It is crucial to note that this process did not occur outside the law, but was a manifestation of the killing power of the law itself. The convict was buried alive by the law, forced to live a death in life within the tomb of the prison. Smith describes this when he writes, “

Perhaps more than any other institution, the prison manifests the power of the law to disfigure and kill those within it circle of rights.”465 The prisoner, though a living and breathing being, is dead—buried by the crushing weight of the law.

466 In short, prisoners do not need to be protected by the law from lawlessness, because the law is what renders them dead. The construction of the prison as a space of death and the prisoner as the living dead arose out of Enlightenment conceptions of humanity and natural rights that called for the abolition of gratuitous public executions in favor of the sterility and isolation—the humanness—of the prison. Humanity and rights are not the potential saviors of the prison’s dead, they are the technologies needed

to turn the living into walking ghosts.

Civil society’s future rested on the prisoner’s expulsion from humanity—this is the life of the prison and it is central to the answer of why and how Guantánamo can exist.

It is crucial to remember, as I outlined in chapter one, that the modes of civil and social incapacity that live within the law and the prison were invented under the legal structures of chattel-slavery. The power of Dayan’s work (and its significance to my project in this chapter) is that she charts a set of legal and extra-legal mechanisms that connect the slave to the prisoner, the prisoner to the detainee, and the detainee to the slave.

The Supreme Court’s decisions concerning the Eighth Amendment over the last thirty years (that have been foundational to the Bush administration’s torture memos) summoned the spirit of slavery and civil incapacitation so that old laws were given new life.467 In the post-1970s era, legal terms governing the forms of violence that could be exacted on the bodies of enslaved people returned to justify and legalize torture in the U.S. prison system and later, under the “war on terror.”

In the 1980s, legal terms like “decency,” “legitimacy,” and “basic human needs,” which justified civil incapacity and social death under slavery, became legal technologies to justify, extend, and invent forms torture in the United States and beyond. Within this framework, as long as the body was not bruised, personhood and the mind could be decimated.

The legal nullification of personhood that created the slave became foundational to the category of the prisoner and now envelopes and makes possible the non-human human that is the detainee

.468 This is crucial to comprehending the systems of power I am trying to outline between neoliberalism, the prison, and slavery, and now in this chapter, “the war on terror.” As I have been arguing throughout, 1970s feminist, queer, and anti-racist activists offer a rich anticipatory genealogy for mapping these forgotten and unthinkable trajectories. For

Dayan, these networks of power live on in the law, and her work is a study of the law. In what follows, I am less concerned with the law and more focused on the forms of knowledge, affect, feelings, and intensities described by women “buried alive” by the law at the Lexington Control Unit. This body of work rewrites the temporalities that underwrite theories of the state of exception.

A2 Interpretation Bad

Poetry does not impose a particular meaning, but opens up space for multiple potential interpretations

Fernando 10




Hence, whenever there is a statement of relationality, one can never fully legitimise this relationality,

not because there is a subjective bias in making the statement – ‘I want there to be a relationality so there will be one' – but as there is always already an unknowability within this very relationality. This is a structural assumption, a structural condition. And it is this very assumption that both allows the statement of relationality to be made, and which also never allows the statement to be fully legitimate. It is for this reason that "______ is like ______" is a descriptive statement, one that never reaches the status of a definition, and is never a definitive statement.

Hence, “______ is like ______” is a claim. In fact, one can no longer even discern whether the claim made is true or false as such – one can no longer differentiate whether it is a performative or a constative statement

as there is no external referent. Referentiality is precisely the assumed relationality of language itself. In this we find an echo of Paul Celan, who on March 26, 1969, wrote this about poetry: "La poésis ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose" (

Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself

).20 Perhaps then, relationality can at best only be a poetic relationality;

one that does not impose a frame, impose a particular meaning, does not efface the singularity of the relationality, but instead only seeks to be open, exposes itself, to the potentiality of relationality.

Poetry eludes capture – an (enigmatic) gift

Fernando 10




The poet

, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy

– a being who since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy

. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes. If we recall the words of Paul Cenan, the words that we turned to earlier, that of “ poetry does not impose itself, it exposes itself

,” one’s instinctive reaction – the thought that comes to mind without thinking, without knowing – is the question ‘expose itself to what?’

Whilst it is easy, too easy, to dismiss a naïve question like that, it would be to our detriment if we choose not to attend it, not to attend a possibility that sometimes lies in the simplest of questions, the silly questions, as it were. After all, if one exposes oneself, it can only be so if there was something, or someone to expose oneself to. There has to be a witness to the exposure, otherwise there would not be one at all. Hence, exposure is always a state of establishing a relationality with another

. It is not a relationality that seeks to impose a particular, single, meaning, reading upon another.

And this is why poetry continues to menace the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge; without an imposition, the borders are not drawn, the limits are not set

. And whilst not forgetting the registers that Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida opened earlier – yes there are only always rules to seeing, and we are always already in grammar, always bounded by grammar – the lack of a boundary also always opens more possibilities than we can account for

. One may not even be overstating if one claims that at this point, all accounting systems which are set up to predict, to control, via graphs, curves, probabilities – fail.

Whilst exposing itself, and hence, opening itself to response, any response, poetry “always risks what it cannot avoid appealing to in reply, namely, recompense

and retribution. It risks the exchange that it might expect but is at the same time unable to count on.

Once the poem is sent off, set off, one can only hope for a response. In fact, one always gets a response; even a non-response, a complete ignoring of the poem, is a form of response.

It is just that one can never know what kind of response one is going to get. Once the poem is set of, the poet remains completely blind to its effects. Once the bomb is set off, the suicide bomber s completely blind to its effects. It is probably of no coincidence that the suicide bomber is usually constituted as one who is completely irrational, cast as a complete idiot; the most common question heard whenever there is an instance of a suicide bombing is ‘why would one give up her life when she has so much to live for?

All attempts to provide an answer to the question are banal, as the very person that the answer attempt to address is dead; hence all answers are unverifiable.

One has no choice but to admit that all reason eludes, escapes, is beyond one, is beyond the limits of one’s cognition, is at the beyond of knowledge

. Perhaps the only thing we can say is that she gives up her life in spite of the fact that she has so much to live for; after all, it is she who chooses to do so. Whilst this does not provide any answer to the question, provide any comfort that we finally understand her, this is all we can say. Perhaps it is the fact that she remains an enigma that is her gift to us

.

It is the refusal to be understood, to be subsumed under any existing conception, to be flattened, exchanged, reproduced, that is her gift.

And in that same spirit

, it is not a gift that can be understoo d – this is not a gift that one can bring to the return-counter at the shop, to be exchanged for something else, something more palatable, something easier, something more comfortable, more comforting.

This is a gift that is unknowable, in full potential, always possible

; perhaps always a gift that is to come. What continues to trouble us is that this gift – as with all gifts – comes with an obligation to reciprocate, an obligation to respond. So even though this is an objectless gift – and to compound it a gift that we might not even begin to comprehend, or even know is present – we are always already within the realm of reciprocation.

This is the point where the eternal question of the serpent, that of ‘what did she mean’, returns to haunt us, along with the other question of responding, and attempting an appropriate response at that; the question of Lenin, that of “what is to be done?” If we attempt the question of Lenin, that of “what is to be done?” If we attempt to answer the question, to provide a prescription, then we are back to the situation of effacement. Perhaps then the task that we are faced with is that of reconstituting Lenin in and within a situation. If the question of ‘what is to be done’ is a situational question, there can be no answer outside of the situation – at the point of uttering both the question and the answer, we are always immanent to the story, in the making, even when we are the ones telling the story to the other – and more than that, each answer is at best a provisional answer. However, the fact that one can even attempt an answer suggests that at least momentarily, one must be able to “step back” as it were, be exterior to the question, to situation. Hence, each answer, each definition to the question can only be accomplished as a more or less provisory, more or less violent arresting of a dynamic that is interminable, but never simply interminable or infinite.

For a dynamic such as this can only be conceived as a series of highly conflictual determinations,

as a movement of ambivalence, in which the other is always being seized as a function of the same, all the while eluding this capture

.

The other becomes the intimate condition of the possibility of the game, remaining all the while out of bounds.

A2 Ks of 1ac Authors

Their critiques of our authors are just like the colonial police

Halberstam, 13 (Judith Halberstam, also known as Jack Halberstam, is the Professor of English and


Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten TAM)

Introducing this labor upon labor, and providing the space for its development, creates risks. Like the colonial police force recruited unwittingly from guerrilla neighborhoods, university labor may

harbor refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways. But there are good reasons for the university to be confident that such elements will be exposed or forced underground. Precautions have been taken, book lists have been drawn up, teaching observations conducted, invitations to contribute made. Yet against these precautions stands the immanence of transcendence, the necessary deregulation and the possibilities of criminality and fugitivity that labor upon labor requires. Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa- expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers. And what will the university say of them? It will say they are unprofessional. This is not an arbitrary charge. It is the charge against the more than professional.

How do those who exceed the profession, who exceed and by exceeding escape, how do those maroons problematize themselves, problematize the university, force the university to consider

them a problem, a danger? The undercommons is not, in short, the kind of fanciful communities of whimsy invoked by Bill Readings at the end of his book. The undercommons, its maroons, are always at war, always in hiding.

A2 Music Fails

The noise, or what they call music, we present was to remind those who it was meant for that the place they desire exists and that they exist in it now because they have the desire

Halberstam, 13




Moten and Harney want to gesture to another place, a wild place that is not simply the left over space that limns real and regulated zones of polite society; rather, it is a wild place that continuously

produces its own unregulated wildness. The zone we enter through Moten and Harney is ongoing and exists in the present and, as Harney puts it, "some kind of demand was already being enacted,

fulfilled in the call itself." While describing the London Riots of 2011, Harney suggests that the riots and insurrections do not separate out "the request, the demand and the call" - rather, they enact

the one in the other: "I think the call, in the way I would understand it, the call, as in the call and response, the response is already there before the call goes out. You're already in something." You are already in it. For Moten too, you are always already in the thing that you call for and that calls you. What's more, the call is always a call to dis-order and this disorder or wildness shows up in many places: in jazz, in improvisation, in noise. The disordered sounds that we refer to as

cacophony will always be cast as "extra-musical," as Moten puts it, precisely because we hear some- thing in them that reminds us that our desire for harmony is arbitrary and in another world, harmony would sound incomprehensible. Lis- tening to cacophony and noise tells us that there is a wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.

A2 No Safe Spaces**

*note—used elsewhere, including A2 Ballot K, Performing Freedom, etc.


Browne, 2012



555; DOA: 7/5/15 || NDW)

‘



(2001, p. 5153



, I borrow Richard Iton’s ‘visual surplus’ and its bside ‘performative sensibility’ (2009, p. 105). What Iton suggests is that we come to internalize an expectation of the potential of being watched and with this emerges a certain ‘performative sensibility’.

Coupled with this awareness of an overseeing surveillance apparatus was

‘the conscious effort to always give one’s best performance and encourage others to do the same, and indeed to perform even when one is not sure of one’s audience (or whether there is in fact an audience)’ (p. 105).


(graffiti, music videos) made increasingly available to the public through the rise of hip-hop in the five boroughs of New

York City in the 1970s and the uses of new technologies (cellular phones, handheld cameras, the Internet, DVDs) to record and distribute performances.

Applied to a different temporal location,Iton’s analyses of visual surplus and performative sensibility are useful for how we think about fugitive acts, black expressive practices and the regulation of black mobilities in colonial

New York City 200 years earlier. What I am suggesting here is that for the fugitive in eighteenth century New York such a sensibility would encourage one to perform


April 1712 saw an armed insurrection in New York City where over two dozen black slaves gathered in the densely populated East Ward of the city to set fire to a building, killing at least nine whites and wounding others. In the end over 70 were arrested, with many coerced into admissions of guilt. Of those, 25 were sentenced to death and 23 of these death sentences were carried out. Burned at the stake, hanged, beheaded and their corpses publicly displayed and left to decompose, such spectacular corporal punishment served as a warning for the city’s slave population and beyond. With these events and the so-called slave conspiracy to burn the city in 1741, the black code governing black city life consolidated previously enacted laws that were enforced in a rather discretionary fashion.6 Some of these laws spoke explicitly to the notion of a visual surplus and the regulation of mobility by way of the candle lantern. On 14 March 1713, the Common Council of New York City passed a ‘Law for Regulating Negro or Indian Slaves in the Nighttime’ that saw to it that ‘no Negro or Indian Slave above the age of fourteen years do presume to be or appear in any of the streets’ of New York City ‘on the south side of the fresh water one hour after sunset without a lantern or a lit candle’ (New York Common Council,

Volume III). ‘Fresh water’ here referring to the Fresh Water Pond found in lower Manhattan, slightly adjacent to the Negroes Burial Ground and that supplied the city with drinking water at the time. Again, this law regulating mobility and autonomy through the use of the technology of the candle lantern was amended on 18 November 1731 where ‘no negro, mulatto or Indian slave above the age of fourteen years’ unless in the company of some white person ‘or white servant belonging to the family whose slave he or she is, or in whose service he or she there are’ was to be without a light that could be plainly seen or it was then ‘lawful for any of his Majesty’s

Subjects within the said City to apprehend such slave or slaves’ and ‘carry him, her or them before the Mayor or Recorder or any of the Aldermen of the said City who are hereby authorized upon proof of offense to commit such slave or slaves to the 552 CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Common Gaol’ (New York Common Council, Volume IV). Any slave convicted of being unlit after dark was sentenced to a public whipping of no more than 40 lashes, at the discretion of the master or owner before being discharged. Later this punishment was reduced to no more than 15 lashes. Such discretionary violence made for an imprecise mathematics of torture. Mostly, punishment for such transgression was taken into the hands of the slave owner. In 1734 a male slave of John van Zandt was found dead in his bed. The dead man was said to have ‘absented himself’ from van Zandt’s dwelling in the night-time (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Although it was first reported that the slave was horsewhipped to death by Van Zandt for being caught on the streets after dark by watchmen, a coroner’s jury found Van Zandt not negligent in this death, finding instead that ‘the correction given by the Master was not the cause of death, but that it was by the visitation of God’ (New York Weekly

Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Other laws put into place around light and black mobilities in New York City stipulated that at least one lantern must be carried per three negroes after sunset, more tightly regulated curfews and in 1722 the Common Council relegated burials by free and enslaved blacks to the daytime hours with attendance of no more than 12, plus the necessary pallbearers and gravediggers, as a means to reduce opportunities for assembly and to prevent conspiracy hatching. In recounting physician Alexander Hamilton’s narrative about his travels through New York City in July of 1744, Andy Doolen details that one outcome of the alleged conspiracy of

1741 was the ruining, according to Hamilton, of the traditional English cup of tea (2005). It was thought by Hamilton that: they have very bad water in the city, most of it being hard and brackish. Ever since the negroe conspiracy, certain people have been appointed to sell water in the streets, which they carry on a sledge in great casks and bring it from the best springs about the city, for it was when the negroes went for tea water that they held their caballs and consultations, and therefor they have a law now that no negroe shall be seen upon the streets without a lanthorn after dark. (Hamilton 1948, p. 88) We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to dawn, made knowable, locatable and contained within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a simple device made for a visual surplus where technology met surveillance, made the business of tea a white enterprise and encoded white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law. Of course, unsupervised leisure, labour, travel, assembly and other forms of social networking past sunset by free and enslaved black New Yorkers continued regardless of the enforcement of codes meant to curtail such things. BLACK LUMINOSITY

AND SURVEILLANCE 553 Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Oftentimes social networking by free and enslaved black New Yorkers took place right under the surveillant gazes of the white population, in markets and during Sabbath and holiday celebrations. In these spaces of sometimes interracial and cross-class commerce and socializing, black performative practices of drumming, dancing and chanting persisted. During celebrations of

Pinkster marking the feast of Pentecost of the Dutch Reformed Church, amongst the rituals, free and enslaved blacks elected a governor who would serve as a symbolic leader resolving disputes and collecting tributes, making this holiday an event for white spectatorship of black cultural and political production, although for many such celebratory resistance made this ‘a festival of misrule’ (Harris 2003, p. 41). So much so that the Common Council of Albany, New York, banned Pinkster celebrations in 1811, for reasons including a resentment of the space that it opened up for unsettling exchanges between blacks and whites (Lott 1993; McAllister 2003; White 1989). The most controversial incorporation of black performativity into Pinkster was the Totau. On the Totau, McAllister writes: a man and a woman shuffle back and forth inside a ring, dancing precariously close without touching and isolating most of their sensual movement in the hip and pelvic areas. Once the couple dances to exhaustion, a fresh pair from the ring of clapping dancers relieves them and the Totau continues. (McAllister 2003, p. 112) That such a performative sensibility was engaged by black subjects in colonial New York City approximately 200 years before the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx, New York City, is of much significance. The Totau, and later, the

Catharine Market breakdown reverberate in the cypher of b-boys and b-girls. In Eric Lott’s discussion of black performances he cites Thomas De Voe’s eyewitness account of the Catharine Market breakdown in the early nineteenth century New York City. De Voe writes: This board was usually about five to six feet long, of large width, with its particular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end. Their music or time was usually given by one of their party, which was done by beating their hands on the sides of their legs and the noise of the heel. The favorite dancing place was a cleared spot on the east side of the fish market in front of Burnel Brown’s Ship Chandlery. (De Voe 1862, cited in Lott 1993, pp. 4142) In this instance, the breakdown is performed in a market, allowing for white spectatorship and patronage in a space that is already overdetermined as a site of commerce within the economy of slavery. Later, DeVoe recalls ‘public 554 CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 negro dances’ at Catharine Market in an 1889 New

York Times article where he is quoted as saying that the dancers ‘would bring roots, berries, birds, fish, clams, oysters, flowers, and anything else they could gather and sell in the market to supply themselves with pocket money’ (28 April 1889).

Sylvia Wynter’s ‘provision ground ideology’ in instructive here for an understanding of solidarity, survival and the role of folk-culture as resistance to the ‘dehumanization of Man and

Nature’

(1970, p. 36).


(1970, p.

36).7


. In so being

, they allow for us to think differently about the predicaments, policies and performances constituting surveillance. Colonial New York City was a space of both terror and promise for black life. Lantern laws, fugitive slave notices, public whippings and the discretionary uses of violence by ‘his Majesty’s subjects’ rendered the black subject as always already unfree yet acts, like the breakdown, that were constitutive of black freedom persisted. It is under this context where certain humans came to be understood by many as unfree and the property of others while at the same time creating practices that maintained their humanity by challenging the routinization of surveillance, that we should read the 1783 Board of Inquiry hearings at Fraunces Tavern.

A2 Opposition Fails

**note—also in unintelligibility good

Fugitivity is not simply opposition or transgression to the social but, rather, functions in a zone of indeterminacy that disrupts the relationship between knowledge and resistance—it is through this space of unintelligibility that blackness can find social life within social death





As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of “being for others,” of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given enough attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw, that outlaws

[interdit] any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man

[person]. For not only must the black man [person] be black; he [they] must be black in relation to the white man [person]. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man [person] has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man [person].1


Frantz Fanon suggests, the black cannot be an other for another black, if the black can only be an other for a white, then is there ever anything called black social life? Is the designation of this or that thing as lawless, and the assertion that such lawlessness is a function of an already extant flaw, something more than that trying, even neurotic, oscillation between the exposure and the replication of a regulatory maneuver whose force is held precisely in the assumption that it comes before what it would contain? What’s the relation between explanation and resistance? Who bears the responsibility of discovering an ontology of, or of discovering for ontology, the ensemble of political, aesthetic, and philosophical derangements that comprise the being that is neither for itself nor for the other? What form of life makes such discovery possible as well as necessary? Would we know it by its flaws, its impurities? What might an impurity in a worldview actually be? Impurity implies a kind of non-completeness, if not absence, of a worldview. Perhaps that noncompleteness signals an originarily criminal refusal of the interplay of framing and grasping, taking and keeping—a certain reticence at the ongoing advent of the age of the world picture. Perhaps it is the reticence of the grasped, the enframed, the taken, the kept—or, more precisely, the reluctance that disrupts grasping

and framing, taking and keeping—as epistemological stance as well as accumulative activity. Perhaps this is the flaw that attends essential, anoriginal impurity—the flaw that accompanies impossible origins and deviant translations.2

What’s at stake is fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic—a movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure. This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression. Part of what can be attained in this zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands a para-ontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance.3 This exchange between matters juridical and matters sociological is given in the mixture of phenomenology and psychopathology that drives

Fanon’s work, his slow approach to an encounter with impossible black social life poised or posed in the break, in a certain intransitive evasion of crossing, in the wary mood or fugitive case that ensues between the fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black and as a slippage enacted by the meaning—or, perhaps too “trans-literally,” the (plain[-sung]) sense—of things when subjects are engaged in the representation of objects.

A2 Suffering/Slavery Reps Bad

The status quo is structured by the logics and technology of chattel slavery and the afterlife of slavery is the past’s possession of the present – the attempt to forgo or

“move beyond” it is a new link

Dillon 13





In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne

Brand writes of the Middle Passage, The door [of no return] signifies the historical moment which colours all moments in the Diaspora.

It accounts for the ways we observe and are observed as people, whether it’s through the lens of social injustice or the laws of human accomplishment.

The door exists as an absence. A thing in fact which we do not know about, a place we do not know.

Yet, it exists as the ground we walk…Where one stands in a society seems always related to this historical experience.

Where one can be observed is relative to that history

. All human effort seems to emanate from this door

.32 For Brand, the Middle Passage and chattel-slavery compose the original template for modern power.

The door of no return is the site from which all disciplinary and biopolitical regimes emanate. It (and not it alone) determines the ways people are regulated, visualized, mobilized, positioned, and organized. Yet, the deathly touch of terror and the warm embrace of inclusion are not just stained from the original scene.

What began at the door is also transmitted, transformed, renewed, and repositioned in our present day

.33 This is what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery,” where premature death, incarceration, limited access to healthcare and education, and poverty are structured by the logics and technologies of chattel-slavery.

34 Under this analytic, the past does not give way to the present, slowly dissolving under the bright shinning light of progress; slavery’s afterlife is the past’s possession of the present.

The past holds the present captive—structuring, surrounding, and inhabiting it.

The fabrication of concrete and compartmentalized conceptions of time and space dissolves under the crushing weight of the blood stained gate. But this possession does not just take the form of the tactile, visible, and known.

Part of the afterlife of slavery emanates from an absence that cannot be recovered or repaired

. The door of no return is not a place, it is a gap that founds the now—it is history as the unknown.

The present rests upon this rupture, upon the unknowable, upon the forgotten, and upon the dead. In this chapter, I use the term possession as a modification of the concept of haunting.

In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon argues that haunting describes how that which seems to be not there—something that is absent or missing—is often a “seething presence…acting on and meddling with taken for granted realities.”35 A ghost is one way something lost, disappeared, or dead makes itself known. Engaging a haunting means to consider the apparitions lingering outside the frame of disciplinary knowledge, to make contact with the reality of fictions and the fictions of reality, to reckon with “endings that are not over” and past events that “loiter in the present.”36 If haunting names the lingering presence of the dead in the realm of the living—the present absence of what is there and yet hidden, the feeling that there is something in the room with you even when your eyes tell you otherwise—then possession is when the ghost does not haunt, but rather, takes hold.

Possession is when the ghost inhabits and controls. To be haunted is to see the ghost that has been waiting for your field of vision to change. By contrast, a possessive spirit is not so passive and patient. Unlike a ghost, a spirit does not wait; it grabs hold of you first, perhaps without your knowledge.

What seizes you are not the murmurs of the oppressed or the whispered demands of those killed by state violence and terror—possession is the deathly grip of the dominant. Possession is a “psychological state in which an individual's normal personality is replaced by another;” “domination by something (as an evil spirit, a passion, or an idea);” or “something owned, occupied, or controlled.”37 To be possessed is to be under the control of something more powerful than the imagined free will of the liberal individual. We can witness possession in the relationship between race, gender, and death as theorized by black feminists in the 1970s. For example, in her 1968 essay “The Black

Revolution in America,” Grace Lee Boggs argues that American capitalism was born out of the labor of black slaves and has since used white workers to “defend the system and…keep

Blacks in their place at the bottom of the ladder, scavenging the old jobs, old homes, old churches, and old schools discarded by whites…thereby contributing to the overall capital of the country.”38

She goes on to outline a regime of biopolitical management animated by this history: They

[black youth] also recognize that although a particular struggle may be precipitated by an individual incident, their struggle is not against just one or another individual but against a whole power

structure comprising a complex network of politicians, university and school administrators, landlords, merchants, usurers, realtors, insurance personal, contractors, union leaders, licensing and inspection bureaucrats, racketeers, lawyers, policemen—the overwhelming majority of who are white and absentee, and who exploit the black ghetto the same way the Western powers exploit the colonies and neo-colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

39 Within a theory of power as possession, slavery’s relationship to the present is more than the haunting of a ghost. Slavery, for Boggs, is not lurking behind contemporary formations of power. Instead, the “complex network” of biopolitical regulation and management outlined by Boggs is given life by an anti-blackness as old as liberal freedom. Contemporary biopolitics are possessed by discourses and technologies produced under slavery that were carried into the future (our present) by race, gender, sexuality, and anti-blackness. As Omise’eke Tinsley writes, “The brown-skinned, fluid- bodied experiences now called blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean.”40 Extending Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploration of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” we can understand race and death as a possessive spirit that works as one, born out of the genocide of conquest and slavery.41 Being placed at the “bottom of the ladder” by an expansive network of racialized management and control is Boggs’s way of describing the uneven distribution of value and disposability produced by slavery’s ongoing role in the present. Although death is sometimes a natural biological phenomenon, it is more often manufactured and distributed by regimes of power far removed from ones last breath or final heartbeat.

Race is one such technology; it is a mechanism for distributing life and death, and for black people, race and white supremacy are motivated by a past of subjection, subjugation, torture, terror, and disposability that has not ended.42 Race possesses life in both the biological and biopolitical sense, ending or extending biological life for individuals and populations

. While race sometimes haunts, it more often limits life chances by inhabiting and controlling individuals, institutions, and populations. In short, we are possessed by race, and death and life are the outcome.

The relationship between race and possession is also evident in the writing of prisoners and activists in the 1970s who connected the contemporary prison to chattel- slavery.

Within this body of work, the contemporary prison is animated by logics, technologies, and discourses constructed under nineteenth-century U.S. slavery. For countless prisoners and activists, race (and anti-blackness) were instruments that transcended space and time so that the past could invade and contort the present in its image. For instance, in his best-selling collection of prison writing Soledad Brother published in 1970, George Jackson described the ways that the prison’s connection to slavery reverses, compresses, and undoes the progress of time: My recall is nearly perfect, time has faded nothing. I recall the very first kidnap. I’ve lived through the passage, died on the passage, lain in the unmarked shallow graves of the millions who fertilized the Amerikan soil with their corpses; cotton and corn growing out of my chest,

“unto the third and fourth generation,” the tenth, the hundredth.43 Here

, Jackson describes the relationship between memory, time, and possession. His captive body is metaphorically infested with the cotton and corn grown under the prison of the plantation. Time did not wash away the horrors of slavery, but rather, modified and intensified them. Jackson both lives the past and continues to live its afterlife.

He feels possessed by the forms of death produced under slavery, and throughout his writing connects this to his “living death” in prison. This possession is not temporally constrained; neither the law nor the state can exorcise black bodies of this death sentence. Instead, Jackson argued that the U.S. “must be destroyed” and that anything less would be “meaningless to the great majority of the slaves.”44

Although an extensive review of Jackson’s discussion of slavery is beyond the scope of this project, his ideas and declaration that “I am a slave to, and of, property” were not unique among the black liberation movement.

45 In fact, Jackson’s writing was emblematic of larger political, social, and economic changes occurring in the 1960s and 1970s, and paradigmatic of the political thought of the black liberation movement. The work of Shakur and Davis are one of the lines of flights that depart from the thought of Jackson and the black liberation movement. Indeed, Davis dedicates “Reflections” to Jackson’s life (cut short by his violent death) and his struggle against his own misogyny. In addition,

Davis offers a literal embodiment of how the theories, histories, and epistemologies produced by the black feminist and black liberation movements have entered the university.

Framework Blocks

A2 T Version

No topical versions of the aff—the fugitive strategy is necessarily opposed to any use of the state. Rather than inscribe bodies into the law, vote affirmative to escape the law as a critique of the “emancipatory” potential of it

Hesse, Northwestern African American studies associate professor, 2014

(Barnor,

“Escaping Liberty: Western Hegemony, Black Fugitivity,” Political Theory, Vol. 42, No. 3, 2014, http://ptx.sagepub.com/content/42/3/288.full.pdf, p. 301-304, IC)

African American and Black British slave narratives developed rapidly as a genre between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Catalyzed by abolitionist movements on both sides of the

Atlantic, they are important for developing alternative figurations of Western liberty.47 Slave narratives have been variously defined as accounts of “the life, or a major portion of the life, of a fugitive or former slave, either written or orally related by the slave personally”48 or

“autobiographical narratives written or dictated by ex-slaves of African descent in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.”49 While factually correct, perhaps what captures the political poignancy of the genre as foundational to black fugitive thought is Frances Smith Fosters’s characterization of them as “personal accounts by black slaves and ex-slaves of their experiences in slavery and of their efforts to obtain freedom. Written after the physical escape had been accomplished and the narrators were manumitted or fugitive slaves.”50 What is significant is the idea of freedom as a formulation conditional upon escape and the accruing status and rationale of fugitivity in the enactment of that escape. The slave narrative was based on a structure of exposition as escape. This included escaping the prohibitions against speaking outside the racial law of slavery; escaping the societal repression of the slaves aspirations for positive liberty from the site of fugitivity; and escaping political retribution for portraying the constraints, indignities and violence inflicted in the individual life of the slave narrator as a communitarian experience.51 Implicating racial slavery in sustaining the private space and privileged status of liberties accredited to white citizens, the slave narrative raised both the prospect of extending liberal ideals to the abolition of slavery and concurrent associations of liberal ideals with the institution of slavery. Slave narratives were

“intensely political documents”52 writing the agency of escape into the logic of fugitivity that produced the narrating black subject.

Conventionally the idea of fugitivity in African American slave narratives is defined by the “slave’s geographical journey of escape, from the slave territories of the U.S. South to the free soil of the

North or Canada.”53 But we should not allow that familiar trope to obscure the political meaning of the relation between liberty, escape and fugitivity. Samira Kawash usefully suggests we can think about this in four connected ways, which expose the “liberal humanist” conception of freedom not only as socially hegemonic but as racially oppressive. First, in “stealing him- or herself” the black fugitive both “violated the law of property” and became “an outlaw.” Second, the black fugitive exposed “the groundlessness of the originating distinction between person and property.” Since the former slave was none of these, she/he could only occupy “this non-place between master and slave” in terms of “silence, invisibility and placelessness.” Third, the black fugitive “never exists as subject,” as an outlaw the fugitive is “not subject to the law nor recognized as subject by law.” In being located as exterior to the law, the fugitive slave exposes the law to its “outside” or what might be described

as racially prescribed terrain of unfreedom. Fourth, as the black fugitive is “neither self possessed nor simply property” she/he cannot be “recognized as a political subject and therefore can never be free” in accordance with the enduring status of fugitivity.54 What Kawash manages to convey so insightfully are the political predicaments of escape that confront the encounter of black fugitivity with the Western institution of negative liberty in its mode of race governance. Negative liberty was effectively white liberty exempt from the intrusiveness and incursions of racial profiling. Although it provided the philosophical grounds for emancipation, it also established the political conditions that conferred black fugitivity, since it was evident that freedom from the law of slavery was not homologous with freedom from the rule of race.55

Citizen Liberty, Slave Liberty

I want to suggest formulations of black freedom are only possible in their rewriting as forms of escape from the Western hegemony of liberty. This means black fugitive thought can only be sustained through the emancipation inherent in escape from the colonial-racial foreclosure underpinning consent to Western hegemony. We have seen the warrant for this approach in Césaire and Du Bois; it can now be further developed in a critical reading of David Walker.56 Walker, a free-born African

American and anti-slavery activist in the early nineteenth century, in 1830 published his Appeal to the

Coloured Citizens of the World but in particular and very expressly to those of the United States of

America. Comprising in part a rhetorical mobilization for sustained diasporic political activism against plantation slavery, it also developed a subtle if provocative analysis of the mix of liberalism, republicanism, Christianity, race and colonialism in the Western hegemony of American culture.

Walker diagnosed the meaning of freedom and slavery in Western hegemonic culture from the

Western foreclosed, oppositional focus of the enslaved, their dispersion, descendents and prospects for escape. In short, he contested the liberty claims of modernity in two principal critiques of Western colonial-racial foreclosure.

The first unraveled the racialization of modern liberty. Although nominally a free man of color, Walker described his own freedom as “of the lowest kind,” “the very dregs” and “the most servile and abject kind” since he was ever vulnerable to the rule of race.57 His so-called freedom from interference was radically limited by race. Not only did it prevent him from standing for high office, it undermined his freedom of movement, invariably leaving him susceptible to being enslaved like the majority of the black population in the United States if any white person questioned him and he was unable to produce or demonstrate the credentials of his liberty. Stephen Marshall suggests “Walker’s conception of freedom is markedly similar to the classic characterization of liberty that Isaiah Berlin associated with the canon of Western political philosophy.”58 The importance of this observation however lies in also appreciating that unlike Berlin Walker did not privilege negative liberty and demonize positive liberty. Indeed while it might be said in Berlin’s political terms that Walker radically lacked negative liberty, in Walker’s own political terms even the positive liberty that was necessary to rectify this lack was radically insufficient and impoverished if it did not also include “the salvation of our whole body,” the diaspora of black populations, on a world-wide basis. Walker’s awareness of the colonial dimensions of Western hegemony urged that a collectivist, anti-slavery positive liberty was required to shore up an individualist negative liberty degraded by the rule of race.

Walker’s second critique unravels Atlantic racial slavery in modernity (i.e., the Americas) as the more pressing meaning of freedom’s antonym and as the normative basis of metaphorical allusions in political discourse rather than slavery in antiquity (i.e., Greece and Rome). During the course of this critique, Walker indicts Enlightenment luminary Thomas Jefferson whose Notes on the State of

Virginia published in 1787 extolled liberal and republican values while equivocating on the abolition of slavery, describing it as a “great political and moral evil,” and yet favoring emancipation at some unspecified time in the distant future.59 It should be recalled of course that Jefferson himself was a large-scale slaveholder in Virginia. Perhaps this explains the use of his Notes to dwell at length on the

“eternal monotony” of the slave populations’ “unfortunate” skin color, their lack of “reflection” and undeveloped intellectual capacity, all of which he considered a “powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”60 What is particularly striking about Jefferson’s ambiguous defense and abhorrence of slavery, as Walker highlights emphatically, is his disingenuous comparison of U.S. plantation slavery with the slavery of Roman antiquity. Jefferson argued Roman slavery was “much more deplorable” than American slavery and expressed admiration that despite their ordeal the

Roman slaves still managed to develop artistic and intellectual abilities, many excelling as poets.

Jefferson concluded these achievements were possible because Roman slaves were a “race of whites” and commented instructively that when achieving emancipation how socially they were able to “mix without staining the blood” of their masters.61 Jefferson regularly used this comparison between white roman slaves and black American slaves to reinforce the idea of congenital racial inferiority among the enslaved black populations and to absolve the American institution of slavery from the causes of the slaves’ perceived intellectual incapacities. In effect, for Jefferson, modernity’s American slavery, as odious as it may have been to his moral sensibilities, was not really slavery at all, that dubious distinction belonged to antiquity.

Walker, who was very familiar with these passages of racial abuse from Jefferson’s Notes, provides not only a riposte but recasts the analysis of slavery politically as a counter-point to Jefferson’s moral ambiguities and racial convictions. Walker reminds us emphatically that slavery in all its wretchedness is annexed to “this REPUBLICAN LAND OF LIBERTY!!!!!!”62 His raised tone insists that a novel and unique political formation of slavery had emerged in modernity that had no correspondence in antiquity. Combining a colonial presence with universal claims of liberty and Christian espousals of equality, modernity’s Atlantic slavery elaborated its governance through the Western hegemony of race. Within this context, Walker reverses Jefferson’s contrast of slavery in modernity with slavery in antiquity to argue that the degradation of black populations in the Americas far exceeded the slaves of the ancient world. Degradation was not just a question of the dehumanizing formation of slavery in place, but also a racial abuse of the definition and provision of freedom in the same place. Walker’s appeal to historiography is compelling: “Everybody who has read history knows that as soon as a slave among the Romans obtained his freedom, he could rise to the greatest eminence in the State, and there was no law instituted to hinder a slave from buying his freedom. Have not the Americans instituted laws to hinder us from obtaining our freedom?”63 Walker’s stricture here against the

Western hegemony of freedom reveals the constitutive colonial relation between racial slavery and liberalism. It requires us to think about the material implications of racial slavery in the Americas being eclipsed by the metaphorical category of slavery in liberal political theory. Walker wrote like a fugitive from the law of race. His Appeal continues to be compelling in challenging us to escape the hegemonic Western meaning of liberty. It reminds us of the theoretical and political tasks involved in

specifying the modern foreclosed Western colonial history and concept of racial slavery from which alternative meanings of freedom needed to be extricated, distinguished and formulated. With the universalization of liberalism’s liberty having evolved dissociated from its detriment of colonized

“others,” whose regulation it perpetuated in the racialization of their aspirational and potential liberties, Walker’s Appeal also raises the more perplexing but necessary question of what might it mean to be liberated or escape from this Western liberty.64

2ac—Undercommons

The university necessarily is unable to recognize the existence of blackness—this means only the Undercommons can create a space for alternative understandings of knowledge





IC)

But surely if one can write something on the surface of the university, if one can write for instance in the university about singularities—those events that refuse either the abstract or individual category of the bourgeois subject—one cannot say that there is no space in the university itself? Surely there is some space here for a theory, a conference, a book, a school of thought? Surely the university also makes thought possible? Is not the purpose of the university as Universitas, as liberal arts, to make the commons, make the public, make the nation of democratic citizenry? Is it not therefore important to protect this Universitas, whatever its impurities, from professionalization in the university? But we would ask what is already not possible in this talk in the hallways, among the buildings, in rooms of the university about possibility? How is the thought of the outside, as Gayatri Spivak means it, already not possible in this complaint?

The maroons know something about possibility. They are the condition of possibility of production of knowledge in the university—the singularities against the writers of singularity, the writers who write, publish, travel, and speak. It is not merely a matter of the secret labor upon which such space is lifted, though of course such space is lifted from collective labor and by it. It is rather that to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it and be recognized by it, and to institute the negligence of that internal outside, that unassimilated underground, a negligence of it that is precisely, we must insist, the basis of the professions. And this act of against always already excludes the unrecognized modes of politics, the beyond of politics already in motion, the discredited criminal paraorganization, what Robin Kelley might refer to as the infrapolitical field (and its music). It is not just the labor of the maroons but their prophetic organization that is negated by the idea of intellectual space in an organization called the university. This is why the negligence of the critical academic is always at the same time an assertion of bourgeois individualism.

Such negligence is the essence of professionalization where it turns out professionalization is not the opposite of negligence but its mode of politics in the United States. It takes the form of a choice that excludes the prophetic organization of the Undercommons—to be against, to put into question the knowledge object, let us say in this case the university, not so much without touching its foundation, as without touching one’s own condition of possibility, without admitting the Undercommons and being admitted to it. From this, a general negligence of condition is the only coherent position. Not so much an antifoundationalism or foundationalism, as both are used against each other to avoid contact with the Undercommons. This always negligent act is what leads us to say there is no distinction between the university in the United States and professionalization. There is no point in

trying to hold out the university against its professionalization. They are the same. Yet the maroons refuse to refuse professionalization, that is, to be against the university. The university will not recognize this indecision, and thus professionalization is shaped precisely by what it cannot acknowledge, its internal antagonism, its wayward labor, its surplus. Against this wayward labor it sends the critical, sends its claim that what is left beyond the critical is waste.

The Undercommons is a space deemed to be ‘criminal’ and ‘unprofessional’—but it is only in this space that the fugitive can find refuge to create resistance to the university





IC)

Perhaps the biopower of the Enlightenment know this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must. But even as it depends on these moles, these refugees, they will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional. And one may be given one last chance to be pragmatic—why steal when one can have it all, they will ask. But if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the underground of the university, into the

Undercommons—this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act. And it is at the same time, the only possible act.

In that Undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualization of research. To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons.

What the beyond2 of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that predicts its own organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the Undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. The Undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood.

Fredric Jameson reminds the university of its dependence on “Enlightenment-type critiques and demystification of belief and committed ideology, in order to clear the ground for unobstructed

planning and ‘development.’”1 This is the weakness of the university, the lapse in its homeland security. It needs labor power for this “enlightenment-type critique,” but, somehow, labor always escapes.

The premature subjects of the Undercommons took the call seriously, or had to be serious about the call. They were not clear about planning, too mystical, too full of belief. And yet this labor force cannot reproduce itself, it must be reproduced. The university works for the day when it will be able to rid itself, like capital in general, of the trouble of labor. It will then be able to reproduce a labor force that understands itself as not only unnecessary but dangerous to the development of capitalism. Much pedagogy and scholarship is already dedicated in this direction. Students must come to see themselves as the problem, which, counter to the complaining of restorationist critics of the university, is precisely what it means to be a customer, to take on the burden of realization and always necessarily be inadequate to it. Later, these students will be able to see themselves properly as obstacles to society, or perhaps, with lifelong learning, students will return having successfully diagnosed themselves as the problem.

--1ar—Undercommons

We solve most of their offense – our advocacy is one that steals from the university, to abuse our welcome into its place. True subversion cannot take place within the formal politics of the university—only a politics of the Undercommons can create revolutionary action





IC)

“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today.

This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.

Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history.

Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek

Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.

2ac—Can’t Get Free

Freedom is not known through experience or thought, but rather ensemble—it is through improvising between the dialectics of the unintelligible and intelligible, through the recognition of affective responses towards structures, that agency can be asserted and freedom recognized




One thinks again and often, in an inevitable return, of the image/figure of the ship in the narrative: the proliferation of the gaze to and from the ship in Equiano, all determined to a certain extent by his first encounter with it. The ship is never not the figure of consumption and containment, and is never to be thought outside of an original determination as the embodiment of the white man. Note, then,

Freeman Equiano, impatient with the ship he was on at the time for taking on too much water, again expressing himself unguardedly: “Damn the vessel’s bottom out!” Of course, his “conscience instantly smote [him] for the expression” (108); but we are led to believe repentance was ineffectual, for the ship—described as transfixed, fascinated, abject, and productive of abjection—soon founders on the rocks. The fear and horror that transfixion or encounter produces reconstitutes and reconfigures the terror Equiano felt as a child, and to which he claims to have grown a stranger; the terror that the ship once held, and which had shifted to a terror of being transferred from one ship (and its correspondent comfort and identification with one’s “original” captor) to another, becomes a terror in being torn away from the ship as such. “All my sins stared me in the face [another abject encounter or transfixion]; and especially I thought that God had hurled his direful vengeance on my guilty head, for cursing the vessel on which my life depended” (109). We must think what it means to curse the ship, to curse what is figured and embodied by the ship, to curse that upon which one’s life depends.

Here, again, lie the problematics of the curse and the ship, and all in the midst of a development towards reflection, reason, “good English.” The vessel or ship must somehow be maintained, and yet that ship’s maintenance is to be figured within the thinking of a kind of contained sabotage, reworking, contamination, poisoning. The ship is that in which one must be contained, and yet what the ship contains must always itself contain the possibility of contamination, reversed encounter, returned gaze. Freeman Equiano returns to England and confronts his benevolent/master Captain

Pascal: “ . . . he appeared a good deal surprised, and asked me how I came back. I answered, ‘In a ship.’” (122)

In the end, it is important to return to the most familiar theorization of the form of encounters such as those of Equiano. Again, the most familiar theorization of the form of this encounter is that which

Frantz Fanon structures around his own answer to the question he asks in the midst of his long improvisation of Freud. Fanon asks: “What does the black man want?” He answers: “I had to meet the white man’s eyes.” According to Bhabha (1990), Fanon’s answer signifies a desire for “the objectifying encounter with otherness.” Is this paradoxically oppositional resolution what Equiano wants? This question is bound up with the subtle interplay between resistance and improvement, sentiment and thought, which comes to signify an oppositional development that is, itself, quite problematic. What is the relationship between the objectifying encounter that ruptures all identity and the knowledge of

freedom certain narratives and their interruptions allow? The answer to this question might move us out from the outside that hybridity or double-consciousness represent.

What I’m after is a kind of knowledge that moves from somewhere on the other side of either reason or experience, intelligibility or sensibility, and that is not reducible to any originary state of nature but for that improvisation of the human which is neither the encoding of or embeddedness in responsibility, nor a given ethical tendency, but a predisposition to ensemble that moves through the originary distinctions between ethics, epistemology, and ontology. Ensemble can here be thought of as a rationalization of the social that is also a rationalization of rationalization itself. In addition to joining Equiano and Uncle Toliver in a kind of displaced and displacing resistance at the intersection of knowledge, language (curse and prayer), and freedom, Mary Prince and Ellen Butler theorize or rationalize, or, we might even say, decolonize that resistance precisely in the way they propose a slide away from the proposition of encounter, a movement out of the normal exigencies of emergent and contained subjectivity as it is theorized in Fanon and extended in Bhabha. Mary Prince and Ellen

Butler offer the theorization, writing, sounding, re-sounding, recitation, performance, rationalization, and improvisation of resistant practices, and of the social and of the human and of the out-from-theoutside subjectivity or agency which produces and which is those practices: ensemble.

Perhaps, in the light of the ensemble, the market, the open sea, the unstable zone of power and the resistance that calls it into being, the crucial links between baptism, liberation, and salvation, which are themselves linked to the questions of knowledge, freedom, salvation, and the identity or subjectivity they demand and allow, can be read. Recall that Equiano’s encounter with Captain Doran is structured around a moment of misrecognition which forces him to remind Equiano of who he is, so that Equiano can play his part in a dialogic moment whose object is the establishment of Doran’s own identity. Equiano refuses the terms of that confrontation in the complex moment of what I termed a declaration of in/dependence. The dependence at that declaration’s heart is, in a sense deferred.

What I’d like briefly to examine is its return. I’d like to think that return in terms of a certain transcendence, one in which Equiano moves from the refusal of an encounter with the lord to the acceptance of an encounter with the Lord. That return takes place during the time of Equiano’s religious despair: a time at which he has come to know a certain separation of liberation from salvation; a time at which, it might be said, the strictures of a certain kind of subjectivity born in abjection and objection reemerge, overwhelming the subjectivity born in resistant apposition into which Equiano had never fully emerged. The moment at which Equiano both prompts and refuses the lord’s determination of who he was is overtaken—in the midst of a desperate search for that certain knowledge of salvation which is somehow tied to the loss of that intensity which generates and regenerates the knowledge of freedom—by the active search for the Lord’s determination of who he was. (This search was urged upon him by a certain Mr. L——d, a clerk of the chapel wherein Equiano attends his first “soul-feast”—the site which replaces the ship as the locus of consumption and assimilation—in the following manner: “He then entreated me to beg of God to shew me what I was and the true state of my soul” [140; his emphasis].) This development carries with it the echo of that illusory absence of terror we came across earlier, one bound up with the slippage, in the traumatized mind of a child, from freedom to heaven (“While I was attending those ladies [the Miss Guerins], their servants told me I could not go to heaven, unless I was baptized. This made me very uneasy; for I had now some faint idea of a future state” [52]), a slippage enabled by a disabling and rupturous

instruction (“[The Miss Guerins] often used to teach me to read and took great pains to instruct me in the principles of religion and the knowledge of God” [53]), and by the illusion of a virtual assimilation that leads to an inordinate faith in the law which, when proven to be unfounded, turns to a rigid differentiation of faith from law. Yet, at precisely the moment at which one would seem to be sliding inexorably towards the need for a rigorous critique and repudiation of the colonizing force of Western religion’s formulation of the subject’s provenance-in-abjection, one deferred by the refusal of the lord, but fulfilled in the acceptance of the Lord, the paradoxically anarchic principle of improvisational apposition returns—in the voices of Mary Prince and Ellen Butler—to raise again a fundamental question: What’s the relation between the knowledge of God (so deeply bound to heaven, the faint idea of a future state) and the knowledge of freedom (another, and one would hope more material, future state)? This question is also prompted by a certain intuition that the teaching of the Misses

Guerin joined but did not erase or supersede the knowledge Equiano already had, and which Ellen

Butler theorizes. That knowledge was always with him and activated, again, an improvisation of that with which he would have been improved.

For Equiano, the determination of the Lord and the securing of his future state are equivalent. They are bound to an adherence to a kind of fundamentalism which returns again and again in abolitionist writing as an appeal to Christians to live up to the principles of their religion as those principles are written. There is, then, a pretty profound textualism embedded in Equiano’s search that is manifest in his obsessive reading of the Bible; but I’d like to argue that that textualism is never disconnected from an impulse to confirm the knowledge that comes from a certain innate endowment—before the ethical, the epistemological, and the ontological—tempered and sharpened by the experience of profound deprivation. At this point, we might say that Equiano is given a revelation of a certain already extant knowledge—of freedom or of salvation (one given as the human, the other given by the Lord; one given in birth, the other given in rebirth)—though for him, liberation and salvation remain problematically differentiated. Therefore, for Equiano, “The word of God was sweet to my taste, yea sweeter than honey and the honeycomb” (143). We are still left in need of another rationalization of sweetness, and of the subject that generates and is generated by it.

Two passages:

After this, I fell ill again with the rheumatism, and was sick a long time; but whether sick or well, I had my work to do. About this time I asked my master and mistress to let me buy my own freedom. With the help of Mr. Burchell, I could have found the means to pay Mr. Wood; for it was agreed that I should afterwards serve Mr. Burchell a while, for the cash he was to advance for me. I was earnest in the request to my owners; but their hearts were hard—too hard to consent. Mrs. Wood was very angry—she grew quite outrageous—she called me a black devil, and asked me who had put freedom into my head. “To be free is very sweet,” I said [my emphasis]: but she took good care to keep me a slave. I saw her change colour, and I left the room. (Prince 1987, 208)

Marster neber ’low he slaves to go to chu’ch. Dey hab big holes out in de fiel’s dey git down in and pray. Dey done dat way ’cause de white folks didn’ want ’em to pray. Dey uster pray for freedom. I dunno how dey larn to pray, ’cause dey warn’t no preachers come roun’ to teach ’em. I reckon de

Lawd jis’ mek ’em know how to pray. (Mellon 1988, 190)

“To be free is very sweet.” Mary Prince says it twice; it is written for her twice, once in response to the question of how she—illiterate black devil— might possibly have known of freedom, and in interruption of her mistress’s reverse echo of the logic of the encounter between lord and bondsman that Captain Doran illustrates and Hegel theorizes, the other time as a part of the rhetorical (hear the echo of a certain persuasion/sweetness) climax she reaches in telling us that slaves were not happy

(214).11 Telling us, yes, because though we might be with her, we also wish to know, and cannot understand, how she could have known freedom in the absence of what we would recognize as the experience of freedom (if we suspend a kind of thinking that moves through what is imagined as a radical questioning of the very idea of experience). And our curiosity is, of course, anomalous given the knowledge we have of freedom that transcends any experience we will have had of it so far: any experience of “personal liberty,” any Lee Greenwood crescendo, any illusion of opportunity, any phantasm of accumulation, any etiolation of some either liberal or communitarian ethos.

The question is of the place of experience, of the projection or improvisation of experience: Is knowledge of freedom always knowledge of the experience of freedom, even when that knowledge precedes experience? If it is, something other than a phenomenology is required in order to know it, something other than a science of immediate experience, since this knowledge is highly mediated by deprivation and by mediation itself, and by a vast range of other actions directed toward the eradication of deprivation. Perhaps that knowledge is embedded in action toward that which is at once (and never fully) withdrawn and experienced. What this knowledge of freedom requires is an improvisation through the sensible and the intelligible, a working through the idiomatic differences between the modes of analysis which would valorize either over the other.

Indeed, Mary Prince requires something other than a reading, and the trace she bears is precisely that non-unitary trait that improvises through race and origin as the condition of the possibility of experience and knowledge, performance and competence, of freedom. This is just as the knowledge she has is something apposed but not opposed to the textual, and to the kind of subjectivity the textual allows without determining. This something other than reading, this something other than the application of an unrationalized understanding of reason, this agency, is precisely what is exercised through Equiano in his quest for the knowledge of freedom and of God. And whence comes Uncle

Toliver’s prayer? Ellen Butler tells us, but her telling, her rationalizing, theorizing, improvising recitation, is only in that it is mediated. Indeed, the rationalization of the resistance is in the disseminative effects of mediation. If so, Equiano’s prayers and curses cannot be merely the products of the medicine/poison, bestowal/imposition of the narrative apparatuses of a violent other. And who or what is “de Lawd” to whom/which Ellen Butler refers, and what, if anything does “de Lawd” have to do with the Lord? Mary Prince addresses this question by way of the transcendental clue embedded in the displacing effects of a reply to her mistress that is not a reply to one who is not her mistress, to one who will have and will have never been, who could never be the mistress of another in and for whom the trace of an anarch(ron)ic freedom of which that other has knowledge awaits, resonates, augments, radiates.

The point is that in their work, Ellen Butler, Uncle Toliver, and Mary Prince evade the opposition we might figure around the imaginary poles of the readable Equiano and the unintelligible and illegible

Ben Ali. They valorize neither literate, rational identity nor its destruction; neither curse nor simplistic prayer; neither material experience nor imaginative intellection; rather, they valorize ensemble,

transmitted in the trace of whatever it is that one carries as human: a generative grammar and affect, a knowledge of language and freedom given by and as de Law/d, by and as the improvisational presence of justice.

History is always already in the process of continual reinvention, oscillating between the planes of intelligibility and unintelligibility as narrative is passed down, stories translated, and recitations transcribed. It is from this unstable and aporic space that we derive the knowledge of freedom and the subjectivity to assert that freedom




Noam Chomsky and others have begun to frame the fundamental questions concerning knowledge of language as an innate endowment activated in the cut (between speech and writing, between inner and outer speech, between silence and sound, between competence and performance, in the interstice that is and engenders rhythm, generated anew and improvised throughout from the strange combination of experience and n[othing]). Knowledge of freedom is also in that cut or hiatus; it’s where Mary Prince is—as if given by the mediating and improvisational force of de Law/d when that force is enacted in the improvised nonexclusionary expansion of humanity. Ellen Butler’s insight into our knowledge of prayer as a particular linguistic mode is also insight into our knowledge of freedom.

And Uncle Toliver’s prayer—uttered in an unknown tongue, given aloud and transmitted through narrative mediation and through a citation and recitation in the rhythmic interstice where ensemble fell—is a citation (one given under the collective name of the Workers of the Writers’ Program of the

Works Project Administration in the State of Virginia) which Litwack names, reigns, showing the mark of that unnamed flowing in his récit, his recitation. But, again, Litwack’s is not some predatory erasure, but the echo of that already extant loss inherent in intelligibility, translation, and transcription, whose presence is and allows the mediational “ethics” of ensemble. (Think of what is lost in the translation from Ellen Butler’s “dialect” to “standard English”: the constitutive cut that separates the Lord and de Law/d and is transformed but retained in the chain of re-citation that marks the writing of oral history.) Uncle Toliver is the gain and loss in this recording at the end of the chain of recitations which is history, and which here is extended at the end of a chain of narratives, of the kind of narrative wherein knowledge of freedom is given to us and for us. The constellation of these recitations and narratives is where Orwell’s problem (how we know so little given so much evidence) and Plato’s problem (how we know so much given so little evidence) intersect.12 It’s where the questions concerning the law of genre, the strange institution called literature (where the law is lifted, where everything can be said), and the peculiar institution called slavery (where nothing could be said as a matter of a law broken, and reconstituted in the breaking and reconstitution of the law of genre, and the law of the law of genre, and their intersection) converge.

One story told in Nansemond County concerns Uncle Toliver, who had the indiscretion to pray aloud.

When rumor reached the great house that he had been praying for the Yankees, Tom and Henry, sons of the master, told the aged slave to kneel in the barnyard and pray for the Confederates. Uncle

Toliver prayed as loud as he could for a Yankee victory. All day long they kept him there, taking turns in lashing him, but he would not give in. At last he collapsed, still praying, his voice a mumbled jargon.

The only word that could be distinguished was Yankee. Sometime that night, while they were still lashing him, Uncle Toliver died (Negro in Virginia 1994, 209).

So you pause at the recitation of lost names and the mumbled jargon where the rest of Uncle Toliver’s utterance remains unheard. In the space that jargon opens (a space off to the side or out-from-theoutside; an appositional spacing or displacement of the encounter in the interest of a subjectivity whose presence remains to be activated; a space not determined by the zero encounter that ruptures the subject or the nostalgic return to an other subject before the encounter; a space where Uncle

Toliver speaks through Tom and Henry—the sons of the master—and through the Workers of the

Writers’ Project of the Works Project Administration of the State of Virginia, and through Leon Litwak to us: piercing and possessing, disabling and enabling mediation and meditation) the rest is what is left for us to say, the rest is what is left for us to do, in the broad and various echoes of that utterance, our attunement to which assures us that we are “in the tradition.”

2ac—Fugitivity = In Between

We are not against debate we exist outside of it while being within

Halberstam, 13




In the essay that many people already know best from this volume, "The University and the

Undercommons," Moten and Harney come closest to explaining their mission. Refusing to be for or against the university and in fact marking the critical academic as the player who holds the "for and

against" logic in place, Moten and Harney lead us to the "Undercommons of the Enlightenment" where subversive intellectuals engage both the university and fugitivity: "where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong." The subversive intellectual, we learn, is unprofessional, uncollegial, passionate and disloyal. The subversive intellectual is neither trying to extend the university nor change the university, the subversive intellectual is not toiling in misery and from this place of misery articulating a "general antagonism." In fact, the subversive intellectual enjoys the ride and wants it to be faster and wilder; she does not want a room of his or

her own, she wants to be in the world, in the world with others and making the world anew. Moten insists: "Like Deleuze. I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the

end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that. And I plan to stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. But that's beyond me, and even beyond me and Stefano, and out into the world, the other thing, the other world, the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the undercommon refusal of the academy of misery."

Performance is a form of fugitvity—it’s both above and below the radar and helps guide theory towards practice

Polson 12

(2012, Dana Roe Polson (PhD in Language Literacy and Culture, UMBC, Baltimore city public and public charter schools high school teacher), “’Longing for Theory:’ Performance Debate in

Action”, E-Book pp. 2, RaMan)

Policy debate in Baltimore urban high schools is often all but invisible to anyone but the practitioners. With the exception of occasional news stories and a 2003

60 Minutes segment featuring the Walbrook High School debate squad as an example of the success of Urban Debate Leagues, urban policy debate exists in a somewhat isolated, insular bubble.

A performance debate squad, which enacts a radical praxis that disrupts the norms of the more traditional policy debate, would therefore similarly exist under the radar, or even more so. The rhetoric and practice of performance debate is not aligned with the Discourse of public schooling today; i t does not fit with reform efforts emphasizing standards, merit pay, accountability.

And yet, students engaged in it are acting, in the sense of both performing and doing, in rigorous, activist intellectual work. They are engaging in an activity that is often described as a game, and yet by talking back, they challenge its norms and practices in order to make it relevant to their lives as debaters and as change agents.

Further, the activity is performed with the support of a counterhegemonic community that uses structural understandings such as those provided by Critical Race Theory to bridge the gap between theory and real life. The practice creates critical space for leadership development through such structural understanding and by creating space for voice to be heard and critique to be enacted in debate.

2ac—Race Pedagogy

Having conversations of race within classrooms opens space for pedagogy that is necessary to combat forms of violence both inside and outside of the academy

Yancy, 2012

- Professor of Philosophy, works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black experience. (George; “Look, A White!”; Article;

Pg. 60-61; DOA: 7/10/15; ProjectMUSE || NDW)

Pedagogically engaging issues of race and racism calls for deeper levels of analysis; it involves exploring aspects of the self that often operate beneath the radar of conscious reflection. The transformation of consciousness is not limited to pedagogies that stress the mere manipulation and mastery of concepts. Rather, it is linked to a form of critical pedagogy that provides “students with ways of knowing that enable them to know themselves better [that is, more complexly and more deeply] and live in the world more fully.”29 Emphasis is also placed on what one does in the world.

Hooks does not reject the love of ideas, but she links this love to “the quest for knowledge that enables us to unite theory and practice.”30 In this way, “the classroom becomes a dynamic place where transformations in social relations are concretely actualized and the false dichotomy between the world outside and the inside world of the academy disappears.”31 Hence, self-actualization in relation to issues of race and racism is not simply about one’s ability to comprehend concepts in the confines of a classroom. According to hooks, the world outside and inside the walls of the academy constitute a continuum. While it is important for her that practices of freedom take place in the classroom, spaces that often teach conformity, such practices must extend beyond. Healers, in this case both teachers/professors and students, are not navel gazers, but are committed to social praxis.

In short, we must act and reflect “upon the world in order to change it.”32

2ac—Performative Pedagogy

Performative pedagogy is the pedagogy of the oppressed that forces the oppress to question the “normal”

Warren and Fassett, 2004

[The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved Theatre Topics

14.2 (2004) 411-430John T. Warren is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and power. Deanna L. Fassett is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at

San José State University, where she teaches courses in instructional communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies //liam TAM]

Performative pedagogy, as a method and theory of the body, can ask questions in a way that

points to the structure and machinery of whiteness. It can put flesh to the concept of whiteness.

It can point to whiteness's perceived absence. It can name the norm. Performative pedagogy, in

this way, can serve as a pedagogy of the oppressor—it can ask those in positions of power (via sex, race, class, or sexuality) to question their own embodied experiences by demanding that they encounter the other through the mode of performance. For if whiteness functions in dominant discourse as the unmarked center of cultural power, then a performative pedagogy can and must ask how we can create a ground for subversion. Performative pedagogy, as a method of enfleshment that brings theory to the body, can question the normal, stable, inevitable

actualization of race, nurturing subversive possibility.

2ac—Prisons

You can’t get free inside the prison, and we define prisons as institutions that don’t allow for freedom – this widened interpretation is vital to disassemble hierarchy

Nagel and Nocella 13

[2013, Mechthild Nagel (Feminist Journal), “The End of Prisons: Reflections from the Decarceration Movement, edited”, online

, Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=TZAjAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=The+original+working+title+for+this+volume+was+Prison+Abolition.+After+discussion+among+the+contribut ors+however,+we+changed+the+title+to+The+End+of+Prisons.&source=bl&ots=wXMtuq07fB&sig=oI8ahleYYLf2pViywJmNfDhip3I&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0ISdVYTxBcWfsgHbsLPoDg&ved=0CB8

Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20original%20working%20title%20for%20this%20volume%20was%20Prison%20Abolition.%20After%20discussion%20among%20the%20contributors%20h owever%2C%20we%20changed%20the%20title%20to%20The%20End%20of%20Prisons.&f=false,

RaMan]

The original working title for this volume was Prison Abolition. After discussion among the contributors however, we changed the title to The End of Prisons. First, we wish to raise discussions about the telos of prisons – what purpose do they have?Second, Prison abolition is strongly related to a particular movement to end the prison industrial complex. Following Michel Foucault(1977), we argue that prisons are also institutions such as schools, nursing homes, jails, daycare centers, parks, zoos, reservations and marriage, just to name a few. Prisons are all around us and constructed by those in dominant oppressive authoritarian positions. There are many types of prisons – religious prisons, social prisons, political prisons, economic prisons, educational prisons, and, of course, criminal prisons. Individuals leave one prison only to enter another. From daycare to school to a nursing home, we are a nation of instutionalized prisons. Criminal prisons in the United States are not officially referred to as such, but rather as correctional facilities. A prison, as we define it in this volume, is an institution or system that oppresses and does not allow freedom for a particular group.

Within this definition, we include the imprisonment of non-human animals and plants, which are too often overlooked. Michel Foucault (1977) famously said, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (p. 288). We believe that this volume is one of the first to extend Foucault’s logic, by making a connection between coercive institutions and all systems of domination as forms of prisons. We argue that the conception of prison is far reaching, always changing and adapting to the times and the socio-political environment.

We expand the concept of prison from concrete walls, barbed wire, gates and fences to many of the institutions and systems throughout society such as schools, mental hospitals, reservations for indigenous Americans, zoos for non-human animals, and national parks and urban cultivated green spaces for the ecological community. United States imperialism, which promotes global domination and capitalism, not only imprisons convicted criminals but its people, land, non-human animals, those that surround it (non-United States citizens) and those trapped within it (American Indians and immigrants).

2ac – State Bad

The state is incurable and the former slave will always be subject to extreme forms of torture, terror, and violence at its hands

Dillon 13





During the past few decades, some scholars have followed the intellectual lead of prisoners and activists in the 1960s and 1970s by exploring the legal, discursive, and institutional relationships between chattel-slavery and the modern prison.

Most critically, the connection between slavery and the prison is formalized and institutionalized by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

46 Joy James refers to this as an “enslaving anti-enslavement narrative,” since the Thirteenth Amendment recreates and repositions slavery inside the prison, even as it abolishes it in the “free world.”

47 This was made clear during congressional debates about the meanings of emancipation, when Senator Charles Sumner presented to Congress a notice from the sheriff of Anne Arundel County in Maryland: Public Sale.—The undersigned will sell at the court-house door, in the city of Annapolis, at twelve o’ clock, on Saturday, 8th December, 1866, a negro man named Richard Harris, for six months, convicted at the October term, 1866, of the Anne Arundel county circuit court for larceny, and sentenced by the court to be sold as a slave. Terms of sale, cash.48 Just six years later, the Supreme Court declared in Ruffin v. Commonwealth (1871) that prisoners were civically dead (dead to the law) and “slaves of the state.”

49 The power of the law converted the slave into a prisoner and the prisoner into a slave. In this way, the law criminalized race, racialized crime, and allowed slavery to live on, or possess, the law

. And so, with the end of one form of slavery came new mechanisms to control, exploit, and contain black bodies, labor, and freedom.

As the historian David Oshinsky writes,

“Law enforcement now meant keeping ex-slaves in line.”50 After the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, the convict-lease system emerged as one mechanism in slavery’s aftermath that extended and renewed the confinement and exploitation of black people

.

Throughout the south, black people (former slaves) were rounded up and charged with “crimes” that in the past would be punished by the torture and terror of the master. The theft of a pig, “insulting gestures,” cohabitating with whites, “mischief,” being unemployed, and vagrancy were now crimes that would be punished by the state

. The law of the master was now the law of the land: “An offense against Mr.

Shields had become an offense against the state.”51

Former slaves were arrested and leased to private contractors to be worked until death. What was once personal property was made public and since black bodies were no longer owned by private individuals but rather leased by the state, many contractors felt free to work convicts to death.

As one private contractor put it, “Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to keep him…But these convicts we don’t own ‘em. One dies, get another.”52

Without private investment and ownership by the master, black bodies were subject to even more extreme forms of torture, terror, and violence. The legal construction of new forms of freedom ushered in new mechanisms for producing human disposability

. Black pain, injury, and death did not slow the accumulation of capital in the same way as they did under plantation slavery; one could just “get another.”

But the convict-lease system was just one mechanism among a massive regime of racialized power and violence that allowed the spirit of slavery to live on.

Like the writing of Boggs and Shakur, the sociologist Loïc Wacquant has extended this analysis of the relationship between race, the carceral, and death to encompass the twentieth century as a whole.

He argues that the prison is part of a “carceral continuum” that traverses time (slavery, the convict-lease system,

Jim Crow, and the early ghetto) and space (the prison, schools, welfare, and the hyper-ghetto) to manage and contain populations rendered surplus or disposable to the racial state and neoliberal capital

.53 In this way, an anti-blackness established under chattel-slavery possesses and structures a variety of

institutions over space and time.

Thus, we might modify Foucault’s famous question, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” to include the plantation, the slave ship, the coffle, and the auction block.

54 Although the connections between slavery and the prison are important to this project, I am also interested in more expansive understandings of the afterlife of slavery.

In particular,

I am concerned with theories that can help make the connection between the market under chattel-slavery and the market under neoliberalism.

In other words, the afterlife of slavery structures much more than the prison or even more than

Wacquant’s “carceral continuum.” For instance, Christina Sharpe argues that our very subjectivity is indebted to, and born out of, the “discursive codes of slavery and post-slavery.” For Sharpe, engaging and analyzing a “postslavery subjectivity” means examining subjectivities constituted by trans-Atlantic slavery and connecting them to present (and past) “mundane horrors that aren’t acknowledged to be horrors.”55

This is one of the main projects of black feminism, as exemplified by Boggs’ engagement with the seemingly innocuous institutions of insurance, state bureaucracy, and the university

.56 This project is also central to Hortense Spillers’s classic essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar book,” where she connects slavery to the life of the symbolic world. She writes: Even though the captive flesh/body has been ‘liberated,’ and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation, so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography or its topics, show movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise.57 Like Jackson and Shakur, Spillers argues that slavery ruptures the progress of time.

The ways meaning and value are institutionalized have been determined by the violence and terror of slavery. Slavery is a death sentence enacted across generations, one that changes name and shape as time progresses. Freedom presupposes and builds on slavery so that post-slavery subjectivities are shaped by forms of power that resemble and sometimes mimic power under slavery (force, terror, sexual violence, compulsion, torture) while they are also confined by the post-emancipation technologies of consent, reason, will, and choice

.58 Frank Wilderson summarizes this more expansive understanding of the afterlife of slavery: “The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No slave no world.”59 According to Wilderson, slavery connotes an ontological (not experiential) status for blackness, one that is shaped not by exploitation and alienation, but by accumulation and fungibility (the condition of being owned and traded.).60 In this way, slavery does not lay dormant in the past, but became attached to the political ontology of blackness.61

What is most crucial for my project on the relationship between the afterlife of slavery and neoliberalism is that as freedom navigated the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was not innocent and it did not come alone. Something from the past held on to freedom as it maneuvered time and space. Freedom was possessed by its opposite, a ghost wished away by liberal thought that did not so easily disappear. In the 1970s, when the market produced the freedom of capital mobility, individuality, and choice, and the prison manufactured the freedom of safety and security, the spirit of slavery dictated the movements and meanings of that freedom.

Indeed, the spirit of slavery lives on in more ways than one can imagine: in the shade of tree-lined suburban streets, in definitions and measures of value, in the prosperity and health of some, and in the hail of the police as one walks down the street. It guides bullets and bombs, makes visible what we see, and vanishes what is right in front of us. It is laced in the cement and steel of the prison, solidified in dreams of liberation, and embedded in psychic life. Although it is sometimes recognizable, it also lives on in what we do not know and cannot remember— in the lives erased, expunged, ended or that were simply never recorded to begin with. Whether it comes as spectacle or something one cannot see or feel, it is always there.

The spirit of slavery does more then meddle in the present; rather, it has intensified, seduced, enveloped, and animated contemporary formations of

power. Possession names the ways that the operations of corporate, state, individual, and institutional bodies are sometimes beyond the self-possessed will of the living. Something else is also in control, something that may feel like nothing even as it compels movement, motivates ideology, and drives the organization of life and death. In this way, slavery is not a ghost lingering in the corner of the room—rather, its spirit animates the architecture of the house as a whole.

The past does not merely haunt the present; it composes the present. As Toni Morrison writes, “All of it is now, it is always now.”62

Prefer this impact – structural violence is invisible and exponential and you have an ethical duty to challenge it

Nixon 11

(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the

Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 2-3)

Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink

-politically, imaginatively, and theoretically-what I call

"slow violence."

By slow violence

I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time

and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed

as violence at all.

Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular

in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility.

We need

, I believe, to engage

a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive,

its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we

also need to engage the

representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence.

Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.

Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as

a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence

as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound.

We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive

and respond to a variety of social afflictions

-from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded.

Hip Hop Key/Pedagogy

Hip Hop helps to break down the disembodied whiteness of the activity.

Polson 12


Action”, E-Book pp. 251-252, RaMan]

Further, the hip-hop music that animates many critical debate rounds is a sonic disturbance to this quiet white space, an aural representation of the Black bodies playing it. The presence of music in a debate round, the Blackness of hip-hop, etc., all conspire against this disembodied whiteness.

As Duane

Hartman said: [Performativity] deals with the performance of the body. And being able to identify something by the performance of the body. And

that doesn’t necessarily have to be active, you know, it could just be looking at you.

What makes a woman a woman is based on the performance of that body. And so that gender becomes a performative identity.

And so their argument became the way in which we express ourselves within debate, is based on the performance of our bodies as Black males, Black females. (Hartman, group interview I, p. 11) What might the “unique styles and expressions” that Ede

Warner and Jon Bruschke (both veteran collegiate debate coaches) called for look like

? Jason Burton described the beginnings of performance debate at the University of Louisville as an effort to increase participation of Black students. He said that the Ede Warner, who was the founder of that program, “began to introduce hip-hop music into debate rounds” as a way of doing so (Jason Burton, group interview I, p. 3). T he beginnings, then, had to do with changing the style of debate to include culturally Black art as part of the debate performance.

These performances often still include hip-hop music, often pre-recorded, as part of debate. In addition, to give just a few examples, students from Paul Robeson High School have played West African percussion and danced, read narratives about their families, created poetry. Student participant Jessica Cooper describes singing in debate,

as a way of being comfortable in debate by making it relate to her experience: “... in debate we, like I’ll sing my first speech because like, like first it was like a way for me to be comfortable in the round....For me, singing was a way for me to make myself comfortable and a way for me to make debate relate to me and my community”

(Jessica Cooper, interview, p. 2).

State Fails—Halberstam

We have to abandon the state and stop trying to be appeal to it. Their framework is bs

Halberstam, 13




If you want to know what the undercommons wants, what Moten and Harney want, what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people want, what we (the "we" who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this - we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after "the break" will be different from what we think we want before the break and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues from being in the break.

State Fails—Reid-Brinkley

The state can’t solve the framing of the black body—visible political movements have failed to challenge squo power structures

Reid-Brinkley 08

[Shanara Rose. PhD in Philosophy from the University of Georgia. The Harsh

Realities Of “Acting Black”: How African-American Policy Debaters Negotiate Representation Through

Racial Performance And Style. https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/reidbrinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf pgs 19-20. 7/5]//kmc

Thus, America faces a grave difficulty in resolving this situation. We find it difficult to understand why such a situation exists in the first place. In essence, it is difficult to believe that the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of legal legislation to end segregation and

8 discriminatory practices, targeted at racial and ethnic minorities

, did not

permanently resolve the problem. Theoretically, all Americans have equal access to the tools that are necessary to lead a successful life with the full benefits of citizenship. The Civil Rights Movement and the

Women’s Movement ensured that racial and ethnic minorities and women achieved equality with white men and thus barriers to their successful participation in society had been removed. If equality has been achieved, and yet we find that the heretofore excluded populations are still unable to achieve the educational and economic heights of the American dream, then one must look to that population for the explanation rather than to American society in general.

No Going Back

Our aff brings the humanities back to the activity, and it's too late to get rid of them anyway.

Polson 12



Shanahan also believes that attempting to eradicate critical styles of debate is not only foolish, but too late: “To consider debate without Kritiks, at this time, is like considering a policy alternative by wishing away the status quo. Kritiks are part of contemporary ‘policy’ debate” (Shanahan, 2004, p.

67). Shanahan agrees with Bruschke that the debate community should join the rest of academia in dealing with intellectual conflict, and points out that ignoring such critical thinking for some years damaged the debate community. “Even the most casual glance across a variety of disciplines demonstrated the irrefutable relevance of so-called post-structuralism and postmodernism to debate practice. .... How could such a sophisticated argumentative community fail to consider and evaluate the relevance of such far-reaching and important changes in academic scholarship?” (Shanahan,

2004, p. 73). For many years, then, the collegiate policy debate community isolated itself from intellectual currents in humanities departments. Shanahan suggests that this isolationism kept them from using those ideas to advance their practice and to stay relevant to academic as a whole.

Becoming more open to intellectual ideas, as opposed to attempting to preserve the discipline as-is, is therefore a positive development, according to Shanahan and Bruschke.

Social Location

Our aff allows debaters to connect global issues with their social location.

Polson 12



The attempt, then, is to allow students to connect the arguments they hear in debate with their own experiences. The result is that students are speaking from their social location.

T hey are not just talking about “what went on at home” as emotional venting or commiseration, however valuable that may be; instead, they are becoming cognizant of the structural nature of their home and community lives and linking them to the concepts they learn about in debate.

There is an analytical approach. Aaron explained:

A nd I think ... what gets people into debate, is when they apply those arguments that they read to their lives and see how they actually connect to the real world themselves.... I just don’t look at arguments and say ‘Hmm, I’m gonna run thi s.’ and say okay I look into the arguments and say ‘ok how does this work in the real world. Like, what do people really think about these type of arguments. And how do people feel about them, and economic social conditions or political conditions that we live in now. (Aaron, interview, p. 3) Performance debate revolves around the pertinence of social location to argumentation and theorizing.

Andre Rubens, a coach, explained how his students created such connections between social location and theory: Well the resolution for us, like when we debate each year, starts from a perspective of what those words mean to someone living in their social conditio n. So for example when you when you’re in the inner city and you think of police presence, what does that mean to you? Usually that means squad cars yelling out with bullhorns at your friends. Or presence that scares you to death when you hear that siren. What is it, that that tense feeling when [imitates police car siren pull-up noise] woo-woop! of a police siren, what does it mean when you hear that. .... what does this resolution, ... how do you feel about it, speaking as a person from where you’re from. What does this mean to you. (Andre Rubens, group interview II, p. 19) As noted in Chapter 1, wh ile performance debate used to more often take a metaphorical approach to a resolution or to reject it altogether in favor of a metacognitive look at the debate community, the relationship to the resolution has changed as the practice has evolved.

As Rubens puts it, his team’s practice started with the relationship between the resolution and the debaters’ own experience with component parts of the resolution, in this case, “police presence” and their own experiences with it. By doing so, the team not only connected their own experiences to the resolution but connected themselves to people affected by United States “liberal” foreign policy. Th ey were able to link their oppression to others’, creating a sense of solidarity with people very far away and developing a more general understanding of the way power is used to oppress

. Rubens noted, “when we conceive of the question of Iraq and Afghanistan, we can make parallels between how the military acts in Iraq and Afghanistan as the same way the police do in urban America” (group interview II, p. 1). So, in this case we see that not only are various US oppression linked, such as gender and race, but also that performance debate can foster a more global outlook.

Global white supremacy, a concept discussed by Charles W. Mills, can be seen if the US military and local US police forces are compared, or if the oppression of Black and Brown people world-wide is noticed

.

A2 Equity/Fairness

Debate is not conformed to rules. It’s about 2 opposing sides convincing the listener about their argument.

Glazer and Rubenstein 2K

[May 2000, Jacob Glazer (The Faculty of Management, Tel Aviv University) and Ariel Rubenstein (The School of Economics, Tel

Aviv University and the Department of Economics, Princeton University. Most of this author’s research was conducted while he was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, New

York during the academic year 1996-7), “Debates and Decisions: On a Rationale of Argumentation Rules”, online, http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/papers/debates.pdf, RaMan]

This paper is a part of our long-term research agenda for studying different aspects of debates using game theoretic tools. Debates are common phenomena in our daily lif e. In a debate, two or more parties (the debaters), who disagree regarding some issue, raise arguments to support their positions or to rebuff the other party’s arguments

. Sometimes the purpose of the debaters is to argue just for the sake of arguing, and sometimes their aim is to try to convince the other party to change his position. In this paper, however, t he purpose of each debater is to persuade a third party (the listener) to support his position

. Note that a debate is different from bargaining and war, which are also mechanisms for conflict resolutions, in that the outcome of those mechanisms heavily depend on the rivals' power.

A debate is different from a conversation, which is also a mechanism in which interested parties make arguments, in that in a conversation, there is a common interest among the parties. We view a debate as a mechanism by which an uninformed decision-maker (the listener) extracts information from two informed parties

(the debaters). The debaters hold contradicting positions about the decision that should be made. The right conclusion depends on several outcomes.

D uring the debate the debaters raise arguments to support their respective positions and on the basis of these arguments, the listener reaches a conclusion regarding the right decision.

When we say that a debater raises the argument x, we mean that he reveals that aspect x supports his position.

When the other debater responds to an argument x with an argument y, we refer to argument y as a counterargument.

The realizations of the aspects are assumed to be independent.

All aspects are assumed to be equally weighted, in the sense that all of them have the same value of information regarding the right decision. In this paper, we address only the issue of the relative strength of arguments and counterarguments. Under the above assumptions one may expect the optimal debate conclusion to be a function only of the number of arguments made by each party. Our Page 5 intuitions supported by some experimental evidence is that this is not correct: after one argument has been made by one party, the subjects, in the role of the other party, may find the seemingly equal counterarguments unequally persuasive. Normatively, we investigate the optimal debate rules within a simple example.

We show, that the optimal debate rules have the property that the strength of a counterargument may depends on the argument it is countering, even when there is no informational dependency between the two arguments. In particular, we show the invalidity of the following principle, regarding the dependency of the outcome of a debate on two the argument raised by one debater and the counterargument raised by the other debater:

The Debate Consistency (DC) Principle:

It is impossible that"x wins the debate" if y is brought up as a counterargument to x, but "y wins the debate" if x is brought up as a counterargument to y.

We show that this principle is not necessarily a property of debate rules optimally designed to extract information from the debaters. Let us emphasize that we do not intend to provide a general theory of debates.

Our only aim is to point out that the logic of the optimal design of debating rules is subtle and contains some features which are not intuitive.

A2 Limits/Stasis Good

Our refusal of their call to order is how we have spill over because that disorder will continue when we leave

Halberstam, 13




The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In The Undercommons if we begin anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you.

Citing Gayatri Spivak, Moten and Harney call this refusal the "first right" and it is a game-changing kind of refusal in that it signals the refusal of the choices as offered. We can understand this refusal in terms that Chandan Reddy lays out in

Freedom With Violence (2011) - for Reddy, gay marriage is the option that cannot be opposed in the ballot box. While we can circulate multiple critiques of gay marriage in terms of its institutionalization of intimacy, when you arrive at the ballot box, pen in hand, you only get to check "yes" or "no" and the no, in this case, could be more damning than the yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as offered.

Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what they term "the call to order." And what would it mean, furthermore, to refuse to call others to order, to refuse interpellation and the reinstantiation of the law. When we refuse, Moten and Harney suggest, we create dissonance and more importantly, we allow dissonance to continue - when we enter a classroom and we refuse to call it to order, we are allowing study to continue, dissonant study perhaps, disorganized study, but study that precedes our call and will continue after we have left the room. Or, when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when we refuse the call to order - the teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening the noose - we refuse order as the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth.

A2 Master’s Tools

Learning the master’s tools is a joke – the master’s tools will never dismantle the master's house

Bensimon 03

[June 2003, Catherine Bensimon (Professor of Educational Policy and Administration at the University of Southern California), “Like it or Not: Feminist Critical Policy Analysis Matters”, online, https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-101862111/like-it-or-not-feminist-criticalpolicy-analysism, RaMan]

Master as Expert, Master as Oppressor Anderson's critique rests on the assumption that her definition of the word "master" is everyone's definition.

The meaning she ascribes to master can be gleaned in the assertions she makes, such as, "Feminists cannot reject the master’s tools, and that it is a good thing t00; . . . increasing one's sensitivity to the nuances of the master's tools is the only way to go; Bensimon and Marshall . . . follow linguistic rules that reveal their mastery of academic ways of making meaning; .

. . they [follow] established academic protocols, . . . the ‘tools of critique’ . . . they urge upon their readers are synonymous with the master's tools . . . the challenges they offer would not make sense to other members of the pro fession . . . if Bensimon and Marshall had not mastered some of the academic protocols handed down by men" (emphasis added). For Anderson the meaning of "master" is strictly academic; it has to do with expertise or command of the "linguistic rules" that signify one's

"mastery of academic ways of making meaning" that separate the masters from the apprentices and distinguish between academic insiders and non-academics

. Thus, according to Anderson, the master’s tools (i.e.. methods) are "nothing more than ways of apprehending the world" that have been handed down to women, presumably because these are the only ways of apprehending the world or because women academics are incapable of developing their own ways of apprehending' the world.

Joan Scott (l988) reminds us that "words, like the ideas and things they are meant to signify, have a history," And the history that Anderson associates with the word "master" is fundamentally different from the history that moved Audre Lorde to declare, "

The

master’s tools will never dismantle the master's house." The presumption that the master's definition is everyone's definition is precisely the kind of reasoning that leads to analyses that are faulty, partial, and distorting.

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House was the title of a talk given by Audre Lorde on a panel, "The Personal and the Political," featured at the Second Sex Conference held in New York City on October 29, 1979.

The title was intended as a criticism of white academic feminists who, in including black feminists only in those sessions that had something to do with race and leaving them out of topics such as existentialism, the erotic, feminist theory, etc., were in fact using the "tools of a racist patriarchy . . . to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy

" (Lorde, I984, p. 98). Lorde's point was that feminist scholars have turned to the "master's tools" in order to gain acceptability and tit into the established disciplinary canons. In contrast, Lorde urges us to tum the "differences" that are the mark of marginalized populations into strengths. She

goes on to say, For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support

. (Lorde, 1984, p. 99).

For black people the term "master" is embedded in a horrific history of legalized injustice and violence. It connotes the control of one person over another or others based on skin color

. Master is associated with the institutions of slavery. I t is also associated with masculine representations such as the "man who serves as head of a household" or a "male teacher," as for example, in

Anderson's conception of male academics handing down methods to feminist academi cs. Standpoint feminism helps us expand on Lorde’s use of the term master and its relevance to the project of feminist and critical policy analysis. Feminist standpoint theorists make a case for the view from the bottom, "the slave," as the more complete one.

"The point of departure for standpoint feminist epistemology is the idea that knowledge is socially situated. It follows that in order to interpret and understand the situation of a particular group of people, thought has to start from their lives. Essentially, standpoint feminist epistemology urges us to move away from the idea of simply adding the "other" to preexisting frameworks and directs us to ground knowledge on the particular experience of the people we want to understand" (Lorde, 1984, p. 144).

Accordingly, standpoint feminists reject the "master's" view because it is partial and distorting. It is partial because it is derived from a vision of reality that takes into account only the reality of the dominant class or power holders. It is distorting because it tends to normalize the experience of the "master" as the generic experienc e. In contrast, Audre Lorde urges us "to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled . . . to take our

differences and make them strengths" (Lorde. 1984, p. 112). Similarly, standpoint feminists suggest that the position of "outsider within" (Hill Collins, 1986) and "borderline" position (Anzaldua, 1987) provide a vision of the academy and relations within it that are inverse to the master's view (Harding, l99l; Hartsock. 1983). For example, Patricia Hill Collins argues that it is the awareness of her marginal status as the "outsider within" that provides the black female intellectual with a unique black feminist standpoint from which to analyze life in the academy

. She observes, "It is the "outsider within" who is more likely to challenge the knowledge claims of insiders, to acknowledge the discrepancy between insiders' accounts of human behavior and her own experiences and to identify anomalies"

(Fonow & Cook, 1991. p.

3). As black feminists make clear, to accept the master's tools could be self-destructive because it would require us to adopt theories and methods - the tools - that historically have excluded women or devalued them. Lorde’s dictum, in the words of .loan Scott, warns us to not be "drawn into the very assumptions of the very discourse we ought to question" (Scott, l998, p. 36).

To adopt the master’s tools is to become an insider and assimilate what we described in our work as androcentric perspectives. "But,"

Anderson asks, "what makes those disciplines and their methods androcentric?"

But, we wonder, why ask a question that

Anderson herself so clearly answers? How else, other than androcentrism, could we describe the presumption that academic man handed down to us the "academic protocols" that enable our work to be understood and heard? T he implication is that fitting in is contingent on compliance with his rules.

A2 People Quit**

Their discomfort in the shape of T and Framework is proof that our “evil” plan is working

Warren and Fassett, 2004 [The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved

Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) 411-430John T. Warren is an assistant professor in the

School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and power. Deanna L. Fassett is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State

University, where she teaches courses in instructional communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies //liam TAM]

Further, this engagement engenders less defensiveness for white subjects because it begins with their experiential interaction with this material, giving acknowledgment to their voices and their experiences. And while their understandings of power and racial inequality are being challenged, they are not individually identified as evil racists who are inflicting intentional harm

onto others. Rather, these workshops attempt to move them to reflect on their own everyday

behaviors by helping them to see that they too are caught up in systems of cultural power. As

Foucault made clear, power is not a zero-sum game, an item that some may possess and so others may not. Rather, power is fluid, flowing through everyone but not fixed anywhere in particular. When we re- move the white subject from the site of direct critique, we avoid the defensive mechanisms that white privilege breeds. It is here that we might just move toward subverting their notions of how racism functions. And if we do that, whiteness loses its naturalness and is seen as the construct

it is.But one should never lose sight of the fact that this pedagogy asks white students/participants

to question themselves and their relation to whiteness. It destabilizes the comfort with which they

live their lives. Often, we learn from white students who participate in these workshops that they

can't imagine living their lives in the same way after this experience. Indeed, some say that they now are obsessed with their own social position and can't watch television, listen to politicians, interact with other members of their family, or teach in the same way that they used to because they are so uncomfortable with their awareness of their cultural privilege that they must search

out some kind of change. Thus, they move from comfort to discomfort, from safety to risk. While we want to acknowledge their feelings of discomfort and vulnerability, we also want to embrace

and celebrate that repositioning.

Their framework destroys participation by shutting down modes of expression that widen the scope of the activity by increasing participation of socially conscious debaters

Polson 12



What would such problem-posing education, such “unveiling of reality,” look like for students? C.

Wright Mills’ concept of the sociological imagination is useful here. The sociological imagination is a way of thinking based on a distinction between troubles and issues. These are the “personal troubles of milieu” as opposed to the “public issues of social structure” that occur when “various milieu overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life” (Mills, 1959, p. 8).

Mills uses unemployment to illustrate this distinction. If a couple of people in a city of several million are unemployed, those people are experiencing troubles. If, however, a third of the city is unemployed, “Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals” (Mills, 1959, p. 9). In the case of my students, they were stating the problem and thus were considering solutions as being “personal situation and character” rather than looking at them on a structural, institutional level. Once we are employing a sociological imagination to understand issues as opposed to troubles, we are least understanding the problem at a more appropriate level of analysis. What oppresses people? We are looking at largerscale institutional and structural explanations, as opposed to troubles-based explanations such as

“Black people are lazy,” which fail to take into account anything other than psychological explanations for individual behavior. They fail to notice the issues facing various groups in society more than other groups. They do not allow us to talk productively about racism, or wealth inequality, or any of a number of structural issues. In this section, I look at how the performance debate practice takes an approach that develops students’ sociological imaginations by helping them explore and defend generally structural explanations, before taking a deeper look at how CRT is used to examine race in such a structural light. For some students, this kind of structural talk and theorizing meets a deeply felt need for making sense of their worlds. Perhaps these are students for whom the deep division between American Dream ideology and patterns of inequality has always been a contradiction; perhaps they reject psychological or cultural explanations for inequity In my titular phrase, Aaron described an urban debater as someone who longs for theory: I think our urban debater is a person that longs for theory. Like bell hooks, I long for some theory to... it sounds corny, but, I long for some theory to umm, to express what I was going through. .... How did [a] paradigm like capitalism and a paradigm like government work, in my context of my social-economic condition. And all that questioning, to me made me even long for theory even more. (Aaron, interview, p. 21).

Every single debate that engages issues leaves an impact behind, arguments like our’s influence more young debaters to challenge the system—empirics prove

Peterson 14

[2014, David Peterson (Doctor of Philosophy), “Debating race, race-ing debate: An extended ethnographic case study of black intellectual insurgency in U.S. intercollegiate debate”, online, http://gradworks.umi.com/36/15/3615472.html, RaMan]

The effort of the University of Louisville galvanized a generation of young students who had found themselves in one of the many urban debate leagues around the country.

As one student explained, “once I saw

Louisville [debate] I knew I could never debate the same way again.”

An indication of the influence of the students from

Louisville could be seen when they, after several years of being absent from competition (they both graduated in 2004),

visited a major national tournament at the University of Kentucky in 2011.

The second they stepped onto campus they were greeted as celebrities by the many young black debaters who had seen videos of their old debates. They expressed astonishment at the increase of black participation and the

radicalization of oppositional arguments.

Though the students were clearly inspired by the University of Louisville and eager to replicate their successes, they pushed the critical envelope beyond the discourse relied upon by the University of Louisville.

They had witnessed and heard stories about the way in which Louisville challenged the debate activity and the recalcitrance of debate participants to self- 80 reflect. They thus possessed a particularly oppositional orientation when they entered the activity. They also entered with more experience in traditional debate training than was possessed by most of the Louisville students. Witnessing the lack of meaningful efforts to expand diversity, the new cohort of black students de-emphasized the call for inclusion. As one student told me, “we didn’t say let us in, we just did us.” They were concerned with more fundamental issues of structural white supremacy that characterized even well-intentioned white liberal discourse.

A2 Predictability Good

Suggesting that performance is “bad for debate” only reinforces neutrality and causes a vicious cycle of violence

Polson 12


Action”, E-Book pp. 16-18, RaMan)

Finally, situation or context is the third aspect of genre and our attempts to find meaning in genre. The context embraces content and form and “enable[s] interpretation of the action resulting from their fusion” (ibid).

What is the context that enables interpretation of critical debate?

I think that is a contested question. Many members of the traditional debate community find critical debate “bad for debate.” P erformance debate proponents might say that they are directly challenging traditional debate conventions that have become mechanistic and are inherently racist, and that debate must find new ways of becoming less exclusive and more relevant.

Specifically, many debate community members such as Preston (a coach and author) suggest that traditional debate practices and pedagogy result in difficulty recruiting minority debaters.

He cites Hill as having “noted that learning and communication styles of African Americans may differ from the learning and communication norms of the policy debating community” (Preston, Jr., 2006, p. 162). A call to solve this problem becomes one of the foundations of performance debate practice. T hrough content and form, performance debaters call for and demonstrate a practice that is inclusive and challenges the norms of the community. Reid-Brinkley quotes a Louisville debater in-round: The university of

Louisville enacts a full withdrawal from the traditional norms and procedures of this debate activity.

Because this institution, like every other institution in society, has also grown from the roots of racism. Seemingly neutral practices and policies have exclusionary effects on different groups for different reasons. These practices have a long and perpetuating history. (Reid-Brinkley, 2008, p. 114) R eid-Brinkley argues that many performance debate tactics are rhetorical strategies “designed to disrupt the normativity of traditional debate practices.... genre violation [is] a means of using style and performance to combat the social ideologies that result in unequal power relations across race, gender, and class within the national policy debate community” (pp. 78-79). Reid-Brinkley identifies four types of genre violations in critical debate: sonic and spatial disruption, violations of strategic norms, violations of expectations regarding the resolution, and violations of the policymaker debate persona.

We can see here the interplay of content, form and context in her argument.

The disruptive aural presence of rap music in a debate round, for example, is not coincidental to a substantive message critiquing Eurocentric epistemology and whitenormed debate practices

, for example. I will discuss such genre violations much more in Chapter 5, as I explain performance debaters’ attempts to do debate rather than just talking about it [social change].

A2 Self-Serving

Not sure how you argue this with a straight face – is it that shocking that someone would finally attempt to develop a framework to serve the interests of black students and black scholarship which were erased for this activity’s entire philosophical generation?

Peterson 14

[ 2014, David Peterson (Doctor of Philosophy), “Debating race, race-ing debate: An extended ethnographic case study of black intellectual insurgency in U.S. intercollegiate debate”, online, http://gradworks.umi.com/36/15/3615472.html, RaMan]

Corey and Kevin cited three main objectives in rejecting the traditional debate framework and confronting their mostly white fellow debaters. Their first objective was, they admitted, somewhat self-serving. They were both interested in anti-racist political action and community building outside of the debate activity. Confronting the debate community in an oppositional manner provided them a political training ground for doing so.

Kevin explains, Knowing the world we live in is run by people who think like many of the people in the debate community in terms of policy analysis and social issues, I felt it would be productive to test these ideas in the face of overwhelming opposition in order to get the best possible test of these ideas.

Going somewhere where people might be more friendly 84 to the criticism or might feel better about it being in a different form doesn’t allow for the type of test that I think is important. Thus, they sought to take advantage of the argumentative prowess possessed by college debaters in order to sharpen their own ability to advocate for “oppressed people.”

The fact that white students did not volunteer to be faced with such a criticism (as in the case, for example, of white students electing to take a course African-American studies or attend an anti-racism workshop), and were unlikely to face such a criticism elsewhere, meant for Towson that the reaction and response of these students would provide a particularly valuable training scenario. Like most other students I interviewed, the students from TU were active in their University’s

Black Student Union (BSU). However, the relationship between the debate team and the BSU is unique in the case of TU.

The debaters at TU, devised a plan to utilize the TU campus in an effort to effectuate larger social change in Baltimore and beyond. These students, devised a plan to utilize campus organizations to train themselves to, as one student put it, “take over the city of Baltimor e.” The plan was to take control of leadership in the BSU, the entire Student union, and the university debate team.

The debate team was crucial to this plan because it provided a unique site in which to receive training in public speaking and argumentation. They would use this training to help them launch a number of political projects outside the debate activity. Kevin, made headlines as one of the youngest candidates for city council in the city’s history and his organization is active in a number of community-based initiatives.

Alumni from TU have recently started a summer debate training institute at Morgan State University for radical debaters.

Additionally, many of them work as teachers in the Baltimore Public School system, have gained positions of leadership within the Baltimore UDL and other community organizations and are intent upon utilizing the 85 activity of competitive debate to develop local leaders that act in the interests of the Black population there.

A2 What’d *We* Do?

Commission is a crime and your ballot matters – reject their episteme – it only reifies Eurocentric ways of knowing the world – only our approach can produce exchange for those left outside this schema

Peterson 14

[ 2014, David Peterson (Doctor of Philosophy), “Debating race, race-ing debate: An extended ethnographic case study of black intellectual insurgency in U.S. intercollegiate debate”, online, http://gradworks.umi.com/36/15/3615472.html, RaMan]

Corey and Kevin argued that the contemporary social world, and the United States in particular, can best be characterized by practices of “white supremacy.” To support this assertion, they read passages from an array of critical race theorists (Charles Mills, Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado) and black feminist scholars (bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins) and played clips of music and poetry, in a break from the established norm of relying solely on written academic literature, from African-American artists such as Lauryn Hill, Nas, and Tupac Shakur. They argued further that the intercollegiate competitive debating activity functions to perpetuate white supremacy. To support this assertion they cited the demographic predominance of white males in the activity and, more importantly (to them), their own feelings of exclusion and the operation of “white normativity” and “white aesthetics” at the heart the debate activity’s institutional culture. Kevin explained, The debate community, in terms of its norms and procedures and tradition, endorses epistemologically white European ideas of the world as the best way to engage in political contestation and this then obscures other approaches to developing ideas about knowledge that can be beneficial for people outside of the traditional white male heterosexual framework. TU refused to engage in a traditional debate about US government policy and demanded instead that their white opponents critically interrogate whiteness and white supremacy. They proposed a framework for debate according to which their opponents should be selected “the winner” only 83 on the condition that they could convincingly articulate how their approach to debate, and their desired framework for debate, accounted for and confronted white supremacy. Kevin explains that, We accused the debate community of the crime of commission with white supremacy in terms of the type of scholarship that’s being produced. Because white supremacy is the status quo, by not deploying any political analysis that takes this into consideration will then act to extend the invisibility and pervasiveness of white supremacy. Towson argued they should be selected the “winner” if they could demonstrate that their opponents failed to meet this burden. This proposed framework invited a debate about the nature of white supremacy in the post-civil rights era, the extent of its influence, and the significance of its social consequences. Ideally, Corey and Kevin hoped the debate activity could be a space where debates could be had concerning both the nature of social power and privilege as well as the most appropriate and effective methods of resistance.

Ballot Ks 2ac

A2 Calls out Fail

We’re not attacking anyone personally so you have no reason to feel offended. This is about something bigger than just individual action that you benefit from





When working with issues of power and cultural violence, we have tried to move our

conversations from the bodies of those most readily implicated (i.e., white people) to

conversations about how such beliefs, such problematic social constructs (i.e., white supremacy)

have created the possibility for inequality. In drawing on Boal's work, we focus our critical

energy on the mystification process, rather than the bodies who stand as a result. This is an especially difficult tack to take when addressing racism and whiteness, for often the tendency is for white people to assume that such activist work levies critique at them alone. It is often difficult to move white people from assuming such a critical project is about them as individuals, to a place where they see themselves as parts of complex social, cultural, and political systems that levy privilege and power to some, while denying it to others.

A2 Judge is White

So what if we have a white judge this discussion is just as important for them as it is for the fugitive





As students work toward their goals, we try to stress that it is not appropriate to use these workshops as an opportunity to talk about white guilt or "reverse discrimination," but to take seriously the social conditions in which they are positioned — indeed, we do sometimes have participants who want to deny whiteness's centrality. We ask these participants to pretend, just for this workshop, that what they read, what they hear, and what they encounter is what it is — to

imagine what life would be like if these things were indeed true. Usually, by the end of the workshop, the students will begin to reflect on the possibility of this reality, if not personally, then

at least that these voices (in performance and the literature) might experience that kind of life.

Our desire here is to distance the resistant students from the trappings of intent. This is to say, whiteness is not so much about individual actions based in diabolical intentions but rather that whiteness is more insidious, more a structure of power that flows through them in covert or

unconscious ways. Thus, white people are trapped just as much as the voices they encounter in

the framing texts; they just happen to be ensnared in their own privilege. This is not to say we let these students off the hook, but rather that our goal is to challenge them to at least see the

problem as structural. From there, resistant students at least have the possibility of genuine self- reflection on their everyday behaviors and interactions. But without recognizing the fact that

systems of oppression exist, they will never see their roles within them.

A2 Narratives Fail

In order to undermine power we must start with those most affected by it

Warren and Fassett, 2004 [The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved Theatre Topics

14.2 (2004) 411-430John T. Warren is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and power. Deanna L. Fassett is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at

San José State University, where she teaches courses in instructional communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies //liam TAM]

Freire argues, "the starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the aspirations of the people" (76). For him, we must begin with the people—that any effort to undermine power structures through a pedagogy of the oppressed must begin with the life situations of the people that are implicated in the power struggle. He argues for a "dialogical" method, one that works from the "thematic universe" of people in an effort to allow education to be a practice of freedom. With this beginning in Freire, we decided to begin our workshops from the life situations of people—people's stories about or experiences with racism and violence. Thus, a workshop in whiteness had to begin with collected narratives of struggle, narratives of people in "real-life contexts" and their engagements with whiteness. To begin with stories of whiteness meant that our effort would ask the participants in the workshops to take seriously the life experiences of others in an effort to search out possibility within their life circumstances.

A2 No Safe Spaces**


Browne, 2012



555; DOA: 7/5/15 || NDW)

‘



(2001, p. 5153



, I borrow Richard Iton’s ‘visual surplus’ and its bside ‘performative sensibility’ (2009, p. 105). What Iton suggests is that we come to internalize an expectation of the potential of being watched and with this emerges a certain ‘performative sensibility’.

Coupled with this awareness of an overseeing surveillance apparatus was

‘the conscious effort to always give one’s best performance and encourage others to do the same, and indeed to perform even when one is not sure of one’s audience (or whether there is in fact an audience)’ (p. 105).


(graffiti, music videos) made increasingly available to the public through the rise of hip-hop in the five boroughs of New

York City in the 1970s and the uses of new technologies (cellular phones, handheld cameras, the Internet, DVDs) to record and distribute performances.

Applied to a different temporal location,Iton’s analyses of visual surplus and performative sensibility are useful for how we think about fugitive acts, black expressive practices and the regulation of black mobilities in colonial

New York City 200 years earlier. What I am suggesting here is that for the fugitive in eighteenth century New York such a sensibility would encourage one to perform


April 1712 saw an armed insurrection in New York City where over two dozen black slaves gathered in the densely populated East Ward of the city to set fire to a building, killing at least nine whites and wounding others. In the end over 70 were arrested, with many coerced into admissions of guilt. Of those, 25 were sentenced to death and 23 of these death sentences were carried out. Burned at the stake, hanged, beheaded and their corpses publicly displayed and left to decompose, such spectacular corporal punishment served as a warning for the city’s slave population and beyond. With these events and the so-called slave conspiracy to burn the city in 1741, the black code governing black city life consolidated previously enacted laws that were enforced in a rather discretionary fashion.6 Some of these laws spoke explicitly to the notion of a visual surplus and the regulation of mobility by way of the candle lantern. On 14 March 1713, the Common Council of New York City passed a ‘Law for Regulating Negro or Indian Slaves in the Nighttime’ that saw to it that ‘no Negro or Indian Slave above the age of fourteen years do presume to be or appear in any of the streets’ of New York City ‘on the south side of the fresh water one hour after sunset without a lantern or a lit candle’ (New York Common Council,

Volume III). ‘Fresh water’ here referring to the Fresh Water Pond found in lower Manhattan, slightly adjacent to the Negroes Burial Ground and that supplied the city with drinking water at the time. Again, this law regulating mobility and autonomy through the use of the technology of the candle lantern was amended on 18 November 1731 where ‘no negro, mulatto or Indian slave above the age of fourteen years’ unless in the company of some white person ‘or white servant belonging to the family whose slave he or she is, or in whose service he or she there are’ was to be without a light that could be plainly seen or it was then ‘lawful for any of his Majesty’s

Subjects within the said City to apprehend such slave or slaves’ and ‘carry him, her or them before the Mayor or Recorder or any of the Aldermen of the said City who are hereby authorized upon proof of offense to commit such slave or slaves to the 552 CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Common Gaol’ (New York Common Council, Volume IV). Any slave convicted of being unlit after dark was sentenced to a public whipping of no more than 40 lashes, at the discretion of the master or owner before being discharged. Later this punishment was reduced to no more than 15 lashes. Such discretionary violence made for an imprecise mathematics of torture. Mostly, punishment for such transgression was taken into the hands of the slave owner. In 1734 a male slave of John van Zandt was found dead in his bed. The dead man was said to have ‘absented himself’ from van Zandt’s dwelling in the night-time (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Although it was first reported that the slave was horsewhipped to death by Van Zandt for being caught on the streets after dark by watchmen, a coroner’s jury found Van Zandt not negligent in this death, finding instead that ‘the correction given by the Master was not the cause of death, but that it was by the visitation of God’ (New York Weekly

Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Other laws put into place around light and black mobilities in New York City stipulated that at least one lantern must be carried per three negroes after sunset, more tightly regulated curfews and in 1722 the Common Council relegated burials by free and enslaved blacks to the daytime hours with attendance of no more than 12, plus the necessary pallbearers and gravediggers, as a means to reduce opportunities for assembly and to prevent conspiracy hatching. In recounting physician Alexander Hamilton’s narrative about his travels through New York City in July of 1744, Andy Doolen details that one outcome of the alleged conspiracy of

1741 was the ruining, according to Hamilton, of the traditional English cup of tea (2005). It was thought by Hamilton that: they have very bad water in the city, most of it being hard and brackish. Ever since the negroe conspiracy, certain people have been appointed to sell water in the streets, which they carry on a sledge in great casks and bring it from the best springs about the city, for it was when the negroes went for tea water that they held their caballs and consultations, and therefor they have a law now that no negroe shall be seen upon the streets without a lanthorn after dark. (Hamilton 1948, p. 88) We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to dawn, made knowable, locatable and contained within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a simple device made for a visual surplus where technology met surveillance, made the business of tea a white enterprise and encoded white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law. Of course, unsupervised leisure, labour, travel, assembly and other forms of social networking past sunset by free and enslaved black New Yorkers continued regardless of the enforcement of codes meant to curtail such things. BLACK LUMINOSITY

AND SURVEILLANCE 553 Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Oftentimes social networking by free and enslaved black New Yorkers took place right under the surveillant gazes of the white population, in markets and during Sabbath and holiday celebrations. In these spaces of sometimes interracial and cross-class commerce and socializing, black performative practices of drumming, dancing and chanting persisted. During celebrations of

Pinkster marking the feast of Pentecost of the Dutch Reformed Church, amongst the rituals, free and enslaved blacks elected a governor who would serve as a symbolic leader resolving disputes and collecting tributes, making this holiday an event for white spectatorship of black cultural and political production, although for many such celebratory resistance made this ‘a festival of misrule’ (Harris 2003, p. 41). So much so that the Common Council of Albany, New York, banned Pinkster celebrations in 1811, for reasons including a resentment of the space that it opened up for unsettling exchanges between blacks and whites (Lott 1993; McAllister 2003; White 1989). The most controversial incorporation of black performativity into Pinkster was the Totau. On the Totau, McAllister writes: a man and a woman shuffle back and forth inside a ring, dancing precariously close without touching and

isolating most of their sensual movement in the hip and pelvic areas. Once the couple dances to exhaustion, a fresh pair from the ring of clapping dancers relieves them and the Totau continues. (McAllister 2003, p. 112) That such a performative sensibility was engaged by black subjects in colonial New York City approximately 200 years before the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx, New York City, is of much significance. The Totau, and later, the

Catharine Market breakdown reverberate in the cypher of b-boys and b-girls. In Eric Lott’s discussion of black performances he cites Thomas De Voe’s eyewitness account of the Catharine Market breakdown in the early nineteenth century New York City. De Voe writes: This board was usually about five to six feet long, of large width, with its particular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end. Their music or time was usually given by one of their party, which was done by beating their hands on the sides of their legs and the noise of the heel. The favorite dancing place was a cleared spot on the east side of the fish market in front of Burnel Brown’s Ship Chandlery. (De Voe 1862, cited in Lott 1993, pp. 4142) In this instance, the breakdown is performed in a market, allowing for white spectatorship and patronage in a space that is already overdetermined as a site of commerce within the economy of slavery. Later, DeVoe recalls ‘public 554 CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 negro dances’ at Catharine Market in an 1889 New

York Times article where he is quoted as saying that the dancers ‘would bring roots, berries, birds, fish, clams, oysters, flowers, and anything else they could gather and sell in the market to supply themselves with pocket money’ (28 April 1889).

Sylvia Wynter’s ‘provision ground ideology’ in instructive here for an understanding of solidarity, survival and the role of folk-culture as resistance to the ‘dehumanization of Man and

Nature’

(1970, p. 36).


(1970, p.

36).7


. In so being

, they allow for us to think differently about the predicaments, policies and performances constituting surveillance. Colonial New York City was a space of both terror and promise for black life. Lantern laws, fugitive slave notices, public whippings and the discretionary uses of violence by ‘his Majesty’s subjects’ rendered the black subject as always already unfree yet acts, like the breakdown, that were constitutive of black freedom persisted. It is under this context where certain humans came to be understood by many as unfree and the property of others while at the same time creating practices that maintained their humanity by challenging the routinization of surveillance, that we should read the 1783 Board of Inquiry hearings at Fraunces Tavern.

A2 SFO

They say speaking for others is bad but there is no other method for revolution

Halberstam, 13




The mission then for the denizens of the undercommons is to recognize that when you seek to make things better, you are not just doing it for the Other, you must also be doing it for yourself . While men may think they are being "sensitive" by turning to feminism, while white people may think they are being right on by opposing racism, no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing "this shit down" until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us . Gender hierarchies are bad for men as well as women and they are really bad for the rest of us. Racial hierarchies are not rational and ordered, they are chaotic and nonsensical and must be opposed by precisely all those who benefit in any way from them. Or, as Moten puts it: " The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it's fucked up for you, in the same way that we've already recognized that it's fucked up for us. I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?" The coalition unites us in the recognition that we must change things or die. All of us. We must all change the things that are fucked up and change cannot come in the form that we think of as "revolutionary" not as a masculinist surge or an armed confrontation. Revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine. Moten and Harney propose that we prepare now for what will come by entering into study.

Study, a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you, prepares us to be embedded in what Harney calls "the with and for" and allows you to spend less time antagonized and antagonizing.

Debate = Key

Debate is a space in which racial identity can be understood—This dynamic is key to confronting racial domination and questioning the underlying aspects of negative racial identities

Reid-Brinkley 08

[Shanara Rose. PhD in Philosophy from the University of Georgia. The Harsh

Realities Of “Acting Black”: How African-American Policy Debaters Negotiate Representation Through

Racial Performance And Style. https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/reidbrinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf pgs 2-3. 7/5]//kmc

The attempts at

educational reform are not limited to institutional actors such as the local, state, and federal governments.

Non-profit organizations dedicated to alleviating the black/white achievement gap have also proliferated. One such organization, the Urban

Debate League, claims that “Urban Debate Leagues have proven to increase literacy scores by 25%, to improve grade-point averages by 8 to 10%, to achieve high school graduation rates of nearly 100%, and to produce college matriculation rates of 71 to 91%.” The UDL program is housed in over fourteen American cities and targets inner city youths of color to increase their access to debate training. Such training of students defined as “at risk” is designed to offset the negative statistics associated with black educational achievement. The program has been fairly successful and has received wide scale media attention. The success of the program has also generated renewed 3 interest amongst college debate programs in increasing direct efforts at recruitment of racial and ethnic minorities. The UDL program creates a substantial pool of racial minorities with debate training coming out of high school, that college debate directors may tap to diversify their own teams.

The debate community serves as a microcosm of the broader educational space within which racial ideologies are operating

.

It is a space in which academic achievement is performed according to the intelligibility of one’s race

, gender, class, and sexuality.

As policy debate is intellectually rigorous and has historically been closed to those marked by social difference, it offers a unique opportunity to engage the impact of desegregation and diversification

of American education.

How are black students integrated into a competitive educational community from which they have traditionally been excluded?

How are they represented in public and media discourse about their participation, and how do they rhetorically respond to such representations?

If racial ideology is perpetuated within discourse through the stereotype, then mapping the intelligibility of the stereotype within public discourse and the attempts to resist such intelligibility is a critical tool in the battle to end racial domination.

K Blocks

2ac Epistemology/Sequencing**

Voting aff affirms the creation of a an entire body of knowledge that isn’t included in their episteme—it’s a pre-requisite to affirming any alternative existence that can strive towards freedom

Dillon 13





The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of two new voices within national debates about racism, imperialism, poverty, and civil rights—the prisoner and the fugitive.

As more and more members of the 1960s

liberation movements were imprisoned or went underground, a new body of knowledge emerged from both of these figures that negated national narratives of progress, equality, and justice

.

While Fugitive Life tells a story about post-civil rights feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism, it focuses on these two figures and two corresponding spaces: the prison and the underground. In response to police repression in the form of incarceration, sabotage, and assassination, and in order to deploy illegal tactics, hundreds of activists in the 1970s left behind families, friends, jobs, and their identities in order to disappear into a vast network of safe houses, under-the-table jobs, and transportation networks

. In fact, before she was imprisoned, Davis herself spent many months underground in order to hide from the FBI. While there has been a resurgence of interest in many of these groups (prompted by and reflected in the anxiety about Obama’s connections to Weather Underground member Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential election), their significance to the post-civil rights landscape—as structured by the prison and neoliberalism—has only begun to be explored. The books of imprisoned authors like Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, and Malcolm X (which sold hundreds of thousands of copies) exposed something about the United

States that only they could know. In the original introduction to Jackson’s Soledad Brother, Jean

Genet wrote that Jackson’s prison writing exposed “the miracle of truth itself, the naked truth revealed.”

20 For Genet and many readers of this literature,

the prisoner had access to a unique formation of knowledge which led to alternative ways of seeing and knowing the world

. Indeed, scholars like Dylan Rodríguez, Michael-Hames Garcia, and

Joy James have argued that the knowledge produced by the prisoner exposes a truth about the United States that cannot be accessed from elsewhere.21 The prisoner could name what others could not even see. At the same time, thousands of political fugitives wrote devastating critiques of the United States as they bombed and robbed their way to what they hoped would be a better world.

Underground organizations like the Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, and

George Jackson Brigade did more than attack symbols of state violence; they also wrote poetry, stories, memoirs, communiqués, magazines, and made films. These groups understood culture as foundational to the production and survival of alternatives to things as they were. In this way, culture became a site for the emergence of alternative forms of knowledge.

2ac Perm

The permutation creates an ensemble of strategies that, rather than strive and compete for dominance, functions to more holistically invoke the critique of property and creates the possibility of agency through narrative




But this is a simple passage, one designed to provide some sense of the violent imposition of silence that marks slavery and will have marked every disaster, every violent assault on or ritual destruction of the whole. We might gather from this simple recounting, this simple “objectivizing archivation,” that slavery is that institution—violent and ritual dehumanization is that event—wherein nothing can be said, whereof nothing can be said, which arrives for us, even now, enveloped in the silence that accompanies the absence of specificity, the lack of an immediate resonance. But to speak here of simplicity—of a text, a passage, that tells, simply, the barest story and unearths, simply, the smallest remnant of a life that gives us, simply, an indication of the nature of a mode of being—is a matter that is, of course, not so simple. The passage, which can only be called “Uncle Toliver,” is more than a subject and more than a text; and its transmission of the whole of Uncle Toliver to us is far from simple. It arrives through various arrangements of the story of Uncle Toliver, the story of a man who could not tell his story as a matter of law, and as a matter of the materiality of his life and death. But the mediation that gives us that story does not obscure the position and situation spoken through his silence. It is spoken so profoundly that the entirety of the Enlightenment tradition and its critical other is invoked, reopened, revised, improvised. The mediated and reconstructed voicing of the slave speaks through the vernacular and for freedom. The mediated and reconstructed voice of a man held as property arrives to us as a critique of Property. As the passage arrives once more, hear again its simplicity in a repetition that serves to further obl/iterate (ob/literate) that simplicity: the subject, the text—that which is more than the person and more than the text—of Uncle Toliver haunts and infuses us.

In Nansemond County, Virginia, a slave known as Uncle Toliver had been indiscreet enough to pray aloud for the Yankees. The master’s two sons ordered him to kneel in the barnyard and pray for the

Confederacy. But this stubborn old man prayed even louder for a Yankee triumph. With growing exasperation, perhaps even bewilderment, the two sons took turns in whipping him until finally the slave, still murmuring something about the Yankees, collapsed and died.

How is this strange arrival possible? What is its significance for us today in the midst of an attempt to provide a desperately needed re/presentation of liberation within an argument for the necessity of something other than either a rejection of, or an indifference to, or a convergence with the (old or given) Enlightenment?

Ensemble, figured in and improvised through the ethical mediation of the Enlightenment’s critical opening of the whole, is the improvisation of the singular identities of Litwack and Uncle Toliver, and the totality which is generated by lingering in the music that airily fills the space between them. They speak in ensemble and are written there in a moment at which we are given, through the mediation of improvisation, the whole of the history of the whole, and the whole of the history of singularist

(and differentiated) totalizations of the whole. Uncle Toliver is, once more, the autobiography of ensemble and the history of an ensemble voicing and agency; it is not the recording of a differentiated, repressed, and oppressed ego by another ego in search of affirmation. Uncle Toliver is the reality which invocations of naive and idiomatic writing, or calls for a voicing-towards-agency, or overlordly assertions of the whole only imagine within the inevitable return to the best and worst of the Enlightenment that poststructuralism and identity politics must make. Uncle Toliver prepares the ground for the real formulation of a more than discursive ethics; we are propelled toward that view of the world that allows our knowledge of the passage, a view that demands a particular way of being in the world. In other words, our attention to ensemble, as it exists in and as Uncle Toliver, activates and improvises—keeps faith with— ensemble. It is an attention that will have always moved through the interminable attention to differentiating singularity or homogenizing totality that has always foreclosed the possibility of a genuine agency. Agency is in the tradition of Uncle Toliver.

Uncle Toliver’s narrative is part of a chain of recitation that moves from a never fully unveiled originary encounter to the specter of an impossible encounter to come, the encounter in the future that would mark the impossible justice of a strange, oppositional resolution. But the oppositional resolution that the bridge or passage would mark falls before its own form. Descent, not oscillation; descent, not the asymmetrical tensions and reemergent subjectivities of a gaze; descent, as in the future resonances of variations of an unknown tongue.

Cap K—2ac

The recognition of fugitivity is break from the dialectical relation between the

Master and Slave—rather than accepting the thesis of property and owner, the fugitive demands analysis of its own human capacity from whence black authenticity can arise




This is all to say that Fanon can only very briefly glance at or glance off the immense and immensely beautiful poetry of (race) war, the rich music of a certain underground social aid, a certain cheap and dangerous socialism, that comprises the viciously criminalized and richly differentiated interiority of black cooperation that will, in turn, have constituted the very ground of externally directed noncooperation. It turns out, then, that the pathological is (the) black, which has been figured both as the absence of color and as the excessively, criminally, pathologically colorful (which implies that black’s relation to color is a rich, active interinanimation of reflection and absorption); as the corticovisceral muscular contraction or the simultaneously voluntary and impulsive hiccupped “jazz lament” that in spite of Fanon’s formulations must be understood in relation to the acceptable jaggedness, legitimate muscularity, and husky theoretical lyricism of the bop and post-bop interventions that are supposed to have replaced it (176). Because finally the question isn’t whether or not the disorderly behavior of the anticolonialist is pathological or natural, whether or not he is born to that behavior, whether or not the performance of this or that variation on such behavior is “authentic”: the question, rather, concerns what the vast range of black authenticities and black pathologies does. Or, put another way, what is the efficacy of that range of natural-born disorders that have been relegated to what is theorized as the void of blackness or black social life but that might be more properly understood as the fugitive being of “infinite humanity,” or as that which Marx calls wealth?

Now, wealth is on one side a thing, realized in things, material products, which a human being confronts as subject; on the other side, as value, wealth is merely command over alien labour not with the aim of ruling, but with the aim of private consumption, etc. It appears in all forms in the shape of a thing, be it an object or be it a relation mediated through the object, which is external and accidental to the individual. Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production. In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e., the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?31

Though Fanon is justifiably wary of anything that is presented as if it were written into the nature of things and of the thing, this notion of wealth as the finite being of a kind of infinite humanity— especially when that in/finitude is understood (improperly, against Marx’s grain) as constituting a critique of any human mastery whatever—must be welcomed. Marx’s invocation of the thing leads us past his own limitations such that it becomes necessary and possible to consider the thing’s relation to human capacity independent of the limitations of bourgeois form.

Like the (colonial) states of emergency that are its effects, like the enclosures that are its epiphenomena, like the civil war that was black reconstruction’s aftershock, like the proletariat’s anticipation of abolition; it turns out that the war of “national liberation” has always been going on, anoriginally, as it were. Fanon writes of “a lot of things [that] can be committed for a few pounds of semolina,” saying, “You need to use your imagination to understand these things” (231). This is to say that there is a counterpoint in Fanon, fugitive to Fanon’s own self-regulative powers, that refuses his refusal to imagine those imagining things whose political commitment makes them subject to being committed, those biologically organized things who really have to use their imaginations to keep on keeping on, those things whose constant escape of their own rehabilitation as men seems to be written into their nature. In such contrapuntal fields or fugue states, one finds (it possible to extend) their stealing, their stealing away, their lives that remain, fugitively, even when the case of blackness is dismissed.

Cap/Neolib K –2ac

Permutation do both solves--race theory explains neoliberalism and our strategy is uniquely key to defeat the penal state

Dillon 13





I turn to the cultural products of imprisoned and underground activists as a record of what has been forgotten by hegemonic epistemologies.

As Roderick Ferguson writes,

“Epistemology is an economy of information privileged and information excluded” under which “national formations rarely disclose what they have rejected.”

22 Yet, the prisoner and the fugitive index the histories and forms of knowledge that were erased and excluded by law and order and neoliberal economics.

Fugitive Life explores the ways that imprisoned and underground activists responded to the changing operations of (and new technologies central to) racialized and gendered power under late capital.

In addition, I contrast the forms of knowledge arising from the underground to the epistemologies central to build-up of the neoliberal-carceral state. In this way

, I argue that the prisoner and the fugitive are figures that produced epistemologies that undermined the political and historical fictions underpinning this process

. For example, while law and order politicians argued that policing and penal technologies were instruments of safety and liberty, and neoliberal economists argued that poverty was the outcome of individual pathology, Davis and countless others labored to name the racialized and gendered violence cloaked by these new discourses.

Chapter one, "Possessed by Death: The Neoliberal-Carceral

State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery,” examines the historical foundations of the neoliberal-carceral state. Since the 1960s, scholars, activists, and prisoners have argued that the contemporary prison exists on a historical continuum with nineteenth century chattel slavery. More recently, a growing body of work has made clear the connections between the post-1980s prison and neoliberal economic policies.

While the prison’s connection to slavery and the market has been well explored, the contemporary market’s relationship to chattel slavery has largely been overlooked.

If slavery’s anti-black technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live on in the operations of the market? What is the relationship between an anti-blackness inaugurated under the Atlantic slave trade and the methods of population management used under neoliberalism? How does the absence, death, and loss left behind by slavery connect to the formation of the contemporary neoliberal-carceral state? To answer these questions, I read two texts written by captive black women in the 1970s United States: Assata Shakur’s "Women in Prison: How We Are” and Angela Davis's "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves."

Both texts were composed at the very moment of the neoliberal-carceral state’s emergence and index the ways that black feminism developed under and critiqued this formation. I also include a discussion of Sherley Anne Williams’s

1986 novel Dessa Rose. Although the novel was written in the mid-1980s, Williams cites Davis's essay—and the rise of the prison in the 1970s—as providing the inspiration for the novel. All three texts emerge from the late twentieth- history of our social, political, and economic present.

Chapter two, “The

End of the Future: Law and Order, the Feminist Underground, and the Temporality of Violence,” extends the first chapter’s concern with time to consider the relationship between the prison, the market, and the future. I begin by exploring how, in their campaign speeches and advertisements, law and order politicians understood the market and prison in relation to time and the future. For Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, the very possibility of a future depended on the immobilization of those rendered surplus or resistant to new economic regimes structured around privatization, deindustrialization, deregulation, and finance. In other words, embedded in the emergent discourses of the neoliberal-carceral state was a vision of the future—one where the freedom of individuality and the market required the mass immobilization of the prison. The first section of the chapter argues that by connecting the freedom of the individual to the governance of the prison, the politics of law and order were complicit with emerging neoliberal discourses of self-care, personal responsibility, and individualism.

In the last half of this chapter, I examine how un derground women activists of the period understood the time and future of an emerging neoliberal-carceral state. Many1970s activists did not see the prison and the market as separate systems of power

. Instead, they understood them as deeply connected, if not at times, indistinguishable. I focus on the writings of underground revolutionary organizations that formed in direct response to the repression and violence of the law and order state.

I analyze the communiqués issued by these organizations—specifically the women’s brigade of the Weather Underground and the George

Jackson Brigade—to consider what the future of neoliberalism and the prison meant for those enmeshed in the changing carceral and economic regimes of the 1970s

. As I argue, the communiqués written by these groups can be understood as feminist and queer responses to the temporality of progress that supported law and order and the development of the neoliberal-carceral state

. Whereas chapter one considered how the past is theorized in the writings of imprisoned (and previously underground) revolutionary black women, this chapter analyzes the writings of 1970s imprisoned radicals and underground revolutionaries, most of whom identified as women, in order to examine how they theorized the prison, the market, and time in relation to the state. It contrasts these revolutionary visions with the dreams of people like Nixon who understood the prison and the market as foundational to the security and order of the nation and its future. The third chapter, “Life Escapes: Neoliberal Economics, the Fugitive, and Queer Freedom,” explores two paradigmatic notions of freedom in the 1970s that I call “neoliberal freedom” and “queer freedom.” In chapter two, I analyzed the politics of law and order to argue that law and order was symbiotic with, and productive of, neoliberal discourses that emphasized the relationship between the freedom of the individual and the freedom of the market. In this way, the prison as a discursive field, a set of fantasies, and a regime of dispersed institutional technologies aimed at policing and incapacitation became constitutive of the freedom of the market and individual. Chapter three continues to explore the ways that penal and policing technologies were imagined as central to the life of the free market, but focuses on the writings of early neoliberal thinkers—in particular, Milton Friedman’s 1962 Capitalism and

Freedom. Friedman was a Nobel Prize-winning American economist, statistician, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. As a leader of the

Chicago school of economics, he has been perhaps the most important opponent to Keynesian economics, and is considered central to the emergence of neoliberal thought and policy.

Despite Friedman’s centrality to neoliberal policy across the globe, scholars of neoliberalism and late twentieth century capitalism have largely ignored his writings. I argue that the emergence of neoliberal theories of freedom were, in part, a response to the liberation movements of the 1960s and ‘70s.

While feminist, anti-racist, and queer liberation movements made demands that exceeded the material and epistemological possibilities of the social order, neoliberal freedom confined and restricted what freedom could be within the relations between the individual and the market.

In addition,

Friedman’s theory of freedom relied on the containment of populations he deemed not responsible enough to be free. In this way, neoliberal theories of freedom necessitated the prison

. I compare Friedman’s theory of freedom to those produced by 1970s women fugitives. By reading memoirs of former political fugitives alongside Susan Choi’s novel American Woman, I argue for a queer conception of freedom where freedom is the very practice of running. Chapter four, “The Control to Come: Sexuality, Terror, and the Control Unit,” documents the rise of control units under neoliberalism. Control units are prisons within a prison, where inmates are held in 6-by-9-foot rooms for 23 hours a day. After the demise of rehabilitation as an ideal of incarceration, control units became a new model that guided the expansion of prisons. It is not just that the prison system expanded exponentially under the neoliberal shifts of the 1970s; control units also emerged as a unique new penal technology. In this way, I argue that control units are directly connected to the political and economic shifts of the 1970s. I explore one unit in particular, the “High Security Unit” in Lexington, Kentucky, which operated from 1986 to 1988. The isolation unit at Lexington was originally designed to hold sixteen women—those, according to the Bureau of Prisons, who were incorrigible flight risks— but Lexington ended up only detaining three women incarcerated for their involvement with the black liberation movement and Puerto Rican independence movement in the

1970s and early 1980s. This chapter turns to the prison writings of the women held at Lexington in order to explore the relationship between sexuality, the body, the expansion of control units as a model of punishment, and the larger social and economic changes implemented under neoliberalism. It also argues that

Lexington offers a genealogy of the forms of punishment and incarceration central to the “war on terror

The neoliberal narrative is described as the “home of the free,” but is rather an extension of the prison—it connects the powers of market under slavery to the powers of the market under neoliberalism—embracing fugitivity is key

Dillon 13

assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in





In her 1978 essay “Women in Prison: How We Are,” Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur wrote: For many, prison is not that much different from the street…For many cells are not that different from the tenements…and the welfare hotels they live in on the street…The fights are the same except they are less dangerous. The police are the same. The poverty is the same. The alienation is the same. The racism is the same. The sexism is the same. The drugs are the same and the system is the same.

24 For Shakur

, the regulations of a burgeoning neoliberal-carceral state possessed life in ways that rendered the free world an extension of the prison.

An assemblage of race, gender, capital, policing, and penal technologies produced a symbiosis between the de- industrialized landscape of the late 20th century urban United States and the gendered racisms of an emerging prisonindustrial complex.

Diffuse structural networks of racism and sexism mimicked the steel bars of a cage. This is the complicity between freedom and captivity, the entanglements between t he living and the living dead, and the hemorrhaging of a buried past into the imagined progress of the present. For Shakur, prison looked like and felt like nineteenth century chattel slavery: “We sit in the bull pen. We are all black. All restless. And we are all freezing.”25 In the essay, affect continually forces the past to open directly onto the present.26 The sensations and feelings of frozen skin speaks in a way that words cannot. In prison, shivering black flesh weighted with chains looked like slavery to Shakur. As a fugitive who now has political asylum in Cuba, she understands herself as a twenty-first century runaway slave, a “maroon woman.”27 Although

Shakur’s essay

does not name neoliberalism explicitly, we can read it as a black feminist theorization of neoliberalism at the very moment of its emergence. Indeed, it is a narration of the drastic racialized and gendered restructurings of social and economic life in the 1970s United States from the perspective of someone detained for resisting those changes.

Written by a captured member of the underground black liberation movement, the text names the discourses and

(state) violence neoliberalism requires yet erases. Neoliberalism is most certainly an economic doctrine that prioritizes the mobility and expansion of capital at all costs, but its mechanisms exceed the liberation of the market from the repression of the state. As Shakur indicates, one of the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the neoliberal state is the kinship shared between the free world and the prison—an affinity structured and produced by an anti- blackness inaugurated under chattel-slavery. More over, as

Shakur argues throughout the essay, the technologies of immobilization utilized by the neoliberal state specifically target black women, a process connected to the emergence of the black feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

By reading black feminist texts from the 1970s as implicit theories of neoliberalism, we can come to understand the formation and implementation of neoliberalism in a new light. Shakur not only connects an emergent neoliberalism to a rapidly expanding prison regime, she also links the contemporary prison to chattel slavery—an institutional, affective, and discursive connection apprehended by Angela Davis’s phrase, “From the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison.”28 The connections made by Shakur between the prison and neoliberalism, and between slavery and the prison, have been thoroughly explored by many scholars.29 Indeed, during the past two decades, a growing body of scholarship has affirmed and extended Shakur’s analysis of blackness, slavery, and the prison by exploring what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.”30 By centering racial terror in a genealogy of the prison, scholars have come to understand the barracoons, coffles, slave holds, and plantations of the Middle Passage as spatial, discursive, ontological, and economic analogues of modern punishment that have haunted their way into the present.31 If the carceral becomes a functional surrogate for slavery’s production of social and living death, then Shakur’s text also hints at another connection that has garnered less attention—slavery’s haunting possession of neoliberalism. While the prison’s connection to slavery and the market has been well explored, the contemporary market’s relationship to chattel slavery has largely been overlooked. If slavery’s anti- black technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live on in the operations of the market? What is the relationship between an anti-blackness inaugurated under the Atlantic slave trade and the methods of population management used under neoliberalism? How does the absence, death, and loss left behind by slavery connect to the formation of the contemporary neoliberal-carceral state? What is the connection between the necropolitics of chattel-slavery and the biopolitics of neoliberalism? To answer these questions, I read two texts written by captive black women in the 1970s United States: Assata Shakur’s "Women in Prison: How We Are” and Angela Davis's "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves." Both texts were composed at the very m oment of the neoliberal-carceral state’s emergence and index the ways that black feminism developed under and critiqued this formation. Throughout the chapter, I examine how Shakur and Davis theorize the relationship between the carceral, the market, the population, and the body. While Davis’s essay explores black women’s experiences of terror and resistance under chattel slavery in order to contest the discourse of the black matriarch, Shakur’s essay describes black women’s experiences of gender, sexuality, race, violence, and incarceration in the early 1970s. I also include a discussion of Sherley Anne Williams’s 1986 novel Dessa Rose. Although the novel was written in the mid-1980s, in the author's note, Williams cites Davis's essay—and the rise of the prison in the 1970s—as providing the inspiration for the novel. Williams uses fiction to recover the histories of enslaved black women Davis could not discover in the written record. Williams turns Davis's brief description of a uprising on a slave coffle led by a pregnant black woman into a novel that theorizes the racialized, gendered, affective, and economic politics of chattel slavery and its regimes of incarceration, torture, and terror. All three texts emerge from the late twentieth-century prison (and an emergent neoliberal state) in order to theorize chattel slavery as a history of our social, political, and economic present.

Yet the texts do not undo normative conceptions of time by deploying the conventions of fact; rather, they use fiction, memory, and imagination to connect the forgotten, the lost, and the dead to the now.

These texts insist that the absence of memory shapes the contours of the present. While many projects on the legacy of slavery utilize demographic data to measure slavery’s extension into our present in concrete terms, I attempt to engage the past through it’s forgetting. I leave behind the world of facts, proof, and Truth in order to connect the powers of the market across time and space through non-normative epistemologies that rely on affect, memory, and imagination. As a matter of fact, it was the reason and rationality of mathematics, demographics, and insurance that produced millions of corpses in the service of making millions of commodities. To be clear, this chapter has three goals. First, it connects the powers of market under slavery to powers of the market under neoliberalism by exploring how black feminists made sense of the afterlife of slavery under an emergent neoliberal state. Second, it uses black feminist engagements with loss, to assert that death and loss undo to the progress of time so that the past lives on, and possesses the present

. By engaging death, loss, and forgetting, the texts I analyze connect penal and economic technologies in the 1970s United States to the carceral nature of the market under chattel slavery. Finally, by constructing a critical genealogy of the market through the writings of black feminists working within and under the neoliberal-carceral state, I argue that under neoliberalism, the market supplements and mimics the prison.

Foucault/Liberal Subject K—2ac

Our narrative deconstructs the myth of the universal, autonomous Kantian subject— rather than accede to the univocal logic of the Enlightenment or of polemic critiques thereof, our strategy inserts resistant appositional to both, creating the possibility of a polyvocal discourse




In 1989, in the tradition of answering the question concerning Enlightenment, Jacques Derrida declares:

Of course I am ‘in favour’ of the Enlightenment; I think we shouldn’t simply leave it behind us, so I want to keep this tradition alive. But at the same time I know that there are certain historical forms of

Enlightenment, certain things in this tradition that we need to criticize or deconstruct. So it is sometimes in the name of, let us say, a new Enlightenment that I deconstruct a given Enlightenment. And this requires some very complex strategies; requires that we should let many voices speak. . . . There is nothing monological, no monologue—that’s why the responsibility for deconstruction is never individual or a matter of the single, self-privileged authorial voice. It is always a multiplicity of voices, of gestures. .

. . And you can take this as a rule: that each time Deconstruction speaks through a single voice, it’s wrong, it is not ‘Deconstruction’ anymore. So in [“Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in

Philosophy”] . . . not only do I let many voices speak at the same time, but the problem is precisely that multiplicity of voices, that variety of tones, within the same utterance or indeed the same word or syllable, and so on. So that’s the question. That’s one of the questions.

But of course today the political, ideological consequences of the Enlightenment are still very much with us—and very much in need of questioning. So a new Enlightenment, to be sure, which may mean deconstruction in its most active or intensive form, and not what we inherited in the name of

Aufklärung. . . . (75)

The black radical tradition is in apposition to enlightenment. Appositional enlightenment is remixed, expanded, distilled, and radically faithful to the forces its encounters carry, break, and constitute. It’s

(the effect of) critique or rationalization unopposed to the deep revelation instantiated by a rupturing event of dis/appropriation, or the rapturous advent of an implicit but unprecedented freedom. It’s the performance of something like a detour of Kant onto a Heideggerian path, a push toward a critical rhythm in which Aufklärung and Lichtung animate one another, in which the improvisation through their opposition is enacted in (interruptions of) passage, tone, pulse, phrase, silence. But the dark matter that is and that animates this tradition sounds, and so sounds another light that for both Kant and Heidegger, in the one’s advocacy and in the other’s avoidance, would remain unheard.

Another way to put it would be this: there is an enduring politicoeconomic and philosophical moment with which the black radical tradition is engaged. That moment is called the Enlightenment. This tradition is concerned with the opening of a new Enlightenment, one made possible by the ongoing improvisation of a given Enlightenment—improvisation being nothing other than the emergence of

“deconstruction in its most active or intensive form.” That emergence bears a generativity that shines and sounds through even that purely negational discourse which is prompted by the assumption that nothing good—experientially, culturally, aesthetically—can come from horror. The Afro-diasporic

tradition is one that improvises through horror and through the philosophy of horror, and it does so in ways that don’t limit the discursive or cultural trace of the horror to an inevitable descriptive approach toward some either immediately present or heretofore concealed truth. There is also a prescriptive component in this tradition, which is to say in its narrative and in its narratives, that transcends the mythic and/or objectifying structures and effects of narrative while, at the same time, always holding on to its impossible descriptive resources. A future politics is given there so powerfully that it’s present as a trace even in certain reactions that, in the very force and determination of reaction, replicate horror’s preconditions. Such replication is done, for instance, in the vexed ethics of encounter of which Olaudah

Equiano tells—and which Frantz Fanon, among others, and Homi Bhabha, after Fanon, cite and recite, theorize and retheorize. I’m after another recitation of that improvisatory and liberatory trace.

All this brings to mind an interesting and important recent text. In his (Dis)forming the American Canon,

Ronald A. T. Judy (1993) would deconstruct and abandon the Enlightenment, its subject and its oppressive sociopolitical manifestations, by way and in the interest of a valorized unreadability, an errant and essentially unapproachable textuality that carries the trace of another being, another subjectivity, another literacy, another politics: the Afro-Arabic. In so doing, however, he renews the temporal and ontological constitution—namely, the systemic relation and opposition of totality and singularity—which grounds the “old” Enlightenment and its phantomic subject by his entrance into the nostalgic projection of an other, pre-oppositional (and thus deeply oppositional) origin.

Judy attempts to take an improvisational tradition, one weighted toward the impossible generativity of an apocalyptic event/institution, and expose it to a deconstruction; or, he would find within it a certain self-deconstructive germ in the form of a fragmentary eighteenth-century Afro-Arabic slave narrative called Ben Ali’s Diary. He does so because he reads the canonical slave narratives (most especially those of Douglass, though I’d argue that his claim extends to those of Mary Prince as well as Equiano—about both of which, more later) as replications of certain deeply problematic metaphysical structures, the most important being a unitary formulation of the subject which has its origins in an intensely racialized—as well as an intensely gendered (sexed and sexualized)—understanding of “Man.” What I’ll attempt to argue here is that both the canonical slave narratives of Prince and Equiano and the noncanonical and fragmentary narratives of Uncle Toliver and Ellen Butler resist placement within a polemic for or against the old Enlightenment subject. Rather they serve as récits and recitations (which is to say rationalizations or theorizations) of an improvisatory suspension of subjectivity, and of a certain desire for subjectivity, and of any prior understanding of subjectivity’s differentiated ground.

These narratives are improvisational and generative in some deep ways, and the tradition they recombine, extend, and transform is marked precisely by an ongoing anarchic seizure, excess, and intensification of what it carries with it as deconstruction. The tradition does so precisely by its active embrace of improvisation in its relation to a material dissatisfaction with the opposition between singularity and totality and its political effects. That improvisation is present in European traditions as well, but with this difference: their general repression of improvisation, an embarrassed refusal enacted by precisely that irrationalism against which it would guard. One could more judiciously call this irrationalism a wariness that manifests itself as a certain disabling decision neither to improvise nor to rationally encounter the revelatory and critical dis/appropriation that must ensue when one is confronted with the structures and effects of “other” traditions that generate and are generated by improvisatory practices. Not even Derrida is immune to this wariness (which, finally, we could call

Eurocentrism), though what’s cool in his work is the trace of improvisation (of which he is wary, but to

which, more often than not, he is attuned, especially in his writing, more complexly in his mediated and recorded speech) that emerges as if a certain elaborative moment in the generative history of philosophy-as deconstruction always and all throughout the ensemble of tradition(s) carries along with it another level of intensity. What I’m after is a critique of the absence of that intensity in the heretofore almost always correspondent historico-philosophical phenomena of Enlightenment and Eurocentrism, and in certain critiques of that absence and that correspondence which lose that intensity themselves.

Judy loses that intensity, that laughter out-from-outside of the house of being, even as he raises crucial questions regarding the development of that intensity in knowledge production and academic labor, allowing us to linger, for instance, at the intersection of the university and the plantation as places of work. What I’ll do here is focus on some other important questions he raises and prompts. Is writing (a more or less conventional and complete autobiographical narrative) always writing-into-being as it is manifest in the totalizing virtuality of the racialized, gendered, nationalized, “universal” Kantian Subject?

This question is a central one, for it implies and opens a critique of being and its question, as well as an improvisation of that subject, its exclusionary categorization, and its conflation with being. It also raises another question: What are the effects of the personalized recounting of the horror of the African encounter with the European other, the middle passage, and slavery? Finally, in a question prompted by

Judy’s work, what, asks Wahneema Lubiano in her introduction to Judy’s text, are the effects— if any, either good or bad—of the depersonalization of that recounting, or at least the valorization of a narrative that, rather than establishing authorial subjectivity, places the very idea of authorship/authority and the possibility of subjectivity on interminable hold? I employ the term

“subjectivity” here, placed within the frame of possibility, in order to begin opening access to what lingers in the cut between the subject and its deconstruction, the virtualities of (European) Man and their others. I’m interested in the objectivity of slave narrative and in the knowledge of language and freedom contained there, and within which, if we linger longer than Judy is willing, we might commit an action.

Ontology K—2ac

Our strategy is one that operates from ‘out of outside’, that begins with the improvisation of subjectivity itself. Our act of telling, of imposing anarchy upon traditional understandings of ‘Man’, is a prerequisite to creating new forms of agency




What I want to get at is that that telling must be situated at a frontier, on the border that is the condition of possibility of “the law of genre” (Derrida 1980, 52). Such a telling must simultaneously fulfill and exceed the generic responsibilities of narrative, must be both récit and recitation. It must move through and reorient the paradoxical space-time of “foreshadowing description,” thereby exhibiting that which, because of its material access to presents that are no longer or that have not yet been, might have been called “ecstatic temporality” (52). This telling must also occupy the space of a frontier between narrative and rationalization, between narrative and the theory of narrative, between narrative and the improvisation of its discourse and of its story, and above all, of its subjectivity and of what that subjectivity knows, and of what that subjectivity is both constituted and capable. This telling must also be situated on the frontier at which “Man” is improvised. I’m interested in how the free story that forms the paradoxically anarchic ground of the black radical tradition will have rationalized that conception of “Man,” improvising through its exclusionary force and toward a notion of agency that allows a fundamental reconstitution of both the methods and the objects of ethics, epistemology, and ontology. With regard to this last formulation, one must see how this telling lies at the frontier of, or in the cut between, singularity and totality, between the unlocatable origin and as yet unlocalized end of their mutual philosophical and politicoeconomic systematization.

When I say that we must improvise notions of genre and of narrative; and that we must descend into the rhythmic break between “foreshadowing” and “description,” rather than treat their oxymoronic linkage as a fateful and convenient bridge that erases itself in its presencing of origination and destination; and that we must honor and extend—by way of improvisation—the black radical tradition’s ongoing improvisation of “Man,” knowing full well the danger of a kind of negative reification such a distancing romance holds; and that we must venture a continued movement out-from-outside of a range of conventional philosophical and historical understandings embedded in the oppositional relation of singularity and totality—I’m thinking of, and hopefully through, a certain pivotal moment in the tradition that marks the intersection of these tasks and their unfulfillment, the event of their dis/appropriation. In the epilogue to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison writes: “Our fate is to become one and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description.” The impasse this impossible fate represents, and the unresolvable caesura this passage is and contains (and implicit here is an argument for the profoundly generative and regenerative force of this phrasing—which is less and more than a sentence, less and more than a proposition—its ability to spawn negations and affirmations of itself that hold prominence in the contemporary extension of that strain of the tradition in which social development is foregrounded), marks a need to know some things again, as if for the first time, about knowledge and

(language and their relation to) freedom. So what I’m interested in, here, is freedom and the relationship of certain narratives of slavery to the question of freedom, not only in the historical context in which they were written, but in the no-less-desperate context of our fiercely urgent now. Mary

Prince, Ellen Butler, Olaudah Equiano, and Uncle Toliver know something—narratives and

understandings of narrative and understandings of the relation between narrative and freedom—that we need to know. What I’m after, among other things, is the question of where that knowledge comes from, and the im/possibilities and theoretical and political problems regarding our access to its source.

Psychoanalysis K—2ac

No link and impact turn – the aff does not rely upon a universal understanding of race

–we allow for black individualism and resistance – however we also recognize that the black body has been objectively demonized by the status quo – only the aff confronts that – the alt’s attempt to wish away anti-blackness fails

Reid-Brinkley et al, 13

Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of Public Address and

Advocacy Director of Debate, William Pitt Debating Union, Department of Communication University of

Pittsburgh; AND Amber Kelsie, M.A., Doctoral Student, Department of Communication University of

Pittsburgh; AND Nicholas Brady, Doctoral Student, Department of Culture & Theory, University of

California, Irvine; AND Ignacio Evans, B.A. History, Towson University; “We Be Fresh As Hell Wit’ Da Feds

Watchin’: A Bad Black Debate Family Responds,” 10/6/2013, http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/we-be-fresh-as-hell-wit-da-feds-watchin-abad-black-debate-family-responds, HSA)

The Philcox translation offers a fairly different wording; significantly what is removed from the Philcox translation entirely is the line: “Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say this is false.”[24] After this section of the passage,

Markmann’s translation goes on to explain that the “metaphysics” of the Black

(“customs and agencies”)

were “wiped out” by civilization.

[25] In the Philcox translation, these same agental capacities and conditions are “abolished.”[26] Here is a moment in which a studied comparison between the two translations—and the Markmann translation in particular—can be enlightening. Though the wordings are different (and one more strongly worded than the other), the relationship of whiteness to blackness offered in each is not mutually exclusive, but mutually revealing.

Bankey interprets this passage as indicating that a discussion of blackness as such reproduces racism by ignoring lived experience of individual blacks.

We think that is the opposite of what is expressed in either version of the text.

Rather, the texts explain that individual/subjective/agental experience of a given black person is exactly what cannot be accounted for because that being is overdetermined by blackness (at symbolic, material, and metaphysical levels).

Bankey misreads Philcox’s translation to suggest that we can “get at” “the lived experience of the black,” in a way that would be intelligible under the current (white) framing (gaze). But the rest of the passage, not to mention the entire chapter and book as a whole, explain at length that lived experience is exactly what is unintelligible and distinct from subjective/white individual capacities for experience. In light of this reading, Bankey’s implication that black people

(in debate/in the world) stop interrogating whiteness and white bodies is especially nonsensical.

It assumes that racism is simply petty prejudice that can be bi-directionally imposed.

Fanon in this passage makes it clear that this proposition has no converse.

¶

There are criticisms that one could make of Wilderson

, and many have. We here do not care to defend

Wilderson’s use of psychoanalysis for example.

But the suggestion that he makes his burden a proof of universal black experience has failed to see the forest for the trees.

Black experience is universalized as black

(“Look! A Negro!”). Individual experience is constituted in this conundrum. This condition—of blackness—is something we must work through, rather than wish away

.

Afro-Pessimism 2ac

Perm

No link and impact turn – the aff does not rely upon a universal understanding of race

–we allow for black individualism and resistance – however we also recognize that the black body has been objectively demonized by the status quo – only the aff confronts that – the alt’s attempt to wish away anti-blackness fails

Reid-Brinkley et al, 13

Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of Public Address and

Advocacy Director of Debate, William Pitt Debating Union, Department of Communication University of

Pittsburgh; AND Amber Kelsie, M.A., Doctoral Student, Department of Communication University of

Pittsburgh; AND Nicholas Brady, Doctoral Student, Department of Culture & Theory, University of

California, Irvine; AND Ignacio Evans, B.A. History, Towson University; “We Be Fresh As Hell Wit’ Da Feds

Watchin’: A Bad Black Debate Family Responds,” 10/6/2013, http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/we-be-fresh-as-hell-wit-da-feds-watchin-abad-black-debate-family-responds, HSA)

The Philcox translation offers a fairly different wording; significantly what is removed from the Philcox translation entirely is the line: “Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say this is false.”[24] After this section of the passage,

Markmann’s translation goes on to explain that the “metaphysics” of the Black

(“customs and agencies”)

were “wiped out” by civilization.

[25] In the Philcox translation, these same agental capacities and conditions are “abolished.”[26] Here is a moment in which a studied comparison between the two translations—and the Markmann translation in particular—can be enlightening. Though the wordings are different (and one more strongly worded than the other), the relationship of whiteness to blackness offered in each is not mutually exclusive, but mutually revealing.

Bankey interprets this passage as indicating that a discussion of blackness as such reproduces racism by ignoring lived experience of individual blacks.

We think that is the opposite of what is expressed in either version of the text.

Rather, the texts explain that individual/subjective/agental experience of a given black person is exactly what cannot be accounted for because that being is overdetermined by blackness (at symbolic, material, and metaphysical levels).

Bankey misreads Philcox’s translation to suggest that we can “get at” “the lived experience of the black,” in a way that would be intelligible under the current (white) framing (gaze). But the rest of the passage, not to mention the entire chapter and book as a whole, explain at length that lived experience is exactly what is unintelligible and distinct from subjective/white individual capacities for experience. In light of this reading, Bankey’s implication that black people

(in debate/in the world) stop interrogating whiteness and white bodies is especially nonsensical.

It assumes that racism is simply petty prejudice that can be bi-directionally imposed.

Fanon in this passage makes it clear that this proposition has no converse.

¶

There are criticisms that one could make of Wilderson

, and many have. We here do not care to defend

Wilderson’s use of psychoanalysis for example.

But the suggestion that he makes his burden a proof of universal black experience has failed to see the forest for the trees.

Black experience is universalized as black

(“Look! A Negro!”). Individual experience is constituted in this conundrum. This condition—of blackness—is something we must work through, rather than wish away

.

A2 Anti-Blackness

Unintelligibility is a way to question the idea of human

Butler, 04

(Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and literary theory. “Undoing Gender” TAM)

But what I would prefer is that we might consider carefully that when David invokes the “I” in this quite hopeful and unexpected way, he is speaking about a certain conviction he has about his own lovability; he says that “they” must think he is a real loser if the only reason anyone is going to love him is because of what he has between his legs. The “they” is telling him that he will not be loved, or that he will not be loved unless he takes what they have for him, and that they have what he needs in order to get love, that he will be loveless without what they have. But he refuses to accept that what they are offering in their discourse is love. He refuses their offering of love, understanding it as a bribe, as a seduction to subjection. He will be and he is, he tells us, loved for some other reason, a reason they do not understand, and it is not a reason we are given. It is clearly a reason that is Doing Justice to Someone beyond the regime of reason established by the norms of sexology itself. We know only that he holds out for another reason, and that in this sense, we no longer know what kind of reason this is, what reason can be; he establishes the limits of what they know, disrupting the politics of truth, making use of his desubjugation within that order of being to establish the possibility of love beyond the grasp of that norm. He positions himself, knowingly, in relation to the norm, but he does not comply with its requirements. He risks a certain “desubjugation”—is he a subject? How will we know? And in this sense, David’s discourse puts into play the operation of critique itself, critique which, defined by

Foucault, is precisely the desubjugation of the subject within the politics of truth. This does not mean that David becomes unintelligible and, therefore, without value to politics; rather, he emerges at the limits of intelligibility, offering a perspective on the variable ways in which norms circumscribe the human. It is precisely because we understand, without quite grasping, that he has another reason, that he is, as it were, another reason, that we see the limits to the discourse of intelligibility that would decide his fate. David does not precisely occupy a new world, since he is still, even within the syntax which brings about his “I,” still positioned somewhere between the norm and its failure. And he is, finally, neither one; he is the human in its anonymity, as that which we do not yet know how to name or that which sets a limits on all naming. And in that sense, he is the anonymous—and critical—

condition of the human as it speaks itself at the limits of what we think we know.

We are not striving to be “human”. To be “human” is to be known. We are literally striving for the opposite (A2 antiblackness)

Butler, 04 (Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and literary theory. “Undoing Gender” TAM)

This is one way in which the matter is and continues to be political. But there is something more, since what the example of drag sought to do was to make us question the means by which reality is made and to consider the way in which being called real or being called unreal can be not only a means of social control but a form of dehumanizing violence. Indeed, I would put it this way: to be called unreal, and to have that call, as it were, institutionalized as a form of differential treatment, is to become the other against which the human is made. It is the inhuman, the beyond the human, the less than human, the

border that secures the human in its ostensible reality. To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one’s language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one’s favor.

The block body is socially dead and embracing fugitivity is the only way to regain agency






In the fall of 1986, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons announced the completion of a new 16-bed high security unit at the federal penitentiary in Lexington, Kentucky. The unit was an entirely self-contained basement wing of the already existing prison. Although built for 16 women, it never held more than seven at any one time. The three women held there the longest were Susan Rosenberg, Alejandrina Torres, and Silvia

Baraldini. Rosenberg and Baraldini had been involved with the new left, black liberation, and Puerto

Rican liberation movements, and both had been charged with helping Assata Shakur escape from prison.

Torres was part of the Puerto Rican liberation movement and in 1983 was charged with conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government along with Edwin Cortes, Jose Alberto Rodriguez, and Jose Luis

Rodriguez. All three women understood themselves to be political prisoners, or in the case of Torres, a

“prisoner of war.”487 The control unit at Lexington was built underground. Its walls, floor, and ceiling were white; there was no natural light, no fresh air, no color, no sound, and there was a severe regulation of human contact of any kind.488 Whenever the women were taken from the control unit to a part of the larger prison they were shackled at the ankles and handcuffed (with a black box over the handcuffs). During these transfers, the entire prison would be locked down so that there was no contact between control unit prisoners and the general population. This policy of isolation extended to the unit’s visitation rules. Only one prisoner could have one visitor at any one time. Guards often scheduled visitors for the same time period and then canceled visitations once family and loved ones had traveled long distances. On a number of occasions, human rights groups were denied access to the control unit because another visitation was already under way.489 Both of these policies meant that the women experienced an extreme form of isolation that all three women understood as a form of social death.490

Central to the control unit’s security regime was an expansive system of monitoring and surveillance; cameras surveilled every inch of the control unit’s space, including the showers. To block the cameras, the women hung a sheet over the shower entrance, refused to shower, and showered fully clothed.491

All activities and conversations were recorded in written logs. Florescent lights were on at all times.

Visiting rights, reading material, and correspondence were severely limited and always monitored.

Screens covered the windows. Amnesty International wrote that if a prisoner wanted to see anything

outside, “one has to put one’s eye close to the mesh to get fuzzy view of the limited view [due to a perimeter fence] beyond.”492 The women held there were not allowed to participate in work, education, and rehabilitation programs offered to most prisoners in the general population.493 They were assigned prison-issued clothing that was designed to ensure they look “feminine.”494 The only work available to them for a short period of time was folding army shorts for six and a half hours a day in a small, poorly ventilated room that was used to be a utility closet. Anytime they left their cells or the outdoor “recreation” cage the women were strip searched by male guards.495 Yet, as Dr. Richard Korn observed on behalf of the ACLU, the searches were useless for locating contraband. When he pointed this out to the warden, the warden agreed, yet the searches continued. The purpose of the pat downs and strip searches, as Korn argued, was to exercise absolute dominion over the women’s bodies. One of the challenges of mounting legal battles against the unit, and indeed of writing about it, is that very little is actually known about its origins or details of its daily operation. Lawyers for the defendants and plaintiffs in a case over the existence of the unit (Baraldini v. Meese) failed to discover any documents outlining the planning objectives or commissioning procedures for the unit. The judge in the case found it astounding that a prison that cost over one million dollars to build did not produce any documents outlining long-term planning objectives or goals. In its report on the unit, Amnesty International stated,

“Nothing…is known about the origins or planning of HSU.”496 Most of what is known about the unit was recorded by the women or is documented in a handful of letters between Amnesty International and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBP). Based on statements from different directors of the FBP, Amnesty

International determined that women would be placed in the Lexington Control unit for two reasons.

First, the unit was intended to hold inmates who may be subject to “recue attempts by outside groups.”497 Second, the unit was to confine “females who have serious histories of assaultive, escape prone, or disruptive activity.”498 The women and ACLU lawyers did not believe that the unit was set up to hold high security prisoners. Instead, they argued that the unit was designed as a “behavioral experiment in the control and [possible] breaking of women who may have constituted a security risk, but more importantly, held firm political views to justify their criminal actions and response to imprisonment.”499 For them, the unit was designed to hold women political prisoners, even though the federal government recognizes no such category. In letters between Amnesty International and the

Federal Bureau of Prisons, all of this is denied. Lexington simply operated according to “normal FBP policy.”500 Simple details, like the size of cells, could not be confirmed, thereby limiting what could be known about the unit. There is no dispute that each cell contained a bed; metal toilet; metal shelf and chair; small metal cabinet; a notice board; and a color television. But Rosenberg claimed that all the cells were different sizes and that the one she was detained in measured 8-foot x 10-foot, while lawyers for the FBP claimed that every single cell was 100 square feet. Other discrepancies concerning what was real and what was imaginary existed as well. Part of the problem of knowing the reality of the unit was created by the prison itself—the physical architecture of the unit produced hallucinations, memory loss, blindness, and other forms of mental and physical debility and incapacity. The women held at Lexington experienced chronic rage; claustrophobia; heart palpitations; depression; the blunting of affect; dizziness; visual disturbances; and weight loss.501 The women became unhinged from realty—objects moved, the walls melted, and space contracted.502 When ACLU doctors returned after the women had been held at Lexington for three months, they found these symptoms had intensified to include insomnia; daily panic attacks; obsessive focus on dying or being killed; inability to concentrate; the forced reliving of past forms of sexual violence caused by “humiliating and physically injurious body search procedures”; non-stop hallucinations; and ongoing fear of mental breakdown.503 Dr. Korn stated

that the unit was deliberately designed “to undermine their physical and mental well being, that is, to destroy them physically and psychologically.”504 In a report on the health effects of the control unit by the ACLU, one of the women said, “I feel violated every minute of the day.”505 Amnesty International described the unit as “deliberately and gratuitously oppressive.”506 Torres described the unit as “a white tomb,” Rosenberg called it “existential death” and like being “buried alive,” and Debra Brown said she felt like she was “in the grave.” Rosenberg writes, [The High Security Unit] is a prison within a prison…The High Security Unit is living death…I believe this is an experiment being conducted by the

Justice Department to try and destroy political prisoners and to justify the most vile abuse to us as women and as human beings, and [to] justify it because we are political.507 Rosenberg understood the control unit at Lexington as a specifically gendered penal technology, one that destroyed gendered subjectivities by deploying regimes of violence that are quite literally incomprehensible. Three months before it was shut down and after two years of operation, a federal judge ruled that the government had unlawfully placed the women in Lexington because it found their political beliefs

“unacceptable.”508 Yet, nowhere were the rules and regulations governing placement in the unit recorded, let alone the unit’s purpose, goals, and history. All of the women reported that they were never told what types of behavior or what period of time would lead to transfer to general population.

This meant that transfer into and out of the unit was completely out of the control of the women.

Rosenberg was told, “You know, you’re going to die here.”509 All of the women also reported being told they were placed in unit due to their political affiliations. A few weeks into their incarceration, the warden told Torres and Rosenberg, “You can be transferred out of here if you renounce your associations, affiliations, and your…uh, err, uh…views. You can have the privilege of living out your life in general population.”510 While one of the unit’s stated goals was to contain “escape prone” inmates

(even though all three women discussed here had perfect disciplinary prison records), one of its other goals was to discipline, manage, and control non-normative epistemologies, feelings, and affects. Korn describes the centrality of knowledge to the unit’s function when he writes: For three of these women, whose ideology is an intrinsic part of their identity, the denial of a personal library is an unmistakable assault on their identity and their right to decide who they are. It is, additionally, an attack which is in itself ideological and violative of their rights as intellectually free and mature human beings. For people such as these, their books are a statement of who they are—a statement made by minds which instruct and respect them. These books are, in effect, their only other society, their only unfailing friends, and to deny them this companionship is as perverse as it is vicious…The point cannot be stressed too much.

The officials who imposed this limitation are not unsophisticated, illiterate, provincials in some penological backwater. They are nothing if not carefully deliberate, in every detail. They know what they are doing, and why they are doing it. The prisoners know it too—and their inability to convey their understanding of this intellectually murderous limitation is part of the pain of it…511 By isolating the prisoners from the general population, their families and loved ones, and even the sociality of books, the unit created a type of social and civil death that not only delegitimized subjugated forms of knowledge, but also sought to eradicate them. The unit worked to discipline and erase forms of knowledge that epistemologically undermined the racial state, the naturalness of incarceration, and the dominance of new ways of ordering economic and social life under neoliberalism. Indeed, memory loss was intrinsic to living in the unit, which meant the women’s histories, convictions, politics, and feelings dissolved into the concrete. This is not only evident in how knowledge was regulated within the unit, but also in how the FBP shaped what could be known about it. We can witness the shaping of knowledge and vision in a

FBP response to Amnesty International. It is worth quoting the Deputy Director of the FBP at length in

order to understand the epistemological dilemma represented by Lexington: The unit is not a control unit nor a disciplinary unit and sensory deprivation is not practiced nor condoned there…We have ensured that inmates in the unit have access to educational, religious, medical and mental health programs and we have established a small industries program there…All walls in the unit have been painted in soft, earth-tone graphics…The industries work area is well ventilated and has an outside window…It is not true that the women in the unit are subject to systematic strip searches whenever they leave or enter their cells. In fact, they are not subject to any search, including pat search, when they enter or leave their cells. Likewise, it is untrue that male guards accompanying Ms. Torres to a medical examination were allowed to watch her undress through an open door. There is no formal nor informal policy wherein security searches of inmates at Lexington are designed to humiliate prisoners… I assure you that the prisoners at Lexington are being confined in a humane and proper manner.512

According to the FBP, the truth of the prisoner’s world was a fiction to the forms of knowledge produced by the state. The control unit was not a control unit: white walls were earth toned; a closet was an

“industries work area”; pat downs and strips searches were figments of the imagination. Reconstituting our understanding of how the neoliberal-carceral state operates—in addition to the state of exception— means embracing fictive facts, hallucinations, and theories produced by panic. The forms of knowledge produced by the state simply could not comprehend what occurred at Lexington.

The state attempts to govern a system of civic death and impose force over the captive bodies






The first control unit in the United States emerged as a direct response to the radical and revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. It also coincided with the emergence of neoliberal economic restructuring. This period saw a dramatic rise in anti- prison activism, prison riots and rebellions, and prisoner organizing that was aligned with the underground and aboveground leftist movements sweeping the country. Indeed, the late 1960s and early ‘70s constitute what Alan Eladio Gómez calls

“the prison rebellion years.” After the 1971 uprising and massacre at Attica prison in New York, there were over 40 prison rebellions in 1972.469 A variety of organizations involved in black, Chicano, Native

American, and Puerto Rican liberation movements understood the prison as the space that would ignite a new struggle for revolutionary transformation in the era immediately after the civil rights reforms of the mid-1960s. During this time, prisoners turned the rehabilitative logic of the mid-twentieth century penal system against itself. Aligned with organizers in the free world, prisoners learned to read and write, studied the law, started ethnic studies classes, and clandestine study groups. The rehabilitative model created an environment where prisoners could historicize and theorize their own subjection and thus led to organized labor strikes, violence against guards, and cellblock shut downs. During April 1972, the Federal Bureau of Prisoners transferred over 100 prisoners involved in organizing and activist work around the country to Marion Federal Penitentiary in Southern Illinois.470 By isolating “problem” inmates within one institution, the Federal Bureau of Prisons sought to control prison activism by

subjecting prisoners at Marion to a new regime of behavior modification techniques. This included brainwashing, sensory deprivation, medication, and prolonged isolation. 471 James Bennett, the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons for most of the mid-twentieth century, believed that criminality was a biological and permanent, yet treatable disease. Under his direction, Marion became a research lab for psychiatrists working at the Center for Crime, Delinquency, and Corrections at Southern

Illinois University in Carbondale.472 Designed to cure criminal deviants, programs at Marion attempted to change prisoners’ behavior, beliefs, and thoughts. In response to this regime, prisoners wrote and submitted a report to the United Nations, and began working with the American Civil Liberties Union,

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the People’s Law Office in Chicago.

Prisoner organizing at Marion peaked after the brutal beating of a Chicano inmate by guards. In response, a racially diverse group of prisoners organized a group called the “Political Prisoners

Liberation Front.” The organization led a series of labor strikes and work stoppages that shut down entire sections of the prison. The prison administration responded by beating, gassing, and confiscating the legal materials of organizers. What followed next would change incarceration models for the next four decades. Authorities isolated members of the “Political Prisoners Liberation Front” in special cells called “steel boxcars.”473 This form of containment eventually became the “control unit”—a permanent form of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation used at Marion and now across the country.474

This model would also come to be called “super-maximum security” or the “supermax” in the mid-

1980s. In control unit prisons (or supermax prisons), prisoners are held in solitary confinement in 6-foot by 8-foot cells for 23 hours a day. There are no religious services, or congregate exercise, dining, and work opportunities. These conditions exist indefinitely. Most prisoners held in control units will never see the horizon, the night sky, or touch another human being. When they leave their cell, they exercise in a slightly larger cell, often still wearing shackles.475 Many prisoners have lived in these “breathing coffins” for decades.476 Control units are said to assist with the management and security control of inmates who have been designated as violent or disruptive. These inmates have been determined to be a threat to safety and security in traditional high-security facilities and “their behavior can [only] be controlled only by separation, restricted movement, and limited access to staff and other inmates.”477

Despite discourses about security and safety, Ralph Arons, a former warden at Marion, stated the purpose of the Control Unit clearly: “The purpose of the Marion Control Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in the society at large.”478 It is important to note that the goal of the unit was not to manage revolutionary action and organizing, but rather, radical and revolutionary orientations and dispositions. In addition, the effects of the unit were not only aimed at prisoners, but also the feelings, thoughts, and attitudes of “society at large.” In this way, Marion’s seizure of the body was about both capturing bodies in addition to knowledges, feelings, and affects. The control unit was designed to inhibit and abolish the epistemological formations produced by the Third World left that undermined the naturalness of the prison and the racial state. These were knowledges that I have outlined in the last three chapters—knowledges that worked to make sense of the emergence of a new state form based on neoliberal economics and the racialized governance of the carceral system. Lorna

Rhodes has argued that the control unit aligns itself with neoliberalism through logics of choice and responsibility that justify the prisoner’s indefinite incapacitation. Contemporary penal discourses emphasize the choices made by imprisoned people, thus abstracting the imagined culpability of the individual from the social, political, and economic conditions that manufacture crime, criminals, and prisons.479 The prisoner makes decisions and choices based on a rational calculation of the costs and benefits of their conduct.480 As Rhodes puts it, the prisoner “is responsibilized as perfectly fitting the

conditions of his confinement.”481 In this way, the control unit is actualized by neoliberal discourses of choice and individuality. However, I am arguing that the control unit also acted as the condition of possibility for the emergence of those discourses. Disappearing insurgent and rebellious bodies of color in a new system of living death was a way to efface and erase the knowledges that prisoners were creating. These knowledges contested neoliberal discourses of freedom, choice, and individuality. The control unit emerged to discipline and disappear forms of knowledge that threatened to epistemologically and materially unravel the neoliberal-carceral state. In this way, we can understand the control unit as a way to manage what could be known in the era of the emergence of the neoliberalcarceral state. The Control Unit at Marion was a tool of “political repression” that represented a new category of legal incapacitation; it was “a state of exception from the rule of prison law within an already existing state of exception from the rule of civil law.”482 As the warden stated, the control unit was designed to send the message to prisoners and free world activists that anti-racist and antiimperialist forms of organizing would be met with a form of punishment where the captive would be

“buried alive” in a world beyond human contact and concern. This world was not outside the law—it was governed by it. As Rhodes writes, “The state of exception thus created at Marion blurred differences between crime and political action, guilty parties and bystanders, and general population and segregation.”483 Marion refashioned the norm out of the state of exception by working within the confines of the law. In the 1980s and ‘90s, the Supreme Court made a distinction between disciplinary isolation and administrative segregation. This meant that a prisoner could be placed in the exact same cell but the label would be different. If the placement was due to disciplinary reasons, it could be contested in court, but if it was an administrative choice that affected the safety, security, and governance of the prison, then the placement was legal. Under administrative segregation prisoners are denied due process and exist in a legal realm beyond the supposed protection of the Eighth Amendment which defines “cruel and unusual punishment.”484 Under the legal logic of administrative segregation, the punishment of the control unit’s isolation does not register as punishment.485 Punishment is

protection, living death is security, and disposability is safety. Transforming the disciplinary into the administrative allowed the control unit to expand as a system of incapacitation and civil death. The control unit does not operate outside the law—it is the execution of the law’s ability to redefine and remake the human. In addition, it is part of a centuries-long experiment executed by modern power to test the limits and endurance of the human body and mind. And finally, the control unit is an attempt to govern the potential futures of the captive. It attempts to repress, contain, and preempt the forms of disobedience and insurgency inherent in the structural position of the prisoner.486 In this way, in contrast to Butler’s theorization of the time of the state of exception, the exception that was (and is always already) the norm captures the future through the law, not by exceeding it. Nowhere was this more evident than at control unit at Lexington.

A2 Pessimism Fails

**note – also in a2 Fanon/Sexton/Copeland

Blackness as constitutive and as an object does not necessitate a politics of pessimism—rather, in the spaces between ‘thing’ and ‘object’ exist a slippage, a space to assert the agency of the Thing, a space for the fugitive [Fanon/Sexton/Copeland

Link?]


(Fred, “The Case of Blackness,”

Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2, Spring 2008, p. 180-182, ProjectMUSE, IC)

One way to investigate the lived experience of the black is to consider what it is to be the dangerous— because one is, because we are (Who? We? Who is this we? Who volunteers for this already given imposition? Who elects this imposed affinity? The one who is homelessly, hopefully, less and more?) the constitutive—supplement. What is it to be an irreducibly disordering, deformational force while at the same time being absolutely indispensable to normative order, normative form? This is not the same as, though it does probably follow from, the troubled realization that one is an object in the midst of other objects, as Fanon would have it. In their introduction to a rich and important collection of articles that announce and enact a new deployment of Fanon in black studies’ encounter with visual studies, Jared

Sexton and Huey Copeland index Fanon’s formulation in order to consider what it is to be “the thing against which all other subjects take their bearing.”5 But something is left unattended in their invocation of Fanon, in their move toward equating objecthood with “the domain of non-existence” or the interstitial space between life and death, something to be understood in its difference from and relation to what Giorgio Agamben calls naked life, something they call raw life, that moves—or more precisely cannot move—in its forgetful non-relation to that quickening, forgetive force that Agamben calls the form of life.6

Sexton and Copeland turn to the Fanon of Black Skins, White Masks, the phenomenologist of (the lived experience of) blackness, who provides for them the following epigraph:

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.

(Black Skins, 77)

[J’arrivais dans le monde, soucieux de faire lever un sens aux choses, mon âme pleine du désir d’être à l’origine du monde, et voici que je me découvrais objet au milieu d’autres objets.]7

Fanon writes of entering the world with a melodramatic imagination, as Peter Brooks would have it— one drawn toward the occult installation of the sacred in things, gestures (certain events, as opposed to actions, of muscularity), and in the subterranean field that is, paradoxically, signaled by the very cutaneous darkness of which Fanon speaks. That darkness turns the would-be melodramatic subject not only into an object but also into a sign—the hideous blackamoor at the entrance of the cave, that world underneath the world of light that Fanon will have entered, who guards and masks “our” hidden motives and desires.8 There’s a whole other economy of skins and masks to be addressed here.

However, I will defer that address in order to get at something (absent) in Sexton and Copeland. What I am after is something obscured by the fall from prospective subject to object that Fanon recites— namely, a transition from thing(s) (choses) to object (objet) that turns out to version a slippage or

movement that could be said to animate the history of philosophy. What if we bracket the movement from (erstwhile) subject to object in order to investigate more adequately the change from object to thing (a change as strange as that from the possibility of intersubjectivity that attends majority to whatever is relegated to the plane or plain of the minor)? What if the thing whose meaning or value has never been found finds things, founds things? What if the thing will have founded something against the very possibility of foundation and against all anti- or post-foundational impossibilities? What if the thing sustains itself in that absence or eclipse of meaning that withholds from the thing the horrific honorific of “object”? At the same time, what if the value of that absence or excess is given to us only in and by way of a kind of failure or inadequacy—or, perhaps more precisely, by way of a history of exclusion, serial expulsion, presence’s ongoing taking of leave—so that the non-attainment of meaning or ontology, of source or origin, is the only way to approach the thing in its informal (enformed/enforming, as opposed to formless), material totality? Perhaps this would be cause for black optimism or, at least, some black operations. Perhaps the thing, the black, is tantamount to another, fugitive, sublimity altogether. Some/thing escapes in or through the object’s vestibule; the object vibrates against its frame like a resonator, and troubled air gets out. The air of the thing that escapes enframing is what I’m interested in—an often unattended movement that accompanies largely unthought positions and appositions. To operate out of this interest might mispresent itself as a kind of refusal of Fanon.9 But my reading is enabled by the way Fanon’s texts continually demand that we read them—again or, deeper still, not or against again, but for the first time. I wish to engage a kind of preop(tical) optimism in Fanon that is tied to the commerce between the lived experience of the black and the fact of blackness and between the thing and the object—an optimism recoverable, one might say, only by way of mistranslation, that bridged but unbridgeable gap that Heidegger explores as both distance and nearness in his discourse on “The Thing.”

A2 Fanon/Sexton/Copeland

[Fanon’s analysis misses the core of the fugitive political consciousness] It is not that resistance must be oppositional but rather, appositional—black life itself, as fugitive and unknowable, functions to disrupt and haunt the oppressor through life within death




While Fanon would consider the zealous worker in a colonial regime a quintessentially pathological case, remember that it is in resistance to colonial oppression that the cases of psychopathology with which Fanon is concerned in The Wretched of the Earth—in particular, those psychosomatic or corticovisceral disorders—emerge. What’s at stake is Fanon’s ongoing ambivalence toward the supposedly pathological. At the same time, ambivalence is itself the mark of the pathological. Watch Fanon prefiguratively describe and diagnose the pathological ambivalence that he performs:

The combat waged by a people for their liberation leads them, depending on the circumstances, either to reject or to explode the so-called truths sown in their consciousness by the colonial regime, military occupation, and economic exploitation. And only the armed struggle can effectively exorcise these lies about man that subordinate and literally mutilate the more conscious-minded among us.

How many times in Paris or Aix, in Algiers or Basse-Terre have we seen the colonized vehemently protest the so-called indolence of the black, the Algerian, the Vietnamese? And yet in a colonial regime if a fellah were a zealous worker or a black were to refuse a break from work, they would be quite simply considered pathological cases. The colonized’s indolence is a conscious way of sabotaging the colonial machine; on the biological level it is a remarkable system of self-preservation and, if nothing else, is a positive curb on the occupier’s stranglehold over the entire country. (220)

Is it fair to say that one detects in this text a certain indolence sown or sewn into it? Perhaps, on the other hand, its flaws are more accurately described as pathological. To be conscious-minded is aligned with subordination, even mutilation; the self-consciousness of the colonized is figured as a kind of wound at the same time that it is also aligned with wounding, with armed struggle that is somehow predicated on that which it makes possible— namely, the explosion of so-called truths planted or woven into the consciousness of the conscious-minded ones. They are the ones who are given the task of repairing (the truth) of man [humanity]; they are the ones who would heal by way of explosion, excision, or exorcism. This moment of self-conscious selfdescription is sewn into Fanon’s text like a depth charge.

However, authentic upheaval is ultimately figured not as an eruption of the unconscious in the conscious-minded but as that conscious mode of sabotage carried out every day—in and as what had been relegated, by the conscious-minded, to the status of impossible, pathological sociality—by the ones who are not, or are not yet, conscious. Healing wounds are inflicted, in other words, by the ones who are not conscious of their wounds and whose wounds are not redoubled by such consciousness.

Healing wounds are inflicted appositionally, in small, quotidian refusals to act that make them subject to charges of pathological indolence. Often the conscious ones, who have taken it upon themselves to defend the colonized against such charges, levy those charges with the greatest vehemence. If Fanon fails to take great pains to chart the tortured career of rehabilitative injury, it is perhaps a conscious

decision to sabotage his own text insofar as it has been sown with those so-called truths that obscure the truth of man.

This black operation that Fanon performs on his own text gives the lie to his own formulations. So when

Fanon claims, “The duty of the colonized subject, who has not yet arrived at a political consciousness or a decision to reject the oppressor, is to have the slightest effort literally dragged out of him,” the question that emerges is why one who is supposed yet to have arrived at political consciousness, one who must be dragged up out of the pit, would have such a duty (220). This, in turn, raises the more fundamental issue, embedded in this very assertion of duty, of the impossibility of such non-arrival. The failure to arrive at a political consciousness is a general pathology suffered by the ones who take their political consciousness with them on whatever fugitive, aleatory journey they are making. They will have already arrived; they will have already been there. They will have carried something with them before whatever violent manufacture, whatever constitutive shattering is supposed to have called them into being. While noncooperation is figured by Fanon as a kind of staging area for or a preliminary version of a more authentic “objectifying encounter” with colonial oppression (a kind of counter-representational response to power’s interpellative call), his own formulations regarding that response point to the requirement of a kind of thingly quickening that makes opposition possible while appositionally displacing it. Noncooperation is a duty that must be carried out by the ones who exist in the nearness and distance between political consciousness and absolute pathology. But this duty, imposed by an erstwhile subject who clearly is supposed to know, overlooks (or, perhaps more precisely, looks away from) that vast range of nonreactive disruptions of rule that are, in early and late Fanon, both indexed and disqualified. Such disruptions, often manifest as minor internal conflicts (within the closed circle, say, of Algerian criminality, in which the colonized “tend to use each other as a screen”) or muscular contractions, however much they are captured, enveloped, imitated, or traded, remain inassimilable

(231). These disruptions trouble the rehabilitation of the human even as they are evidence of the capacity to enact such rehabilitation. Moreover, it is at this point, in passages that culminate with the apposition of what Fanon refers to as “the reality of the ‘towelhead’ ” with “the reality of the ‘nigger,’ ” that the fact, the case, and the lived experience of blackness—which might be understood here as the troubling of and the capacity for the rehabilitation of the human—converge as a duty to appose the oppressor, to refrain from a certain performance of the labor of the negative, to avoid his economy of objectification and standing against, to run away from the snares of recognition (220). This refusal is a black thing, is that which Fanon carries with(in) himself, and in how he carries himself, from Martinique to France to Algeria. He is an anticolonial smuggler whose wares are constituted by and as the dislocation of black social life that he carries, almost unaware. In Fanon, blackness is transversality between things, escaping (by way of) distant, spooky actions; it is translational effect and affect, transmission between cases, and could be understood, in terms Brent Hayes Edwards establishes, as diasporic practice.28 This is what he carries with him, as the imagining thing that he cannot quite imagine and cannot quite control, in his pathologizing description of it that it—that he—defies. A fugitive cant moves through Fanon, erupting out of regulatory disavowal. His claim upon this criminality was interdicted. But perhaps only the dead can strive for the quickening power that animates what has been relegated to the pathological. Perhaps the dead are alive and escaping. Perhaps ontology is best understood as the imagination of this escape as a kind of social gathering; as undercommon plainsong and dance; as the fugitive, centrifugal word; as the word’s auto-interruptive, auto-illuminative shade/s.

Seen in this light, black(ness) is, in the dispossessive richness of its colors, beautiful.

Blackness as constitutive and as an object does not necessitate a politics of pessimism—rather, in the spaces between ‘thing’ and ‘object’ exist a slippage, a space to assert the agency of the Thing, a space for the fugitive [Fanon/Sexton/Copeland

Link?]




One way to investigate the lived experience of the black is to consider what it is to be the dangerous— because one is, because we are (Who? We? Who is this we? Who volunteers for this already given imposition? Who elects this imposed affinity? The one who is homelessly, hopefully, less and more?) the constitutive—supplement. What is it to be an irreducibly disordering, deformational force while at the same time being absolutely indispensable to normative order, normative form? This is not the same as, though it does probably follow from, the troubled realization that one is an object in the midst of other objects, as Fanon would have it. In their introduction to a rich and important collection of articles that announce and enact a new deployment of Fanon in black studies’ encounter with visual studies, Jared

Sexton and Huey Copeland index Fanon’s formulation in order to consider what it is to be “the thing against which all other subjects take their bearing.”5 But something is left unattended in their invocation of Fanon, in their move toward equating objecthood with “the domain of non-existence” or the interstitial space between life and death, something to be understood in its difference from and relation to what Giorgio Agamben calls naked life, something they call raw life, that moves—or more precisely cannot move—in its forgetful non-relation to that quickening, forgetive force that Agamben calls the form of life.6

Sexton and Copeland turn to the Fanon of Black Skins, White Masks, the phenomenologist of (the lived experience of) blackness, who provides for them the following epigraph:

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.

(Black Skins, 77)

[J’arrivais dans le monde, soucieux de faire lever un sens aux choses, mon âme pleine du désir d’être à l’origine du monde, et voici que je me découvrais objet au milieu d’autres objets.]7

Fanon writes of entering the world with a melodramatic imagination, as Peter Brooks would have it— one drawn toward the occult installation of the sacred in things, gestures (certain events, as opposed to actions, of muscularity), and in the subterranean field that is, paradoxically, signaled by the very cutaneous darkness of which Fanon speaks. That darkness turns the would-be melodramatic subject not only into an object but also into a sign—the hideous blackamoor at the entrance of the cave, that world underneath the world of light that Fanon will have entered, who guards and masks “our” hidden motives and desires.8 There’s a whole other economy of skins and masks to be addressed here.

However, I will defer that address in order to get at something (absent) in Sexton and Copeland. What I am after is something obscured by the fall from prospective subject to object that Fanon recites— namely, a transition from thing(s) (choses) to object (objet) that turns out to version a slippage or movement that could be said to animate the history of philosophy. What if we bracket the movement from (erstwhile) subject to object in order to investigate more adequately the change from object to thing (a change as strange as that from the possibility of intersubjectivity that attends majority to

whatever is relegated to the plane or plain of the minor)? What if the thing whose meaning or value has never been found finds things, founds things? What if the thing will have founded something against the very possibility of foundation and against all anti- or post-foundational impossibilities? What if the thing sustains itself in that absence or eclipse of meaning that withholds from the thing the horrific honorific of “object”? At the same time, what if the value of that absence or excess is given to us only in and by way of a kind of failure or inadequacy—or, perhaps more precisely, by way of a history of exclusion, serial expulsion, presence’s ongoing taking of leave—so that the non-attainment of meaning or ontology, of source or origin, is the only way to approach the thing in its informal (enformed/enforming, as opposed to formless), material totality? Perhaps this would be cause for black optimism or, at least, some black operations. Perhaps the thing, the black, is tantamount to another, fugitive, sublimity altogether. Some/thing escapes in or through the object’s vestibule; the object vibrates against its frame like a resonator, and troubled air gets out. The air of the thing that escapes enframing is what I’m interested in—an often unattended movement that accompanies largely unthought positions and appositions. To operate out of this interest might mispresent itself as a kind of refusal of Fanon.9 But my reading is enabled by the way Fanon’s texts continually demand that we read them—again or, deeper still, not or against again, but for the first time. I wish to engage a kind of preop(tical) optimism in Fanon that is tied to the commerce between the lived experience of the black and the fact of blackness and between the thing and the object—an optimism recoverable, one might say, only by way of mistranslation, that bridged but unbridgeable gap that Heidegger explores as both distance and nearness in his discourse on “The Thing.”

Fanon’s construction of the black as deontologically bound to resistance either reifies dominant narratives of the criminality of blackness or prevents meaningful resistance




I must emphasize my lack of interest in some puritanically monochromatic denunciation of an irreducible humanism in Fanon. Nor is one after some simple disavowal of the law as if the criminality in question had some stake in such a reaction. Rather, what one wants to amplify is a certain Fanonian elaboration of the law of motion that Adorno will come to speak of in Fanon’s wake. Fanon writes, “Here we find the old law stating that anything alive cannot afford to remain still while the nation is set in motion, while man both demands and claims his infinite humanity” (221). A few years later, in different contexts, Adorno will write: “The inner consistency through which artworks participate in truth always involves their untruth; in its most unguarded manifestations art has always revolted against this, and today this revolt has become art’s own law of movement [Bewegungsgesetz]” (Aesthetic Theory, 168–

69) and “Artworks’ paradoxical nature, stasis, negates itself. The movement of artworks must be at a standstill and thereby become visible. Their immanent processual character—the legal process that they undertake against the merely existing world that is external to them—is objective prior to their alliance with any party” (176–77). In the border between Black Skins, White Masks and The Wretched of the

Earth, the body that questions is a truth that bears untruth. It is a heavy burden to be made to stand as the racial-sexual embodiment of the imagination in its lawless freedom, and the knowledge it produces exclusively, particularly when such standing is a function of having one’s wings clipped by the understanding.29 However the burden of such exemplarity, the burden of being the problem or the case, is disavowed at a far greater cost. So that what is important about Fanon is his own minor internal conflict, the viciously constrained movement between these burdens. On the one hand, the one who does not engage in a certain criminal disruption of colonial rule is pathological, unnatural; on the other hand, one wants to resist a certain understanding of the Algerian as “born idlers, born liars, born thieves, and born criminals” (Wretched/P, 221). Insofar as Fanon seems to think that the colonized subject is born into a kind of preconscious duty to resist, that the absence of the capacity to perform or to recognize this duty is a kind of birth defect that retards the development of political consciousness,

Fanon is caught between a rock and a crawl space. Against the grain of a colonial psychological discourse that essentially claims “that the North African in a certain way is deprived of a cortex” and therefore relegated to a “vegetative” and purely “instinctual” life, a life of involuntary muscular contractions,

Fanon must somehow still find a way to claim, or to hold in reserve, those very contractions insofar as they are a mobilization against colonial stasis (225). Against the grain of racist notions of “the criminal impulsiveness of the North African” as “the transcription of a certain configuration of the nervous system into his pattern of behavior” or as “a neurologically comprehensible reaction, written into the nature of things, of the thing which is biologically organized,” Fanon must valorize the assertion of a kind of political criminality written into the nature of things while also severely clipping the wings of an imaginative tendency to naturalize and pathologize the behavior of the colonized (228). Insofar as crime marks the Algerian condition within which “each prevents his neighbor from seeing the national enemy” and thereby arriving at a political consciousness, Fanon must move within an almost general refusal to look at the way the colonized look at themselves, a denial or pathologization or policing of the very sociality that such looking implies (231). Here Fanon seems to move within an unarticulated Kantian distinction between criminality as the teleological principle of anticolonial resistance and crime as the unbound, uncountable set of illusory facts that obscure, or defer the advent of, postcolonial reason. This distinction is an ontological distinction; it, too, raises the question concerning the irreducible trace of beings that being bears.30

A2 Whiteness

By subverting we de subvert the naturalness of whiteness

Warren and Fassett, 2004 [The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved Theatre Topics 14.2

(2004) 411-430John T. Warren is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at

Bowling Green State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and power.

Deanna L. Fassett is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San José

State University, where she teaches courses in instructional communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies //liam TAM]

But subversion is not as simple as it seems. One might easily misread "subverting," imagining we endorse a view of whiteness research that suggests one can simply undo racism by undermining whiteness to

such an extent that it ceases to be the cultural center (see Ignatiev and Garvey; McLaren). While such a vision of the world is well intentioned, it is an enabling fiction at best and a dangerous myth at worst; in effect, such a rhetorical move allows white identified/appearing people an easy out, an easy dismissal of the power of whiteness in our lives and in our actions. Rather than embrace this easy sense of subversion, we take "subverting" as an active verb, in which we grapple with whiteness in an attempt

to unmask it. This is to say, these workshops are a way for participants to see and think about whiteness in ways they have not done before. By pointing out whiteness's power and discursive machinery, we

hope to subvert its naturalness, or rather, participate in the process of racial subversion. While we do not think a single two-hour workshop will transform these participants into antiracists, we hope to create spaces for us all to reenvision how race matters (as well as how race comes to matter) in our lives.

Misc

Equiano’s story

Story beginning—fear and abjection as a result of the encounter with the ship but also the possibility of redemptive resistance




Two passages:

The first object that saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, that was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe, and much more the then feelings of my mind when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I was sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexion too, differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, which was very different from any I had ever heard, united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would freely have parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with the meanest slave in my own country. When I looked round the ship too, and saw a large furnace or copper boiling and a multitude of black people, of every description, chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck, and fainted. When I recovered a little, I found some black people about me, who I believed were some of those who brought me on board, and had been receiving their pay: they talked to me in order to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair. They told me I was not: and one of the crew brought me a small portion of spiritous liquor in a wine glass; but, being afraid of him, I would not take it out of his hand. One of the blacks therefore took it from him and gave it to me, and I took a little down my palate, which, instead of reviving me, as they thought it would, threw me into the greatest consternation at the strange feeling it produced, having never tasted any such liquor before. (Equiano

1987, 32–33)

I was soon put down under the decks, and there received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathesomeness of the stench, and with my crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. I had never experienced anything of this kind before, and although, not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time

I saw it, yet nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side . . . (33–

34)

The ship is the emblem of the encounter, the originary site of abjection, of the production or evocation of a shuddering affect that is quickly conceptualized in/as the mark of the aural and visual differences encoded in language and complexion.4 This initial encounter remains. It is durative, domesticated or

inhabited in representation. It remains in every passage of the text, in the text’s representation of the act of passage. Part of what the encounter generates in Equiano is a fear of being eaten, terror which is shaped by prior experience in the culture of his origin in which food is given a double status— sustenance and (possibly) poison—and is thus to be regarded warily.5 The young Equiano is scared of being consumed, and though he is not eaten by the white men, certainly he is consumed by the ship, situated within its bowels, swallowed by and radically drawn into the economy the ship symbolizes and instantiates, and incorporated into the dialectic of recognition that is initiated by the encounter and its originary abjectification. But this description of abjection foreshadows an emergent resistance. In that emergence, Equiano embodies a reversal of the pharmakon, opening and marking the possibility of a contamination of what consumes him—a re-sounding and re-vision of the aural-visual assumptions and structure of European Man and his self-image. The abject, force-fed child takes poison for medicine while being taken, as poison, for sustenance.

Middle story—language as the simultaneous manifestation of capitulation and resistance




Two passages:

It was now between two and three years since I first came to England, a great part of which I had spent at sea; so that I became mured to that service, and began to consider myself as happily situated; for my master treated me always extremely well; and my attachment and gratitude to him were great. From the various scenes I had beheld on ship-board, I soon grew a stranger to terror of every kind, and was, in that respect at least, almost an Englishman. I have often reflected with surprise that I never felt half the alarm, at any of the numerous dangers in which I have been, that I was filled with at the first sight of the

Europeans, and at every act of theirs, even the most trifling, when I first came among them, and for sometimes afterwards. That fear, however, the effect of my ignorance, wore away as I began to know them.

I could now speak English tolerably well, and perfectly understood every thing that was said. I not only felt myself quite easy with these new countrymen, but relished their society and manners. I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us; and therefore I had the stronger desire to resemble them, to imbibe their spirit, and imitate their manners. I therefore embraced every occasion of improvement; and every new thing that I observed I treasured up in my memory. I had long wished to be able to read and write; and for this purpose I took every opportunity to gain instruction, but had made as but very little progress. However, when I went to London with my master, I had soon an opportunity of improving myself, which I gladly embraced. Shortly after my arrival, he sent me to wait upon the Miss Guerins, who had treated me with so much kindness when I was there before, and they sent me to school. (51–52)

There was also one Daniel Queen, about forty years of age, a man very well educated, who messed with me on board this ship, and he likewise dressed and attended the captain. Fortunately this man soon became very much attached to me, and took great pains to instruct me in many things. He taught me to

shave, and dress hair a little, and also to read in the Bible, explaining many passages to me, which I did not comprehend. I was wonderfully surprised to see the laws and rules of my own country written almost exactly here; a circumstance which, I believe, tended to impress our manners and customs more deeply on my memory. I used to tell him of this resemblance; and many a time we have set up the whole night together at this employment. In short, he was like a father to me; and some used even to call me after his name; they also styled me “the black Christian.” Indeed I almost loved him with the affection of a son. Many things I have denied myself, that he might have them; and when I used to play at marbles or any other game, and won a few halfpence, or got some money for shaving any one, I used to buy him a little sugar or tobacco, as far as my stock of money would go. He used to say that he and I never should part, and that when ship was paid off, as I was as free as himself or any other man on board, he would instruct me in his business, by which I might gain a livelihood. This gave me new life and spirits; and my heart burned within me, while I thought the time long till I obtained my freedom. For though my master had not promised it to me, yet, besides the assurances I had often received that he had no right to detain me, he always treated me with the greatest kindness, and reposed in me an unbounded confidence. He even paid attention to my morals; and would never suffer me to deceive him, or tell lies, of which he used to tell me the consequences; and that if I did do, God would not love me. So that from all this tenderness I had never once supposed, in all my dreams of freedom, that he would think of detaining me any longer than I wished. (63–64)

The encounter remains in the memory of abjection and terror, an ineradicable and inconsumable trace even and especially in the context of the desire to resemble the one who’d once been feared. The paradox of freedom resurfaces in the fact of the abjectifying desire for and impossibility of resemblance.

There is the illusion of resemblance—between the laws and rules of Equiano’s country of origin and those written in the Bible (a paradoxically divergent coalescence about which more later)—but that illusion is disappeared by the split between the theory and practice of Christianity; and in the absence of either an aural resemblance (a sound that is an absolute sounding-like; the absence of accent) or a visual resemblance (effect of some magical phenotypical transfiguration), resemblance must be reformulated and relocated by and in Equiano’s relation to language—to tone, grammar, and the written mark.

Resemblance is to be made manifest in literacy, that which would become the mark of the same, the

“universal,” the “human.”

Equiano’s overcoming of terror corresponds, then, with a desire for resemblance that is enacted in his virtual acquisition of English(ness). The ability to speak, read, and write English “tolerably well” is connected to an ability no longer to look on white men as spirits; instead, he looks on them as superior men and wishes to resemble them, to “imbibe their spirits and imitate their manners.” (This opens, of course, the possibility of a kind of intoxication, and reintroduces the motif of consumption and the notion of pharmakon that goes along with it; this notion of intoxication is bound up with the possibility of transportation or ecstasy, and this imbibing of the spirit returns, along with the motif of consumption, during Equiano’s conversion [again, about which more later], prompted by his attendance at a “soulfeast” at which nothing material was eaten or drunk, and at which the entire complex of metaphors regarding consumption approaches resolution.)6 Equiano “therefore embraced every occasion of improvement,” many of which were afforded him by the Misses Guerin who taught him to read and also were responsible for his baptism, thereby foreshadowing the resolution of a dialectical motion from the white man as inhabiting the interstitial identity between God and Man, to the white man as superior

man or lord to the Lord. Nevertheless, there is a certain reconstruction of language, a certain refusal to understand, that is embedded in the desire, manifest in the re-citation, to move from the abject to the same. It is a desire for “selfimprovement” through the knowledge of language that is, again, wholly within the frame of the encounter. Equiano must be given this opportunity by the one by whom he is taken. He depends upon random kindnesses and gifts: enter the Misses Guerin, who offer Equiano the gift of (their) language; his profit, of course, is the ability to curse. Again, one might reconfigure this ability: as a mode of resistance, disabling the language, making it halt or limp or move unreliably for— which is to say against—its framers; as an infiltration or improvisation of the language, a contamination or an improvement, if you will, of that with which one would have been improved. The problem, though, is that even this reversal of improvement is doubled by another kind of fall: one learns to curse when before, in Africa, one had had neither the need nor the tools “to pollute the name of the object of our adoration. . . .” (20)

Nevertheless, this reversal, the improvisation of improvement, is what must occur in the absence of any absolute mimesis. The accent remains— like the trace of the encounter—as the sound-alike is resounded. The written shifts uncontrollably; the letter moves. That movement is not the authentic difference of (the) African/Experience, a difference constitutive of the maintenance of the dialectic of recognition in the discourse of abolition, and manifest in prefaces which, in an attempt to figuratively confirm an imagined and already written/canonized otherness, speak of “round, unvarnished tale[s],” thereby betraying the inability to read Equiano except through the image of Othello, the phantasmatically stylized other whose self-deprecation conceals an intoxicating and sexually transgressive and predatory linguistic power, or in reviews that would vouch for the narratives’ authenticity in spite of the artful mediation of some European editor which, finally, must have been there.7 And, of course, one must remember that racial codes and biologically determined boundaries would always have served to mark the absolute boundary between the races, even as the consumptive sexual appetites of the European (man) takes to itself that impurity against which it so zealously guards.8 Note, then, the echoes of Shakespeare’s construction of the colonized, enslaved, or racialized other with which Equiano is determined, and which he is determined to resemble: paradigmatic oppositional attitudes toward and within the white man and his language (and his daughter).

Final Section – speaking as both a co-option of the Master’s tools and the refusal to speak in the face of the master to deconstruct the dialectic of Master and Slave—the improvisation opens up the space for a possible transcendence of various forms of power




Three passages:

In pursuance of our orders we sailed from Portsmouth for the Thames, and arrived at Deptford the 10th of December, where we cast our anchor just as it was high water. The ship was up about half an hour, when my master ordered the barge to be manned; and, all in an instant, without having before given me the least reason to suspect any thing of the matter, he forced me into the barge, saying, I was going to leave him, but he would take care that I did not. I was so struck with the unexpectedness of this

proceeding, that for some time I did not make a reply; only I made an offer to go for my books and clothes, but he swore I should not move out of his sight; and if I did, he would cut my throat, at the same time taking out his hanger. I began, however, to collect myself; and, plucking up courage, I told him that I was free, and he could not by law serve me so. But this only enraged him the more; and he continued to swear, and said he would soon let me know whether he would or not and at that instant sprung himself into the barge, from the ship, to the astonishment and sorrow of all on board. (64–65)

But, just as we had got a little below Gravesend, we came alongside of a ship going away the next tide for the West-Indies; her name was the Charming Sally, Captain James Doran. My master went on board and agreed with him for me; and in little time I was sent for into the cabin. When I came there Captain

Doran asked me if I knew him; I answered I did not; ‘Then,’ said he, you are now my slave.’ I told him my master could not sell me to him nor to anyone else. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘did not your master buy you?’ I confessed he did. ‘But I have served him,’ said I, ‘many years, and he has taken all my wages and prizemoney, for I only got one sixpence during the war. Besides this I have been baptized; and, by the laws of the land, no man has a right to sell me.’ And I added, that I had heard a lawyer, and others, at different times tell my master so. They both then said, that those people who told me so, were not my friends; but I replied—it was very extraordinary that other people did not know the law as well as they. Upon this, Captain Doran said I talked too much English, and if I did not behave myself well and be quiet, he had a method on board to make me. I was too well convinced of his power over me to doubt what he said; and my former sufferings in the slave-ship presenting themselves to my mind, the recollection of them made me shudder. However, before I retired I told them, that as I could not get any right among men here, I hoped I should hereafter in Heaven, and I immediately left the cabin, filled with resentment and sorrow. (65)

Thus, at the moment I expected all my toils to end, was I plunged into, as I supposed, a new slavery; in comparison of which all my service hitherto had been perfect freedom; and whose horrors, always present to my mind, now rushed on it with tenfold aggravation. I wept bitterly for some time; and began to think that I must have done something to displease the Lord, that he punished me so severely. This filled me with painful reflections on my past conduct. I recollected that, on the morning of our arrival at

Deptford, I had very rashly sworn that as soon as we reached London, I would spend the day in rambling and sport. My conscience smote me for this unguarded expression: I felt that the Lord was able to disappoint me in all things, and immediately considered my present situation as a judgment of Heaven, on account of my presumption in swearing. (66)

Equiano tells of a lessening of the original terror of the encounter, and that telling can be construed as the mark of the submergence of any possible resistance, and a capitulation to an oppressive Eurocentric model of selfmeasure and self-fashioning. The absence of terror is connected to Equiano’s relation to the ship, which is the locus of his sense of himself as (virtual) Englishman, the site of a delicate shift from the phantasm of consumption to the fantasy of assimilation. But, as we see, his status on board the ship must have a double implication, and a resistant, improvisatory, asyntagmatic use of language occurs at the very moment that the virtuality of his Englishness is again unconcealed, namely in the reemergent encounter with the other—the redoubled image of another consuming ship—that corresponds to his sale; this is the moment at which it becomes clear that the absence of terror was a finite deferral, and not an erasure. The other side of that implication is also indexed to his virtuality as an Englishman, a virtuality that leads to the first of his many ineffectual appeals to the law. These appeals signify not only the juridical difference between himself and the English, but the impotence of the law with respect to

freedom, on the one hand, and salvation on the other. Finally, the law pales in comparison to a certain kind of knowledge (more precisely, faith, though we’ll see that neither faith nor law work in opposition to the other) that is bound up with the improvisation of a future state, one indexed to both freedom and salvation. Part of what Equiano’s text demands that we confront are the questions of the relation between the knowledge of freedom and the knowledge of salvation, and of what these have to do with the knowledge of language and the knowledge of the Lord.

So, the double of Equiano’s narrative of his original encounter with his other is the story of his first being sold. This sale comes just as Equiano has begun to believe he will finally obtain his freedom. Equiano’s sale is seen by him as the result of the unguarded expression of emotion. Still, though unguarded expression—namely, cursing—produces negative effects, those effects can be warded off by another form of unguarded expression: a pouring out of the soul, with unfeigned repentance and contrition of heart. Earnest prayer relieves Equiano: “In a little time my grief, spent with its own violence, began to subside; and after the first confusion of my thoughts was over, I reflected with more calmness on my present condition” (67). It’s as if the opposing profuse strains of unpremeditated expression cancel one another out and are replaced by reasoned reflection and the possibility of a kind of redemption.9

Mediating between curse and prayer is the moment of an improvisatory contamination of the oppressor’s language, the encounter in which Equiano “talked too much English.” That impasse between imitative and resistant uses of the language is itself marked by an interruptive logical displacement such that, at the very moment at which it would seem we have a resistant encounter to valorize, we must also see that that encounter is the emergence of an interruption of the encounter as such, an interruption made possible by Equiano’s knowledge of freedom. When Captain Doran asks Equiano if he knew him, he seems to imply that Equiano ought to have some prior knowledge, a certain antemetaphysical bondsman’s understanding or competence, that would allow him to recognize Doran. The self-recognition that would emerge in Doran by way of Equiano’s affirmative answer is interrupted, however, and in that deferral Doran must bestow upon Equiano a moment of selfrecognition, a moment that would let Equiano know who and what he is so that Doran’s identity can be confirmed. “You are now my slave,” says Doran; but here, recognition is missed again. Though Doran’s utterance would be performative, as if in the face of Equiano’s failure (or refusal) to recognize his new master, Doran hopes to instantiate, by speaking, their relative statuses: you are now, in the deferring absence of your immediate recognition of this fact and of what it implies about our identities, my slave because I say so.

Still, in the interruptive absence of the immediate knowledge of his condition and of his identity vis-à-vis

Captain Doran, another knowledge is implied: precisely that knowledge which animates Equiano’s resistant speech. The “too much English” that Equiano talks is a function of the too little English he talks at the moment in which his response is supposed to establish the identities of lord and bondsman.

When Equiano responds, answering that he did not know Captain Doran, that he did not recognize the master or his mastery, that he did not know himself to be this master’s slave, he lays claim to that knowledge in his expression of it. Not to know what Captain Doran would have him know is not to know nothing.

Of course, this moment of misrecognition—at which the condition of possibility of a renaissance of resistance is revealed—is shadowed by another recognition. One lord is denied, but another Lord is affirmed as the author of Equiano’s misfortunes. Here, swearing and resistant response, a stated intention to carouse, and an oppositional legal assertion of independence are connected precisely in the fact that that legalistic assertion of independence is, more precisely, a declaration of in/dependence

contingent upon the mediating effects of an already extant ownership. Lordship and lordship return in and as one another’s figures, and at moments of resistant or unguarded expression, moments which both constitute a kind of devolution of their originary animus, like the “I answered I didn’t know” that marks the negative assertion of the trace of the knowledge of freedom. The question, of course, of the origin of that trace is vexed and, perhaps, impossible. Embedded in that question, however, is a possible improvisation of the very idea of the lord in its relation/opposition to the bondsman. That improvisation, emerging at the site of another question concerning the language of improvisatory resistance’s origin, in which the knowledge of freedom is expressed, is one to which we’ll return by way of the theorization of

Ellen Butler, a theorization which anticipates the improvisation of another consciousness, moving outfrom-the-outside, that the oppositions of lord and bondsman, Lord and bondsman, curse and prayer allow us only to imagine.

Rowell

Challenge static structures of language and meaning

Rowell 2004

(Charles H., Ohio State University PhD in English literary studies, Texas A&M professor of

English, interviewing Fred Moden, UC Riverside Department of English professor, “’Words Don’t Go

There’: An Interview with Fred Moten,” Callaloo, Vol. 27, No. 4, Fall 2004, p. 962-963, ProjectMUSE, IC)

MOTEN: Although there are a whole set of very complicated, well-developed and well-defined protocols within which music is created and received, music is not constrained by the requirement to mean in the way that language is so constrained. It is in this sense, according to Louis Zukofsky, Baraka, Harryette

Mullen and a whole bunch of others, that music becomes a limit that poets attempt to approach. But even though music is not constrained by meaning, no one would ever say that music doesn’t bear content or that music doesn’t have something to say. So I’m trying to write poems that are situated in relation to this question: how is it that a work can bear content, have something to say, while not being wholly bound to the constraints and the requirements of making meaning? At the same time, I never want totally to refuse either the requirement or opportunity that is given in poetry to produce meaning.

I want to write poems that recognizably inhabit, but in some kind of underground or fugitive way, the space between the laws of music and the laws of meaning. I want to challenge the law that language lays down while taking advantage of the opportunity that language affords. Of course, with regard both to language and to music, the African Diaspora is a global experimental field in which the laws of valuation, phonic organization and graphic (re) production are constantly placed under the severe pressure of questioning and creativity. In “Ev’rytime We Say Goodbye,” Cole Porter writes: “There’s no love song finer / but how strange, the change, / from major to minor”; but what Betty Carter does both to these words and to that change takes Porter’s composition out into the very economy, the very discovery, of the secret (of loss and of love) that he wished to transmit. She moves against the laws he broke and made, and I want to move on her line (which is also Baraka’s line and Mullen’s line, but also, by way of different protocols, different versions of the secret, Porter’s line and, in a whole other way, on wholly other terrain, Zukofsky’s line as well).

Fugitivity aesthetics

Rowell 2004

(Charles H., Ohio State University PhD in English literary studies, Texas A&M professor of

English, interviewing Fred Moden, UC Riverside Department of English professor, “’Words Don’t Go

There’: An Interview with Fred Moten,” Callaloo, Vol. 27, No. 4, Fall 2004, p. 963-964, ProjectMUSE, IC)

MOTEN: In Nathaniel Mackey’s great essay “Cante Moro,” he discusses—by way of Federico Garcia

Lorca’s elaboration of the term “duende” as well as some amazing stuff Baraka has to say about how saxophonist John Tchicai’s tone and phrasing “slide away from the proposed”—a particular quality of sound that implies and encodes movement, restlessness, a kind of fugal and centrifugal desire and execution that he calls “fugitivity.” This sound is indicative of something that one is possessed by; it indicates, finally, life; that, as Foucault says, life constantly escapes; it steals away. Art works this way, too, I think; this sliding away from the proposed, this placement of the truth or of the secret in that space of tension or movement that is characterized by obscurity and indirection is what [Theodor]

Adorno calls art’s “immigrant law of motion.” That law is given, and as its breaking, in a sound, in the dispossessive tension between music and meaning that Harryette Mullen talks about under the rubric of

the “runaway tongue.” This is the sound of the resistance to slavery; the critique of (private) property and of the proper, and it is, in the radical transformationality of all of its reproduction and recording, its commodified dissemination and circulation, irreducible and ongoing. That sound infuses Taylor’s art and that’s what I was trying to get at in the passage you quote. He’s operating on a plane (and in a plain) of desire in which freedom and justice, each in its own complicated relation to law, are envisioned as unopposed to one another. That’s our tradition. It is fugitive, even criminal, but not lawless. It is, as musician and musicologist Salim Washington says, a tradition of freedom but not of license. It’s not but nothing other than the tradition within which Holcomb exerts his “untamed sense of control.” I can’t help thinking of a vast set of ranges and styles of fugitivity: Mondrians’s and Shakespeare’s (and now I’m back to the question that precedes the one I’m supposed to be answering) and Rakim’s and Aretha’s.

But, see, this is the trouble with talking about transitions and the qualities that inform them: you just start babbling and dropping names. In the end, that’s probably all my writing is—dropping names and droppin’ things, like Betty Carter.

Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr - University of Michigan Debate Camp Wiki

Note

-- On File Layout

Some of the 1acs utilize music as a form of poetics, such as the song “Cold War” by

Janelle Monae, “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone, “Ronald Reagan” by Killer Mike or

“Power” by Kanye West.

Other 1acs use different literary devices. The ‘Moten’ 1ac cites the story of Uncle

Tolliver to explain fugitivity, and “Black Privilege” plays a poem by Crystal Valentine.

Researching how different artists perform fugitivity was one of the most fun parts of this file. If you’d like to be creative and do this on your own there is a section called

‘Build Your Own 1ac’ that contains some of the various parts you would use to help you construct your argument.

-- On File Construction

Thank you to Tamara Morrison from U Prep who brought the idea to the lab and put in tons of extra hours in the library to make it happen. I think her note here is excellent and right to the point;

To follow Tamara’s advice, holler anytime with questions or ideas to any of these folks, who all did great work on this file;

Danielle Zitro from Austin SFA

Isaac Cui from Liberal Arts and Sciences (LBJ)

Kristina Curtiss from Traverse City Central

Nicolas Williams from Henderson

Riley Franklin from Dulles

Ragul Manoharan from Little Rock Central

Ross Fitzpatrick from Barstow

Simone Schwartz-Lombard from Notre Dame

Tamara Morrison from U Prep

**additional thanks to DJ Williams and Peyton Woods from Little Rock Central for their contributions as well, all the more impressive given that this was work they added on top of their work in their own lab.

1acs

1ac—Janelle Monae

~Janelle Monae - Cold War

her performance as a black women and her reference to the cold war Janelle creates a duality of everywhere-ness and concrete experience

REDMOND, 11

Thus affirm the 1ac as a performance to counter-gaze the state.

Freedom isn’t fiat; it is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the location of the body or an abstract vision of social change.

Monae’s narrative creates a space that fosters different methods of state deconstruction.

REDMOND, 11

Monae’s sound takes advantages of social movements and leave an opportunity for future one

REDMOND, 11

Monae´ has developed, within a relatively short period of time,a sound/sight corpus of black

Monae s challenge to those who have forgotten, lost, or ignored their own voice and agency, and her maintenance of black diasporic arts traditions in which "the

cultural realm is always in play and already politically significant terrain," is a "fantastic" disruption to black political lethargy, and evidences an intelligent design rooted in black feminist

constructions that wed body to mind and experience to history (Iton). It is within these methods and conjunctions that the future spaces of political possibility might be realized

This space allows black women to not only deconstruct the state, but also patriarchy in order to combat oppression with alternative forms of performance.

REDMOND, 11

This deconstruction allows us to question history as it affects present structures as well as promoting a free space that advocates for alternative discourse.

REDMOND, 11

Fugitivity exists in our use of language and it’s constant re-reading and re-use. Such a

“freedom” is utopian and fugitive

Tremblay McGraw 10

The knowledge here is specifically key. It allows experimental ways of change

Warren and Fassett, 2004

The role of the ballot is to vote for the team that best creates a space of undercommons to deconstruct and overthrow anti-black structures of power

1ac—Moten

Browne 2012

Slaves were not, however, passive objects implicated within the play of this biopolitical endeavor. Consider the story of Uncle Toliver, as told in Leon Litwack’s

“Been in the Storm So Long”:

One might conclude that Uncle Toliver’s death was a nihilistic, tragic event—that his state of subjugation was so entrenched that nothing meaningful could come from it.

Yet, the aporia of the slave’s unintelligible actions, of property’s critique against

Property, creates a bewilderment, a disorientation of the Master that allows for the possibility of agency. Fred Moten notes in 2004 that…

Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2004

Vote affirmative to recognize the fugitive politics of Uncle Toliver.

Vote affirmative to acknowledge that the United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance of fugitive bodies.

Vote affirmative to endorse fugitivity.

Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2008

**gender modified

Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2004

Vote affirmative to steal from the academy. Moten and Harney explain in 2004 that…

Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, and Harney, Singapore

Management University professor, 2004

1ac—Nina Simone

Play – https://youtu.be/D5Y11hwjMNs?t=18s

It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me.

Yeah, it's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me, ooooooooh...

And I'm feelin' good.

Fish in the sea, you know how I feel

River runnin' free, you know how I feel

Blossom on the tree, you know how I feel

It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me,

And I'm feelin' good

Dragonfly out in the sun, you know what I mean, don't you know,

Butterflies all havin' fun, you know what I mean.

Sleep in peace when day is done: that's what I mean,

And this old world is a new world and a bold world for me...

**“Been in the Storm So Long”:**

**Our performance is an act of poetics from a “legacy gone missing,” a strategy that both utilizes enclosure and run, that is here but is not here, that is there but is not**

**Our performance is an act of poetics from a “legacy gone missing,” a strategy that both utilizes enclosure and run, that is here but is not here, that is there but is not**

**Our performance is an act of poetics from a “legacy gone missing,” a strategy that both utilizes enclosure and run, that is here but is not here, that is there but is not**