OCTOS NEG V. STANFROD GL
1NC
1NC T
A. The aff isn’t topical—
The agent and verb of the rez indicate a debate about desirability of policy change
Jon M Ericson 3, Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et
al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each
topic contains certain key elements, although they
agent doing the acting ---“The
United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition
of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges
action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a
program or policy into action through governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a
limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for
have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An
example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal
with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The
entire debate is about whether something ought to
occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an
audience to perform the future action that you propose.
Legalize means to make lawful by judicial or legislative sanction
Business Dictionary No Date, "legalize",
www.businessdictionary.com/definition/legalize.html
legalize¶ Definition¶ To make enforceable, justifiable, or lawful by judicial or legislative sanction.
Relevance isn’t enough—only a precise and limited rez creates deliberation on a
point of mutual difference
Steinberg & Freeley 8 *Austin J. Freeley is a Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal,
personal injury and civil rights law, AND **David L. Steinberg , Lecturer of Communication
Studies @ U Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision
Making pp45Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict of
interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or policy, there is no need for
debate: the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to
attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four," because there is simply no controversy about
this statement. (Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas,
proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate. In addition, debate cannot produce
effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For
example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal
immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is
their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do
they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to
discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity- to gain
citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that
American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status?
Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low are their families impacted by their status? What is
the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the
Mexican border, establish a national identification can!, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite
immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a
conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this "debate" is likely to
be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a
particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be
discussed and resolved effectively, controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in
unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure
of the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the summer
of 2007.
Someone disturbed by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly educated, socially
disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible job! They are overcrowded,
and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain
order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision,
such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned
citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their
frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their
discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of
clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such
as "What can be done to improve public education?"—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up
simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can
be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for
legislative assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter
schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly
identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific
policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference.
To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing
limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk
about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global warming" we are likely to have an
interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement
"Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis
for clear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for
some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose.
Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely
worded to promote well-organized argument. What
sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels,
government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context?
What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question
might be. "Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of our support in a certain
crisis?" The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as "Resolved: That the
United States should enter into a mutual defense treatv with Laurania." Negative advocates
might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to
say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that
good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts
of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance
provided by focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following
discussion.
It’s a prior question—otherwise there's nothing to require disagreement
Ruth Lessl Shively 2k, associate professor of political science at Texas A&M, 2000 Political
Theory and Partisan Politics p. 181-2
The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The
ambiguists must say "no" to—they must reject and limit—some ideas and
actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to some things. In particular, they must say "yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first,
that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is
necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The
mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest—that consensus kills debate. But
this is true only if the agreement is perfect—if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In
our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but
not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited
agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths;
most cases, however,
therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a
There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement.
we cannot argue about something if we are not communicating: if we cannot
agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts
as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we
can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks
euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience
simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that
it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about
what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas
about the subject and/or the terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a
sit-in must share an understanding of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being
basic sense, the reverse is true.
(Murray 1960, 10) In other words,
resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words,
contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony. The point may seem trite, as surely the ambiguists
would agree that basic terms must be shared before they can be resisted and problematized. In fact, they are often very candid
about this seeming paradox in their approach: the paradoxical or "parasitic" need of the subversive for an order to subvert. But admitting the paradox is
not helpful if, as usually happens here, its implications are ignored; or if the only implication
drawn is that order or harmony is an unhappy fixture of human life. For what the paradox should tell
us is that some kinds of harmonies or orders are, in fact, good for resistance; and some ought to be fully supported.
As such, it should counsel against the kind of careless rhetoric that lumps all orders or
harmonies together as arbitrary and inhumane. Clearly some basic accord about the terms of
contest is a necessary ground for all further contest. It may be that if the ambiguists wish to
remain full-fledged ambiguists, they cannot admit to these implications, for to open the door to
some agreements or reasons as good and some orders as helpful or necessary, is to open the door to some sort of
rationalism. Perhaps they might just continue to insist that this initial condition is ironic, but
that the irony should not stand in the way of the real business of subversion.Yet difficulties
remain. For agreement is not simply the initial condition, but the continuing ground, for
contest. If we are to successfully communicate our disagreements, we cannot simply agree on
basic terms and then proceed to debate without attention to further agreements. For debate and contest are forms of
dialogue: that is, they are activities premised on the building of progressive agreements. Imagine, for instance, that two
people are having an argument about the issue of gun control. As noted earlier, in any argument, certain initial agreements will be needed just to begin the discussion. At the
discussants must agree on basic terms: for example, they must have some shared sense of what gun control is about; what is at issue in arguing
They must also agree—and they do so simply by entering into
debate—that they will not use violence or threats in making their cases and that they are willing to listen
to, and to be persuaded by, good arguments. Such agreements are simply implicit in the act of
argumentation.
very least, the two
about it; what facts are being contested, and so on.
B. Vote neg—
1. Prep and clash—post facto topic change alters balance of prep, which
structurally favors the aff because they speak last and use perms—key to engage a
prepared adversary and a target of mutual contestation.
2. Limits—specific topics are key to reasonable expectations for 2Ns—open
subjects create incentives for avoidance and monopolization of moral high
ground—that denies a role for the neg and turns accessibility.
Debating and researching government policy does not entrench a universal
standard of male subjecthood, but refusal on those grounds ironically does
Zanotti, 13 [Laura, associate professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech., Ph.D. from the
University of Washington in 2008 and joined the Purdue University faculty in 2009.
“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World”,
originally published online 30 December 2013, DOI: 10.1177/0304375413512098, P. Sage
Publications]
Unlike positions that adopt governmentality as a descriptive tool and end up embracing the liberal substantialist ontological assumptions and
epistemological framework they criticize, positions that embrace an intra-agential (or relational) ontology, maintain that nothing ‘‘is’’ but
everything is made within specific practices. Governmentality as a research
program that explores ‘‘the present as multiply constituted, polytemporal . . . and recombinatory . . .
and not just the expression of a singular logic or the resultant of a linear process’’61 has an important role to
play as a methodology of inquiry that brings to the foreground the techniques through
which power is practically enacted, the ambiguity embedded in its practices, and the various tactics for
unsettling it that become possible in the context of multifarious political encounters. Because political
power scripts do not stand as substances that preexist the practices of their making and the specific relations that construct them, the application of a
relational ontology and of an archival methodology opens the way for nonidealist, engrained in praxis, analyses of politics and conceptualizations of
political agency. In this framework, the
space for politics is rooted on ambiguity and performativity, that is on the
making and remaking of meaning, subjects, power, and political spaces in the context of agonic relations.
What Does This All Matter for Political Agency? I will now turn to elaborating more specifically on the relevance of scholarly positions that, while not
necessarily relying mainly on governmentality as a research program, have imagined both power and subjects in non-substantialist ways and embraced
situatedness and ambiguity as the very constitutive space for politics for conceiving political agency beyond liberal straightjackets. For Richard Ashley
and R. B. J. Walker, far from being issues to be resolved or feared in the name of a sovereign universal truth and the definition of what one’s identity is,
ambiguity and uncertainty are indeed political resources to be deployed in sites of struggles where the
‘‘differences between inside and outside are uncertain.’’62 Here political action is not predicated on asserting
‘‘the life and freedom or some sovereign identity, some community of truth that is
victimized and repressed by power.’’63 Instead, resistance is very much about questioning
practices of power that attempt ‘‘to impose and fix ways of knowing and doing that
shall be recognized as natural and necessary to autonomous being.’’64 For Ashley and Walker, in other words,
political action is about questioning assumptions about the unity of identity, the mighty homogeneity of
power, and the stability of categories of thought. Downplaying ambiguity is indeed itself a technique of power. In taking issue with ‘‘descriptive’’
governmentality theories, Jacqueline Best argued representing social events as totally calculable is itself a governmental strategy, part of government’s
very attempts to depoliticize them.65 For Best, such representations undermine the analysis of what ‘‘exceeds efforts to govern through risk.’’66
Therefore, one should not be seduced by contemporary governmental strategies’ own promise of infallibility. For Best, ambiguity brings to the
foreground the limits of knowledge and should be included in current analyses of governmental tactics. Ambiguity is a fundamental trajectory of power,
rooted in the nontransparency of language that always calls for hermeneutics and opens the possibility for political interpretation and manipulation
even in the presence of governmental strategies of regulation. Indeed, pace liberal institutionalism that looks at norms as ‘‘entities’’ and explanatory
variables for institutional behavior, regulations are only a shell and norms are always in context, negotiated and renegotiated in the contingent spaces
within which they are interpreted. Postcolonial literature has also offered interesting insights of how political agency may be exerted in the face of
power’s self representation as a powerful and mighty script. Homi Bhabha has argued that colonial power’s self-representation as ‘‘unity’’ is a colonial
strategy of domination and explored the subversive potential of the mimicry and mockery of the colonized.67 For Bhabha, The display of hybridity—its
peculiar ‘‘replication’’—terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery. Such a reading of colonial authority profoundly
unsettles the demand that figures at the centre of the originary myth of colonialist power. It is the demand that the space it occupies be unbounded, its
reality coincident with the emergence of an imperialist narrative and history, its discourse nondialogic, its enunciation unitary, unmarked by the trace
of difference-a demand that is recognizable in a range of justificatory Western ‘‘civil’’ discourses. 68 Bhabha sees subjection and resistance as intimately
related. Political agency is a process of hybridization through transformation of meaning. Thus, ‘‘Colonial
hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures which can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism.
Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other ‘denied’
knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority—its rules of recognition.’’69 Political agency is not portrayed as
the free subjects’ total rejection of a unified totalizing assemblage of power. While (the colonizer’s) power attempts to reproduce its script by creating
the ‘‘mimic men,’’ that is, the ‘‘docile colonial subjects who are ‘almost the same, but not quite’,’’70 it also creates an ambivalence, a contradiction
between ‘‘same’’ and ‘‘not quite’’ that can be appropriated by the subaltern. Mimicry is easily camouflaged as mockery, with the colonial subject
consequently subverting or refusing to simply repeat the master’s lessons. Instead of producing a controlled imitation or a managed response from the
native, the civilizing mission elicits an answer back, a menacing look, a distorted and disturbing echo.71 Agency is exerted through moves that are
imbricated with discourses of power but also recognize and question them. In this way, universal claims are unsettled and power’s purported unity
menaced. Bhabha sends a note of caution to those whose response to subjection is direct opposition, a warning that ‘‘overcoming domination, far from
getting rid of it, often occasions its mere reversal.’’72 Thus, Ilan Kapoor suggests that ‘‘the agent must play with the cards s/he is dealt, and the
hegemon, despite the appearance of absolute strength, needs or desires the subaltern.’’73 Purity of identity may not ever have been a possibility, even
less when the very ideas of what accounts for identity and alterity are being rapidly reworked. In relying on Foucault’s understanding of power and on
feminist elaborations of Identity,74 Roland Bleiker has embraced a non- substantialist standpoint and the acceptance of ambiguity as central for
conceptualizing human agency and for exploring its actual transformative possibilities. Bleiker questions positions that see agency as a reflection of
externally imposed circumstances as well as traditions that ‘‘bestow the human subject . . . with a relatively large sense of autonomy.’’75 Assumptions of
fundamental autonomy (or ‘‘freedom’’) would ‘‘freeze a specific image of human agency to the detriment of all others.’’76 As Bleiker puts it: ‘‘A
conceptualization of human agency cannot be based on a parsimonious proposition, a one-sentence statement that captures something like an
authentic nature of human agency. There
is no essence to human agency, no core that can be brought down
to a lowest common denominator, that will crystallize one day in a long sought after magic
formula. A search for such an elusive centre would freeze a specific image of human
agency to the detriment of all others.’’77 For Bleiker, universals are indeed tainted with an
imperial flavor. This includes the imperialism of ideas of identity based on liberty and
freedom (rather than imbrication, situatedness, and relationality) as the ontological horizon for understanding
human nature and assessing political agency. Non-substantialist positions do not assume the existence of monolithic power
scripts or ontologically autonomous subjects; do not establish linear links between intentions and outcomes, and do not assume that every form of
agency needs an identifiable agent. Instead, they call for careful attention to contexts. In this disposition, Bleiker advocates a modest conceptualization
of agency, one that relies upon Michel de Certeau’s operational schemes, Judith Butler’s contingent foundations, or Gilles Deleuze’s rhizomes.78 In a
similar vein, in a refreshing reading of realism, Brent Steele has highlighted the problematic aspects of assessing political agency based upon actors’
intention and focused on contexts as the yardstick for assessing political actions.79 For Steele, ‘‘as
actors practice their agency
within the space of a public sphere, intentionality—at best—becomes dynamic as new spaces in
that sphere open up. Intentions, even if they are genuine, become largely irrelevant in
such a dynamic, violent, and vibrant realm of human interaction.’’80 In shifting attention from
‘‘intention’’ to the context that made some actions possible, Steele sees agency as a
‘‘redescription’’ of existing conditions, rather than the total ‘‘rejection’’ of or
‘‘opposition’’ to a totalizing ‘‘script.’’ As a consequence, Steele advocates ‘‘pragmatist humility’’
for politicians and scholars as well.81 In summary, in non-substantialist frameworks, agency is conceptualized as modest and
multifarious agonic interactions, localized tactics, hybridized engagement and redescriptions, a series of uncertain and situated responses to ambiguous
discourses and practices of power aimed at the construction of new openings, possibilities and different distributive processes, the outcomes of which
are always to an extent unpredictable. Political
agency here is not imagined as a quest for individual
authenticity in opposition to a unitary nefarious oppressive Leviathan aimed at the
creation of a ‘‘better totality’’ where subjects can float freed of ‘‘oppression,’’ or a multitude made
into a unified ‘‘subject’’ will reverse the might of Empire and bring about a condition of
immanent social justice. By not reifying power as a script and subject as monads endowed with
freedom non-substantialist positions open the way for conceptualizing political agency as an
engagement imbricated in praxis. The ethical virtue that is called for is ‘‘pragmatist humility,’’
that is the patience of playing with the cards that are dealt to us, enacting redescriptions and
devising tactics for tinkering82 with what exists in specific contexts. Conclusion In this article, I have
argued that, notwithstanding their critical stance, scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool remain rooted in substantialist ontologies
that see power and subjects as standing in a relation of externality. They also downplay processes of coconstitution and the importance of
indeterminacy and ambiguity as the very space where political agency can thrive. In this way, they drastically limit the possibility for imagining political
agency outside the liberal straightjacket. They
represent international liberal biopolitical and governmental
power as a homogenous and totalizing formation whose scripts effectively oppress ‘‘subjects, ’’
that are in turn imagined as free ‘‘by nature.’’ Transformations of power modalities through
multifarious tactics of hybridization and redescriptions are not considered as options. The complexity of
politics is reduced to homogenizing and/or romanticizing narratives and political
engagements are reduced to total heroic rejections or to revolutionary moments. By
questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on
power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options
for
resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or
‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social
order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted
within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and
transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of
liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and
nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or
abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways
with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked,
and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex
diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations
rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the
local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the
ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the
dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative
formulations also foster an ethics of political
engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand
continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’ ’83 Such ethics
of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be
regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with
whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the
consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is
bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my
position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84
CASE
Their conception of identity presumes an intersection of positions from which to
demand accountability—this rendering of the social field reproduces disciplinary
power and locks us into the grid of positionality, preventing change
Puar 7. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke
University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 211
There is no entity, no identity, no queer subject or subject to queer, rather queerness
coming forth at us from all directions, screaming its defiance, suggesting a move from
intersectionality to assemblage, an affective conglomeration that recognizes other
contingencies of belonging (melding, fusing, viscosity, bouncing) that might not fall so easily into what is
sometimes denoted as reactive community formations-identity politics-by control
theorists. The assemblage, a series of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks,
draws together enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect, organic and nonorganic forces.
For Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages are collections of multiplicities:
There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in
the object, or "return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only
determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the
multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase as the multiplicity grows ).... An assemblage
is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.
There are no points or positions.... There are only lines.21
As opposed to an intersectional model of identity, which presumes that components-race,
class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion-are separable analytics and can thus be
disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate
time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency.22 Intersectionality demands
the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, relying on the
logic of equivalence and analogy between various axes of identity and generating narratives of
progress that deny the fictive and performative aspects of identification: you become an identity,
yes, but also timelessness works to consolidate the fiction of a seamless stable identity in every
space. Furthermore, the study of intersectional identities often involves taking imbricated
identities apart one by one to see how they influence each other, a process that betrays the
founding impulse of intersectionality, that identities cannot so easily be cleaved. We can think of
intersectionality as a hermeneutic of positionality that seeks to account for locality, specificity, placement, junctions. As a tool
of diversity management and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism, intersectionality
colludes with the disciplinary apparatus of the state- census, demography, racial
profiling, surveillance- in that "difference" is encased within a structural container that simply
wishes the messiness of identity into a formulaic grid, producing analogies in its wake and
engendering what Massumi names "gridlock": a "box[ing] into its site on the culture map." He
elaborates:
The idea of positionality begins by subtracting movement from the picture. This catches the
body in cultural freeze-frame. The point of explanatory departure is a pin-pointing, a zero point
of stasis. When positioning of any kind comes a determining first, movement comes a
problematic second.... Of course, a body occupying one position on the grid might succeed in
making a move to occupy another position.... But this doesn't change the fact that what defines the body is
not the movement itself, only its beginnings and endpoints.... There is "displacement," but no
transformation; it is as if the body simply leaps from one definition to the next. ... "The space of
the crossing, the gaps between positions on the grid, falls into a theoretical no-man's land."B
Many feminists, new social movement theorists, critical race theorists, and queer studies
scholars have argued that social change can occur only through the precise accountability to
and for position/ing. But identity is unearthed by Massumi as the complexity of process sacrificed
for the "surety" of product. In the stillness of position, bodies actually lose their capacity for
movement, for flow, for (social) change. Highlighting the "paradoxes of passage and position,"
Massumi makes the case for identity appearing as such only in retrospect: a "retrospective
ordering" that can only be "working backwards from the movement's end." Again from Massumi:
"Gender, race and sexual orientation also emerge and back-form their reality, ... Grids happen. So
social and cultural determinations feed back into the process from which they
arose. Indeterminacy and determination, change and freeze-framing, go together."24
The phallocentric economy Irigaray critiques is less stable and unitary than they
assume—the structuralist underpinnings of the 1ac prevent any positive notion of
becoming. Dibs on that ground.
Butler 99 [Judith, Gender Trouble, edition published 1999, Routledge: New York, NY, p. 3743]
The feminist appropriation of sexual difference, whether written in opposition to the phallogocentrism
of Lacan (Irigaray) or as a critical reelaboration of Lacan, attempts to theorize the feminine, not as an
expression of the metaphysics of substance, but as the unrepresentable absence effected by (masculine) denial
that grounds the signifying economy through exclusion.The feminine as the repudiated/excluded within that system constitutes the
possibility of a critique and disruption of that hegemonic conceptual scheme.The works of Jacqueline Rose49 and Jane
Gallop50 underscore in different ways the constructed status of sexual difference, the inherent instability of
that construction, and the dual consequentiality of a prohibition that at once institutes a sexual identity and
provides for the exposure of that construction’s tenuous ground. Although Wittig and other materialist
feminists within the French context would argue that sexual difference is an unthinking replication of a reified set of sexed polarities,
these criticisms neglect the critical dimension of the unconscious which, as a site of repressed
sexuality, reemerges within the discourse of the subject as the very impossibility of its
coherence. As Rose points out very clearly, the construction of a coherent sexual identity along the
disjunctive axis of the feminine/masculine is bound to fail;51 the disruptions of this coherence through the
inadvertent reemergence of the repressed reveal not only that “identity” is constructed, but that the prohibition that constructs
identity is inefficacious (the paternal law ought to be understood not as a deterministic
divine will, but as a perpetual bumbler, preparing the ground for the insurrections
against him). The differences between the materialist and Lacanian (and post- Lacanian) positions
emerge in a normative quarrel over whether there is a retrievable sexuality either “before” or
“outside” the law in the mode of the unconscious or “after” the law as a postgenital sexuality. Paradoxically, the normative
trope of polymorphous perversity is understood to characterize both views of alternative sexuality. There is no
agreement, however, on the manner of delimiting that “law” or set of “laws.” The psychoanalytic critique
succeeds in giving an account of the construction of “the subject”—and perhaps also the illusion of substance—within the matrix of
normative gender relations. In her existential-materialist mode,Wittig presumes the subject, the person, to have a presocial and
pregendered integrity. On the other hand, “the paternal Law” in Lacan, as well as the monologic mastery of
phallogocentrism in Irigaray, bear the mark of a monotheistic singularity that is perhaps less
unitary and culturally universal than the guiding structuralist assumptions of the
account presume.52 But the quarrel seems also to turn on the articulation of a temporal trope of a subversive sexuality that
flourishes prior to the imposition of a law, after its overthrow, or during its reign as a constant challenge to its authority. Here it
seems wise to reinvoke Foucault who, in claiming that sexuality and power are coextensive,
implicitly refutes the postulation of a subversive or emancipatory sexuality which could be free of
the law. We can press the argument further by pointing out that “the before” of the law and “the after” are discursively and
performatively instituted modes of temporality that are invoked within the terms of a normative framework which asserts that
subversion, destabilization, or displacement requires a sexuality that somehow escapes the hegemonic prohibitions on sex. For
Foucault, those prohibitions are invariably and inadvertently productive in the sense that “the
subject” who is supposed to be founded and produced in and through those prohibitions does not
have access to a sexuality that is in some sense “outside,” “before,” or “after” power itself. Power,
rather than the law, encompasses both the juridical (prohibitive and regulatory) and the productive
(inadvertently generative) functions of differential relations. Hence, the sexuality that emerges within the
matrix of power relations is not a simple replication or copy of the law itself, a uniform
repetition of a masculinist economy of identity. The productions swerve from their original purposes and
inadvertently mobilize possibilities of “subjects” that do not merely exceed the bounds of
cultural intelligibility, but effectively expand the boundaries of what is, in fact, culturally intelligible.
The feminist norm of a postgenital sexuality became the object of significant criticism from feminist theorists of sexuality, some of
whom have sought a specifically feminist and/or lesbian appropriation of Foucault. This utopian notion of a sexuality
freed from heterosexual constructs, a sexuality beyond “sex,” failed to acknowledge the ways in
which power relations continue to construct sexuality for women even within the terms of a
“liberated” heterosexuality or lesbianism.53 The same criticism is waged against the
notion of a specifically feminine sexual pleasure that is radically differentiated
from phallic sexuality. Irigaray’s occasional efforts to derive a specific feminine sexuality from
a specific female anatomy have been the focus of anti-essentialist arguments for some time.54 The return to
biology as the ground of a specific feminine sexuality or meaning seems to defeat the feminist premise that
biology is not destiny. But whether feminine sexuality is articulated here through a discourse of
biology for purely strategic reasons,55 or whether it is, in fact, a feminist return to biological
essentialism, the characterization of female sexuality as radically distinct from a phallic organization
of sexuality remains problematic. Women who fail either to recognize that sexuality as their own or
understand their sexuality as partially constructed within the terms of the phallic economy are
potentially written off within the terms of that theory as “male-identified” or “unenlightened.”
Indeed, it is often unclear within Irigaray’s text whether sexuality is culturally constructed, or whether
it is only culturally constructed within the terms of the phallus. In other words, is specifically
feminine pleasure “outside” of culture as its prehistory or as its utopian future? If so, of what use
is such a notion for negotiating the contemporary struggles of sexuality within the terms
of its construction? The pro-sexuality movement within feminist theory and practice has effectively argued that sexuality is
always constructed within the terms of discourse and power, where power is partially understood
in terms of heterosexual and phallic cultural conventions.The emergence of a sexuality constructed (not
determined) in these terms within lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual contexts is, therefore, not a sign of a masculine identification
in some reductive sense. It is not the failed project of criticizing phallogocentrism or heterosexual hegemony, as if a political critique
could effectively undo the cultural construction of the feminist critic’s sexuality. If sexuality is culturally constructed
within existing power relations, then the postulation of a normative sexuality that is “before,”
“outside,” or “beyond” power is a cultural impossibility and a politically impracticable
dream, one that postpones the concrete and contemporary task of rethinking subversive possibilities for sexuality and identity
within the terms of power itself. This critical task presumes, of course, that to operate within the matrix of
power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. It offers the possibility of a
repetition of the law which is not its consolidation, but its displacement. In the place of a “male-identified” sexuality in which “male”
serves as the cause and irreducible meaning of that sexuality, we might develop a notion of sexuality constructed
in terms of phallic relations of power that replay and redistribute the possibilities of that
phallicism precisely through the subversive operation of “identifications” that are, within the
power field of sexuality, inevitable. If “identifications,” following Jacqueline Rose, can be exposed as phantasmatic, then
it must be possible to enact an identification that displays its phantasmatic structure. If there is no radical repudiation of a culturally
constructed sexuality, what is left is the question of how to acknowledge and “do” the construction one is invariably in. Are
there forms of repetition that do not constitute a simple imitation, reproduction, and, hence,
consolidation of the law (the anachronistic notion of “male identification” that ought to be discarded from a feminist vocabulary)?
What possibilities of gender configurations exist among the various emergent and occasionally
convergent matrices of cultural intelligibility that govern gendered life? Within the terms of feminist sexual theory, it is
clear that the presence of power dynamics within sexuality is in no sense the same as the simple consolidation or augmentation of a
heterosexist or phallogocentric power regime. The “presence” of so-called heterosexual conventions within
homosexual contexts as well as the proliferation of specifically gay discourses of sexual difference, as
in the case of “butch” and “femme” as historical identities of sexual style, cannot be explained as chimerical
representations of originally heterosexual identities. And neither can they be understood as the pernicious insistence of
heterosexist constructs within gay sexuality and identity. The repetition of heterosexual constructs within sexual
cultures both gay and straight may well be the inevitable site of the denaturalization and
mobilization of gender categories. The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual
frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original.Thus, gay is to
straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of “the
original,” discussed in the final sections of chapter 3 of this text, reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of
the natural and the original.56 Even
if heterosexist constructs circulate as the available sites of
power/discourse from which to do gender at all, the question remains: What possibilities of
recirculation exist? Which possibilities of doing gender repeat and displace through hyperbole, dissonance,
internal confusion, and proliferation the very constructs by which they are mobilized?
Consider not only that the ambiguities and incoherences within and among heterosexual, homosexual, and
bisexual practices are suppressed and redescribed within the reified framework of the disjunctive and asymmetrical binary of
masculine/feminine, but that these cultural configurations of gender confusion operate as sites for intervention, exposure, and
displacement of these reifications. In other words, the “unity” of gender is the effect of a regulatory
practice that seeks to render gender identity uniform through a compulsory heterosexuality. The
force of this practice is, through an exclusionary apparatus of production, to restrict the relative meanings of “heterosexuality,”
“homosexuality,” and “bisexuality” as well as the subversive sites of their convergence and resignification. That the power
regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant
repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition
itself ought to be stopped—as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural
reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition
might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself? If there is no recourse to a “person,” a “sex,” or a
“sexuality” that escapes the matrix of power and discursive relations that effectively produce and regulate the
intelligibility of those concepts for us, what constitutes the possibility of effective inversion, subversion, or
displacement within the terms of a constructed identity? What possibilities exist by virtue of the constructed character of sex
and gender? Whereas Foucault is ambiguous about the precise character of the “regulatory practices” that produce the category of
sex, and Wittig appears to invest the full responsibility of the construction to sexual reproduction and its instrument, compulsory
heterosexuality, yet other discourses converge to produce this categorial fiction for reasons not
always clear or consistent with one another. The power relations that infuse the biological
sciences are not easily reduced, and the medicolegal alliance emerging in nineteenth-century Europe
has spawned categorial fictions that could not be anticipated in advance. The very
complexity of the discursive map that constructs gender appears to hold out the promise of an
inadvertent and generative convergence of these discursive and regulatory structures. If the
regulatory fictions of sex and gender are themselves multiply contested sites of meaning, then the very
multiplicity of their construction holds out the possibility of a disruption of their univocal
posturing.
Vote neg even if the 1AC is true. Their claims are part of a will to truth that fixes
subjects in place and enables the logic of the war on terror. Assemblages are a
prior question because they constitute the field of emergence for subjectivities.
Puar 7. Jasbir, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke University
Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 214
Linked to this is what Massumi calls "ontogenetic difference" or "ontogenetic priority," a concept
that rescripts temporality exterior to the sheer administrative units that are mobilized to capture
the otherwise unruly processes of a body:
To say that passage and indeterminancy "come first" or "are primary" is more a statement of
ontological priority than the assertion of a time sequence. They have ontological privilege in the
sense that they constitute the field of emergence, while positionings are what emerge. The
trick is to express that priority in a way that respects the inseparability and
contemporaneousness of the disjunct dimensions: their ontogenetic difference.
And later: "The field of emergence is not pre-social. It is open-endedly social. ... One of the things
that the dimension of change is ontogenetically 'prior to' is thus the very distinction between
individual and the collective, as well as any given model of their interaction. That interaction is precisely what takes
form."' The given models of interaction would be these bifurcated distinctions between the body and the social (its signification)
such that the distinctions disappear. Massumi's move from ontology (being, becoming) to ontogenesis is also relevant to how he
discusses affect and cognition and the processes of the body: "Feedback and feed forward, or recursivity, in
addition to converting distance into intensity, folds the dimensions of time into each other. The
field of emergence of experience has to be thought of as a space-time continuum, as an
ontogenetic dimension prior to the separating-out of space and time. Linear time, like positiongridded space, would be emergent qualities of the event of the world's self- relating. " 2 7
This ontogenetic dimension that is "prior" but not "pre" claims its priorness not through
temporality but through its ontological status as that which produces fields of emergence; the
prior and the emergence are nevertheless "contemporaneous." "Ontological priority" is a temporality and a
spatialization that has yet to be imagined, a property more than a bounded- ness by space and time. The ontogenetic dimension that
articulates or occupies multiple temporalities of vectors and planes is also that which enables an emergent bifurcation of time and
space.
Identity is one of affect, a capture that proposes what one is by masking its retrospective
ordering and thus its ontogenetic dimension- what one was- through the guise of an illusory
futurity: what one is and will continue to be. However, this is anything but a relay between
stasis and flux; position is but one derivative of systems in constant motion, lined with erratic
trajectories and unruly projectiles. If the ontogenetic dimensions of affect render affect as prior
to representation-prior to race, class, gender, sex, nation, even as these categories might be the
most pertinent mapping of or reference back to affect itself-how might identity-as-retrospectiveordering amplify rather than inhibit praxes of political organizing? If we transfer our energy, our
turbulence, our momentum from the defense of the integrity of identity and submit instead to this affective
ideation of identity, what kinds of political strategies, of "politics of the open end,""
might we unabashedly stumble upon? Rather than rehashing the pros and cons of identity
politics, can we think instead of affective politics?
Displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly, audibly, legibly, or tangibly evidentthe seemingly queer body in a "cultural freeze-frame" of sorts-assemblages allow us to attune to
movements, intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, and textures as they inhabit events,
spatiality, and corporealities. Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation,
and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information. Further,
in the sway from disciplinary societies (where the panoptic "functioned primarily in terms of
positions, fixed points, and identities") to control societies, the diagram of control, Michael Hardt
writes, is "oriented toward mobility and anonymity. . . . The flexible and mobile performances of
contingent identities, and thus its assemblages or institutions are elaborated primarily through
repetition and the production of simulacra. "29 Assemblages are thus crucial conceptual
tools that allow us to acknowledge and comprehend power beyond disciplinary regulatory
models, where "particles, and not parts, recombine, where forces, and not categories, clash. "30
Most important, given the heightened death machine aspect of nationalism in our contemporary political terrain-a heightened
sensorial and anatomical domination indispensable to Mbembe's necropolitics-assemblages work against narratives
of U.S. exceptionalism that secure empire, challenging the fixity of racial and sexual taxonomies
that inform practices of state surveillance and control and befuddling the "us versus them"
of the war on terror. (On a more cynical note, the recent work of Eyal Weizman on the use of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze,
Felix Guattari, and Guy Debord by the Israeli Defense Forces demonstrates that we cannot afford to ignore concepts such as war
machines and machinic assemblages, as they are already heavily cultivated as instructive tactics in military strategy.) For while
intersectionality and its underpinnings- an unrelenting epistemological will to
truth- presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, or, perhaps more accurately, prematurely
anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever, assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal
of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be known, seen, or heard, allows for
becoming beyond or without being.32
White male supremacy functions not through exclusion, but an abstract machine
of faciality. Dialectics and phenomenology fail because theorizing one’s position in
relation to the dominant face is always an implicit concession to power
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 194
My disagreement is not with Fanon’s and Martín Alcoff’s insistence on embodiment and
emotion, but with their reliance on a Hegelian notion of recognition to explain encounter.
Because of this they tend to treat white and nonwhite not only as a dyad, but as almost naturally
opposed entities. There is, then, little attention paid to the complicated processes whereby some
racial formations become dominant, that is, how racial formations emerge from material
conditions and collective interactions, which greatly exceed the spatiality of self versus other .
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality is not based on an intersubjective dialectics enlarged to worldhistorical scope. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari strongly distance themselves from phenomenology and psychoanalysis. First of
all, for them, it isn’t consciousness but an abstract machine of faciality that arranges bodies
into relations of power. And second, faciality constantly invents new faces to capture deviant bodies,
multiplying possible positions far beyond any binaries such as black/white (though
binarization can be an important effect). That is precisely its strength. There are thousands of encounters, thousands
of trains. Deleuze and Guattari believe faciality’s imperialism arose with institutional Christianity. Being imposed in lands populated
by different phenotypes, faciality became a matter of imperialist racialization. That faciality originated in Renaissance humanism
and depictions of Jesus seems a plausible if one-sided interpretation. It is less relevant than Deleuze and Guattari’s unusual theory
of contemporary racism: If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White Man, then
the first deviances, the first divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the
second or third category. They are also inscribed on the [white] wall [of signification], distributed by the [black] hole [of
subjectivity]. They must be Christianized, in other words, facialized. European racism as the white
man’s claim has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other: it is
instead in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped as an “other.” Racism operates by the
determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to
integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes
tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing
them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic
. . .). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There
are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. 5 For Anjuna’s psytrance parties, there were “no people on the outside.” Locals, domestic tourists, charter tourists, and beggars would join the white
Goa freaks on the dance floor, sometimes even in Nine Bar. In fact, as with the United Colors of Benetton, it will be remembered that
the rhetoric of PLUR demonstrated faciality’s inclusiveness— the parties were supposed to be open to all. But immediately, the
faciality machine would place all bodies in relation to the Goa freak standard, both spatiotemporally and subjectively, measuring
their acceptability through increasingly meticulous signs: sociochemical monitoring, scene savviness, chillum circles, sexual
attractiveness. Many nonfreaks felt uneasy being pigeonholed like this— especially domestic tourists, who would retreat to the
darker corners. The result was viscosity, bodies temporarily becoming impenetrable— more or less. It would seem to me
that to understand the intricate hierarchies of racism, a framework that allows for gradual and
multidimensional deviances is preferable to a dialectical model. Faciality also explains
why after colonialism, with television and tourism, there is scarcely place left for any “dark
others.” Everyone is included; everyone is facialized. At the same time, Euro-American ways of life
continue to spread, and White Man (Elvis Presley, Sylvester Stallone, David Beckham) remains
the global standard against which all other faces are forced to compete. What this account of
racism has in common with the Fanonian is that whiteness is the norm, even in our “post”colonial era. Where it differs, however, is that deviance is based not on lack of recognition or
negation or annihilation of the other, but on subtle machinic differentiations and
territorializations. The virtual structures behind racial formations don’t look like formal
logic (a/not-a); they continually differentiate as actual bodies interact and aggregate. Racism,
then, can’t be countered with a Hegelian sublation into the universal.
Phenotypes and power relations are inevitable, but need not be correlated. The
only neg role that avoids micro-fascism is one that refuses the intractable logic of
identitarian categories. The faciality machine grants unequal access to becomingotherwise, but the propensity to “freak” itself can be turned like a gun to its head,
utilizing white bodies to undo the naturalized link to a privileged human face
--post/anti-humanism recapitulates logic of humanism, must use lines of flight to frustrate the faciality machine by proliferating
race
--cosmopolitanism NB
Saldanha 7. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 198
“In
no real sense did the hippies become Indians or poor blacks, or prostitutes or tramps— or
only in a guilty disingenuous sense— but they found their own significance in what they took
these groups to be: a significance to be understood against the dominant society and with
respect to their own special awareness,” says the ethnographer Paul Willis. 11 Seeing blacks, Mexicans, and Indians as
more authentic, because relatively untouched by mainstream white modernity, the counterculture transformed white
modernity by appropriating some of that authenticity. But it is that very appropriation that
betrays white privilege and that spawns new tropes of subcultural (and potentially racist)
snobbism. A creative movement turning in on itself, becoming paranoid and reactionary, is
what Guattari called “microfascism.” Psychedelics clearly turned microfascistic in Anjuna,
accompanied as it was by arrogance, segregation, noise pollution, corruption, exploitation, and
psychosis. If whiteness is defined by its lines of flight, microfascism becomes as interesting to
the study of whiteness as Nazism. Psychedelics— travel, music, drugs— is whiteness accelerating,
whiteness stuttering: either a deeper entrenchment into economic and cultural exploitation, or a shedding of privilege, at
least here and now. On the whole, the Goa freaks of Anjuna do not follow the lines of flight of whiteness to critique their own
position as whites. In this sense, they were hardly “freaking” the racial assemblage. Recall the proposition of Rachel Adams and
Leslie Fiedler of appropriating freak as a critical category: [F]reaks cannot be neatly aligned with any
particular identity or ideological position. Rather, freak is typically used to connote the absence
of any known category of identity....I am drawn to freak because, like queer, it is a concept that
refuses the logic of identity politics, and the irreconcilable problems of inclusion and
exclusion that necessarily accompany identitarian categories. 12 A true freaking of
whiteness would grasp its lines of flight not for fascism but for a future where paler-skinned
bodies have no privileged access to economic and cultural capital and to happiness. Freaking
whiteness is problem-based, coalition-led, and self-critical; it would try to understand what
biophysical and technological forces subtend it (computers, HIV, floods, radiation). Humanism
and cosmopolitanism are severely limited if the struggle against racism is defined only in
human terms.
So: race should not be abandoned or abolished, but proliferated. Race’s energies are then
directed at multiplying racial differences, so as to render them joyfully cacophonic.
What is needed is an affirmation of race’s virtuality. When racial formations crumble and
mingle like this, the dominance of whiteness in the global racial assemblage is undermined as
the faciality machine finds it increasingly difficult to take hold of bodies. It is not that everyone
becomes completely Brownian (or brown!), completely similar, or completely unique. It is just that
white supremacism slowly becomes obsolete as other racial formations start harboring the
same creativity as whites do now, linking all sorts of phenotypes with all sorts of wealth and
all sorts of ways of life (sedentary, touristic, ascetic). When no racial formation is the standard,
race acquires a very different meaning: The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed
race, and in the name of the oppression it suffers; there is no race but inferior, minoritarian;
there is no dominant race; a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity
conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of
race. 13 When no racial formation is clearly hegemonic, perhaps there will be no need anymore for the term
“race.” Although there will always be phenotypical variation and relations of power, perhaps
sometime in the future they won’t be correlated at all. Unlikely, but possible. Until then, however, there
seems little point in trying to stop talking about race, as antiracists such as Paul Gilroy suggest we do. 14 Race
is creative, and we can heed its creativities against itself. Challenging the global faciality
machine encompasses the transformation not just of prejudice, tabloid journalism, and Unesco, but of the
pharmaceutical industry, farm subsidies, seismology, the arms trade, income tax policy, and the International
Monetary Fund. In contrast to what many antiracists and advocates of political correctness prescribe, the sites where the
most urgent battles are to be fought are not culture and language, but trade and health . Freaking
whiteness is no easy task. A good start for social scientists, however, is to acknowledge the
persistent materiality of race. It is important that the real barriers to mobility and imagination
that exist in different places be taken into account. Cosmopolitanism has to be invented, not
imposed. Taking responsibility and activism will only follow from both understanding and
feeling the intensive differences that exist between many different kinds of bodies: between a
Jew and a black soldier, between a woman in the Sahel and a woman on Wall Street, between a
Peruvian peasant and a Chinese journalist.
Precarity is the shared condition of living matter, subject as it is to unequal
distribution. Foregrounding it is key to dispel the existential individualism of the
1AC, which cloaks the functioning of power and plays into reactionary forces
--K of posthumanism that isn’t tied to liberal humanist alts
--aff makes precariousness into an identity, preventing any shared conception of ethics
--AT: start with anti-human/slave – must start with shared precarity, nothing founds us outside struggle to establish bonds
Butler 12. Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and
Comparative Literature and the codirector of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of
California, Berkeley, Precarity Talk A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler,
Bojana Cvejic,; Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanovic; edited by Jasbir Puar, TDR: The
Drama Review 56:4 (T216) Winter 2012, pg. 169
I think it may be important to keep active the relationship between the various meanings of
the
precarious that both Isabell and Jasbir have laid out: (1) precariousness, a function of our social
vulnerability and exposure that is always given some political form, and precarity as
differentially distributed, and so one important dimension of the unequal distribution of
conditions required for continued life; but also (2) precaritization as an ongoing process, so that
we do not reduce the power of precarious to single acts or single events. Precaritization allows us
to think about the slow death that happens to targeted or neglected populations over time
and space. And it is surely a form of power without a subject, which is to say that there is no
one center that propels its direction and destruction. If we only stayed with “precaritization,” I am not sure that we
could account for the structure of feeling that Lauren has brought up. And if we decided to rally under the name of
“the precarious” we might be making a social and political condition into an identity, and so
cloaking some way that that form of power actually works. So maybe precarious is what we
feel, or would rather not feel, and its analysis has to be linked to the impetus to become
impermeable, as so often happens within zones of military nationalism and rhetorics of
security and self-defense. But it seems also important to call “precarious” the bonds that support
life, those that should be structured by the condition of mutual need and exposure that should
bring us to forms of political organization that sustain living beings on terms of equality. It is not
just that a single person is precarious by virtue of being a body in the world. Although that is surely
true, since accidents happen and some of us are then snuffed out or injured irreversibly. What
seems more important than that form of existential individualism is the idea that a “bond”
is flawed or frayed, or that it is lost or irrecoverable. And we see this very prominently when, for
instance, Tea Party politicians revel in the idea that those individuals who have failed to “take
responsibility” for their own health care may well face death and disease as a result. In other words,
at such moments, a social bond has been cut or destroyed in a way that seeks to deny a shared
precariousness and the very particular ethos and politics that ideally should follow from that
— one that underscores global interdependence and objects to the radically unequal distribution
of precarity (and grievability).
So I want to caution against an existential reading and insist that what is at stake is a way
of rethinking social relationality. We
can make the broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from
our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance
and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness, and destitution under unjust and
unequal political conditions. As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another,
namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and
social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and
political institutions. In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of
politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our
sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency.
Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical
distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of
precarity, one that depends upon dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable and worth
protecting, and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable — a life that
is, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and
sustenance. In my own view, then, we have to start from this shared condition of precarity (not as
existential fact, but as a social condition of political life) in order to refute those normative
operations, pervasively racist, that decide in advance who counts as human and who does not.
My point is not to rehabilitate humanism, but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical
obligation that is grounded in precarity. No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life
— it is, we might say, our common non-foundation. Nothing “founds” us outside of a struggle
to establish bonds that sustain us.
2NC
ORR
Turns the entire case because it means we have to ontologize our condition to
make sense of the world
Orr 13—Victoria
(Steven, “Identity and Authoritarianism: The Boundaries of a Boundless Selfhood”, http://www.bcpsa.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2013/04/Orr1.pdf, dml)
The contemporary subject is a being implicated in a variety of overlapping and contradictory
identities that all fail to adequately represent the character of the individual subject because of
the unnavigable distance between the distinct individual and the ideal that is imposed upon
them, yet these approximations are not entirely false either. Identity claims represent a desire to remain
intact, to stay whole and formed, but have left us without the possibility for a plurality of selves.
It is necessarily the case that an identity categorization will not fully speak to the subject of focus: this
can most obviously be understood with personality traits such as kind or relaxed that are, at best,
approximations of a particular moment, but insufficiently general to possibly describe the whole
sum of a being. A variety of contemporary theorists and philosophers have explored the notion of boundlessness—Arthur
Kroker uses the term “body drift” to describe the way that we transition “through many different specular performances of the
body”; Patricia Hill Collins uses intersectionality to describe the theory that "oppression cannot be reduced to one
fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice”; and Wendy Brown
explores the paradoxical nature of identity wherein “the first imaginings of freedom are always constrained by
and potentially even require the very structure of oppression that freedom emerges
to oppose”—and each advocates for understanding the ambiguous boundaries of identity so as to better explain the unique and
distinct nature of individual subjects (Kroker 1; Collins 18; Brown 7). These thinkers showcase the conflict between authoritarian
and normative regimes of identity that we accept and the possibility for plurality that all subjects are capable of.
One cannot make a totality out of an infinity, and the task of defining identity is always an
attempt to make rigid the boundless possibilities that lay before human beings.
Categorization is invariably an exclusionary process wherein we establish what we are by
establishing what we are not. These boundaries are convenient acts of generalization that allow for
comparisons between an absolute form and a specific subject. This relational understanding of
the self transforms all subjects into deviations from established forms—or the norm—of
these concepts. Such understandings of the self entrench a sense of inferiority in contrast
to an unattainable ideal, distancing our selves from and removing identity ambiguities. These
identity constructions are always projects of self-harm, where we seek to become the
category in which we are placed (or place our selves in) at the expense of that which we are. Human
beings are complex, messy, and drifting; tidiness is not within our nature. When we attempt
such cleanliness it is a method of willing our selves out of existence; rather than existing
within the contradictions of our identity we accept the imposition of others. This
conception of selfhood is more akin to the tenets of totalitarianism than the liberal subject;
it is closer to an authoritarian regime of identity than the principles of civil rights and the freedoms of speech,
expression, and belief. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, political philosopher Hannah Arendt traces the way that
“heterogeneous uniformity is one of the primary conditions for totalitarianism” (Arendt, Origins 332).
When we insist upon rigid identity boundaries we demonstrate that we would rather be
dominated than self-determining, that despite the Western insistence on democratic states we are rooted in a
totalitarian conception of selfhood.1 We would rather be simple than ourselves.
AT: STONE/XU
Even their “strategic essentialist” reclaiming of Irigrary still links because it
means we can only mock a static male ideal defined as absence.
Guenther asst prof phil @ vandy 2010 (Lisa “Other Fecundities: Proust and Irigaray on Sexual Difference” Differences: A
journal of feminst cultural studies Volume 21, Number 2)
Irigaray offers a trenchant critique of the patriarchal
monoculture that fails to recognize sexual difference, and
so represses women’s voices, bodies, and ways of being. But
her recent focus on the duality of the sexes, and her
apparent suspicion of multiplicity, lead to problems theorizing other forms of difference such as race,
culture, and sexuality, and it may prematurely disqualify possibilities for imagining sexual
difference beyond the magical “two.” Even Alison Stone’s recent revision of Irigaray, which attempts to
reconcile her account of sexual duality with bodily multiplicity as a way of addressing the exclusion of
intersex bodies in her work, still maintains the primacy of duality and in my view fails to address claims of
multiplicity on its own terms. In what follows, I test the limits of Irigaray’s approach to sexual difference through a reading of
Proust’s novel Sodom and Gomorrah, in which I develop a model of sexual difference based on an irreducible duality of sexual
“parts,” both of which may be found in the same individual but that nevertheless relate to one another and so become meaningful
only through the circulation of an incongruous third element or libidinal force that generates multiple forms of pleasure and
fecundity. Proust’s novel opens with an extended comparison of a sexual encounter between two men to the fertilization of a rare
orchid by a bumblebee; the men connect to the sexual difference in themselves and in the other through their mutual enjoyment of
pleasure across a threshold of alterity that is as mobile and contingent as it is irreducible to sameness. In my reading, this scene from
Proust suggests a flexible way of accounting for practices that complicate the sexual duality of male and female without dissolving it,
but also without enshrining it in the figure of the heterosexual couple. As such, it promises to open new ways of theorizing sexual
difference in contexts where “to be two” is simply not enough. Irigaray and the Limits of Sexual Difference Alison Stone’s recent
analysis of Irigaray’s later work addresses precisely the concerns I have raised here about the relation between duality and
multiplicity. In Stone’s reading, Irigaray is a realist essentialist, which means that she believes in a
natural, irreducible, and really existing sexual duality.7 This duality has yet to find adequate cultural expression;
under patriarchy, and even under certain forms of feminism, sexual difference is reduced to an explicitly neutral but
implicitly masculine monoculture of humanity. For Stone, Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference is best understood in terms
of different rhythms or temporalities such as expansion and contraction, which are linked in a process like breathing where “each
pole, alternately, inhales and exhales air, so that the one expands while the other shrinks” (Luce 90). Female rhythms, like female
sexual development, are depicted as irreversible and discontinuous; they are connected to cyclical processes in nature like the
change of the seasons. Male rhythms, on the other hand, are characterized by homeostatic processes that
hover around an ideal mean, building up tension and releasing it while maintaining a steady equilibrium. Stone locates these
processes not only in sexed organisms but also in more diffuse natural processes like weather or the growth of plants; ultimately, she
draws on German Romantic thought to fill in a more general account of male and female principles operating in all of nature (Luce
92–93, 138–43, 154–60, 193–215). Stone frankly acknowledges the limits and potential problems of Irigaray’s realist essentialism.
It is simply not the case that every woman experiences her body in terms of irreversible cyclical
rhythms, and the reason for this is not merely because our culture fails to give expression to
innate female rhythms. Even in a feminist utopia, it is not clear that each and every woman
would identify with Irigaray’s account of our “real” natures, nor is it clear that everyone who
identifies as a woman would count as such for Irigaray. The conviction that there are two and
only two sexes marginalizes an experience of bodily multiplicity that is just as
phenomenologically real and compelling as the experience of sexual duality (Luce 85, 112–13).
Irigaray’s repeated suggestion that the only genuine encounter with difference can happen
between the two sexes enforces a heterosexual paradigm that marginalizes same-sex
relationships (Luce 7, 48, 189–90, 221–22) and makes it impossible for Irigaray to account for intersex
or transsexual bodies without characterizing them as aberrant or unnatural (Luce 49, 113–21).
Universal value of appropriation is just as totalizing – we agree that they agree that
the female identity is fragmented and multiple, but the MALE identity isn’t in that
framework, and the PHALLOCENTRIC ECONOMY is the universal against which
they define themselves – that’s the link
Butler 99 [Judith, Gender Trouble, edition published 1999, Routledge: New York, NY, p. 1819]
Beauvoir and Irigaray clearly differ over the fundamental structures by which gender asymmetry is reproduced; Beauvoir turns to
the failed reciprocity of an asymmetrical dialectic, while Irigaray suggests that the dialectic itself is the monologic elaboration of a
masculinist signifying economy. Although
Irigaray clearly broadens the scope of feminist critique by
exposing the epistemological, ontological, and logical structures of a masculinist signifying economy, the power
of her analysis is undercut precisely by its globalizing reach. Is it possible to identify a
monolithic as well as a monologic masculinist economy that traverses the array of cultural
and historical contexts in which sexual difference takes place? Is the failure to acknowledge
the specific cultural operations of gender oppression itself a kind of epistemological
imperialism, one which is not ameliorated by the simple elaboration of cultural differences as
“examples” of the selfsame phallogocentrism? The effort to include “Other” cultures as
variegated amplifications of a global phallogocentrism constitutes an appropriative act that risks
a repetition of the self-aggrandizing gesture of phallogocentrism, colonizing under the
sign of the same those differences that might otherwise call that totalizing concept into
question.23 Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying
economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of feminism. The
effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics
the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms. That the tactic can operate in
feminist and antifeminist contexts alike suggests that the colonizing gesture is not primarily or irreducibly
masculinist. It can operate to effect other relations of racial, class, and heterosexist
subordination, to name but a few. And clearly, listing the varieties of oppression, as I began to do,
assumes their discrete, sequential coexistence along a horizontal axis that does not describe their
convergences within the social field. A vertical model is similarly insufficient; oppressions cannot
be summarily ranked, causally related, distributed among planes of “originality” and
“derivativeness.”24 Indeed, the field of power structured in part by the imperializing gesture of
dialectical appropriation exceeds and encompasses the axis of sexual difference,
offering a mapping of intersecting differentials which cannot be summarily hierarchized either within the terms of phallogocentrism
or any other candidate for the position of “primary condition of oppression.” Rather than an exclusive tactic of masculinist signifying
economies, dialectical appropriation and suppression of the Other is one tactic among many, deployed
centrally but not exclusively in the service of expanding and rationalizing the masculinist
domain.
AT: PERM
Mutually exclusive. Freaking whiteness through a theory of machinic assemblages
is a distinct strategy that’s a prereq to making sense of the 1AC itself
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 200
The multiplication of race I’m proposing should be distinguished from other antiracist
strategies. It is neither antiwhite, nor pro-Indian, nor a simple celebration of hybridity, nor
multicultural or universalist. Machinic antiracism isn’t antiwhite because it is aware that the
freaky creativities of the white racial formation can be used against white supremacy. It doesn’t
take sides in racial politics at all (for Indians, for minorities, for the poor, against the rich) but asks what needs to
happen for there to be sides at all. Machinism is wary of any identity politics as this tends to
hide internal fissures of the identity it seeks to defend. In my case, the resistance against cultural
imperialism in defense of some Goan identity has often been severely limited by a strong Catholic, nostalgic and middle-class bias, as well as
homophobia and conservative moralism. 15 Machinism
also avoids the easy reverence for travel and bricolage
found in postmodernism and a lot of cultural studies. Mobility and hybridization can be good or bad. A
lack of cosmopolitanism cannot be held against anyone but must be explained. Hailing the transracial inventiveness in consumer tactics hardly erodes
the international division of labor, advertising, and the military-industrial complex that support racial clustering in the first place. Finally,
machinism does not imply multiculturalism or liberal universalism, because hoping for
horizontal equality (“color blindness”) and mere tolerance of the other leaves out of analysis
the privileged location of whites from which equality and tolerance are bound to be defined.
Importantly, though, these common antiracist practices aren’t without their relevance. They just need to
be seen as limited in their effectivity and potentially even reinforcing the intricate system of
whiteness they want to attack.
THEORY GOOD
Here’s our theory good net benefit. Aversion to meta-narratives is itself a metanarrative, and a potentially Maoist one at that.
Bowman 10. Paul Bowman, professor of cultural studies at Cardiff University, “Reading Rey
Chow,” Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, pg. 248
Thus, Chow recasts the investments and orientations of cultural studies, poststructuralism, and other politicized ‘suffix-studies’ subjects in terms of the
unacknowledged but constitutive ‘Chinese prejudice’, first identified by Spivak. According to Chow, ‘China’ has a multiple status in Western discourses,
including cultural studies. As well as representing, for so long, the Other of capitalism, of freedom, of democracy, and so on, ‘China’ has also offered
‘radical thought’ in the West a promissory image of alterity, revolution, difference, alternativeness, and hence resistance as such. And, as Chow also
observes, one of the most enduring metanarratives that has long organized cultural studies and cultural theory (plus much more besides) is the
discourse of ‘resistance’. ‘If
there is a metanarrative that continues to thrive in these times of
metanarrative bashing’, argues Chow, ‘it is that of ‘‘resistance’’’: ‘Seldom do we attend a conference
or turn to an article in an academic journal of the humanities or the social sciences without
encountering some call for ‘‘resistance’’ to some such metanarrativized power as ‘‘global
capitalism’’, ‘‘Western imperialism’’, ‘‘patriarchy’’, ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality’’, and so
forth’.41
The discourses of cultural theory and cultural studies more widely do seem to be structured by keywords or (worse) buzzwords like ‘resistance’,
‘struggle’, ‘difference’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘multiculturalism’. And many have interpreted this as evidence that such putatively ‘radical’ work is, basically,
nothing more than fashionable nonsense. But, rather than writing it off, Chow proposes that one
of the key problems with the
notion of resistance resides in the consequences of its rhetorical construction. She argues that the
popular rhetoric of resistance is itself implicitly organized and underwritten by a
subject/object divide in which ‘we’ speak against that which oppresses (capital, patriarchy,
the West, etc.) and for (or ‘in the name of’) the oppressed other. Thus, ‘we’ rhetorically position
ourselves as somehow ‘with’ the oppressed and ‘against’ the oppressors, even when ‘we’ are
more often than not much more obviously at some distance from sites and scenes of
oppression.42
Of course, the aim of ‘speaking out’ and publicizing the plight of the oppressed may be regarded as responsibility itself. It is certainly the
case that a dominant interpretation of what academic-political responsibility is boils down to the
idea that to be responsible we should speak out. Yet it is nevertheless equally the case that, unless
the distances, relations, aporias and irrelations are acknowledged and interrogated, there is a
strong possibility that ‘our’ discourse will become what Chow calls a version of Maoism. She
explains:
Although the excessive admiration of the 1970s has since been replaced by an oftentimes equally excessive denigration of China, the
Maoist is
very much alive among us, and her significance goes far beyond the China and East Asian fields.
Typically, the Maoist is a cultural critic who lives in a capitalist society but who is fed up with
capitalism – a cultural critic, in other words, who wants a social order opposed to the one that is
supporting her own undertaking. The Maoist is thus a supreme example of the way desire
works: What she wants is always located in the other, resulting in an identification with and
valorization of that which she is not/ does not have. Since what is valorized is often the other’s
deprivation – ‘having’ poverty or ‘having’ nothing – the Maoist’s strategy becomes in the main a
rhetorical renunciation of the material power that enables her rhetoric.43
In other words, such rhetoric claims a ‘position of powerlessness’ in order to claim a particular
form of ‘moral power’:44 a heady conceptual and rhetorical mix that can be seen to underpin an awful lot of academic work today.
Derrida regularly referred to this position as ‘clear-consciencism’: namely, the belief that speaking out, speaking for, speaking against, etc. equals Being
Responsible. However, quite
apart from tub-thumping and mantra-reciting, Derrida believed in the
promise of the ‘most classical of protocols’ of questioning and critical vigilance as ways to avoid
the greater violence of essentialist fundamentalisms. Of course, Derrida’s attempts to draw such questions as how to
interpret ‘responsibility’, how to establish who ‘we’ are, in what relations ‘we’ exist, and what our responsibilities might be, into the crisis of
undecidability were equally regularly regarded as an advocation of theoretical obscurantism and irresponsibility. This charge was – and remains – the
most typical type of ‘resistance’ to deconstruction. Despite the clarity and urgency of Derrida’s reasons for subjecting all presumed certainties to the
harrowing ordeal of undecidability, the resistance to deconstruction surely boils down to a distaste for the complexity of Derrida’s ensuing close
readings/rewritings of texts.45
Such resistance to deconstruction is familiar. It is often couched as a resistance to theory
made in the name of a resistance to ‘disengagement’; a resistance to ‘theory’ for the sake of
‘keeping it real’. Such a rationale for the rejection of deconstruction (or indeed ‘Theory’ as such)
is widespread. But when ‘keeping it real’ relies upon a refusal to interrogate the ethical and
political implications of one’s own rhetorical and conceptual coordinates – one’s own ‘key
terms’ – the price is too high. Chow points to some of the ways and places that this high price is paid, and reflects on the palpable
consequences of it. For instance, in politicized contexts such as postcolonial cultural studies, there are times when
‘deconstruction’ and ‘theory’ are classified (reductively) as being ‘Western’, and therefore
as being just another cog in the Western hegemonic (colonial, imperial) apparatus. As she puts it,
in studies of non-Western cultural others, organized by postcolonial anti-imperialism, all things
putatively ‘Western’ easily become suspect. Thus, ‘the general criticism of Western
imperialism’ can lead to the rejection of ‘Western’ approaches, at the same time as ‘the study of
non- Western cultures easily assumes a kind of moral superiority, since such cultures are often
also those that have been colonized and ideologically dominated by the West’.46 In other words,
‘theory’ – ‘for all its fundamental questioning of Western logocentrism’ – is too hastily ‘lumped
together with everything ‘‘Western’’ and facilely rejected as a non-necessity’.47 Unfortunately, therefore:
In the name of studying the West’s ‘others’, then, the critique of cultural politics that is an inherent
part of both poststructural theory and cultural studies is pushed aside, and ‘culture’ returns to a
coherent, idealist essence that is outside language and outside mediation. Pursued in a morally
complacent, antitheoretical mode, ‘culture’ now functions as a shield that hides the positivism,
essentialism, and nativism – and with them the continual acts of hierarchization, subordination,
and marginalization – that have persistently accompanied the pedagogical practices of area
studies; ‘cultural studies’ now becomes a means of legitimizing continual conceptual and
methodological irresponsibility in the name of cultural otherness.48
What is at stake here is the surely significant fact that even the honest and principled or declared aim of studying others can actually amount to a
positive working for the very forces one avowedly opposes or seeks to resist. Chow clarifies this in terms of considering the uncanny proximity but
absolute difference between cultural studies and area studies. For, area
studies is a disciplinary field which ‘has long
been producing ‘‘specialists’’ who report to North American political and civil arenas about
‘‘other’’ civilizations, ‘‘other’’ regimes, ‘‘other’’ ways of life, and so forth’.49 However, quite unlike cultural
studies and postcolonial studies’ declared aims and affiliative interests in alterity and ‘other cultures’, within area studies ‘others’
(‘defined by way of particular geographical areas and nation states, such as South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, Latin America, and countries of
are studied as if potential threats, challenges and – hence – ultimately ‘information target
fields’.50
Africa’)
Thus, says Chow, there is ‘a major difference’ between cultural studies and area studies – and indeed between cultural studies and ‘normal’ academic
disciplines per se.51 This
difference boils down to a paradigmatic decision – itself an act or effort of
resistance. This is the resistance to ‘proper’ disciplinarity; the resistance to becoming ‘normal’ or
‘normalized’, wherever it might equal allowing power inequalities, untranslatables and
heterogeneities to evaporate in the production of universalistic ‘objective’ knowledge. This is why
Chow’s attitude is always that:
In the classroom [...] students
should not be told simply to reject ‘metadiscourses’ in the belief that
by turning to the ‘other’ cultures – by turning to ‘culture’ as the ‘other’ of metadiscourses – they
would be able to overturn existing boundaries of knowledge production that, in fact,
continue to define and dictate their own discourses. Questions of authority, and with
them hegemony, representation, and right, can be dealt with adequately only if we insist on the
careful analyses of texts, on responsibly engaged rather than facilely dismissive judgments, and
on deconstructing the ideological assumptions in discourses of ‘opposition’ and ‘resistance’ as
well as in discourses of mainstream power. Most of all, as a form of exercise in ‘cultural literacy’, we need to continue to
train our students to read – to read arguments on their own terms rather than discarding
them perfunctorily and prematurely – not in order to find out about authors’ original intent
but in order to ask, ‘Under what circumstances would such an argument – no matter how
preposterous – make sense? With what assumptions does it produce meanings? In what ways and to
what extent does it legitimize certain kinds of cultures while subordinating or outlawing
others?’ Such are the questions of power and domination as they relate, ever asymmetrically,
to the dissemination of knowledge. Old-fashioned questions of pedagogy as they are, they nonetheless
demand frequent reiteration in order for cultural studies to retain its critical and political
impetus in the current intellectual climate.52
1NR
CONDO GOOD
It’s good that we’re uncertain—negation is a process of questioning that requires
ideological flux. We’re still students forming opinions so it’s conditional ethics,
and requiring certainty turns case
Sholock 12 – Chatham University
(Adale, “Methodology of the Privileged: White Anti-racist Feminism, Systematic Ignorance, and Epistemic Uncertainty”, Hypatia
Volume 27, Issue 4, pages 701–714, November 2012, dml)
However, something
profound happens in The Color of Fear that troubles the epistemological arrogance
and self-deception that epitomize normative whiteness. David frustrates everyone to the point where Victor
Lewis, an African American man in the group, finally loses his patience and lashes out in anger at David's willful ignorance. This is a
climactic moment in the film and one that I find instructive to white anti-racist efforts both feminist and otherwise. Lee Mun Wah,
the filmmaker and facilitator of the discussion, gently but skillfully asks David what is keeping him from believing Victor's claims
about pervasive racism: “So what would it mean David, then, if life really was that harsh? What if the world was not as you thought,
that [racial injustice] is actually happening to lots of human beings on this earth?” He continues, “What if he knew his reality better
than you?” What then occurs is best described as a “lightbulb moment”: David says with uncharacteristic thoughtfulness, “Oh, that's
very saddening. You don't want to believe that man can be so cruel to himself and his own kind.” David's comment startlingly echoes
what James Baldwin has described as the double-bind of white folk: “White America remains unable to believe that
Black America's grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face
what this fact says about themselves and their country” (Baldwin 1985, 536). David's newfound
awareness not only challenges his self-assuredness—as Baldwin suggests—but also his very authority
as a knower. In other words, David shifts from the cognitive comforts of not knowing that he doesn't
know to the epistemic uncertainties of knowing that he doesn't know.
I admit that The Color of Fear has sometimes made me feel a depressing lack of confidence in the ability of the privileged (myself
included) to achieve any kind of mutually reciprocal relationship with the racially and geopolitically oppressed. Yet I believe that it
is more accurate to view The Color of Fear as an allegory of hope and possibility for the future of
feminism without borders. Of course, it is still uncomfortable to watch The Color of Fear and recognize that I might think and act
more like David than I can fully comprehend, that his ignorance is structurally related to my own, and that I will not always know
better. Nevertheless, I remind myself that it is the very moment when David admits his ignorance that
Victor extends the offer, “from here I can work with you.”
David and Victor's breakthrough indicates that effective coalition across racial and other power inequities
might actually benefit from epistemic uncertainty among the privileged. Of course, this
observation will likely unsettle whites who are conditioned to assert epistemic mastery and authority .
As Pratt admits, “to acknowledge … that there are things that I do not know … [is] an admission hard
on my pride, and harder to do than it sounds” (Pratt 1984, 42). However, Bernice Johnson Reagon sagely reminds us that
comfort is rarely part of coalition-building, as verified by the contentious conversations in The Color of Fear.
Coalition work is “some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn't look for
comfort. Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on
whether or not they feel good when they get there” (Reagon 1983, 359). Accordingly, a methodology of the
privileged might embrace the discomforts of epistemic uncertainty as an indication of
effectiveness rather than failure within coalitional politics.
Perhaps more than self-reflexivity or racial sedition, epistemic uncertainty is a methodology that
highlights the necessary interdependence of the privileged and the oppressed in
struggles to eliminate injustice.12 For instance, when David's intellectual confidence finally
wavers, he must rely upon the knowledge claims of non-whites in the group. In other words, it is only
through Victor's keen understanding of racial oppression and white privilege that David
recognizes his ignorance. According to Harding, in order for anti-racist and transnational solidarity to flourish, white
women's reliance on insights developed by women of color feminists is “not a luxury but a necessity” (Harding 1991,
282). This methodological directive is itself evidence of the instruction Harding takes from women of color who assert that the
epistemic accomplishments of the oppressed hold the key to the eradication of ignorance within
feminist theory and praxis (Collins 1986; Narayan 1989; Anzaldúa, 1987; Sandoval 2000).
ARMSTRONG
Pure creativity requires the existence of constraints--- retaining some degree of
predictability enables creativity within those constraints without pre-scripting
every debate
Paul Armstrong 2k, Professor of English and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the
State University of New York at Stony Brook, Winter 2000, “The Politics of Play: The Social
Implications of Iser's Aesthetic Theory,” New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, p. 211-223
Such a play-space also opposes the notion that the only alternative to the coerciveness of
consensus must be to advocate the sublime powers of rule-breaking. 8 Iser shares Lyotard's
concern that to privilege harmony and agreement in a world of heterogeneous language games is
to limit their play and to inhibit semantic innovation and the creation of new games. Lyotard's
endorsement of the "sublime"--the pursuit of the "unpresentable" by rebelling against
restrictions, defying norms, and smashing the limits of existing paradigms--is undermined by
contradictions, however, which Iser's explication of play recognizes and addresses. The paradox
of the unpresentable, as Lyotard acknowledges, is that it can only be manifested through a game of
representation. The sublime is, consequently, in Iser's sense, an instance of doubling. If violating
norms creates new games, this crossing of boundaries depends on and carries in its wake the conventions
and structures it oversteps. The sublime may be uncompromising, asocial, and unwilling to be
bound by limits, but its pursuit of what is not contained in any order or system makes it
dependent on the forms it opposes. [End Page 220]
The radical presumption of the sublime is not only terroristic in refusing to recognize the
claims of other games whose rules it declines to limit itself by. It is also naive and
self-destructive in its impossible imagining that it can do without the others it opposes. As a
structure of doubling, the sublime pursuit of the unpresentable requires a play-space that includes other, less
radical games with which it can interact. Such conditions of exchange would be provided by the
nonconsensual reciprocity of Iserian play.
Iser's notion of play offers a way of conceptualizing power which acknowledges the necessity and
force of disciplinary constraints without seeing them as unequivocally coercive
and determining. The contradictory combination of restriction and openness in how play deploys power is
evident in Iser's analysis of "regulatory" and "aleatory" rules. Even the regulatory rules, which
set down the conditions participants submit to in order to play a game, "permit a certain
range of combinations while also establishing a code of possible play. . . . Since these
rules limit the text game without producing it, they are regulatory but not prescriptive. They do
no more than set the aleatory in motion, and the aleatory rule differs from the regulatory in
that it has no code of its own" (FI 273). Submitting to the discipline of regulatory restrictions is
both constraining and enabling because it makes possible certain kinds of interaction that the
rules cannot completely predict or prescribe in advance. Hence the existence of aleatory rules
that are not codified as part of the game itself but are the variable customs, procedures, and
practices for playing it. Expert facility with aleatory rules marks the difference, for example, between
someone who just knows the rules of a game and another who really knows how to play it. Aleatory rules are
more flexible and open-ended and more susceptible to variation than regulatory rules, but they
too are characterized by a contradictory combination of constraint and possibility,
limitation and unpredictability, discipline and spontaneity.