Fugitivity Negative—beffjr
File Notes
The stuff under “case turns” is all very good, and it’s at the top of the file for a reason.
None of it has a lot of evidence designed for extension but there’s also some purpose
to that, too—better to read one or two deep pieces of evidence and engage the 2ac
than to pile up cards on what should be an analysis-oriented debate.
There are also 1nc cards to challenge the various methods of fugitive poetics (poems,
narratives, music, hip hop, performance, etc.) Given the number of affs that utilize
some form of hip hop, there are additional extensions to that for the block at the
bottom of the file, though I would encourage you to be thoughtful about why the
evidence you’re reading which indicts hip hop broadly applies to the specific art
form/song the 1ac is utilizing.
There’s a pretty solid topicality section, two very good separate critiques (counter
gazing and a loosely formed Ballot K, where the ‘safe spaces’ evidence is one of the
better cards in the file), a couple links to different K affs and two CPs that advocate
what might loosely be thought of as PICs.
Case Turns**
Grammar of Suffering K
The affirmative’s positioning of violence as central to the slave reinscribes a grammar
of suffering as a standard for others to live up to, further entrenching antiblack
violence within the academy
McKittrick, 2014 – Professor of Gender Studies @ Queen's University in Kingston Ontario. Peter
Hudson interviewing Katherine McKittrick. (Katherine; “The Geographies of Blackness and AntiBlackness: An Interview with Katherine McKittrick”; Online PDF;
http://www.katherinemckittrick.com/download/hudson_mckittrick.pdf; DOA: 7/6/15 || NDW)
There are always two things on my mind when I am researching and writing about blackness, black geographies, and practices of violence: the
repetitive
circulation of anti-blackness, from past to present and back; and, the ways in which we take up racial
violence in our academic work. I am concerned with the ways our analyses of histories and narratives
and stories and data can actually honour and repeat and cherish anti-black violence and black death. If
our analytic source of blackness is death and violence, the citation of blackness—the scholarly stories we tell—calls
for the repetition of death and violence. Spatially, then, the plantation folds over into the prison which
expresses its carceral underpinnings within the urban and which are mapped onto the tourist island and
back again to the plantation and forward to asymmetrical and racist residential patterns that keep the
poorest poor on our planet in slums. Analytically, there seems no way out, except to name these repetitions—
even in their continuities and ruptures—and ask those who are the foci of these analyses, poor black people, to live up
to a version of humanness that they are necessarily excluded from. Put differently, the system itself does not
change: plantation logic steadies different kinds and types of racial violence; and, our analyses honour
the violence by naming it (as wrong and unjust) and asking the condemned to escape violence and join to the
very system that thrives on anti-blackness! This is the Fanonian predicament that underwrites the
academy: the subhuman is invited to become human on terms that require anti-black sentiment. So, for me,
one way to dislodge this kind of analytic thinking is to both expose its naturalness (of course violence is
wrong and unjust, but why is naming it naturally at the heart of our academic conclusions!), to draw
attention to black thinkers that provide deliberate commentary on the ways in which blackness works
against the violence that defines it (so here I look to the work of Wynter among many many others, Audre Lorde, Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, as
well as a whole range of black creative thinkers and musicians), and to demand that this deliberate commentary be central to
how we think about and organize the planet and our futures. It is a lofty demand! But I do think,
following Wynter, that transatlantic slavery provided the conditions through which we all, in different
ways, came to a new world view; and this history of the human, if re-historicized on the terms thinkers like Wynter lay out, is
also one that provided the conditions through which many black subjectivities articulated an anticolonial practice that did not (and cannot and does not) envision the emancipatory terms of teleological
democratic-abolition—for it is this system, these terms, that guarantees and profits from and repeats
anti-black violence.
Slavery Images K
Spectacular images of black suffering only serve to re-create racial domination
through exaggerated instances of power. Only a realization of mundane forms of
violence are capable of addressing the reality of antiblackness.
Hartman, 1997 - Professor of African American literature and history at Columbia University (Saidiya
V.; “Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America”; Book; Pg. 42;
DOA: 7/7/15 || NDW)
The parade of shackled bodies to market captured not only the debasements of slavery but also its
diversions. Yet the convergence of pleasure and terror so striking in the humiliating exhibitions and defiling pageantry of the trade was also present in
"innocent amusements.“ The slave dancing a reel at the big house or stepping it up lively in the come similarly
transformed subjugation into a pleasing display for the master, albeit disguised, to use Pierre Boutdieu's terms, by
the "veil of enchanted relationships.“‘" These “gentler forms" extended and maintained the relations of
domination through euphemism and concealment. Innocent amusements constituted a form of
symbolic violence--that is, a “form of domination which is exercised through the communication in which it
is disguised.“ When viewed in this light. the most invasive forms of slavery's violence lie not in these exhibitions of
"extreme“ suffering or in what we see but in what we don‘t see. Shocking displays too easily obfuscate
the more mundane and socially endurable forms of terror.92 ln the benign scenes of plantation life (which
comprised much of the Southern and, ironically. abolitionist literature of slavery) reciprocity and recreation obscure the quotidian
routine of violence. The bucolic scenes of plantation life and the innocent amusements of the enslaved. contrary to our expectations, succeeded not in
mollifying terror but in assuring and sustaining its presence. Rather than glance at the most striking spectacle with revulsion or
through tear-filled eyes, we do better to cast our glance at the more mundane displays of power and the
border where it is difficult to discern domination from recreation. Bold instances of cruelty are too easily
acknowledged and forgotten, and cries quieted to an endurable hum. By disassembling the "benign" scene, we
confront the everyday practice of domination, the nonevent, as it were. Is the scene of slaves dancing
and fiddling for their masters any less inhumane than that of slaves sobbing and dancing on the auction
block‘? If so, why? Is the effect of power any less prohibitive? Or coercive? Or does pleasure mitigate coercion? Is the boundary between
terror and pleasure clearer in the market than in the quarters or at the "big house"? Are the most
enduring forms of cruelty those seemingly benign? Is the perfect picture of the crime the one in which
the crime goes undetected? If we imagine for a Inoment adusky fiddler entertaining at the big house, master cutting a figure among the dancing
slaves, the mistress egging him on with her laughter, what do we see?
Plantation K
The 1ACs focus on the plantation creates memory images of the black body as silent,
suffering, and perpetually violated. The plantation becomes a site of racialized
violence that we run from but never stop talking about, reinforcing its violence and
shutting out any possibility of reform
McKittrick, 2013 – Professor of Gender Studies @ Queen's University in Kingston Ontario. (Katherine;
“Plantation Futures”; Essay; Pg. 8-10; DOA: 7/6/15 || NDW)
It is the descriptive statement identifying black geographies as dead spaces of absolute otherness that has prompted my return to the plantation—precisely because
in my research the plantation is cast as the penultimate site of black dispossession, antiblack violence,
racial encounter, and innovative resistance. Indeed, it is the plantation that was mapped onto the lands
of no one and became the location where black peoples were “planted” in the Americas—not as
members of society but as commodities that would bolster crop economies.28 Within this geographic
system, wherein racial violence is tied to the administration of economic growth, the “protean capabilities” of black humanness are
lived.29 As I note in Demonic Grounds, the plantation is often defined as a “town,” with a profitable economic
system and local political and legal regulations.30 The plantation normally contains a main house, an office, a carriage house, barns, a
slave auction block, a garden area, slave quarters and kitchen, stables, a cemetery, and a building or buildings through which crops are prepared, such as a mill or a
refinery; the plantation will also include a crop area and fields, woods, and a pasture. Plantation towns are linked to transport—rivers, roads, small rail networks—
that enable the shipping of crops, slaves, and other commodities. This
is a meaningful geographic process to keep in mind
because it compels us to think about the ways the plantation became key to transforming the lands of
no one into the lands of someone, with black forced labor propelling an economic structure that would
underpin town and industry development in the Americas. With this in mind, the plantation spatializes early
conceptions of urban life within the context of a racial economy: the plantation contained identifiable economic zones; it
bolstered economic and social growth along transportation corridors; land use was for both agricultural and industrial growth; patterns of specialized activities—
from domestic labor and field labor to blacksmithing, management, and church activities—were performed; racial groups were differentially inserted into the local
economy, and so forth.31 In Cabin, Quarter, Plantation, Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsberg examine the architecture and landscape of plantation towns in North
the efforts of pro-slavery
agents [in shaping] environments that facilitated control and surveillance of slaves' activities[,] … slaveholders
adapt[ing] old building types and develop[ing] new ones with the purpose of employing architecture to subjugate and
control their human chattel.”32 These features—the economy, the landscape, the architecture—go hand in hand with
different kinds and types of racial violence, what Saidiya Hartman describes as “scenes of subjection”:
the mundane terror of plantation life; the brutalities perpetuated under the rubric of pleasure,
paternalism, and property; the suffering, rape, and depersonalization; the “brutal exercise of power that gave form to
resistance.”33 While plantations differed over time and space, the processes through which they were
differentially operated and maintained draw attention to the ways racial surveillance, antiblack violence,
sexual cruelty, and economic accumulation identify the spatial work of race and racism. In many senses the
plantation maps specific black geographies as identifiably violent and impoverished, consequently normalizing the uneven production of space. This
normalization can unfold in the present, with blackness and geography and the past and the present enmeshing to uncover contemporary
sites of uninhabitablity. Yet to return to the plantation, in the present, can potentially invite unsettling and
contradictory analyses wherein: the sociospatial workings of antiblack violence wholly define black
history; this past is rendered over and done with, and the plantation is cast as a “backward” institution
that we have left behind; the plantation moves through time, a cloaked anachronism, that calls forth the
prison, the city, and so forth. These contradictions keep in place, to borrow from Kara Keeling, “common memory
images” that are habitually called forth to construct blackness as silent, suffering, and perpetually
violated, just as it attempts to erase the ways antiblack violence is enacted in the present.34 Put differently,
America, adding to the racial economy by noticing “the hand of enslaved workers in transforming (literally) the land[,] …
this kind of analytical framework is unsettling because it simultaneously archives the violated black body
as the origin of New World black lives just as it places this history in an almost airtight time-space
continuum that traces a linear progress away from racist violence. Within this framework there is an underlying
push to seek consolation in naming violence. This carries with it an expectation that the road to recovery
is an evolution toward a mode of humanness that is produced through inequities. I am not suggesting
that we forget violence or that the practice of returning to the brutalities of plantation life is unethical. I
am suggesting that when the lands of no one were transformed by plantocracy logics, firming up racial hierarchies
of humanness, the question of encounter is often read through our present form of humanness, with spaces
for us (inhabited by secular economically comfortable man and positioned in opposition to the
underdeveloped impoverished spaces for them) being cast as the locations the oppressed should strive
toward. In this formulation three curiosities arise: the enslaved who were planted in the Americas, and their sense of
place, are cast as normally lifeless, over and done with, ungeographic, and left behind; our
contemporary struggles with racial violence and blackness are denied a context; and the mythicalbiological Darwinian contours of our reading practices reveal that “the fittest” is a mode of being human
we strive toward. These curiosities, as usual, are articulated alongside the discourse that things have gotten better because time has progressed. What
if the plantation offered us something else? What if its practices of racial segregation, economic
exploitation, and sexual violence mapped not a normal way of life but a different way of life? What if we
acknowledged that the plantation is, as Toni Morrison writes, a space that everybody runs from but
nobody stops talking about, and thus that it is a persistent but ugly blueprint of our present spatial
organization that holds in it a new future?35 Finally, if this conceptualization is possible, how might
contemporary expressions of racial and spatial violence and black city geographies be grappled with
anew?
The negative posits the plantation not as a historical instance of imperialism, but
rather proof of its unfinished nature. We must recognize the plantation not as a site of
death, but one of life and struggle, to allow for new understandings of what black life
could entail. Only this approach is capable of transgressing current cycles of pain and
misery that structure black existence.
McKittrick, 2013 – Professor of Gender Studies @ Queen's University in Kingston Ontario. (Katherine;
“Plantation Futures”; Essay; Pg. 12-15; DOA: 7/6/15 || NDW)
So, what kind of future can the plantation give us? If black geographies are conceptualized as mutually constitutive of broader
geographic processes, how does Wynter's framework allow us to grapple with historically present practices of
racial exclusion without condemning the most marginalized to spaces of absolute otherness? I conclude
by turning to Dionne Brand's long poem Inventory, reading it as a creative work that intervenes in the
commonsense teleology of racial violence. Extending decolonial politics and decolonial thinking—the
coalitional effort to understand decolonization and modernity as unfinished projects—I identify
Inventory as a text of decolonial poetics: this poetics dwells on postslave violences in order to provide
the context through which black futures are imaginable.40 The decolonial work of Inventory, therefore,
does not lie in archiving and naming violence; the decolonial work of Inventory lies in the analytical
possibilities that arise from reading casualty-data as soldered to the creative. With my prior discussion in mind, I
consider Inventory to be a creative work that is produced outside the realms of normalcy, one that
rejects the rules of the system that profits from racial violence and in this envisions a future where a
corelated human species perspective is honored. It is as the text turns itself toward its reader that the possibilities of corelatedness
emerge—giving the plantation a different analytical future. Inventory has seven parts. Part 1 begins, “We believed in nothing.”41 From
there, Brand takes her reader to several locations, from the hopeful disappointments of the civil rights movement to the mourning of singer Nina Simone and
activist Marlene Green. The poem moves from the criminalized black Canadian urban space, the Toronto neighborhood Jane and Finch, to fingerprinted travelers.
Here Brand also writes the streets of Cairo, Baghdad, and Darfur. Across these streets and narratives we are able to track Stevie Wonder's inner-city blues, Miami
houses clamped to the earth, John Coltrane's Stellar Regions, unremitting malls, and the science-fiction tales of democracy, New Orleans storm shutters, and
bombs. Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the 1960s, and the invasion of Iraq make difficult appearances throughout the long poem. In part 3, the narrator sits by the
television, weeping, counting bombs and bomb deaths: a fire bomb in Nashville, a bomb at a football stadium, twenty-three killed by a suicide bomb, eight killed by
a suicide bomb, two men and a child by a car bomb, bomb-filled shoes:
eight hundred every month
for the last year,
and one hundred
and twenty in a brutal four days
things, things add up.(52)
Inventory is a difficult text—it is difficult because it documents, in an empirically poetic sense, our
unbearable world. It is difficult because it is an intelligible and exhausting list of despair:
She's afraid of killing someone today,
picked up laundry, ate pasta,
and a citrus tart,
bought a book, drove a street. (76)
Brand's long poem could easily be identified as a tabulation of urbicidal acts:
Consider then the obliteration of four restaurants,
the disappearance of sixty taxis each with one passenger
of four overcrowded classrooms, one tier of a football stadium,
the sudden lack of, say, cosmeticians
……………………………….
vanished, two or three hospital waiting
rooms, the nocturnal garbage collectors gone. (78)
Indeed, the long poem draws the reader to the violent acts, the despair, and the hopelessness that
make the poet's inventory possible—one can mathematically calculate, and gather, death:
still in June,
in their hiatus eight killed by suicide bomb at
bus station, at least eleven killed in Shula at
restaurants, at least fifteen by car bomb. (25)
If Inventory can be read as a systemic tabulation and enumeration of racial violence and death, it might
also be read as speaking for life. More specifically, Inventory documents and undoes the
aforementioned linear progress toward unending death. Perhaps Brand's poetic inventories can reveal
what Kenneth Hewitt calls the mortality of place. In his work on area bombing, Hewitt identifies the connectedness
of biological human life and place: “Places share the problems of survival and mortality in our biological
existence. Just as biological life may be called a set of activities intended to resist death, so our place
and the world are at least partly a means to resist psychosocial and cultural dissolution.”42 One way of
disclosing the mortality of place is through expressive texts such as Brand's Inventory. These narratives,
texts that would otherwise be considered ungeographic and politically detached from the empirical work of city plans, bear witness to the
destruction of place by invoking the stakes of human struggle. The reading-work Inventory asks us to do
might not simply be to consume transparent enumeration but rather to engage cooperative human
efforts and turn the practice of accounting for the brutalities of our world toward the reader. Reading the
text—“our grief will dry lakes” (61)—demands the reader register the data by asking why the poet would
acknowledge, make plain, and versify this data. To turn to decolonial poetics produced by diasporic
communities who have survived violent displacement and white supremacy allows us to identify unseen
and uncharted aspects of city life and, in doing so, depict city death not as a biological end and biological
fact but as a pathway to honoring human life and what W. E. B. Du Bois called our sorrow songs—“the
expression[s] of human experience” that have been neglected, misunderstood, despised.43 Brand's long poem suggests that black
perspectives on the city reveal spaces of absolute otherness, so often occupied by the racially and
economically condemned, are geographies of survival, resistance, creativity, and the struggle against
death. In other words, we might read the poem not as a text that tracks a linear progression toward death but
rather as the creative consequences of the plot and the plantation—a conception of the city imbued
with a narrative of black history that is neither celebratory nor dissident but rooted in an articulation of
city life that accepts that relations of violence and domination have made our existence and presence in
the Americas possible as it recasts this knowledge to envision an alternative future. Inventory demands
ethical engagement. Brand's work often refuses a commitment to our present order of things; she writes geography and her own political affiliations to
space, as assertions of humanness rather than tacked to one side of an insider/outsider world.44 This positioning of the poet is important, because it refuses to
venerate the comforts of us/them paradigms as Brand herself writes cities and other spaces anew vis-à-vis her black diasporic history. This
is, at least to me, a
radical politics in that it asks not simply that we track future-misery but that we witness our difficult
present in order to think both the plantation and the city differently. Read without certain nationaffiliation, read without the profits of witnessing enumerated deaths, read as decolonial poetics that
remembers antiblack violence and couples this with the Iraq Body Count Project, news feeds and birds flying from tree
to tree, the city deaths compiled in Inventory require being read through a different register. The lists and catalogues, the dead and dying, might be read as a way to
identify that acts of genocidal and ecocidal violence, to return to Wynter, “should in no instance be taken as the index of what the empirical reality of our social
universe is.”45 The aesthetics Brand provides us with in Inventory can thus be imagined as a route to noticing how the normalization of body counts and city deaths
in fact disclose the ways our present systems of urban planning and its attendant modes of city life—the normally good cities and the normally bad cities—
Brand's
poetics uncover the normalizing work that human death and city death can do when they are cast as an
index of how human life is constituted. It follows, then, that Brand's long poem might be read as an
inventory that calls into question the grounds through which urbicide is made possible and
commonsense. Read in this way, what the decolonial poetics of Inventory demand is that we, its
readers, be held accountable for the deadly moral codes that regulate, profit from, and conceptualize
spaces of absolute otherness as they are inhabited by the unsurviving. The body count that frames much
of Inventory—800 every month for the last year, 120 in four days—is thus also about survival and human life, or a new
math-space, where the calculus of human actions and cooperative human efforts encounter poetry to
reinvent the unambiguous dead-end culmination that is so often coupled with analyses of violence (21–52).
Working with Inventory requires honoring and living city life differently. The difficult poem demands
imagining cities and global struggles, plantation pasts and futures, as predicated on all-of-human-life—
even in death—and the work of survival. Here, we envision a life on the edge, a geography that
demands you stay alive yet threatens your physiology, a spatial politics of living just enough, just enough
for the city: this is a political location that fosters more humanly workable, and alterable, geographic
practices.
effectively bind us to a process of morally geographic superiority and inferiority, where place mortality is cast as disadvantageous. Put differently,
Suffering K
The affirmative is a form of damage-centered research which puts the slave in a
matrix of pain and suffering. This focus shuts out any other potential for the slave and
reentrenches the suffering it claims to critique
Tuck and Yang 14 (Eve Tuck – professor of educational studies and coordinator of Native American
Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, K Wayne Yang – professor of ethnic studies at
UC San Diego, “R-Words: Refusing Research,” https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuckand-Yang-R-Words_Refusing-Research.pdf)
Elsewhere, Eve (Tuck, 2009, 2010) has argued that educational
research and much of social science research has been
concerned with documenting damage, or empirically substantiating the oppression and pain of Native
communities, urban communities, and other disenfranchised communities. Damage-centered
researchers may operate, even benevolently, within a theory of change in which harm must be recorded
or proven in order to convince an outside adjudicator that reparations are deserved. These reparations
presumably take the form of additional resources, settlements, affirmative actions, and other material,
political, and sovereign adjustments. Eve has described this theory of change1 as both colonial and
flawed, because it relies upon Western notions of power as scarce and concentrated, and because it
requires disenfranchised communities to position themselves as both singularly defective and
powerless to make change (2010). Finally, Eve has observed that “won” reparations rarely become reality,
and that in many cases, communities are left with a narrative that tells them that they are broken. Similarly, at
the center of the analysis in this chapter is a concern with the fixation social science research has
exhibited in eliciting pain stories from communities that are not White, not wealthy, and not straight.
Academe’s demonstrated fascination with telling and retelling narratives of pain is troubling, both for
its voyeurism and for its consumptive implacability. Imagining “itself to be a voice, and in some
disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised” (Simpson, 2007, p. 67, emphasis in the original) is not just a rare
historical occurrence in anthropology and related fields. We observe that much of the work of the academy is
to reproduce stories of oppression in its own voice. At first, this may read as an intolerant condemnation of the academy,
one that refuses to forgive past blunders and see how things have changed in recent decades. However, it is our view that while many
individual scholars have chosen to pursue other lines of inquiry than the pain narratives typical of their
disciplines, novice researchers emerge from doctoral programs eager to launch pain-based inquiry
projects because they believe that such approaches embody what it means to do social science. The
collection of pain narratives and the theories of change that champion the value of such narratives are
so prevalent in the social sciences that one might surmise that they are indeed what the academy is
about. In her examination of the symbolic violence of the academy, bell hooks (1990) portrays the core message from the academy to those
on the margins as thus: No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about
yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then
I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own.
Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject
and you are now at the center of my talk. (p. 343) Hooks’s words resonate with our observation of how much of social
science research is concerned with providing recognition to the presumed voiceless, a recognition that is
enamored with knowing through pain. Further, this passage describes the ways in which the researcher’s voice is
constituted by, legitimated by, animated by the voices on the margins. The researcher-self is made
anew by telling back the story of the marginalized/subaltern subject. Hooks works to untangle the
almost imperceptible differences between forces that silence and forces that seemingly liberate by
inviting those on the margins to speak, to tell their stories. Yet the forces that invite those on the
margins to speak also say, “Do not speak in a voice of resistance. Only speak from that space in the
margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain” (hooks, 1990, p.
343). The costs of a politics of recognition that is rooted in naming pain have been critiqued by recent
decolonizing and feminist scholars (Hartman, 1997, 2007; Tuck, 2009). In Scenes of Subjection, Sadiya Hartman (1997)
discusses how recognizing the personhood of slaves enhanced the power of the Southern slaveowning
class. Supplicating narratives of former slaves were deployed effectively by abolitionists, mainly White,
well-to-do, Northern women, to generate portraits of abuse that ergo recognize slaves as human (Hartman,
2007). In response, new laws afforded minimal standards of existence, “making personhood coterminous
with injury” (Hartman, 1997, p. 93), while simultaneously authorizing necessary violence to suppress slave
agency. The slave emerges as a legal person only when seen as criminal or “a violated body in need of
limited forms of protection” (p. 55). Recognition “humanizes” the slave, but is predicated upon her or his
abjection. You are in pain, therefore you are. “[T]he recognition of humanity require[s] the event of
excessive violence, cruelty beyond the limits of the socially tolerable, in order to acknowledge and
protect the slave’s person” (p. 55). Furthermore, Hartman describes how slave-as-victim as human accordingly
establishes slave-as-agent as criminal. Applying Hartman’s analysis, we note how the agency of Margaret Garner or
Nat Turner can only be viewed as outsider violence that humane society must reject while
simultaneously upholding the legitimated violence of the state to punish such outsider violence. Hartman
asks, “Is it possible that such recognition effectively forecloses agency as the object of punishment . . . Or
is this limited conferral of humanity merely a reinscription of subjugation and pained existence?” (p. 55).
Stealing K
The 1ac advocates a means of flight, of abandoning surrender, of becoming fugitive.
It’s an academic theorization of a narrative that has been repeated for centuries; that
the target must escape the gaze of the captor to achieve freedom.
This oversimplified view infantilizes targets and real avenues of resistance, such as
strategically stealing from and utilizing surveillance – their oversimplification
overlooks alternative fugitive strategies that can be reappropriated as more effective
challenges to authority and control.
Goffman, 14 – Sociology Prof @ UW-Madison, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, p 105107 BR
From these examples, we can see that young men and women around 6th street sometimes
reappropriate the intense surveillance and the looming threat of prison for their own purposes. Even
as women endure police raids and interrogations, and suffer the pain of betraying the man they'd rather
protect, they occasionally make use of a man's "go to jail" card to protect him from what they perceive
to be mortal danger. In anger and frustration at men's bad behavior, they can sometimes use men's
precarious legal status to control them, to get back at them, and to punish them for any number of
misdeeds. In doing so, they get men taken into custody, not for the crimes or violations the police are
concerned with, but for personal wrongs the police may not know or care about.
Perhaps more remarkably, the young men who are the targets of these systems of policing and
surveillance occasionally succeed in using the police, the courts, and the prisons for their own purposes.
They may check themselves into jail when they believe the streets have become too dangerous,
transforming jail into a safe haven. When they come home from jail or prison, they may turn the bail
office into a kind of bank, storing money there for specific needs later on, or using those funds as
collateral for informal loans. Young men even turn their fugitive status into an advantage by invoking a
warrant as an excuse for a variety of unmet obligations and personal failings.
In these ways, men and women in the neighborhood turn the presence of the police, the courts, and
the prisons into a resource they make use of in ways the authorities neither sanction nor anticipate.
Taken together, these strategies present an alternative to the view that 6th street residents are simply
the pawns of authorities, caught in legal entanglements that constrain and oppress them.
They can’t say stealing is a bad countermethod – their primary intellectual force and
aff author…
Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, and Harney, Singapore
Management University professor, 2004 (Fred and Stefano, “The University and the
Undercommons: Seven Theses,” Social Text, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2004, p. 101-102, ProjectMUSE, IC)
“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would
surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This may
be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this
much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it
cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one
can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to
join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive
intellectual in the modern university.
Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call
for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or
Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this
goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came
under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome.
The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she
disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the
university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets
subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.
A2 Perms
The permutation fails—we must begin ‘out-from-outside’, a space distinct and away
from the relations of ‘same’ and ‘other’
Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2004 (Fred, “Knowledge of
Freedom,” The New Centennial Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2004, p. 281, ProjectMUSE, IC)
The point, here, is that those critiques which pay descriptive and prescriptive attention to singularity
and totality while responsibly confronting the horrific effects of singularist totalization must be
acknowledged and assimilated. But the fact that they offer only choked and strained and silenced
articulations of the whole—that which allows our aspirations for equality, justice, freedom—means they
must be improvised. The various discourses that are informed by identity theories open the possibility
for such improvisation in their directions toward other philosophical or anti-philosophical or
antephilosophical modes of thought and representation. But it is precisely in the thought of the other,
the hope for another subjectivity and an other ontology, that the metaphysical foundations and
antilibertarian implications of the politico-philosophical tradition to which identity theories attempt to
respond are replicated and deepened. Improvisation—and thus the possibility of describing and
activating an improvisational whole—is thereby foreclosed. I want to offer here another chorus of
ensemble—by way of what/whom you’ll come to know as Uncle Toliver—as something out-fromoutside, other than the other or the same, something unbound by their relation or nonrelation, and
situated at an opening onto the site of the intersection of the knowledge of language (as prayer, curse,
narrative [récit or recitation]) and the knowledge of freedom (as both a negative function of the
experience of oppression and the trace of an “innate endowment that serves to bridge the gap between
experience and knowledge . . .”). (Chomsky 1986, xxv–xxvi)
Method Answers—1nc
Poems—1nc
The affirmative interpretation of intersubjective meaning is empty signification that
closes down other potentialities for meaning
Fernando 10 --- Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, Research Fellow at the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social
Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
(Jeremy, “The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death,” ATROPOS PRESS, pg 146-147)//RAW
Not only do we have face an absolute blindness in terms of the moment when death encounters death, we are also faced
with the
problem of who is recounting this moment, recalling this unrecallable moment, and testifying to what is
essentially un-testifiable. For even though every testimony requires an uncertainty, a potentiality of fiction—otherwise it would just be
fact, and knowledge—this moment of death remains blind from testimony due to the fact that in order to
testify, one has to have experienced it, and if one is dead, there is no testimony that can be uttered.
Hence, this testimony, this remembering of the event of his death, can only be uttered from this position of impossibility, this position of being
living and dead at the same time, as a living-dead where one is not in either state but in a duality, of being both self and other at the same time,
of being both the 'I' and the ' he', the duality embodied in the "young man." There is an echo of this living-dead in what Jacques Derrida says of
Maurice Blanchot and archi-passivity, which is the "neuter and a certain neutrality of the 'narrative voice', a
voice without person, without the narrative voice from which the 'I' posits and identifies itself."7 For if the "young man" is always already
potentially both the ''I" and the "he" at the same time, then the "young man" is
a signifier, signifying nothing more than the
fact that it is signifying: and this is hinted at, near the end of the tale, when the narrative voice utters, "I am alive. No, you are dead."8
It is not so much that there are two selves in this utterance – for the same self cannot be both alive and dead – but that there is always already
an otherness within the self, an otherness of which nothing can be said. This is why all the narrative voice can say is, "I know, I imagine that this
unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence":9 all that can be said about this " unanalyzable feeling" is that which is
imagined, recalled as fiction, testified to; a statement that will and can only remain unverifiable, and ultimately unknowable. Hence, the
utterance, "I am alive. No, you are dead," is an utterance
without referent, without any possibility of reference: and by extension all
that can be said about death is through an imaginative gesture: the instant of death is the instant in which death is
uttered, but it is nothing more – or less – than an utterance. It is this "unanalyzable” state of death that
continues to haunt us, and unsettle us. For if it is undefinable – and remains always in the realm of the
imagination – not only can one not be certain about death, it is always already in full potentiality. And like the problem that Vladimir
and Estragon face in never being able to tell if and when Godot comes, we face the same dilemma: we would not know even if
death is staring us in the face.
-- A2 We Don’t Interpret
The affirmative’s refusal to engage in even a subjective interpretation of poetry
constitutes a withdrawal from life itself. Only intersubjective meaning can continue
the conversation.
Fernando 10 --- Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, Research Fellow at the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social
Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
(Jeremy, “The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death,” ATROPOS PRESS, pg 219-220)//RAW
In all of this, there is always already an echo of the strange pairing of despair and hope in the Beckettian
formulation of not being able to go on, but yet having to at the same time. We also hear this strange paradox resound in
Wolfgang Schirmacher's wonderful response to aporia, one that he formulates in his deceptively simple maxim of 'Just Living'. This is not a overarching philosophy to life - one that frames, guides, or attempts to be a framework - but the exact opposite; it is a response to life itself. All
you can ever do is choose, respond, live—live your life as a concept, life in general, will take care of
itself. In other words, in order to live life, you have to actually distance yourself, at least momentarily,
from life as an idea, and actually be ambivalent to life. When one is asked, 'how to live', the only answer – which is at best a
provisional response – is ‘you just do’. And perhaps it is in this ambivalence towards the answer – of having to come up with a
provisional answer whilst knowing that it is only provisional at the same time – that allows one to
maintain a ‘proper distance’ as it were, towards the answer, towards a final solution.
Refusing to call anything into relationality destroys all difference.
Fernando 10 --- Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, Research Fellow at the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social
Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
(Jeremy, “The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death,” ATROPOS PRESS, pg 221)//RAW
possibility of
metaphor is disappearing in every sphere."25 This disappearance as he posits, is due to the "viral loss of
determinacy";26 that of transparency, of utter and absolute exchangeability; in other words, when everything is like
everything else and one can no longer distinguish between objects any longer. It is this lack of distance between objects that
results in them disappearing in to each other, into meaninglessness. For, the very name for this ambivalence, this
'proper distance' itself, is metaphor. It is metaphor that allows us to name, to call, and to witness. And it is
also metaphor that doesn't allow the names to sink into one another, doesn't allow names to equate with each other,
prevents them from disappearing in to utter nothingness.
The significance of this exposure, this ambiguity, comes to light if we recall Jean Baudrillard and his lamentation that "the
This is solipsism and a precondition for genocidal violence
Fernando 10 --- Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, Research Fellow at the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social
Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
(Jeremy, “The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death,” ATROPOS PRESS, pg 223-224)//RAW
For, in the
chuckle lies not an ironic distance that is indifferent to anything and everything. That would be a
position of utter and absolute non-response; what Slavoj Zizek has so aptly termed 'Western Buddhism'. This is an
attitude of ' I am above and beyond all of this, and nothing will affect me', a dangerous game that has
been played so many times in history by despots, governed by a single Idea, dismissing any singularity as
a mere blip in their path, to be over-looked, and discounted. One is hard pressed to find a more fitting - and
frightening - figure for 'Western Buddhism' than Heinrich Himmler.28 {28 Himmler (in)famously carried a copy of the
Bhagavad-Gita with him at all times, claiming that like the warrior Arjuna, he was simply doing his duty without
attachment to his actions.} Moreover, it is of no coincidence that many fascist regimes were ' inspired' by
perverted versions of Buddhism. 'Western Buddhism': an anthropocentric gesture as there is no other
that is in relation to the self; not only is the self the centre of the world, there is no other in this world. By
definition, every other has already been excluded. Apparently most of them seemed to have completely overlooked - effaced the fact that in Buddhism, the self is completely absent as well; the self is absolutely other to itself.
Narratives—1nc
Trading autobiographical narrative for the ballot commodifies one’s identity and has
limited impact on the culture that one attempt’s to reform – when autobiographical
narrative “wins,” it subverts its own most radical intentions by becoming an exemplar
of the very culture under indictment
Coughlin 95—associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. (Anne, REGULATING THE SELF:
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER SCHOLARSHIP, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1229)
Although Williams is quick to detect insensitivity and bigotry in remarks made by strangers, colleagues, and
friends, her taste for irony fails her when it comes to reflection on her relationship with her readers and
the material benefits that her autobiographical performances have earned for her. n196 Perhaps Williams should
be more inclined to thank, rather than reprimand, her editors for behaving as readers of autobiography invariably do. When we examine this
literary faux pas - the incongruity between Williams's condemnation of her editors and the professional benefits their publication secured her we detect yet another contradiction between the outsiders' use of autobiography and their desire to transform culture radically. Lejeune's
autobiography is a lucrative commodity. In our culture,
consume personal stories , n197 which surely explains why first-rate law journals and
academic presses have been eager to market outsider narratives. No matter how unruly the self that it records, an
autobiographical performance transforms that self into a form of "property in a moneyed economy" n198
and into a valuable intellectual [*1283] asset in an academy that requires its members to publish. n199 Accordingly, we
must be skeptical of the assertion that the outsiders' splendid publication record is itself sufficient
evidence of the success of their endeavor . n200
characterization of autobiography as a "contract" reminds us that
members of the reading public avidly
Certainly, publication of a best seller may transform its author's life, with the resulting commercial success and academic renown. n201 As one
critic of autobiography puts it, "failures do not get published." n202 While
writing a successful autobiography may be
momentous for the individual author, this success has a limited impact on culture. Indeed, the
transformation of outsider authors into "success stories" subverts outsiders' radical intentions by
constituting them as exemplary participants within contemporary culture, willing to market even themselves to
literary and academic consumers. n203 What good does this transformation do for outsiders who are less
fortunate and less articulate than middle-class law professors? n204 Although they style themselves cultural
critics, the [*1284] storytellers generally do not reflect on the meaning of their own commercial
success, nor ponder its entanglement with the cultural values they claim to resist. Rather, for the most part,
they seem content simply to take advantage of the peculiarly American license, identified by Professor Sacvan Bercovitch, "to have
your dissent and make it too." n205
Even if their best intention is to resist the liberal subject, autobiography is understood
by its consuming audience as the assertion of the classic autonomous subject – this
subverts the political potential of performance by rendering one’s experience legible
to the terms of liberalism. This recreates the violence of liberalism that is the root of
Western conquest
Coughlin 95—associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. (Anne, REGULATING THE SELF:
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER SCHOLARSHIP, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1229)
The outsider narratives do not reflect on another feature of autobiographical discourse that is perhaps the most significant obstacle to their
goal to bring to law an understanding of the human self that will supersede the liberal individual. Contrary to the outsiders' claim that their
personalized discourse infuses law with their distinctive experiences and political perspectives, numerous historians and critics of
autobiography have insisted that those
who participate in autobiographical discourse speak not in a different
voice, but in a common voice that reflects their membership in a culture devoted to liberal values. n206
As Sacvan Bercovitch puts it, American cultural ideals, including specifically the mythic connection between the "heroic individual ... [and] the
values of free enterprise," are "epitomized in autobiography." n207 In his seminal essay on the subject, Professor Georges Gusdorf makes an
observation that seems like a prescient warning to outsiders who would appropriate autobiography as their voice. He remarks that the
practice of writing about one's own self reflects a belief in the autonomous individual, which is "peculiar to Western
man, a concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest of the [*1285] universe and that he has
communicated to men of other cultures; but those men will thereby have been annexed by a sort of intellectual colonizing to a mentality that
was not their own." n208 Similarly, Albert Stone, a critic of American autobiography, argues that autobiographical
performances
celebrate the Western ideal of individualism, "which places the self at the center of its world." n209 Stone
begins to elucidate the prescriptive character of autobiographical discourse as he notes with wonder "the tenacious social ideal whose
persistence is all the more significant when found repeated in personal histories of Afro-Americans, immigrants, penitentiary prisoners, and
others whose claims to full individuality have often been denied by our society." n210¶ Precisely
because it appeals to readers'
fascination with the self-sufficiency, resiliency and uniqueness of the totemic individual privileged by liberal political
theory, there is a risk that autobiographical discourse is a fallible, even co-opted, instrument for the social
reforms envisioned by the outsiders. By affirming the myths of individual success in our culture, autobiography reproduces the
[*1286] political, economic, social and psychological structures that attend such success. n211 In this light, the outsider autobiographies
unwittingly deflect attention from collective social responsibility and thwart the development of collective solutions for the eradication of racist
and sexist harms. Although we may suspect in some cases that the author's own sense of self was shaped by a community whose values oppose
those of liberal individualism, her decision to register her experience in autobiographical discourse will have a significant effect on the self she
reproduces. n212 Her story will solicit the public's attention to the life of one individual, and it will privilege her individual desires and rights
above the needs and obligations of a collectivity.¶ Moreover, literary theorists have remarked the tendency of autobiographical discourse to
override radical authorial intention. Even where
the autobiographer self-consciously determines to resist liberal
ideology and represents her life story as the occasion to announce an alternative political theory, "the relentless individualism of
the genre subordinates" her political critique. n213 Inevitably, at least within American culture, the personal narrative
engrosses the readers' imagination. Fascinated by the travails and triumphs of the developing autobiographical self, readers tend to
construe the text's political and social observations only as another aspect of the author's personality.¶
Paradoxically, although autobiography is the product of a culture that cultivates human individuality, the genre seems to make available only a
limited number of autobiographical protagonists. n214 Many theorists have noticed that when an author assumes the task of defining her own,
unique subjectivity, she invariably reproduces herself as a character with whom culture already is well-acquainted. n215 While a variety of
forces coerce the autobiographer [*1287] to conform to culturally sanctioned human models, n216 the pressures exerted by the literary market
surely play a significant role. The
autobiographer who desires a material benefit from her performance must
adopt a persona that is intelligible, if not enticing, to her audience. n217 As I will illustrate in the sections that follow, the
outsider narratives capitalize on, rather than subvert, autobiographical protagonists that serve the values of
liberalism.
-- A2 Metaphors
Metaphors fail
Dillon 13 assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in
American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of
Minnesota. (Stephen, “Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State “,A
DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF
MINNESOTA , May 2013 //SRSL)
In his afterword to George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, Jean Genet writes:
“And from the first letter to the last, nothing has
been willed, written or composed for the sake of a book, yet here is a book, tough and sure, both a
weapon of liberation and a love poem. In this case I see no miracle except the miracle of truth itself, the
naked truth revealed.”527 I return to this quote because it sums up the project of Fugitive Life. It can be easy to overlook—or indeed
to erase and ignore—the truth produced by those forced to inhabit the time of slow death and spaces of social death. Fugitive Life has argued
that there is a truth that lies within what has been erased, destroyed, and rendered invisible. Many of the writings examined throughout this
project are documents that are not supposed to exist. Some were written on toilet paper and smuggled out of prisons. Some were spoken
through glass walls and composed by lawyers. Some were written on the run from forces seeking the author’s capture. And some were simply
written by people who “were never meant to survive.”528 If
we are to understand the forms of power we find ourselves
inhabited by and that have given rise to what I am calling the neoliberal- carceral state, we must look to
spaces and times of expulsion, disappearance, and incapacitation for the diagnosis and the cure. Indeed, if
history is more than a flash or revelation, if it is a piling up, if time does not pass but accumulates, then one must be able to search the
wreckage, but also see what was destroyed along the way. In Fugitive Life, I have tried to search what has been left behind, forgotten, and
erased in an attempt to comprehend neoliberalism and the prison in ways that open new lines of thought when considering the unprecedented
economic and penal changes of the last forty years. In the last two decades, a new field has emerged that calls itself Critical Prison studies.
This field attempts to study incarceration in ways that do not naturalize the prison, criminality, or the
prisoner. In her keynote address at the National Women’s Studies Association in 2009, Angela Davis
critiqued the formation of this subfield. For her, there is a danger of becoming attached to one’s object
of research. To institutionalize the object of one’s research means the object’s existence must continue
for the field to survive. My understanding of this subfield is that it is part of a much larger intellectual
endeavor and grassroots movement that is attempting to remove the prison from our social, cultural,
and political horizons. Although I recognize Davis’s warning (it is akin to Judith Butler’s critique of
“women’s studies” in her article “Against Proper Objects”) I do not see a contradiction in studying
something even as one is working to destroy the very object of study. One certainly needs to be cautious, but caution is required in any
scholarly and political project. Pitfalls, traps,e and opportunities for collusion abound. However, I do think there is a danger in Critical Prison
studies becoming divorced from the insights, theories, and concerns produced by people in prison and people targeted by the police. This is
why Genet’s insight is so crucial. Fugitive Life has shown that the theories of incarceration now central to what is becoming Critical Prison
studies were first articulated by imprisoned black feminists, underground feminist writing groups, and queer activists on the run in the 1970s. If
scholars of the prison are to truly understand the convergence of neoliberalism and the prison, reckoning with and further exploring this rich
body of work is of the utmost importance. Simply put, Critical Prison studies must be intimately connected to the concerns and epistemologies
of prisoners and former prisoners. There is another critical warning embedded in Davis’s speech. There is a danger in Critical Prison studies
mistaking the end of the prison for the end of power. Fugitive Life positions the prison as site from which to advance the study of power; the
object is important, but not essential. The prison could disappear tomorrow and the forms of power that gave rise to its reign could live on in
other forms. Indeed, this is one of the lessons of the Control Unit at Lexington. The Lexington unit was shut down, but a new unit opened up in
Florida, another in California, another in Colorado, and on and on. All the while the Federal Prison at Marion has held prisoners in isolation
since 1972. The end of Lexington was a symptom that could have been misunderstood as a solution. Davis’s writing from prison addresses the
problem of mistaking the prison for power when confronting and theorizing the politics of incarceration. In the 1971 essay “Political Prisoners,
Prisons, and Black Liberation,” Davis argues that the sole purpose of the police was to “intimidate blacks” and to “to persuade us with their
violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our lives.”529 Davis
theorizes the violence of police and prisons as
pervasive and unrelenting. Throughout the essay, Davis names the complicity between an anti-blackness
as old as liberal freedom and new forms of penal and policing technologies that emerged in the 1970s in
response to political upheaval and insurrection. Davis calls for the abolition of what she terms the “law-
enforcement- judicial-penal network” in addition to arguing for the construction of a mass movement
that could contest the “victory of fascism.”530 Yet, in line with the political imaginaries at the time, Davis wanted more than
an end to the prison and the violence of the police. Like other early black feminist writing, Davis did not just call for the overthrow of one form
of state power so that a new one may take its place. Instead, Davis implied that the social order itself must be undone. For Davis, the prison
was not the primary problem. The prison was made possible by the libidinal, symbolic, and discursive regimes that actualized the uneven
institutionalized distribution of value and disposability along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality. Davis called for the total epistemological
and ontological undoing of the forms of knowledge and subjectivity that were produced by the racial state. In short, hope, for Davis, meant that
the prison could not have a future, and more so, that a world that could have the prison would need to end as well. This insight of Davis’s is why
Critical Prison studies must engage queer of color and feminist of color scholarship. The critique of the prison advanced by many scholars of the
prison does not comprehend the forms of devaluation that render poor women of color and queer people of color vulnerable to the power that
makes the prison possible. As I have been arguing through Fugitive Life, the prison is more than an institution, more than cement and steel
walls, more than razor wire. In her 1979 essay, “Coming of Age: A Black Revolutionary” the Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member
Safiya Bukhari described this when she wrote, “The maturation process is full of obstacles and entanglements for anyone, but for a black
woman it has all the markings of a Minotaur’s maze. I had
to say that, even though nothing as spectacular takes place
in the maturation process of the average black woman.”531 Like the writings of Assata Shakur and
Davis, Bukhari argues that everyday life in the free world mimicked and replicated her experience of
incarceration. For her, black women’s lives are “a story of humiliation, degradation, deprivation, and
waste that [starts] in infancy and [lasts] until death,” but unlike stories of spectacular repression and
brutality in the prison, the forms of subjection and subjugation black women experience are so banal
that metaphors fail to describe them.532 For Bukhari, the Greek myth of the Minotaur’s maze describes the impossibility of
escape that confronts black women and other people surrounded by capitalism, white supremacy, and sexism. Yet the analogy fails because the
impossibility of escape is not isolated to a maze or a prison—it describes the mundane contours of the world. Bukhari, Davis, and Shakur are
three women who have all been prisoners and fugitives, and their critiques of the prison and neoliberalism emerged from these two symbiotic
positionalities. The fugitive and the prisoner are figures we can turn to as the sites of an immanent critique of the state’s policing and penal
powers—figures produced by those same formations. As fugitives and prisoners, Davis, Shakur, and Bukhari could see what they could not see
before—invisible things became glaring in an absence they no longer inhabited, and what had always been visible became strange and
unfamiliar. Running away was a tactic that challenged the power of the neoliberal-carceral state, yet it also opened up new formations of
knowledge and politics. Yet,
like Jenny’s flight from the police and the regulatory power of knowledge in
American Woman, Davis, Shakur, and Bukhari were not only forced to flee the police and disappear into
the world of the underground; they have also been fugitives from normative modes of thought. They
were always trying to flee the forms of knowledge constitutive of the racial state, the prison,
heteronormativity, and new formations of global capital. For all three, there might not be a way out, but
that does not mean you stay put. In his correspondence with Barbara Smith, the white anti-racist and
anti- imperialist political prisoner David Gilbert describes the imperative to escape through his
transcription of a poem to Smith written by the Turkish political prisoner Nazim Hikmet, “It’s This Way.”
I stand in the advancing light, my hands hungry, the world beautiful. My eyes can’t get enough of the trees - they’re so
hopeful, so green. A sunny road runs through the mulberries, I’m at the window of the prison infirmary. I can’t smell the medicines- carnations
must be blooming nearby. It’s this way: being captured is beside the point, the point is not to surrender.533 Even though Gilbert’s body is
immobilized, and will be until he dies, he remains committed to producing modes of thought that take flight. This
is the lesson of the
fugitive, a lesson Critical Prison studies must grasp if the affects, desires, discourses, and ideas central to
the prison are to end along with its cages, corridors, and guard towers. The prison’s end must exceed
the institution. The fugitive can lead the way. Even if escape is impossible, we still have to run.
Music—1nc
Musical performance cannot act as vehicle for resistance – it operates through a
circular logic: one starts with identifying the groups that are “hegemonic” and the
groups that are “marginal” and then simply valorizes the practices of those groups
without rigorously researching and debating the material political conditions that
produce poverty, racism, and violence. This undermines political agency by offering
the false hope that engaging in the practices that become the markers of identity is
political while remaining elusive whenever one is pressed to define the conditions of
oppression that one opposes and whenever one is challenged to defend the
substantive politics that might actual redress those conditions.
Gitlin 97—sociology, Columbia (Todd, The anti-political populism of cultural studies, Dissent; Spring,
Vol. 44, Iss. 2; p 77, ProQuest)
From the late 1960s onward, as I have said, the insurgent energy was to be found in movements that
aimed to politicize specific identities-racial minorities, women, gays. If the "collective behavior" school
of once-conventional sociology had grouped movements in behalf of justice and democratic rights
together with fads and fashions, cultural studies now set out to separate movements from fads, to take
seriously the accounts of movement participants themselves, and thereby to restore the dignity of the
movements only to end up, in the 1980s, linking movements with fads by finding equivalent dignity in
both spheres, so that, for example, dressing like Madonna might be upgraded to an act of "resistance"
equivalent to demonstrating in behalf of the right to abortion, and watching a talk show on family
violence was positioned on the same plane. In this way, cultural studies extended the New Left
symbiosis with popular culture. Eventually, the popular culture of marginal groups (punk, reggae, disco,
feminist poetry, hip-hop) was promoted to a sort of counterstructure of feeling, and even, at the edges,
a surrogate politics-a sphere of thought and sensibility thought to be insulated from the pressures of
hegemonic discourse, of instrumental reason, of economic rationality, of class, gender, and sexual
subordination. The other move in cultural studies was to claim that culture continued radical politics by
other means. The idea was that cultural innovation was daily insinuating itself into the activity of
ordinary people. Perhaps the millions had not actually been absorbed into the hegemonic sponge of
mainstream popular culture. Perhaps they were freely dissenting. If "the revolution" had receded to the
point of invisibility, it would be depressing to contemplate the victory of a hegemonic culture imposed
by strong, virtually irresistible media. How much more reassuring to detect "resistance" saturating the
pores of everyday life! In this spirit, there emerged a welter of studies purporting to discover not only
the "active" participation of audiences in shaping the meaning of popular culture, but the "resistance" of
those audiences to hegemonic frames of interpretation in a variety of forms-news broadcasts (Dave
Morley, The `Nationwide ' Audience, 1980); romance fiction (Janice Radway, Reading the Romance,
1984); television fiction (Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, The Export of Meaning, 1990; Andrea Press,
Women Watching Television, 1991); television in general (John Fiske, Television Culture, 1987); and
many others. Thus, too, the feminist fascination with the fictions and talk shows of daytime "women's
television"-in this view, the dismissal of these shows as "trivial," "banal," "soap opera," and so on,
follows from the patriarchal premise that what takes place within the four walls of the home matters
less than what takes place in a public sphere established (not coincidentally) for the convenience of
men. Observing the immensity of the audiences for Oprah Winfrey and her legions of imitators, many in
cultural studies upended the phenomenon by turning the definitions around. The largely female
audiences for these shows would no longer be dismissed as distracted voyeurs, but praised as active
participants in the exposure and therefore politicizing of crimes like incest, spousal abuse, and sexual
molestation. These audiences would no longer be seen simply as confirming their "normality" with a
safe, brief, well bounded, vicarious acquaintanceship with deviance. They could be understood as an
avant-garde social movement. Above all, in a word, cultural studies has veered into populism. Against
the unabashed elitism of conventional literary and art studies, cultural studies affirms an unabashed
populism in which all social activities matter, all can be understood, all contain cues to the social nature
of human beings. The object of attention is certified as worthy of such not by being "the best that has
been thought and said in the world" but by having been thought and said by or for "the people"-period.
The popularity of popular culture is what makes it interesting-and not only as an object of study. It is the
populism if not the taste of the analyst that has determined the object of attention in the first place. The
sociological judgment that popular culture is important to people blurs into a critical judgment that
popular culture must therefore be valuable. To use one of the buzzwords of "theory," there is a
"slippage" from analysis to advocacy, defense, upward "positioning." Cultural studies often claims to
have overthrown hierarchy, but what it actually does is invert it. What now certifies worthiness is the
popularity of the object, not its formal qualities. If the people are on the right side, then what they like is
good. This tendency in cultural studies-I think it remains the main line-lacks irony. One purports to stand
four-square for the people against capitalism, and comes to echo the logic of capitalism. The consumer
sovereignty touted by a capitalist society as the grandest possible means for judging merit finds a
reverberation among its ostensible adversaries. Where the market flatters the individual, cultural
studies flatters the group. What the group wants, buys, demands is ipso facto the voice of the people.
Where once Marxists looked to factory organization as the prefiguration of "a new society in the shell of
the old," today they tend to look to sovereign culture consumers. David Morley, one of the key
researchers in cultural studies, and one of the most reflective, has himself deplored this tendency in
recent audience studies. He maintains that to understand that "the commercial world succeeds in
producing objects. . . which do connect with the lived desires of popular audiences" is "by no means
necessarily to fall into the trap . . . of an uncritical celebration of popular culture." But it is not clear
where to draw the line against the celebratory tendency when one is inhibited from doing so by a
reluctance to criticize the cultural dispositions of the groups of which one approves. Unabashedly, the
populism of cultural studies prides itself on being political. In the prevailing schools of cultural studies, to
study culture is not so much to try to grasp cultural processes but to choose sides or, more subtly, to
determine whether a particular cultural process belongs on the side of society's angels. An aura of hope
surrounds the enterprise, the hope (even against hope) of an affirmative answer to the inevitable
question: Will culture ride to the rescue of the cause of liberation? There is defiance, too, as much as
hope. The discipline means to cultivate insubordination. On this view, marginalized groups in the
populace continue to resist the hegemonic culture. By taking defiant popular culture seriously, one takes
the defiers seriously and furthers their defiance. Cultural studies becomes "cult studs." It is charged with
surveying the culture, assessing the hegemonic import of cultural practices and pinpointing their
potentials for "resistance." Is this musical style or that literary form "feminist" or "authentically Latino"?
The field of possibilities is frequently reduced to two: for or against the hegemonic. But the nature of
that hegemony, in its turn, is usually defined tautologically: that culture is hegemonic that is promoted
by "the ruling group" or "the hegemonic bloc," and by the same token, that culture is "resistant" that is
affirmed by groups assumed (because of class position, gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on) to
be "marginalized" or "resistant." The process of labeling is circular, since it has been predetermined
whether a particular group is, in fact, hegemonic or resistant. The populism of cultural studies is
fundamental to its allure, and to the political meaning its adherents find there, for cultural studies
bespeaks an affirmation of popularity tout court. To say that popular culture is "worth attention" in the
scholarly sense is, for cultural studies, to say something pointed: that the people who render it popular
are not misguided when they do so, not fooled, not dominated, not distracted, not passive. If anything,
the reverse: the premise is that popular culture is popular because and only because the people find in it
channels of desire pleasure, initiative, freedom. It is this premise that gives cultural studies its aura of
political engagement-or at least political consolation. To unearth reason and value, brilliance and energy
in popular culture is to affirm that the people have not been defeated. The cultural student, singing
their songs, analyzing their lyrics, at the same time sings their praises. However unfavorable the
balance of political forces, people succeed in living lives of vigorous resistance! Are the communities of
African-Americans or AfroCaribbeans suffering? Well, they have rap! (Leave aside the question of
whether all of them want rap.) The right may have taken possession of 10 Downing Street, the White
House, and Congress-and as a result of elections, embarrassingly enough!-but at least one is engage in
cultural studies. Consolation: here is an explanation for the rise of academic cultural studies during
precisely the years when the right has held political and economic power longer and more consistently
than at any other time in more than a half century. Now, in effect, "the cultural is political," and more, it
is regarded as central to the control of political and economic resources. The control of popular culture
is held to have become decisive in the fate of contemporary societies-or at least it is the sphere in which
opposition can find footing, find breathing space, rally the powerless, defy the grip of the dominant
ideas, isolate the powers that be, and prepare for a "war of position" against their dwindling ramparts.
On this view, to dwell on the centrality of popular culture is more than an academic's way of filling her
hours; it is a useful certification of the people and their projects. To put it more neutrally, the political
aura of cultural studies is supported by something like a "false consciousness" premise: the analytical
assumption that what holds the ruling groups in power is their capacity to muffle, deform, paralyze, or
destroy contrary tendencies of an emotional or ideological nature. By the same token, if there is to be a
significant "opposition," it must first find a base in popular culture-and first also turns out to be second,
third, and fourth, since popular culture is so much more accessible, so much more porous, so much
more changeable than the economic and political order. With time, what began as compensation
hardened-became institutionalized-into a tradition. Younger scholars gravitated to cultural studies
because it was to them incontestable that culture was politics. To do cultural studies, especially in
connection with identity politics, was the politics they knew. The contrast with the rest of the West is
illuminating. In varying degrees, left-wing intellectuals in France, Italy, Scandinavia, Germany, Spain and
elsewhere retain energizing attachments to Social Democratic, Green, and other left-wing parties.
There, the association of culture with excellence and traditional elites remains strong. But in the AngloAmerican world, including Australia, these conditions scarcely obtain. Here, in a discouraging time,
popular culture emerges as a consolation prize. (The same happened in Latin America, with the decline
of left-wing hopes.) The sting fades from the fragmentation of the organized left, the metastasis of
murderous nationalism, the twilight of socialist dreams virtually everywhere. Class inequality may have
soared, ruthless individualism may have intensified, the conditions of life for the poor may have
worsened, racial tensions may have mounted, unions and social democratic parties may have
weakened or reached an impasse, but never mind. Attend to popular culture, study it with sympathy,
and one need not dwell on unpleasant realities. One need not be unduly vexed by electoral defeats.
One need not be preoccupied by the ways in which the political culture's center of gravity has moved
rightward-or rather, one can put this down to the iron grip of the established media institutions. One
need not even be rigorous about what one opposes and what one proposes in its place. Is capitalism
the trouble? Is it the particular form of capitalism practiced by multinational corporations in a
deregulatory era? Is it patriarchy (and is that the proper term for a society that has seen an upheaval in
relations between women and men in the course of a half-century)? Racism? Antidemocracy?
Practitioners of cultural studies, like the rest of the academic left, are frequently elusive. Speaking
cavalierly of "opposition" and "resistance" permits-rather, cultivates-a certain sloppiness of thinking,
making it possible to remain "left" without having to face the most difficult questions of political
selfdefinition. The situation of cultural studies conforms to the contours of our political moment. It
confirms-and reinforces-the current paralysis: the incapacity of social movements and dissonant
sensibilities to imagine effective forms of public engagement. It substitutes an obsession with popular
culture for coherent economic-political thought or a connection with mobilizable populations outside
the academy and across identity lines. One must underscore that this is not simply because of cultural
studies' default. The default is an effect more than a cause. It has its reasons. The odds are indeed
stacked against serious forward motion in conventional politics. Political power is not only beyond
reach, but functional majorities disdain it, finding the government and all its works contemptible. Few of
the central problems of contemporary civilization are seriously contested within the narrow band of
conventional discourse. Unconventional politics, such as it is, is mostly fragmented and self-contained
along lines of racial, gender, and sexual identities. One cannot say that cultural studies diverts energy
from a vigorous politics that is already in force. Still, insofar as cultural studies makes claims for itself as
an insurgent politics, the field is presumptuous and misleading. Its attempt to legitimize the ecstasies of
the moment confirms the collective withdrawal from democratic hope. Seeking to find political
energies in audiences who function as audiences, rather than in citizens functioning as citizens, the
dominant current in cultural studies is pressed willy-nilly toward an uncritical celebration of
technological progress. It offers no resistance to the primacy of visual and nonlinear culture over the
literary and linear. To the contrary: it embraces technological innovation as soon as the latest
developments prove popular. It embraces the sufficiency of markets; its main idea of the intellect's
democratic commitment is to flatter the audience. Is there a chance of a modest redemption? Perhaps,
if we imagine a harder headed, less wishful cultural studies, free of the burden of imagining itself to be a
political practice. A chastened, realistic cultural studies would divest itself of political pretensions. It
would not claim to be politics. It would not mistake the academy for the larger society. It would be less
romantic about the world-and about itself. Rigorous practitioners of cultural studies should be more
curious about the world that remains to be researched and changed. We would learn more about
politics, economy, and society, and in the process, appreciate better what culture, and cultural study, do
not accomplish. If we wish to do politics, let us organize groups, coalitions, demonstrations, lobbies,
whatever; let us do politics. Let us not think that our academic work is already that.
The 1AC’s use of music as a means of dissent exposes their discourse to those who
should not hear it-- ‘hipster critics’ who only wish to be subversive so they can claim
they are--while preventing wide-spread movements
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, “Stupid Undergrounds,” Postmodern
Culture, vol. 5, http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paul-mann.aspx//RF)
"Although functioning as a support for the totalitarian order, fantasy is then at the same time the leftover of the real that
enables us to 'pull ourselves out,' to preserve a kind of distance from the socio-symbolic network. When we become crazed in
our obsession with idiotic enjoyment, even totalitarian manipulation cannot reach us" (128).
Zizek's example here is
precisely popular music, the inane ditty that anchors the fantasy, that runs endlessly in one's head; what one
wishes to add here is the criterion of force, of intensity, of sound so loud that, even though it is a cultural product
from top to bottom, it nonetheless enfolds the audience and isolates it within the symbolic order. The
intensity of loud drowns out the Other. It is the limit of the symbolic, its null point, experienced in the
very onslaught of its signs. Perhaps we could appropriate a Lacanian term for this fantastic volume that goes beyond
fantasy: the *sinthome.* Zizek calls it "subversive," but that, unfortunately, is to offer it to those who
wannabe subversive, to see themselves seen as subversives, to be (to fantasize being) political agents in
an older and ever more current sense.^26^ Let us nonetheless pursue the concept for a moment.
Hip Hop—1nc
Hip hop is inevitably marketed to white consumers- turns black culture into a
commodity that can be tossed away
-Card can also be used as an alt- diaspora movement
Hartigan 5- prof of anthropology @ UT, PhD from University of California, Santa Cruz
(John, South Atlantic Quarterly 104.3, Summer, “Culture against Race: Reworking the Basis for Racial
Analysis”)
One might be tempted to assume that Gilroy’s stance is largely polemical, but his critique
is thoroughgoing, as is his call to
reject ‘‘this desire to cling on to ‘race’ and go on stubbornly and unimaginatively seeing the world on the
distinctive scales that it has specified.’’ In spite of powerful, novel efforts to fundamentally transform racial
analysis—such as the emergence of ‘‘whiteness studies’’ or analyses of the ‘‘new racism’’—Gilroy is
emphatic in ‘‘demand[ing] liberation not from white supremacy alone, however urgently that is required, but
from all racializing and raciological thought, fromracialized seeing, racialized thinking, and racialized thinking about
thinking’’ (40). In contrast to Visweswaran—and, interestingly, voicing concerns over ‘‘cultural politics’’ that resonate with Dominguez’s
critique—Gilroy sees a host of problems in ‘‘black political cultures’’ that rely on ‘‘essentialist approaches
to building solidarity’’ (38).14 Nor does he share Harrison’s confidence in making racism the centerpiece of critical cultural analysis.
Gilroy plainly asserts that ‘‘the starting point of this book is that the era of New Racism is emphatically over’’ (34). A singular focus on
racism precludes an attention to ‘‘the appearance of sharp intraracial conflicts’’ and does not effectively
address the ‘‘several new forms of determinism abroad’’ (38, 34). We still must be prepared ‘‘to give effective
answers to the pathological problems represented by genomic racism, the glamour of sameness, and the eugenic
projects currently nurtured by their confluence’’ (41). But the diffuse threats posed by invocations of racially essentialized
identities (shimmering in ‘‘the glamour of sameness’’) as the basis for articulating ‘‘black political cultures’’ entails an
analytical approach that countervails against positing racism as the singular focus of inquiry and critique.15
From Gilroy’s stance, to articulate a ‘‘postracial humanism’’ we must disable any form of racial vision and ensure that it
can never again be reinvested with explanatory power. But what will take its place as a basis for talking about the dynamics
of belonging and differentiation that profoundly shape social collectives today? Gilroy tries to make clear that it will not be ‘‘culture,’’ yet this
concept infuses his efforts to articulate an alternative conceptual approach. Gilroy conveys many of the same reservations about culture
articulated by the anthropologists listed above. Specifically, Gilroy cautions that ‘‘the culturalist approach still runs the risk of naturalizing and
normalizing hatred and brutality by presenting them as inevitable consequences of illegitimate attempts to mix and amalgamate primordially
incompatible groups’’ (27). In contrast, Gilroy expressly prefers the concept of diaspora as a means to ground a new form of attention to
collective identities. ‘‘As
an alternative to the metaphysics of ‘race,’ nation, and bounded culture coded into
the body,’’ Gilroy finds that ‘‘diaspora is a concept that problematizes the cultural and historical
mechanics of belonging’’ (123). Furthermore, ‘‘by focusing attention equally on the sameness within
differentiation and the differentiation within sameness, diaspora disturbs the suggestion that political
and cultural identity might be understood via the analogy of indistinguishable peas lodged in the protective
pods of closed kinship and subspecies’’ (125). And yet, in a manner similar to Harrison’s prioritizing of racism as a central concern for
social inquiry, when it comes to specifying what diaspora entails and how it works, vestiges of culture reemerge as a basis for
the coherence of this new conceptual focus. When Gilroy delineates the elements and dimensions of diaspora, culture provides
the basic conceptual background and terminology. In characterizing ‘‘the Atlantic diaspora and its successor-cultures,’’ Gilroy
sequentially invokes ‘‘black cultural styles’’ and ‘‘postslave cultures’’ that have ‘‘supplied a platform for youth
cultures, popular cultures, and styles of dissent far from their place of origin’’ (178). Gilroy explains how the ‘‘cultural expressions’’
of hip-hop and rap, along with other expressive forms of ‘‘black popular culture,’’ are marketed by the
‘‘cultural industries’’ to white consumers who ‘‘currently support this black culture’’ (181). Granted, in these
uses of ‘‘culture’’ Gilroy remains critical of ‘‘absolutist definitions of culture’’ and the process of
commodification that culture in turn supports. But his move away from race importantly hinges upon
some notion of culture. We may be able to do away with race, but seemingly not with culture.
Rap and hip hop are tools to be exploited by corporations- images of rap as a platform just entrench
racism
Kitwana 2- fellow at the Jamestown Project, think tank @ Harvard
(Bakari, “The Hip Hop Generation,” p. 9-11)
Let us begin with popular culture and the visibility of Black youth within it. Today, more and more Black
youth are turning to rap music, music videos, designer clothing, popular Black films, and television
programs for values and identity. One can find the faces, bodies, attitudes, and language of Black youth
attached to slick advertisements that sell what have become global products, whether it’s Coca-Cola and
Pepsi, Reebok and Nike sneakers, films such as Love Jones and Set it Off, or popular rap artists like Missy
Elliot and Busta Rhymes. Working diligently behind the scene and toward the bottom line are the
multinational corporations that produce, distribute, and shape these images. That Black youth in New
Orleans, Louisiana, and Champaign, Illinois, for example, share similar dress styles, colloquialisms, and
body language with urban kids from Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City is not coincidental. We live
in an age where corporate mergers, particularly in media and entertainment, have redefined public
space. Within this largely expanded public space, the viewing public is constantly bombarded by visual
images that have become central to the identity of an entire generation. Within the arena of popular
culture, rap music more than anything else has helped shape the new Black youth culture. From 1997 to
1998, rap music sales showed a 31 percent increase, making rap the fastest growing music genre, ahead
of country, rock, classical, and all other musical forms. By 1998 rap was the top-selling musical format,
outdistancing rock music and country music, the previous leading sellers. Rap music’s prominence on
the American music scene was evident by the late 1990s- from its increasing presence at the Grammy’s
(which in 1998, for example, awarded rapper Lauryn Hill five awards) to its pervasiveness in
advertisements for mainstream corporation like AT&T, The Gap, Levi’s, and so on. Cultural critic Cornel
West, in his prophetic Race Matters (Beacon Press, 1993), refers to this high level of visibility of young
blacks, primarily professional athletes and entertainers, in American popular culture as the AfroAmericanization of white youth. The Afro-Americanization of white youth has been more a male than
female affair given the prominence of male athletes and the cultural weight of male pop artists. This
process results in white youth-male and female- imitating and emulating black male styles of walking,
talking, dressing and gesticulating in relations to others. The irony in our present moment is that just as
young black men are murdered, maimed, and imprisoned in record numbers, their styles have become
disproportionately influential in shaping popular culture. Whereas previously the voices of young Blacks
had been locked out of the global age’s public square, the mainstreaming of rap music now gave Black
youth more visibility and a broader platform than we ever had enjoyed before. At the same time, it gave
young Blacks across the country who identified with it and were informed by it a medium through which
to share a national culture. In the process, rap artists became the dominant public voice of this
generation. Many have been effective in bringing the generation’s issues to the fore. From NWA to
Master P, rappers- through their lyrics, style, and attitude- helped to carve a new Black youth identity
into the national landscape. Rappers’ access to global media and their use of popular culture to
articulate many aspects of this national identity renders rap music central to any discussion of the new
Black youth culture. The irony in all this is that the global corporate structure that gave young Blacks a
platform was the driving force behind our plight.
Hip hop reinforces stereotypes-gives racism a green card
Kitwana 2- fellow at the Jamestown Project, think tank @ Harvard
(Bakari, “The Hip Hop Generation,” p. xxi)
A final obstacle is the unprecedented influence Black youth have achieved through popular culture,
especially via the hip-hop phenomenon. Young Blacks have used this access, both in pop film and music, far too
much to strengthen associations between Blackness and poverty, while celebrating anti-intellectualism, ignorance,
irresponsible parenthood, and criminal lifestyles. This is the paradox: given hip-hop’s growing influence, these
Birth of a Nation- styled representations receive a free pass from Black leaders and organizations
seeking influence with the younger generation. These depictions also escape any real criticism from non-Black
critics who, having grown tired of the race card, fear being attacked as racist. Void of open and consistent, criticism, such widely
distributed incendiary ideas (what cultural critic Stanley Crouch calls “the new minstrelsy”) reinforce myths of Black inferiority
and insulate the new problems in African American culture from redemptive criticism.
Performance – 1nc
Performance is not a mode of resistance – it gives too much power to the audience
because the performer is structurally blocked from controlling the (re)presentation of
their representations. Appealing to the ballot is a way of turning over one’s identity
to the same reproductive economy that underwrites liberalism
Phelan 96—chair of New York University's Department of Performance Studies (Peggy, Unmarked: the
politics of performance, ed published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005, 146-9)
146
Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or
otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it
becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the
economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the
ontology of subjectivityproposed here, becomes itself through disappearance.
The pressures brought to bear on performance to succumb to thelaws of the reproductive economy are
enormous. For only rarely in this culture is the “now” to which performance addresses its deepest
questions valued. (This is why the now is supplemented and buttressedby the documenting camera, the video archive.) Performance occursover a time
which will not be repeated. It can be performed again, butthis repetition itself marks it as “different.” The document of a performance then is
only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present.
The other arts, especially painting and photography, are drawnincreasingly toward performance. The French-born artist Sophie Calle,for example, has photographed
the galleries of the Isabella StewartGardner Museum in Boston. Several valuable paintings were stolen fromthe museum in 1990. Calle interviewed various visitors
and membersof the muse um staff, asking them to describe the stolen paintings. She then transcribed these texts and placed them next to the photographs of the
galleries. Her work suggests that the descriptions and memories of the paintings constitute their continuing “presence,” despite the absence of the paintings
themselves. Calle
gestures toward a notion of the interactive exchange between the art object and the viewer.
While such exchanges are often recorded as the stated goals of museums and galleries, the institutional effect of the gallery
often seems to put the masterpiece under house arrest , controlling all conflicting and unprofessional
commentary about it. The speech act of memory and description (Austin’s constative utterance) becomes a performative expression when Calle places
these commentaries within the
147
representation of the museum. The descriptions fill in, and thus supplement (add to, defer, and displace) the stolen paintings. The factthat these descriptions vary
considerably—even at times wildly—onlylends credence to the fact that the interaction between the art objectand the spectator is, essentially, performative—and
therefore resistantto the claims of validity and accuracy endemic to the discourse of reproduction. While the art historian of painting must ask if thereproduction is
accurate and clear, Calle asks where seeing and memoryforget the object itself and enter the subject’s own set of personalmeanings and associations. Further her
work suggests that the forgetting(or stealing) of the object is a fundamental energy of its descriptiverecovering. The description itself does not reproduce the
object, it ratherhelps us to restage and restate the effort to remember what is lost. Thedescriptions remind us how loss acquires meaning and generatesrecovery—
not only of and for the object, but for the one who remembers.The disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; itrehearses and repeats the
disappearance of the subject who longs alwaysto be remembered.
For her contribution to the Dislocations show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1991, Calle used the same idea but this time she asked curators, guards,
and restorers to describe paintings that were on loan from the permanent collection. She also asked them to draw small pictures of their memories of the paintings.
She then arranged the texts and pictures according to the exact dimensions of the circulating paintings and placed them on the wall where the actual paintings
usually hang. Calle calls her piece Ghosts, and as the visitor discovers Calle’s work spread throughout the museum, it is as if Calle’s own eye is following and tracking
the viewer as she makes her way through the museum.1 Moreover, Calle’s work seems to disappear because it is dispersed throughout the “permanent
collection”—a collection which circulates despite its “permanence.” Calle’s artistic contribution is a kind of self-concealment in which she offers the words of others
about other works of art under her own artistic signature. By making visible her attempt to offer what she does not have, what cannot be seen, Calle subverts the
goal of museum display. She exposes what the museum does not have and cannot offer and uses that absence to generate her own work. By placing memories in
the place of paintings, Calle asks that the ghosts of memory be seen as equivalent to “the permanent collection” of “great works.” One senses that if she asked the
same people over and over about the same paintings, each time they would describe a slightly different painting. In this sense, Calle demonstrates the performative
quality of all seeing.
148
I Performance
in a strict ontological sense is nonreproductive. It is this quality which makes performance the runt of the litter of
contemporary art. Performance clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the
circulation of capital. Perhaps nowhere was the affinity between the ideology of capitalism and art made more manifest than in the debates about the
funding policies for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).2 Targeting both photography and performance art, conservative politicians sought to prevent
endorsing the “real” bodies implicated and made visible by these art forms. Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies. In performance
art spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no left-overs, the gazing spectator must try to take everything in. Without a copy, live performance
plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation
and control. Performance resists the balanced circulations of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends. While photography is vulnerable to charges of counterfeiting
and copying, performance art is vulnerable to charges of valuelessness and emptiness. Performance indicates the possibility of revaluing that emptiness; this
potential revaluation gives performance art its distinctive oppositional edge.3 To attempt to write about the undocumentable event of performance is to invoke the
rules of the written document and thereby alter the event itself. Just as quantum physics discovered that macro-instruments cannot measure microscopic particles
without transforming those particles, so too must performance critics realize that the labor to write about performance (and thus to “preserve” it) is also a labor
that fundamentally alters the event. It does no good, however, to simply refuse to write about performance because of this inescapable transformation. The
challenge raised by the ontological claims of performance for writing is to re-mark again the performative possibilities of writing itself. The act of writing toward
disappearance, rather than the act of writing toward preservation, must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself. This
is the project of Roland Barthes in both Camera Lucida and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. It is also his project in Empire of Signs, but in this book he takes the
memory of a city in which he no longer is, a city from which he disappears, as the motivation for the search for a disappearing performative writing. The trace left by
that script is the meeting-point of a mutual disappearance; shared subjectivity is possible for Barthes because two people can recognize the same Impossible. To live
for a love whose goal is to share the Impossible is both a humbling project and an exceedingly ambitious one, for it seeks to find connection only in that which is no
longer there. Memory. Sight. Love. It must involve a full seeing of the Other’s absence (the ambitious part), a seeing which also entails the acknowledgment of the
Other’s presence (the humbling part). For to acknowledge the Other’s (always partial) presence is to acknowledge one’s own (always partial) absence. In the field of
linguistics, the performative speech act shares with the ontology of performance the inability to be reproduced or repeated. “Being an individual and historical act,
a performative utterance cannot be repeated. Each reproduction is a new act performed by someone who is qualified. Otherwise, the reproduction of the
performative utterance by someone else necessarily transforms it into a constative utterance.”4
149
Writing, an activity which relies on the reproduction of the Same(the three letters cat will repeatedly signify the four-legged furry animalwith whiskers) for the
production of meaning, can broach the frame of performance but cannot mimic an art that is nonreproductive. Themimicry of speech and writing, the
strange
process by which we put words in each other’s mouths and others’ words in our own, relies on a
substitutional economy in which equivalencies are assumed and re-established. Performance refuses
this system of exchange and resists the circulatory economy fundamental to it. Performance honors the
idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value
which leaves no visible trace afterward . Writing about it necessarily cancels the “tracelessness” inaugurated
within this performative promise. Performance’s independence from mass reproduction, technologically,
economically, and linguistically, is its greatest strength. But buffeted by the encroaching ideologies of capitaland reproduction, it frequently
devalues this strength. Writing aboutperformance often, unwittingly, encourages this weakness and falls inbehind the drive of the document/ary.
Performance’s challenge to writingis to discover a way for repeated words to become performative
utterances, rather than, as Benveniste warned, constative utterances.
Topicality
T-Version**
Multiple topical versions of the aff that prove the aff can discuss both institutionalized
racism and how Blacks have responded (i.e. fugitivity)—welfare searches, stop-andfrisk, public housing surveillance, stop-and-sniff, motor vehicle stops, etc., are all
topical policy proposals that solve
Bailey, Chicago-Kent law assistant professor, 2014 (Kimberly D., “Watching Me: The War on
Crime, Privacy, and the State,” University of California Davis Law Review, Vol. 47, January 2014,
http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3395&context=fac_schol, p. 1555-1561,
IC)
Scholars have documented the fact that the poor and people of color continue to have the least amount
of privacy in our society and, therefore, they are still the most vulnerable to more extreme state social
control policies.101 Some argue that welfare is still a means of regulating the sexual behavior of many
poor, single women.102 Indeed, many women currently must participate in mandatory paternity
proceedings in order to be entitled to benefits, and many jurisdictions impose family caps, which limit
cash benefit increases for any children conceived while the mother is receiving welfare benefits.103
Recipients of state funded prenatal care often have to endure highly embarrassing and intrusive
questions about their parenting history, criminal history, immigration status, contraceptive use, and
finances, which middleand upper-class women simply do not have to endure.104 Furthermore, the
Supreme Court has held that welfare recipients are not entitled to Fourth Amendment rights when it
comes to searches in their homes.105 Social workers can stop by and search a recipient’s home and
interview her with no warning or warrant. As will be discussed more fully below, the privacy invasions
that result from current criminal justice policies also contribute to greater social control of poor people
of color because of the chilling effects they have on selfdetermination, freedom of association, and
freedom of expression.
In addition to making poor people of color more vulnerable to oppressive state social control, the war
on crime has also created serious dignitary harms. When the state curtails privacy, it sends a powerful
message: an individual cannot be trusted to use his privacy in legitimate ways.106 For example, parents
tend to give their children less privacy because they do not yet trust that the children have the maturity
and wisdom not to make choices that could potentially harm themselves or others. Likewise, one reason
we limit the privacy of prisoners is because their past acts suggest that we cannot trust them not to
engage in criminal and potentially dangerous activities, at least for a set period of time. The lack of trust
expressed by the state through the war on crime, therefore, at best resembles a form of paternalism; at
worst, it resembles a form de facto criminalization of individuals simply because they are poor and of
color.107 These individuals logically conclude that the state does not respect them nor does it view their
identities and viewpoints as equal to those of white and wealthier citizens.108
B. The War on Crime’s Impact on Individual Privacy
1. Stops-and-Frisks and Motor Stops
The myopic focus of the war on drugs on arrest and conviction rates, combined with the racialized view
of illegal drug use, creates an environment where police officers feel free to subject poor urban AfricanAmericans and Latinos to intrusive stops-and-frisks on a daily basis.109 In 2011, 84% of stops-and-frisks
conducted in New York were on African-Americans and Latinos.110 Eighty-eight percent of these stops
did not result in an arrest or a summons being given.111 Contraband was found in only 2% of these
stops.112 In other words, although the vast majority of residents of poor urban neighborhoods are lawabiding citizens, many of them still have to tolerate these intrusions.113 Indeed, particularly for young,
African-American and Latino males, they are a regular part of life.114 For example, between January
2006 and March 2010, the police stopped 52,000 individuals in an eight-block minority area in
Brooklyn.115 This amounted to an average of one stop per resident per year.116 The average increased
to five stops per person for males fifteen to thirty-four years of age.117
Some of those who have been stopped by the New York Police Department describe a hornet-like
invasion where they are barraged with questions such as “where’s the weed?” and “where’s the
guns?”118 These exchanges are sometimes laced with profanity, racial epithets, and name-calling like
“immigrant,” “old man,” or “bro.”119 Other exchanges are more polite where the police officer asks
whether they can talk with the individual; asks him a series of questions such as what he is doing, where
he lives, and whether he has anything on him; and then lets the individual go.120 In either type of
exchange, the subjects of these stops often report “feeling intruded upon and humiliated.”121 A college
student from Brooklyn describes, “‘They talk to you like you’re ignorant, like you’re an animal.’”122
Another man from Queens describes feeling “belittled,” even though he once experienced a more polite
exchange.123 Individuals often feel shame after these interactions and fear that others who witness the
stop-andfrisk will assume that they are criminals.124 Even young children are not immune from this
practice. One New Yorker reporters,
There’s a junior high school [where] almost all the kids are either of Arabic [sic] descent or Latino. There
[were] days when you’d see all these little kids lined up, with their legs spread, holding [onto] the wall,
and the cops are going through their pockets and stuff. It’s just like a terrible, disgusting, horrible thing
to see.125
Furthermore, police often engage in abusive and inappropriate behaviors via the stop-and-frisk including
forcibly stripping individuals down to their underclothing in public, “inappropriate touching, physical
violence and threats, extortion of sex, sexual harassment and other humiliating and degrading
treatment.”126 Objecting to inappropriate touching can lead to a charge of resisting arrest.12
What is most striking about this practice is that residents of particular communities have had to modify
their everyday activities in order to lessen the risk associated with police encounters.128 New Yorkers of
color describe refraining from wearing stereotypical “ethnic” clothing and hair styles to make
themselves less likely to be accosted by the police.129 They also describe taking public transportation
and avoiding walking altogether to avoid encounters with law enforcement on the street.130 Others
describe how young people have to stay indoors and cannot play outside.131 Adults feel like they
cannot sit on the porch or go to the store or interact with their neighbors.132
The police have particularly focused on public housing sites for heightened surveillance,133 but the city
of New York also has a special program, Operation Clean Halls, which involves private buildings.134
Under this program, owners of private buildings sign contracts with the New York Police Department,
which allows the police to patrol these buildings.135 African-Americans and Latinos are
disproportionately stopped by police as part of this program.136
In order to avoid the accusation of trespassing, many New Yorkers report always carrying identification
or a piece of mail verifying that they live in a particular building.137 Some report that residents of a
building may even have to produce a lease in order to avoid arrest.138 For many, they daily must
endure police inquiries of, “Do you live here?”139 New Yorkers report that they also carry pay stubs to
prove that they have a legitimate source of income.140
In Chicago, police cars patrol public housing projects and when they stop, every young African-American
man in the area automatically places his hands against the car and spreads his legs to be searched.141
This automatic reflex to “assume the position” happens in poor communities of color across the
nation,142 and it underscores how constant police presence and surveillance have become woven into
the everyday fabric of poor, urban life. It is not surprising, therefore, that residents in these
communities describe this constant presence as a type of “military occupation”143 or “outside
prison.”144
A variation of the stop-and-frisk is the “stop-and-sniff.” New York police officers will stop individuals
drinking from cups in public.145 They then ask to sniff the contents of the individual’s cup to see if it
contains alcohol.146 If it smells like alcohol, they are issued a summons for public drinking.147 The
penalty for the offense is small at twentyfive dollars per ticket, but the real purpose for these stops is to
have an excuse to check to see if an individual has any outstanding warrants.148 As is the case with
stop-and-frisk practices, residents are angry and resentful when police officers demand to sniff the
contents of their cups.149 Furthermore, one judge found that 85% of the summonses that were issued
during one month in Brooklyn were to AfricanAmericans and Latinos.150
Just as is the case with stops-and-frisks, motor vehicle stops are a numbers game.151 As a result, tens of
thousands of innocent individuals are pulled over every year as part of the war on drugs.152
Unfortunately, a disproportionate number of these individuals are African-American and Latino.153
Indeed, many are familiar with the terms “driving while black” or “driving while brown,” which refer to
the disproportionate effects of traffic stops on African-Americans and Latinos.154 Some New Yorkers
report that they avoid driving altogether and opt for public transportation in order to avoid these
confrontations.155
Surveillance**
Surveillance matters—it is part and parcel to the creation of the Black as criminal and
lesser—institutional engagement is necessary to change it
Brucato, former Union College adjunct professor, 2014 (Ben, “Fabricating the Color Line in a
White Democracy: From Slave Catchers to Petty Sovereigns,” ResearchGate, Theoria, December 2014,
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ben_Brucato/publication/269998697_Fabricating_the_Color_Line
_in_a_White_Democracy_From_Slave_Catchers_to_Petty_Sovereigns/links/5564740608ae6f4dcc99eb4
5.pdf, p. 48, IC)
In 1721, the first agency in the U.S. that looked anything like modern police was given its mandate:
prevent Black insurrection. This mandate has remained core to U.S. police ever since. Nothing more
profoundly explains the persistence in racial outcomes of policing than this genetic moment, as
throughout the nearly 300 years since, all reforms to the institution have managed to retain this
imperative, when not in directive then certainly in practice. The historical practices of police in fulfilling
this mandate have not only shaped contemporary policing, but also established that Black insurrection is
to be prevented through constant proximity of police to communities of colour, intensive surveillance,
routine harassment and violent terror by agents of the state and white citizens. Nonetheless, specific
political and juridical adaptations have directed these activities. Since Reconstruction, the line between
the symbols 'young Black male' and 'criminal' is difficult to draw. The two categories practically define
one another. It is through the surveillance and physical violence of police that the symbolic violence of
this identity is made functional, reliable and durable.
Police, by virtue of this mandate, is the strong blue thread that weaves together the white race and the
state, forming a barrier to full political inclusion of non-whites. As such, this institution represents a key
point of strategic intervention to weaken the centuries-old white democracy. Just as race has been a
primary point of tension that has been central to every political shift in U.S. history, the peculiar
institution of U.S. police has been profoundly implicated in these processes. The institution has both
shaped these events and been shaped by them.
State key**
Identity is not constructed in isolation from political norms, but rather, is constructed
by institutions—recognizing how the state interacts with the formation of identities is
key
Hayward, Washington University in St. Louis political science associate professor, and
Watson, Washington University in St. Louis doctoral student, 2010 (Clarissa and Ron,
“Identity and Political Theory,” Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, Vol. 33, Issue 1, January
2010,
http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=law_journal_law_policy,
p. 31-33, IC)
This is not our view. Political theory, we want to suggest in the final sections of this Article, can and
should continue to contribute to work on the role of the state in identity politics. Indeed, some of the
most important work on this topic in recent years has been by theorists who are beginning to shift the
terms of the debate.98 To frame identity politics‘ normative-political problem in terms of state
“recognition”—in terms of its benefits or its burdens—is a mistake, their claim is. Although Taylor‘s work
in the early 1990s performed the critically important task of drawing attention to the limits of toleration
and initiating a conversation about other state responses to identity politics, his language—indeed, the
very logic of— “recognition” misleads. The term “recognition,” along with much of the debate about
identity that has been conducted using that term, implies, erroneously, that states merely react to–that
they “acknowledge the existence or truth of” (or, alternatively, refuse to acknowledge)—racial, national,
ethnic, gendered, and other collective identities.99
But states never simply “recognize” (or refuse to recognize) identities. Instead, they play a crucial role in
producing and reproducing them. States strongly shape national identities, for example, through
citizenship law and family law.100 States strongly shape racial, ethnic, and gender identities, as well.
They institutionalize them in legal norms and in policies, for example, in census categories, and in the
case of race in the United States, in racial zoning laws and explicitly racist federal housing policies.101
States vest some, but not other, identities with public significance by distributing resources and
opportunities along group lines.102 They thus influence how citizens identify, and incentivize people to
organize and mobilize as members of particular groups.
States construct identities, in other words, even before people advance political claims in their names,
shaping group boundaries, group norms, and group practices, through laws, policies, and political
institutions. What is more, when people press claims in the name of identity, state responses to those
claims never simply “acknowledge [identity‘s] existence or truth” (or fail to). Instead, they actively
produce and reproduce identity. Recall Charles Taylor‘s example of the proposed Meech amendment to
the Canadian constitution. Even Taylor would acknowledge that the Canadian state changes Quebecois
culture when it gives French-speaking parents the right to educate their children in English.103 Indeed,
the force of the example is his claim that the state changes culture when it acts to transform a linguistic
tradition that comprises an important element of a particular identity. We want to underscore,
however, that even if the Meech amendment had passed—if the Canadian state had legally enabled the
Quebecois to restrict parents‘ educational choices—state actors still would have shaped Quebecois
culture. They would not (as Taylor suggests) merely have enabled the survival of authentic traditions
and practices. Instead, they would have lent the coercive force of the state to those who would
perpetuate the linguistic status quo, helping them prevail against those who would challenge and
change what it means to be Quebecois.
Similarly, when the U.S. enabled the Santa Clara Pueblos to exclude from membership the children of
women who marry outside the tribe, it lent the coercive force of the state to those who favored a
particular set of membership rules. It helped some tribal members prevail in their struggle against
others—others who challenged, and who hoped to change, those rules. As Sarah Song shows in her
insightful analysis of this case, the U.S. shaped Pueblo identity, and it did so in ways that reproduced and
reinforced the patriarchal norms of the larger society.104
To be clear, our claim is not that a different outcome in the Martinez case would have constituted state
non-intervention. To the contrary, we want to underscore that identity groups—those collectivities
which people experience as deeply constitutive of their personal identities—rarely, if ever, define
themselves independently and consensually. Members of groups—along with those nonmembers who
vie for membership—struggle and negotiate with one another to create and re-create group boundaries
and group norms. They do so in interaction with other groups, and in interaction with the major
institutions of their political society. In Song‘s words, “cultures are not entities that exist prior to social
and political interactions but rather are created in and through them.”105
Even negative state action is still constructive in terms of identity—contesting the
terms in which identity are established is key
Hayward, Washington University in St. Louis political science associate professor, and
Watson, Washington University in St. Louis doctoral student, 2010 (Clarissa and Ron,
“Identity and Political Theory,” Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, Vol. 33, Issue 1, January
2010,
http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=law_journal_law_policy,
p. 33-34, IC)
Song characterizes the latter claim as a ―modest” constructivist view. This view does not imply, she
writes, ―that cultures are always radically heterogenous and contested.”106 We suspect most theorists
writing on identity—strong multiculturalists, liberal multiculturalists, and Foucaultians alike—would
accept as noncontroversial this modest constructivism. Still, the constructed and contested nature of
identity is obscured when the normative-political debate is framed in terms of ―recognition.” A case in
point is Kymlicka‘s reasoning with respect to Martinez. He endorses the U.S. Supreme Court decision,
not on the grounds that gender-biased membership rules are good rules.107 (Recall, he specifically cites
these rules as an instance of ―internal restriction”—an identity harm, to use the language introduced in
Part IV). Instead, Kymlicka endorses the decision on the grounds that it refrains from ―interven[ing]
forcibly to compel the Pueblo council to respect [female members‘] rights.”108 He supports state
accommodation of the Santa Clara Pueblos, in other words, because he worries state “intervention” is
coercive.
The trouble with his reasoning (and with similar reasoning by others) is that accommodation is a form of
intervention—a form that enables and promotes coercion. When state actors enable some tribal
members to discriminate against others, when they enforce genderbiased property rights (or any
property rights, for that matter), when they distribute educational opportunities and basic resources,
such as housing and medical care and education, in ways that reproduce and reinforce some particular
set of norms—any particular set of norms— they intervene in, and they help to shape, identity. At the
same time, they coerce those who contest the particular norms they enforce.
Kymlicka‘s reasoning would be sound, of course, if the answer to the question, “Who are the Santa Clara
Pueblos?” were settled and stable—if there existed some obvious and unproblematic definition of the
tribe‘s (authentic) traditions and of its (true) boundaries. The very fact that this case arose, however, is
evidence there is not. Any conceivable state action, including accommodation and other forms of
recognition, contributes to identity-construction. It does not simply “acknowledge [identity‘s] existence
or truth,” but rather makes identity, in some particular, contestable form.
The state is never a neutral actor in the formation of identity—this necessitates the
politicization of identity. Utilizing the state for nondominatory practices such as the
defense of rights is net good and doesn’t link to any offense that doesn’t link to the
status quo
Hayward, Washington University in St. Louis political science associate professor, and
Watson, Washington University in St. Louis doctoral student, 2010 (Clarissa and Ron,
“Identity and Political Theory,” Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, Vol. 33, Issue 1, January
2010,
http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=law_journal_law_policy,
p. 36-38, IC)
States are not, as Wendy Brown reminds us, “neutral arbiters of injury.”111 They cannot “recognize”
identity without helping construct it. Nor can they construct identity in ways that are noncontroversial.
But that does not mean every conceivable state construction of identity is equivalent, or that political
theorists should refuse to address the question, “How should states construct identity?” If state actors
necessarily make and remake identity, we want to argue in this final Part, they should do so in ways that
render identitarian norms, boundaries, and practices as responsive as possible to those they affect. To
construct identity democratically is a matter, less of “recognizing” it, than promoting nondomination, by
which we mean that state of power relations in which all participants are enabled, and equally so, to
challenge and change, or alternatively to defend, their terms.112
Nondomination in identity politics has at least three important dimensions. First, in every multicultural
and socially stratified political society, it has an inter-group dimension, since in such societies relations
of power tend to follow group lines. Second, whenever group boundaries are controversial, whenever
group practices are internally contested and relations of power within groups hierarchical,
nondomination has an intra-group dimension. Third and finally, nondomination has a systemic
dimension, since people are unfree when subjected to social, yet impersonal forms of power, such as
the power of norms that are deeply entrenched (for instance, because naturalized or sacralized).113
States should construct and reconstruct identity, our view is, with a view to promoting inter-group,
intra-group, and systemic nondomination. In some cases, promoting nondomination along the first
(inter-group) dimension may require the very political institutions multiculturalists recommend. It may
require various forms of group rights, for instance, or even relatively broad powers of group selfgovernment. The aim, however, is not to protect and preserve “cultures,” but to reverse significant
identity-based forms of domination.
Promoting nondomination along the second (inter-group) dimension typically will require defining and
protecting a wide range of individual rights. Intra-group nondomination requires rights to exit, to cite
one important example. It requires individual political rights that ensure effective participation in the
processes through which group boundaries and norms are defined. The aim, however, is not to promote
individual autonomy, but to reduce—ideally to eliminate—the arbitrary exercise of power by some
group members over others.114
Promoting nondomination along the third (systemic) dimension requires state action to ensure the
malleability of group norms and group boundaries: to ensure their responsiveness, that is, to the human
subjects whose lives they govern. To be sure, it may be the case—contra some theorists of “agonistic”
democracy—that in a given social context it would be infelicitous to destabilize a particular identitarian
practice.115 Even still, that practice should be in principle open to challenge and change. The
institutions that best promote this systemic form of nondomination are procedurally democratic
institutions that foster contestatory forms of political engagement in which people critique and defend,
and sometimes transform, the groups with which they identify.
Institutions Good
Shifting to their politics is a way to dodge fundamental collective debates with the
hegemonic forces that underwrite oppression – training an incapacity to engage with
institutional power sets activism up to fail against the organized forces of political
control – the aff is a modern day Nero who fiddles the night away as Rome burns
down around him
Chandler 7 – Researcher @ Centre for the Study of Democracy, Chandler. 2007. Centre for the Study
of Democracy, Westminster, Area, Vol. 39, No. 1, p. 118-119
This disjunction between the human/ethical/global causes of post-territorial political activism and the
capacity to 'make a difference' is what makes these individuated claims immediately abstract and
metaphysical – there is no specific demand or programme or attempt to build a collective project. This
is the politics of symbolism. The rise of symbolic activism is highlighted in the increasingly popular
framework of 'raising awareness'– here there is no longer even a formal connection between ethical
activity and intended outcomes (Pupavac 2006). Raising awareness about issues has replaced even the
pretense of taking responsibility for engaging with the world – the act is ethical in-itself. Probably the
most high profile example of awareness raising is the shift from Live Aid, which at least attempted to
measure its consequences in fund-raising terms, to Live 8 whose goal was solely that of raising an
'awareness of poverty'. The struggle for 'awareness' makes it clear that the focus of symbolic politics is
the individual and their desire to elaborate upon their identity – to make us aware of their 'awareness',
rather than to engage us in an instrumental project of changing or engaging with the outside world. It
would appear that in freeing politics from the constraints of territorial political community there is a
danger that political activity is freed from any constraints of social mediation(see further, Chandler
2004a). Without being forced to test and hone our arguments, or even to clearly articulate them, we
can rest on the radical 'incommunicability' of our personal identities and claims – you are 'either with
us or against us'; engaging with those who disagree is no longer possible or even desirable. It is this lack
of desire to engage which most distinguishes the unmediated activism of post-territorial political actors
from the old politics of territorial communities, founded on struggles of collective interests (Chandler
2004b). The clearest example is old representational politics – this forced engagement in order to win
the votes of people necessary for political parties to assume political power. Individuals with a belief in a
collective programme knocked on strangers' doors and were willing to engage with them, not on the
basis of personal feelings but on what they understood were their potential shared interests. Few
people would engage in this type of campaigning today; engaging with people who do not share our
views, in an attempt to change their minds, is increasingly anathema and most people would rather
share their individual vulnerabilities or express their identities in protest than attempt to argue with a
peer. This paper is not intended to be a nostalgic paean to the old world of collective subjects and
national interests or a call for a revival of territorial state-based politics or even to reject global
aspirations: quite the reverse. Today, politics has been 'freed' from the constraints of territorial political
community – governments without coherent policy programmes do not face the constraints of failure or
the constraints of the electorate in any meaningful way; activists, without any collective opposition to
relate to, are free to choose their causes and ethical identities; protest, from Al Qaeda, to anti-war
demonstrations, to the riots in France, is inchoate and atomized. When attempts are made to formally
organize opposition, the ephemeral and incoherent character of protest is immediately apparent.
Clash is Nice
In order for clash to occur, debate must follow the set rules. The objective of the affirmative is to
present a case that defends the resolution in order to be fair and educational for both sides.
Idea 05 [October 10, 2005, Idea (International Debate Education Association, develops, organizes and promotes debate and debate-related activities in communities throughout the
world. IDEA acts as an independent membership organization of national debate clubs, associations, programs, and individuals who share a common purpose: to promote mutual
understanding and democracy globally by supporting discussion and active citizenship locally.), “Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate”, online,
http://idebate.org/sites/live/files/standards/documents/rules-cross-examination.pdf, RaMan]
Introduction Like other forms of debate, Cross-Examination (C-X or Policy) Debate focuses on the core
elements of controversial issue. Cross-Examination Debate develops important skills, such as critical thinking,
listening, argument construction, research, note-taking and advocacy skills. Cross-Examination Debate is distinct from other
I.
formats, with the exception of Parliamentary Debate, in its use of a two-person team. Cross-Examination Debate also places emphasis on questioning or cross-examination between
, Cross-Examination Debate typically rewards intensive use of evidence, and
is more focused on content than on delivery. II. Rules of Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate This section highlights the important rules that govern the
constructive speeches. While specific practices vary
Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate format. Because these rules focus on the goals and procedures of debate, they do not include all that might be considered, from a strategic perspective,
he topic for Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate is typically called a
"resolution" or "proposition." Different types of propositions may be used in a Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate, but policy propositions tend to
be the most common. Different leagues, organizations or individual tournaments may use a particular resolution for a particular debate. So that clash might
occur in a debate, debaters should engage in research on both sides of the topic. Research is primarily
the job of debaters. Teachers and coaches may conduct research in order to improve their job performance and to facilitate the learning of their students, but should limit the
amount of research they conduct for debaters. B. Interpretation of the Resolution Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate involves two teams, each consisting of two people. One team
takes the affirmative position and is responsible for defending and supporting the resolution. The other team takes
the negative and is responsible for refuting the affirmative, which may be done in a variety of strategic ways. The affirmative team is responsible for the
initial interpretation of the resolution, and for presenting a case that defends and supports the
resolution. The negative team may challenge this interpretation if they believe the affirmative team's
interpretation is unreasonable. 2 1. Arguing a Case for the Resolution The objective of the affirmative team is to
construct and present a case that defends and supports the resolution. An adequate case (one that meets a certain burden of
proof) depends on what type of proposition is debated. Individual topics and tournaments determine what burden is required. 2. Arguing Against the Resolution
The objective of the negative team is to refute the affirmative case, which, by extension, is an argument
against the resolution. Depending on the topic and the type of proposition, the negative may have a variety of possible strategies available when refuting the affirmative
principles of effective debate. A. Resolutions and Preparation T
case. C. Rules During the Debate 1. In-Round Research is Prohibited Topic research must be completed prior to the beginning of a debate. Once the debate begins, the participants may not
conduct research via electronic or any other means. No outside person(s) may conduct research during the debate and provide it directly or indirectly to the debaters. Debaters, however, are
allowed to use a dictionary to determine the meaning of English words. 2. Citations are Mandatory Debaters may cite or refer to any public information. When doing so, they should be
prepared to provide complete source documentation to the opposing team and to the judge, upon request. A team's documentation of cited material must be complete enough so that the
opposing team and the judge can locate the information of their own. Ordinarily, such documentation would include the name of an author (if any), the name and date of a publication, the
URL of a Web site (if the information was retrieved electronically), and a page number (if
Counter Gazing K
Counter Gazing K—1nc
We endorse a strategy of counter-gazing – instead of evading the watchfulness of our
masters, we must confront it. Only this radical act is capable of asserting black
subjectivity, and opening up spaces of political and social resistance to structures of
antiblackness.
Hooks, 1992 - English professor and senior lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern
California. (Bell; “The Oppositional Gaze”; Book; Pg. 115-116;
http://www.umass.edu/afroam/downloads/reading14.pdf; DOA: 7/10/15 || NDW)
When thinking about black female spectators,
I remember being punished as a child for staring, for those hard intense direct looks
"gaze" has always
children would give grown-ups, looks that were seen as confronta- tional, as gestures of resistance, challenges to authority. The
been political in my life. Imagine the terror felt by the child who has come to understand through repeated punishments that one's gaze can be
dangerous. The child who has learned so well to look the other way when necessary. Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents, "Look at me when I talk to
you." Only, the child is afraid to look. Afraid to look, but fascinated by the gaze. There
is power in looking. Amazed the first time I
read in history classes that white slave- owners (men, women, and children) punished enslaved black
people for looking, I wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze had informed black parenting and black spectatorship. The politics of
slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze. Connecting
this strategy of domination to that used by grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up, I was pained to think that there was no absolute
Years later, reading Michel Foucault, I thought again
about these connections, about the ways power as domination reproduces itself in different locations
employing similar apparatuses, strategies, and mechanisms of control. Since I knew as a child that the
dominating power adults exercised over me and over my gaze was never so absolute that I did not dare
to look, to sneak a peep, to stare dangerously, I knew that the slaves had looked. That all attempts to
repress our/black peoples' right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a
rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: "Not only will I
stare. I want my look to change reality." Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to
manipulate one's gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the
possibility of agency. In much of his work, Michel Foucault insists on describing domination in terms of "relations
of power" as part of an effort to challenge the assumption that "power is a system of domination which
controls everything and which leaves no room for freedom." Emphatically stating that in all relations of
power "there is necessarily the possibility of resistance," he invites the critical thinker to search those
margins, gaps, and locations on and through the body where agency can be found. Stuart Hall calls for recognition of
our agency as black spectators in his essay "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation." Speaking against the construction of white
representations of blackness as totalizing, Hall says of white presence: "The error is not to conceptualize
this 'presence' in terms of power, but to locate that power as wholly external to us-as extrinsic force,
whose influence can be thrown olf like the serpent sheds its skin. What Franz Fanon reminds us, in Black Skin, White Mask, is
difference between whites who hadioppressed black people and ourselves.
how power is inside as well as outside: ...the movements, the attitudes, the glances or the Utner nxed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by
a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened I burst apart. Now
the fragments have been put together again
by another self. This "look," from--so to speak-the place of the Other, fixes us, not only in its violence,
hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of its desire. Spaces of agency exist for black people,
wherein we can both interro- gate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming
what we see. The "gaze" has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally.
Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that "looks" to
document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency
by claiming and cultivating "aware- ness" politicizes "looking" relations--one learns to look a certain way
in order to resist.
2nc Solvency
Counter gazing challenges structures of privilege and creates a possibility for agency –
the alternative is the first step to constructing social hierarchies
Farough 04 [Steven D, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Assumption College. The Social
Geographies of White Masculinities, pages 253-254. http://crs.sagepub.com/content/30/2/241.short
accessed 7/10/15]//kmc
It is also important to consider the agency of those marginalized by racial inequality. In Black Looks, bell hooks
(1992) notes the racialized politics of looking back at those in position of power. This seemingly innocuous act
highlights the exploitative relations of power for those in privileged standpoints. To gaze upon someone
constitutes an interrogation, a right for the gazer to survey the gazed. Hooks (1992) points out that the
entitlement of whites to gaze upon blacks is a deeply structured practice throughout U.S. history.
However, when African Americans gaze back this produces violent or defensive reactions among
whites because their privileged standpoint is exposed. Such a gaze is deeply gendered as well. John
Berger (1972) notes the gendered structure of sight where men are allowed to look at women as
objects; between men the gaze is structured through rituals intended to mark dominance and deference
(Connell 1987). The right to gaze also plays out in a spatial context where the public sphere is more often
occupied by men and structured by the male gaze (Connell 1987). However, the structure of racialized and
gendered sight that positions white men as those who posses the “right” to gaze can fail in certain
contexts. In geographies where whites are the numerical minority, the power to gaze can be reversed by
the traditionally oppressed group. This reversal of the gaze can have the effect of transforming the
sense of self of those in privileged positions. bell hooks calls this the oppositional gaze. She notes: That all attempts to
repress our black peoples’ right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a
rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: ‘Not only will I
stare. I want my look to change reality.’ Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate
one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of
agency. (Hooks 1992:116; emphasis added) It is this possibility of looking back that marks white male bodies in a way that produces anxiety,
fear, and anger among those in positions of privilege. The structures of power work through the oppositional gaze,
exposing what is more readily invisible or repressed in the spaces of the everyday life of some white
men, and thus “changing reality.” Those within positions of domination can feel disoriented. ...[T]he movements, the attitudes,
the glances of the Other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation.
Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self. This
‘look,’ from – so to speak –
the place of the Other, fixes us, not only in its violence, hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence
of its desire. (Fanon; quoted from hooks 1992:116) In this field of vision, Fanon provides a reading of the paranoia of counter surveillance;
that white men can feel fear that the others might look back and retaliate. Fanon’s quote addresses a Lacanian
understanding of the limits of a sense of self in relation to the other – that there are conditions where
the production of a sovereign sense of self comes into a context where it must address the privileged
production of its own existence (Brennan 1993). Yet the political economy of this visual form of exchange is
deeply rooted in the specifics of spatial context and social interaction.
Countergazing forces consciousness in the object of the gaze, that’s the only way to
give a voice to those who remain ‘invisible’ in society—fugitivity is unable to solve
without a concrete form of resistance against the state
Schreiber, 96, Ph.D. in literature, University of Colorado (Evelyn, “Reader, text, and subjectivity: Toni
Morrison's Beloved as Lacan's gaze Qua object,” George Washington University Literature Review, Vol.
30, Iss. 3, p. 445 http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 231174378?pq-origsite=gscholar//RF)
As a white reader of Morrison's narrative, on the other hand, the text's anamorphic vision allows me to
"know too much" (Zizek 44), and my ego begins to dissolve as my subject status splinters. Readers in this
position experience themselves as objects when they realize that the African-American text is gazing at
them, signifying something about themselves. In Morrison's texts, the fantasy object (the exotic other)
cripples the subject by gazing back. While some readers (certainly some of his contemporaries) are threatened
by Faulkner's texts, Morrison's montage technique creates anxiety by revealing a Lacanian piece of the real
through the menacing gaze of the other. Zizek explains how Hitchcock's tracking shot zeros in on an
anamorphic spot, or something that sticks out. His movement from montage to tracking closes in on the gaze,
causing anxiety in the viewer. Lacan posits that the essence of the gaze is a "gratuitous showing, [causing] . . . some
form of `sliding away' of the subject" (Four Fundamental 75-76). Thus, in the movement from montage to tracking,
Hitchcock, and, I suggest, Morrison, zero in on the gaze to create anxiety in the viewer/reader. Zizek calls this gaze
the "Hitchcockian blot" (88), the gaze of the other that reduces the viewer/reader to object. Like Hitchcock,
Morrison creates this gaze by moving from a montage of differing perspectives and points in time to focus on the
uncanny often in the form of "inhuman" behavior-the unspeakable-thereby fissuring the text. In this way,
Morrison succeeds in giving voice to the unspoken, those "invisible [repressed] things [that] are not
necessarily `not-there"' ("Unspeakable" 11).
2nc Sequencing/A2 Perm
The act of countergazing and surveilling those who ‘surveilled’ disrupts status quo
production of knowledge and alters dominant discourse—our advocacy is a
prerequisite to any discussion of the historical implications of fugitivity and
surveillance
Buzinde, Ph.D., University of Illinois, and Osagie, 11 Professor at Penn State 11, (Christine and
Iyunolu, “Fugitive subjectivity, travel writing, and the gaze,” William Wells Brown,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf /10.1080/09502386.2010.545425)
Similarly, African-Americans adopted gazes that ‘were substantially different from those of their white
counterparts’ (Schueller 1999, p. x); such differences existed between and within social subgroupings as well.
Some adopted a surface gaze, a surveillance of sorts (Urry 1990), which, although lacking in depth,
allowed the viewers to maintain a certain superior sense of self that was aligned with dominant societal
discourses. Such strategies of seeing were captured in travel narratives and they allowed writers to offer accounts
that resonated with the reading public. Others adopted what MacCannell (2001) refers to as the second gaze, in
which the viewer sought for ‘the unseen behind the details’ (p. 33) a strategy that affirmed the writer’s sense of
self. Arguably, notions of identity, race, and class merge to influence the gaze and its narrativized forms
within the travelogue. Scholars have examined the various ways Anglo writers interpreted the world in their
travelogues. However, far less scholarship has been conducted on the accounts by nineteenth century AfricanAmerican travel writers. Perhaps this lacuna in the literature is attributable to the fact that travel was seen as a
privilege mostly afforded to Anglos and often denied to Blacks. Gilroy (1993) argues that black writers and
thinkers were ignored, poorly addressed, or ‘undertheorised’ because of the ‘ethnohistorical’ racism of
the West (pp. 56). Gilroy’s (1993) mission in Black Atlantic was to promote Blacks as ‘agents’ with ‘cognitive
capacities’ and ‘an intellectual history’ (p. 6). Gilroy and a new generation of scholars are taking seriously the
need to focus on less discussed ‘non canonical texts and authors’ (Gifra-Adroher 2000, p. 21). Fish (2004)
has also examined travelogues by black and white women who traveled during the nineteenth century. Schueller’s
(1999) recovery of David Dorr’s 1858 publication, A Colored Man Round the World, and her provocative
introduction, is a worthy first step to enliven academic interest in marginal writers of the nineteenth century. Hotz
(2006) has also revisited fugitive slave travel writing by William Grimes, Moses Roper, and Frederick
Douglass. Much of this work provides insights into pivotal moments in history (Gifra-Adroher 2000) and
highlights ‘the tensions and conflicts underlying early U.S. history and culture’ (Hotz 2006, p. 11). However, further
investigation is needed to understand how slaves, whose identities were contested, appropriated and engaged in
tourism (by definition an activity in freedom) while their personal freedom was in doubt.
Only confrontation can solve and move black bodies from the margins of society and
disrupt dominant power structures
Schreiber, 96, Ph.D. in literature, University of Colorado (Evelyn, “Reader, text, and subjectivity: Toni
Morrison's Beloved as Lacan's gaze Qua object,” George Washington University Literature Review, Vol.
30, Iss. 3, p. 445 http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 231174378?pq-origsite=gscholar//RF)
Thus, we can look at Morrison's Beloved as a performative representation of the gaze through the
signification of black culture. This articulation of culture and history from the point of view of the
marginalized and through the cultural embodiment of the gaze of the other reinscribes that culture and
the Other. Consider Beloved as a montage of differing realities, of the multiple identities within the text.
Morrison's montage reveals points of fissure, or the real, on a phallic level, just as Hitchcock's tracking shot
captures differing aspects of reality. Morrison's text is a cultural manifestation of multiple constituencies
that disrupt or overturn dominant cultural views of blacks as absent or negated. The retelling of the
story, in pieces, by different narrators and from different points in time, confronts the reader with the gaze(s)
of the Other, moving that Other from object to subject and thus threatening the subject position of the
reader.
A2 Gets Shut Down
Counter gazing causes those in a structure of power to question their status – helps
realize privilege and move away from stereotypes of identity
Farough 04 [Steven D, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Assumption College. The Social
Geographies of White Masculinities, pages 255-256. http://crs.sagepub.com/content/30/2/241.short
accessed 7/10/15]//kmc **note: “he” refers to the subject being interviewed**
Consistent with hooks’ (1992) oppositional gaze, I found that it
is not just that some of my respondents are afraid of
robbery or being beaten up in urban spaces, it is also the experience of being looked at that exposes
them as privileged. In this section I will specifically explore the narratives of three white men to
highlight the inter-relationship between the oppositional gaze, social geography, and identity
transformation. For instance, consider Jesse, an urban raised, working class white man who offers his
interpretation of being stared at. “You know, when I go into the ghetto and I see them, you know, in the morning hanging out, ten
people ... and I honestly felt that they hated us more than we hated them, you know.” Jesse specifies this
perceived hate though staring. I mean, I mean, I was on the bus a couple weeks ago. You know, and this
black kid was looking at me. Younger kid, 19 or 20. So he is staring at me. And I – you know how you just know
that someone is looking at you. [Int: Right, yeah.] He is staring at me, he’s looking at me in the eyes. So I
looked at him, and I’m saying to myself ‘if I turn away from them, he’s going to think, like, you know,
he punked me.’ You do know what I’m saying? [Int: Right.] So, I’m staring at him, staring at him, staring at him. So
he says, ‘what are you looking at’? I said, ‘nothing.’ I said, ‘I’m not looking at anything.’ And I just
wanted – I just wanted to say something to him. Because I just wanted to take it out on him. [Int: umm
hmm.] But he was just smart enough and walked away. But I’ve had other run ins. They are definant. They
are defiant people. I mean, you know – I don’t allow other people to do this. Racist how I look at it.
But I see it, man, all the time, you know? (emphasis added) Jesse notes that the stare was rooted in a
context of “defiance.” In this narrative he argues that the young black man on the bus engaged in a
scrutinizing stare. Jesse believes that this stare is “racist,” a look of contempt toward a white man. Also
rooted in this staring contest was the production of masculinity in an urban context. As Connell (1987) notes, hegemonic forms of
masculinity are not only defined in relation to femininities, but is also produced by marginalizing
other men. According to Connell (1987) the prolonged stares and verbal exchange are produced by the historical connection between
public space and the entitlement of being a man. Eye contact between men can evoke a sense of defending one’s
right to the public sphere. In this ritual, who ever looks away first is interpreted as deferring to the
other man. Yet in the context of staring Jesse’s interpretation makes references to racialized and
gendered social power. Jesse notes that he could not stop staring, otherwise he would “lose” in the
visual exchange. The narrative ends with anger – “They are defiant. They are defiant people... Racist is how I look at it.” Jesse’s ending
comments of African Americans being “defiant” and “racist” in this narrative are important because it moves his specific experience with a
young black man on a bus to a more general account of racialized and gendered social power.
Jesse interprets the gaze as a stare
that is sending a message of hatred toward white people, an oppositional gaze. The stare clearly makes Jesse
angry. In this context the stare implicitly reminds him of his white masculinity, and thus makes it
impossible to feel as if separate from racialized and gendered forms of social power. Subsequently
Jesse’s narrative maps an emotionally frustrating experience, one that not only addresses the potential
for physical conflict but one that lays the foundation of how he positions himself as a white man in
structural and discursive space as well. As a result, Jesse’s racialized and gendered narrative leads him
into a subsequent story where he provides an implicit class-based analysis, one that places his biography
in relation to the context he lives and his standpoint as a white man. Geographically, Jesse lives in a part of Boston
that he feels has a large population of African Americans. He also believes that whites are not privileged in this area. In fact whites are the new
recipients of discrimination. In another part of the interview, Jesse notes that whites have been helping out blacks for too long. The following
narrative makes the point more apparent.
A2 Ignores Slavery
The countergaze creates anxiety in the audience—forcing consciousness and reflection
on the position of the slave
Schreiber, 96, Ph.D. in literature, University of Colorado (Evelyn, “Reader, text, and subjectivity: Toni
Morrison's Beloved as Lacan's gaze Qua object,” George Washington University Literature Review, Vol.
30, Iss. 3, p. 445 http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 231174378?pq-origsite=gscholar//RF)
Morrison's text creates this unhomeliness for the reader in the points where the real emerges, producing for
the reader a sense of unease in the shift from object to subject when the traditional object-Otherbecomes subject. Points of fissure in the narrative, the places where pieces of the real emerge, signify the gaze of
the Other and point to the nullity of the reader's own subjectivity. These locations in the text exemplify Lacan's
statement that "[t]he message, our message, in all cases comes from the Other[,] . . . `from the place of the Other"'
("Of Structure" 186). These varying points in the text, materialized through shifts in perspective, create a
bombardment-the montage-of pieces of the real. And it is in these fissures that the characters perceive their own
object positions so as to claim their subjectivity. Morrison consciously opens Beloved in medias res so that
the reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign . ... Snatched just as the
slaves were from one place to another, from any place to another, without preparation and without
defense.... One of its purposes is to keep the reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit
world while being supplied a controlled diet of the incredible political world.
Ballot K
Brown
Resistance via the ballot can only instill an adaptive politics of being and effaces the
institutional constraints that reproduce structural violence
Brown 95—prof at UC Berkeley (Wendy, States of Injury, 21-3)
For some, fueled by opprobrium toward regulatory norms or other mo- dalities of domination, the language of "resistance" has taken up the
ground vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom. For others, it is the discourse of “empowerment” that carries the ghost of freedom's
valence ¶ 22¶. Yet as many have noted, insofar as resistance is an effect of the regime it opposes on the one hand, and insofar as
its practitioners often seek to void it of normativity to differentiate it from the (regulatory) nature of
what it opposes on the other, it is at best politically rebellious; at worst, politically amorphous. Resistance stands
against, not for; it is re-action to domination, rarely willing to admit to a desire for it, and it is neutral with regard to possible
political direction. Resistance is in no way constrained to a radical or emancipatory aim. a fact that emerges clearly as soon as one analogizes Foucault's notion of resistance to
its companion terms in Freud or Nietzsche. Yet in some ways this point is less a critique of Foucault, who especially in his later years made clear that his political commitments were not
identical with his theoretical ones (and un- apologetically revised the latter), than a sign of his misappropriation. For Foucault, resistance marks the presence of power and expands our understanding of its mechanics, but it is in this regard an analytical strategy rather than an expressly political one. "Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet. or rather consequently, this
resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power. . . . (T]he strictly relational character of power
relationships . . . depends upon a multiplicity of points of resis- tance: these play the role of adversary,
target, support, or handle in power relations.*39 This appreciation of the extent to which resistance is by no means
inherently subversive of power also reminds us that it is only by recourse to a very non-Foucaultian moral evaluation of power as bad or that which is to be
overcome that it is possible to equate resistance with that which is good, progressive, or seeking an end to domination. ¶ If popular and academic notions of resistance attach, however weakly
at times, to a tradition of protest, the other contemporary substitute for a discourse of freedom—“empowerment”—would seem to correspond more closely to a tradition of idealist
The language of resistance implicitly acknowledges the extent to which protest always
transpires inside the regime; “empowerment,” in contrast, registers the possibility of generating one’s
capacities, one’s “self-esteem,” one’s life course, without capitulating to constraints by particular regimes of power. But in so doing, contemporary discourses of
empowerment too often signal an oddly adaptive and harmonious relationship with domination
insofar as they locate an individual’s sense of worth and capacity in the register of individual feelings, a register
implicitly located on some- thing of an other worldly plane vis-a-vis social and political power. In this regard, despite its
apparent locution of resistance to subjection, contem- porary discourses of empowerment partake strongly of
liberal solipsism—the radical decontextualization of the subject characteristic of¶ 23¶ liberal discourse that is key to the fictional sovereign individualism of liberalism. Moreover,
in its almost exclusive focus on subjects’ emotionalbearing and self-regard, empowerment is a formulation that
converges with a regime’s own legitimacy needs in masking the power of the regime.¶ This is not to suggest that talk of
reconciliation.
empowerment is always only illusion or delusion. It is to argue, rather, that while the notion of empowerment articulates that feature of freedom concerned with action, with being more than
contemporary deployments of that notion also draw so heavily on an
undeconstructed subjectivity that they risk establishing a wide chasm between the (experience of)
empowerment and an actual capacity to shape the terms of political, social, or economic life. Indeed,
the possibility that one can “feel empowered” without being so forms an important element of
legitimacy for the antidemocratic dimensions of liberalism.
the consumer subject figured in discourses of rights and eco- nomic democracy,
Safe Spaces**
The affirmative’s focus on the struggle of the slave parades this space to be one of
safety. This claim only serves to further reinforce the violent exclusion that makes
educational spaces possible, precluding the possibility of real political resistance.
McKittrick, 2014 – Professor of Gender Studies @ Queen's University in Kingston Ontario. Peter
Hudson interviewing Katherine McKittrick. (Katherine; “The Geographies of Blackness and AntiBlackness: An Interview with Katherine McKittrick”; Online PDF;
http://www.katherinemckittrick.com/download/hudson_mckittrick.pdf; DOA: 7/6/15 || NDW)
On twitter, you (depressingly, brilliantly) wrote, “I’ve never glimpsed safe teaching (and learning) space. It is a white fantasy that harms.” I’m wondering if you could
expand on that as it pertains to the Black student in Canada? How does such a vexed space inform your own pedagogical practice?Yes. I
wonder a lot
about why the classroom should be safe. It isn’t safe. I am not sure what safe learning looks like because the
kinds of questions that need to be (and are) asked, across a range of disciplines and interdisciplines, necessarily attend to violence and sadness and the struggle for
life. How
could teaching narratives of sadness ever, under any circumstances, be safe!? And doubled onto this:
which black or other marginalized faculty is safe in the academy, ever? Who are these safe people? Where are they? But
there is also, on top of this all, an underlying discourse, one that emerges out of feminism and other “identity” discourses that
assumes that the classroom should be safe. This kind of “safe space” thinking sometimes includes
statements on course outlines about respect for diversity and how the class (faculty? students?) will not tolerate
inappropriate behavior: racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism. This kind of hate-prevention is a fantasy
to me. It is a fantasy that replicates, rather than undoes, systems of injustice because it assumes, first,
that teaching about anti-colonialism or sexism or homophobia can be safe (which is an injustice to those who have lived
and live injustice!), second, that learning about anti-colonialism or sexism or homophobia is safe, easy,
comfortable, and, third, that silencing and/or removing ‘bad’ and ‘intolerant’ students dismantles
systems of injustice. Privileged students leave these safe spaces with transparently knowable oppressed
identities safely tucked in their back pockets and a lesson on how to be aggressively and benevolently
silent. The only people harmed in this process are students of colour, faculty of colour, and those who are the
victims of potential yet unspoken intolerance. I call this a white fantasy because, at least for me, only someone
with racial privilege would assume that the classroom could be a site of safety! This kind of privileged person sees the
classroom as, a priori, safe, and a space that is tainted by dangerous subject matters (race) and unruly (intolerant) students. But the classroom is, as I
see it, a colonial site that was, and always has been, engendered by and through violent exclusion!
Remember Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy?! How wretched are those daffodils!?! I am not suggesting that the classroom be a location that
welcomes violence and hatefulness and racism; I am suggesting that learning and teaching and
classrooms are, already, sites of pain. We cannot protect or save ourselves or our students by
demanding silence or shaming ignorance or ‘warning’ the class that difficult knowledge is around the
corner (as with “trigger” moments—the moment when the course director or teaching assistant says: “look out, I need to acknowledge a trigger moment that
will make you uncomfortable: we are going to talk about whiteness!”) All of this, too, also recalls the long history of silencing—
subalterns not speaking and all of that. Why is silencing, now, something that protects or enables
safety? Who does silence protect and who does silence make safe and who does silence erase? Who has the
privilege to demand tolerance? In my teaching, although this is a day-to-day skirmish for me because the site where we begin to teach is
already white supremacist, I try very hard to create classroom conversations that work out how knowledge is linked to an ongoing struggle to end
violence and that, while racist or homophobic practices are certainly not encouraged or welcome, when they do emerge (because they always do!) we need
to situate these practices within the wider context of colonialism and anti-blackness. This is a pedagogy
wherein the brutalities of racial violence are not descriptively rehearsed, but always already demand
practical activities of resistance, encounter, and anti-colonial thinking.
A2 Challenge Oppression
The claim that oppression should be the basis for winning a debate round is a pretty
good example of our link argument---the ballot is not a tool of emancipation, but
rather a tool of revenge---it serves as a palliative that denies their investment in
oppression as a means by which to claim the power of victory
Enns 12—Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University (Dianne, The Violence of Victimhood, 28-30)
Guilt and Ressentiment We need to think carefully about what is at stake here. Why is this perspective appealing, and what are its effects? At
first glance, the argument appears simple: white, privileged women, in their theoretical and practical interventions, must take into account the
experiences and conceptual work of women who are less fortunate and less powerful, have fewer resources, and are therefore more subject to
systemic oppression. The lesson of feminism's mistakes in the civil rights era is that this “mainstream” group must not speak for other women.
But such a view must be interrogated. Its effects, as I have argued, include a veneration of the other, moral currency for the victim, and an
insidious competition for victimhood. We will see in later chapters that these effects are also common in situations of conflict where the stakes
are much higher. ¶ We witness here a twofold appeal: otherness discourse in feminism appeals
both to the guilt of the
privileged and to the resentment, or ressentiment, of the other. Suleri's allusion to “embarrassed privilege” exposes the
operation of guilt in the misunderstanding that often divides Western feminists from women in the developing world, or white women from
women of color. The
guilt of those who feel themselves deeply implicated in and responsible for imperialism
merely reinforces an imperialist benevolence, polarizes us unambiguously by locking us into the
categories of victim and perpetrator, and blinds us to the power and agency of the other. Many fail to
see that it is embarrassing and insulting for those identified as victimized others not to be subjected to
the same critical intervention and held to the same demands of moral and political responsibility.
Though we are by no means equal in power and ability, wealth and advantage, we are all collectively
responsible for the world we inhabit in common. The condition of victimhood does not absolve one of moral responsibility. I
will return to this point repeatedly throughout this book.¶ Mohanty's perspective ignores the possibility that one can
become attached to one's subordinated status, which introduces the concept of ressentiment, the focus of much
recent interest in the injury caused by racism and colonization. Nietzsche describes ressentiment as the overwhelming sentiment of “slave
morality,” the revolt that begins when ressentiment itself
becomes creative and gives birth to values. 19 The
sufferer in this schema seeks out a cause for his suffering—“ a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering”— someone on whom
he can vent his affects and so procure the anesthesia necessary to ease the pain of injury. The motivation behind
ressentiment, according to Nietzsche, is the desire “to deaden, by means of a more violent emotion of any kind, a tormenting, secret pain that
is becoming unendurable, and to drive it out of consciousness at least for the moment: for that one requires an affect, as savage an affect as
possible, and, in order to excite that, any pretext at all.” 20 In its contemporary manifestation, Wendy Brown argues that ressentiment
acts as the “righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured,” which “delimits a specific site of
blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the ‘injury’ of social subordination.” Identities are
fixed in an economy of perpetrator and victim, in which revenge, rather than power or emancipation,
is sought for the injured, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does. 21¶ 30¶ Such a concept is useful for understanding why an ethics
of absolute responsibility to the other appeals to the victimized. Brown remarks that, for Nietzsche, the source of the triumph of a
morality rooted in ressentiment is the denial that it has any access to power or contains a will to
power. Politicized identities arise as both product of and reaction to this condition; the reaction is a
substitute for action— an “imaginary revenge,” Nietzsche calls it. Suffering then becomes a social virtue at the same time
that the sufferer attempts to displace his suffering onto another. The identity created by ressentiment, Brown
explains, becomes invested in its own subjection not only through its discovery of someone to blame, and a
new recognition and revaluation of that subjection, but also through the satisfaction of revenge . 22¶ The outcome of
feminism's attraction to theories of difference and otherness is thus deeply contentious. First, we witness the further reification
reification of the very oppositions in question and a simple reversal of the focus from the same to the
other. This observation is not new and has been made by many critics of feminism, but it seems to have made no serious impact on
mainstream feminist scholarship or teaching practices in women's studies programs. Second, in the eagerness to rectify the mistakes of “white,
middle-class, liberal, western” feminism, the other
has been uncritically exalted, which has led in turn to simplistic
designations of marginal, “othered” status and, ultimately, a competition for victimhood. Ultimately, this approach has led to a new
moral code in which ethics is equated with the responsibility of the privileged Western woman, while moral immunity is granted to the
victimized other. Ranjana Khanna describes this operation aptly when she writes that in the field of transnational feminism, the
reification
of the other has produced “separate ethical universes” in which the privileged experience paralyzing
guilt and the neocolonized, crippling resentment. The only “overarching imperative” is that one does
not comment on another's ethical context. An ethical response turns out to be a nonresponse. 23 Let us
turn now to an exploration of this third outcome.
A2 Change Debate
Their speech act doesn’t spill over to change anything but their own minds –
a. Structural constraints
Atchison and Panetta 9 – *Director of Debate at Wake Forest University and **Director of Debate
at the University of Georgia (Jarrod, and Edward, “Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication:
Issues for the Future,” The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed., 2009, p. 317334)
The first problem that we isolate is the difficulty of any individual debate to generate community
change. Although any debate has the potential to create problems for the community (videotapes of
objectionable behavior, etc.), rarely doesany one debate have the power to create community-wide change. We
attribute thisineffectiveness tothe structural problems inherent in individual debates and the collective
forgetfulness of the debate community. The structural problems stem from the current tournament format that
has remained relatively consistent for the past 30 years. Debaters engage in preliminary debates in rooms that
are rarely populated by anyone other than the judge. Judges are instructed to vote for the team that does the
best debating, but the ballot is rarely seen by anyone outside the tabulation room. Given the limited number
of debates in which a judge actually writes meaningful comments, there is little documentation of whatactually
transpiredduring the debate round. During the period when judges interact with the debaters, there are often external
pressures (filing evidence, preparing for the next debate, etc.) that restrict the ability of anyoneoutside the debate to
pay attention to the judges’ justification for their decision. Elimination debates do not provide for a much
better audience because debates still occur simul- taneously, and travel schedules dictate that most of the
participants have left by the later elimination rounds. It is difficult for anyone to substantiate the claim that
asking a judge to vote to solve a community problem in an individual debate with so few participants is
the best strategy for addressing important problems.
b. Competition
Atchison and Panetta 9 – *Director of Debate at Wake Forest University and **Director of Debate
at the University of Georgia (Jarrod, and Edward, “Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication:
Issues for the Future,” The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed., 2009, p. 317334)
The debate community has become more self-reflexive and increasingly invested in attempting to address the problems that have plagued the
community from the start. The degrees to which things are considered problems and the appropriateness of different solutions to the problems
have been hotly contested, but some fundamental issues, such as diversity and accessibility, have received considerable attention in recent
years. This section will address the “debate as activism” perspective that argues that the appropriate site for addressing community problems is
individual debates. In contrast to the “debate as innovation” perspective, which assumes that the activity is an isolated game with educational
benefits, proponents of the “debate as activism” perspective argue that individual debates have the potential to create change in the debate
community and society at large. If the first approach assumed that debate was completely insulated, this perspective assumes that there is no
substantive insulation between individual debates and the community at large. From our perspective, using
individual debates to
create community change is an insufficient strategy for three reasons. First, individual debates are, for the most
part, insulated from the community at large. Second, individual debates limit the conversation to the
immediate participants and the judge, excluding many important contributors to the debate community. Third,
locating the discussion within theconfines of a competition diminishes theadditional potential for
collaboration, consensus, and coalition building.
A2 Inclusive Curriculum Good
Inclusion in the debate space is a empty act of tolerance that ensures that nothing
really changes
Zizek 8—Institute for Social Sciences, Ljubljana (Slavoj, The Prospects of Radical Politics Today, Int’l
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 5;1)
ellipses in orig
Let us take two predominant topics of to day's American radical academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however,
postcolonial studies" tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of the colonized
minorities' "right to narrate" their victimizing experience, of the power mechanisms which repress
"otherness," so that, at the end of the day, we learn that the root of postcolonial exploitation is our
intolerance toward the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our intolerance toward the "Stranger
in Ourselves," in our inability to confront what we repressed in and of ourselves. The politico-economic
struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to
confront its inner traumas ... The true corruption of American academia is not primarily financial, it is not only that
they are able to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included – up to a point), but conceptual: notions of "European"
critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of Cultural Studies chic. ¶ My personal experience is that practically all of the "radical"
academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as
their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is a thing they are gen-uinely horrified of, it is
a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environ-ment of the "symbolic classes" in the developed
Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World
sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identi-fication, a kind of compulsive
ritual whose hidden logic is: "Let's talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change to
make sure that nothing will really change!" Symptomatic here is the journal October: when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will
"
half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, that October – in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic analyses of modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the
link with the radical revolutionary past ... With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture toward Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game
pseudo-radical academic Leftists who adopt toward the
Third Way the attitude of utter disdain, while their own radi-cality ultimately amounts to an empty
gesture which obligates no one to any-thing determinate.¶ II. From Human to Animal Rights ¶ We live in the "postmodern" era in which
straight and are honest in their acceptance of global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the
truth- claims as such are dismissed as an expression of hidden power mechanisms – as the reborn pseudo-Nietzscheans like to emphasize, truth is a lie which is most efficient in asserting our
What we
get instead of the universal truth is a multitude of perspectives, or, as it is fashionable to put it today, of "narratives" – not only
of literature, but also of politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate
goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist,
in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his/her
story. The two philosophers of today's global capitalism are the two great Left-liberal "progres-sives," Richard Rorty and Peter Singer – honest in their respective stances. Rorty defines the
will to power. The very question "Is it true?" apropos of some statement is supplanted by another question: "Under what power con-ditions can this statement be uttered?"
basic coordinates: the fundamental dimension of a human being is the ability to suffer, to experience pain and humiliation – consequently, since humans are symbolic animals, the
fundamental right is the right to nar-rate one's experience of suffering and humiliation.2 Singer then provides
Link Supplement
L—Islamophobia
There’s no church in the wild
Halberstam, 13 (Judith Halberstam, also known as Jack Halberstam, is the Professor of English and
Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California. “The Undercommons:
Fugitive Planning & Black Study: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten)
Like all world-making and all world-shattering encounters, when you enter this book and learn how to be
with and for, in coalition, and on the way to the place we are already making, you will also feel fear,
trepidation, concern, and disorientation. The disorientation, Moten and Harney will tell you is not just
unfortunate, it is necessary be- cause you will no longer be in one location moving forward to another,
instead you will already be part of "the "movement of things" and on the way to this "outlawed social life of
nothing."The movement of things can be felt and touched and exists in language and in fantasy, it is
flight, it is motion, it is fugitivity itself. Fugitivity is not only es- cape, "exit" as Paolo Virno might put it, or
"exodus" in the terms of- fered by Hardt and Negri, fugitivity is being separate from settling. It is a being in
motion that has learned that "organizations are obstacles to organising ourselves" (The Invisible Committee
in The Coming In- surrection) and that there are spaces and modalities that exist separate from the logical,
logistical, the housed and the positioned. Moten and Harney call this mode a "being together in
homelessness" which does not idealize homelessness nor merely metaphorize it. Homeless- ness is the
state of dispossession that we seek and that we embrace: "Can this being together in homelessness,
this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, this undercommon appositionality, be a place
from which emerges neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that
proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question?" I think this is what Jay-Z and
Kanye West (another collaborative unit of study) call "no church in the wild." For Fred Moten and Stefano
Harney, we must make common cause with those desires and (non) positions that seem crazy and
unimaginable: we must, on behalf of this alignment, refuse that which was first refused to us and in this
refusal reshape desire, reorient hope, reimagine possibility and do so separate from the fantasies
nestled into rights and respectability. Instead, our fantasies must come from what Moten and Harney
citing Frank B. Wilderson III call "the hold": "And so it is we remain in the hold, in the break, as if entering
again and again the broken world, to trace the visionary company and join it." The hold here is the hold
in the slave ship but it is also the hold that we have on reality and fantasy, the hold they have on us and
the hold we decide to forego on the other, preferring instead to touch, to be with, to love. If there is no
church in the wild, if there is study rather than knowledge production, if there is a way of being
together in brokenness, if there is an undercommons, then we must all find our way to it. And it will not
be there where the wild things are, it will be a place where refuge is not necessary and you will find that
you were already in it all along.
L—Neolib
The affirmative’s politics of cultural performance withdrawal themselves from
resistance, allowing for excessive consumption without restraint, strengthening
systems of neoliberalism. Only direct confrontation solves.
Goldberg, 2007 - Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute. (David T.;
“Neoliberalizing Race”; Article; Pg. 21-23;
http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=maccivicf; DOA:
7/10/15 || NDW )
It follows that the individualizing of discrimination and exclusion, and the slipperiness as well as ghostlike quality of racial terms, make it an often thankless, even burdensome task to point out racist
discrimination. Critics of racisms are viewed as akin to whistleblowers and often treated analogously—as
spoil sports, or paranoid, or just plain delusional, seeing wrong by invoking terms the prevailing social
order claims to reject. Racist exclusions accordingly become unreferenced even as they permeate
sociality. They are often unrecognizable because society lacks the terms of characterization or
engagement. When recognizable, however, they are more often than not in deep denial—the ghost in
the machine of neoliberal sociality. There are two further considerations barely discernible in the
preceding line of analysis. The history of racial configuration is profoundly linked in its emergence,
elaboration, and expression, to death and violence, variously articulated. Fred Moten has noted that
black social life is one angled towards death, both physical and social. Blackness, historically conceived,
is “being-towards-death.” One could perhaps generalize the point without diminishing the particular and
quite pressing exemplification of the principle embodied in the modern histories of blackness. The
intense modern experience of any group that has been conjured principally as the object of racial
configuration will find its sense of self mediated, if not massaged and managed—in short, threatened—
through its relation to death. What traces do the voluminous legacies of racially prompted death and
violence leave in the making and making over, the remaking, of racially marked communities imagining
themselves anew? Different “minoritized” groups react to this mediation in different ways. For Jews, the
slogan “Never Again,” articulated by Emil Fackenheim as the 614th biblical commandment, internalizes a
vigilant aggressiveness expressed as survival at almost any cost. Radical Muslim political theology
rationalizes the violence of its response to what Philomena Essed revealingly identifies as humiliation in
terms of the lure of a liberatory reward in the afterlife. American Indians suffer the liquidation of their
interests, first in the melancholy of disaffected sociality and in some regional states more recently in the
turn to con-ventional electoral politics. Blacks respond variously to their persistent minority status and
repeated (often spotlighted) invisibility. One type of response includes a turn to an insistent visibility of
cultural performance, sometimes celebrating a counter-violence in the wake of a persistent challenge to
self-confidence. Another reaction is racially driven political organizing, by assimilating or integrating as
best as conditions allow, or (as in the case of Latin America) by an effort to amalgamate through mixing.
All responses have decidedly varying results. In each instance, the valence of death lingers, if only as a
negative dialectic, modulating the inevitable melancholy or aggressiveness vying for the sense and
sensibility the group comes to have of itself. Virtually every dominant structural or policy response by
the state to this relational, racially inscribed “being-towards-death” that insists on what I have
characterized as Euro-mimesis once more “minoritizes” the contributions and concerns of the
historically “diminutized” and devalued. These responses thus reinscribe the racially excluded as
secondary social citizens, as burdens of state largesse. The state suppresses their contributions in their
own right to state formation or social reconstruction while silencing the terms of reference for even
registering such contributions. In short, they offer both the precursor and perfect exemplification of
neoliberal commitment to consumption sans the source of production, to pleasure denuded of guilt,
excess unrestricted by constraint, fabrication unanchored from fact. Anti-racist social movements
mobilize for greater social recognition, access, equality, and protection from discrimination when
focused on race as the principal organizing feature. They will more likely succeed in enabling greater
recognition than produce any significant material benefits or dramatic social improvements, as Michael
Hanchard has demonstrated in the case of Brazil’s Moviemiento Negro. Vigorous access, equality, and
diminished discrimination require ongoing, relentless, scaled social challenge and change around
residential improvements and interraciality, significantly better educational opportunities from the
earliest age, steady employment, and public recognition and general enforcement of the importance of
antidiscrimination regimes. The ongoing tensions between anti-racist transformation, racelessness,
socio-class divisions, persistent debilitations, and variations on the devastations of everyday life reveal
in their ambivalence and ambiguity the enormous challenges to face down a half millennium of
periodically renewed racial rule.
Invisibility PIC
Note
Kind of like the Mann K but instead of saying don’t do the plan/get invested in
producing a new episteme/academic approach, this K/advocacy says we should do
that but do it on the low low
1NC
Complete invisibility—not fugitivity, but a step beyond—that’s the only way to create
insurrection
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and intellectuals, (“The
Coming Insurrection”, http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
We can’t even see where an insurrection would begin anymore. Sixty years of pacification, of suspended
historical upheavals; sixty years of democratic anesthesia, of managed events have weakened our ability
to abruptly perceive what’s real, to understand the meaning of the resistance going on in the current war...
We’ve got to rediscover that ability of perception first. There’s no reason to get indignant about the fact that a law
as notoriously unconstitutional as the Everyday Security Law47 has been in force for the past five years, or to
protest against the total implosion of the whole legal framework. Organize accordingly instead . There’s no
reason to engage in one citizens’ collective or another, in one extreme- left impasse or another, in the
latest communitarian imposture. All the organizations that claim to contest the present order
themselves have all the puppetry of the form, morals and language of miniature States about them.
None of the old lies about “doing politics differently” have ever contributed to anything but the
indefinite extension of Statist pseudopodia48. There’s no reason to react to the news of the day, but to
understand each information given as an operation carried out on a hostile battlefield full of strategies to decode,
an operation aiming precisely to stir up some certain reaction or another among some group of people or another,
and to see that operation itself as the real news contained within the apparent news. There’s no more reason to
expect or wait for anything – to expect that it will all blow over, that the revolution will come, a nuclear
apocalypse or a social movement. To wait anymore is madness. The catastrophe isn’t coming; it’s here.
We’re already situated within a civilization’s movement of collapse. And we have to take part in it. To stop
waiting means to enter into insurrectionary logic in one way or another. It means to begin to hear, once
again, in the voices of our rulers, that trembling of terror that’s never really left them. Because to govern
has never meant anything but to hold back, by a thousand subterfuges, the moment when the crowd will
string you up – and every act of government is nothing but another way to keep from losing control over
the population. 47 An ensemble of anti-terrorist legislation passed a few months after September 11th.
48 A temporary protrusion of the surface of an amoeba for movement and feeding. The starting point for us is
one of extreme isolation and extreme powerlessness. Everything about the insurrectionary process still
remains to be built. It may be that nothing seems more unlikely than an insurrection; but nothing is
more necessary
Obvi there’s no advocacy text—that’s the point
2NC Overview
The counterplan is the only mechanism for complete invisibility. That’s the only way
to solve the impacts of the 1AC and create social changes. Their offense is based on
the fact that ‘those who need to understand’ will. If that’s true, complete invisibility
solves 100% of the aff while avoiding any risk of state cooption.
Only complete invisibility brings activists together without exposing intentions to
outsiders
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and intellectuals, (“The
Coming Insurrection”, http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
An encounter, a discovery, a huge strike movement, an earthquake: every event produces truth by changing
our way of being in the world. Conversely, an official report that is indifferent to us, that leaves us
unchanged, that engages nothing, doesn’t even deserve to be called a truth anymore. There’s a truth
underlying every gesture, every practice, every relationship, and every situation. Our habit is to elude it, to
manage it, which produces the characteristic distractedness of the majority of people these days. In fact,
everything is linked. The feeling that you’re living in a great lie is also a truth. But you have to not let that go, and
start from there, even. A truth isn’t a view on the world; a truth is something that keeps us tied to it in an
irreducible way. A truth isn’t something you hold but something that holds you. It makes and unmakes
me, it’s my constitution and destitution as an individual; it distances me from a lot, but brings me closer to
those who feel it too. An isolated being attached to it will unavoidably meet a few fellow creatures. In
fact, every insurrectional process starts from a truth that refuses to be given up. In Hamburg, in 1980, a
handful of the occupants of a squatted house decided that they would only be expelled over their dead bodies.
The whole neighborhood was besieged by tanks and helicopters; days were filled with street battles, monster
demonstrations – and the mayor at last gave in. Georges Guingouin, the “first French resistance fighter” in 1940
had nothing but the certitude that he refused the Nazi occupation. At the time, the Communist Party called him
“just some madman living in the woods”; and they kept on thinking that way until 20,000 of those madmen living
in the woods liberated Limoges.
2NC Solvency
Community connections are necessary to combat structures of power—only the CP
solves
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and intellectuals, (“The
Coming Insurrection”, http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
Communes come into being when people find themselves, understand each other, and decide to go
forth together. The commune itself makes the decision as to when it would perhaps be useful to break it up. It’s
the joy of encounters, surviving its obligatory asphyxiation. It’s what makes us say “we,” and what makes that an
event. What’s strange isn’t that people who agree with each other form communes, but that they remain
separated. Why shouldn’t communes proliferate everywhere? In every factory, every street, every
village, every school. At last the true reign of the committees of the base! We need communes that accept
being what they are, where they are; a multitude of communes, replacing society’s institutions: family,
school, union, sports club, etc. We need communes that, outside of their specifically political activity, aren’t
afraid to organize themselves for the material and moral survival of all their members and all the lost ones
that surround them. Communes that don’t define themselves – as collectives tend to do – by what’s within
them and what’s outside of them, but by the density of the connections at their core. Communes not
defined by the persons that make them up, but by the spirit that animates them. A commune is formed every
time a few people, freed of their individual straitjackets, decide to rely only on themselves and pit their strength
against the reality. Every wildcat strike is a commune; every house occupied collectively on a clean-cut foundation
is a commune; the action committees of 1968 were communes, as were the runaway slave villages in the United
States, or even Radio Alice in Bologna in 1977. Every commune needs to be based on itself. It needs to bring the
question of needs to an end. It needs to smash all political subjection and all economic dependency, and
degenerates in milieus whenever it loses contact with the truths that founded it. There are all kinds of communes
now that aren’t waiting to have the numbers, or the resources, or much less the “right moment” – which never
comes – to get organized.
2NC Method Comparison
Even simple acts of resistance are able to challenge dominant power structures—the
only question you have to answer is which form of resistance is better able to prevent
fragmentation and failure
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and intellectuals, (“The
Coming Insurrection”, http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
The commune is the elementary unit of resistance reality. An insurrectionary upswing perhaps means no
more than a multiplication of communes, their connections to each other, and their articulation. In the course
of events, either the communes will melt into entities of a larger scale, or they will break up into
fractions. Between a band of brothers and sisters tied together “in life and in death,” and the meeting of a
multiplicity of groups, committees, gangs, to organize supplies and self- defense in a neighborhood, or
even in a whole region in revolt, there is only a difference of scale; they are all communes. All the
communes can only tend towards self-sufficiency in food and feel that money within them is a derisory thing, out
of place there. The power of money is that it forms connections between those who have no connections,
connects strangers as strangers and thus, by making all things equivalent through it, gets everything into
circulation. But the price of money’s capacity to tie everything together is the superficiality of those ties, where lies
are the rule. Distrust is the foundation of the credit relationship. Because of this the reign of money must always
be the reign of control. The practical abolition of money will only be accomplished by the expansion of the
communes. Each commune in its expansion, however, must take care not grow beyond a certain size,
after which it would lose contact with itself and almost unavoidably give rise to a dominant class within
it. And the communes will prefer to split up, to spread themselves better that way, and simultaneously
to prevent such an unfortunate problem. The uprising of Algerian youth that set all Kabylia aflame in
spring 2001 managed to retake almost the whole territory, attacking the armed police, the courthouses, and
all the representations of the State, and generalizing the riot until they caused the unilateral retreat of the forces
of order, until they physically prevented the elections from being held . The movement’s strength was in the
diffuse complementarity of multiple constituents – who were only very partially represented in the
endless and hopelessly masculine assemblies of the village committees and other popular committees.
The face of the “communes” of the still trembling Algerian insurrection was those “blazing,” helmeted youths,
throwing bottles of gasoline at the riot cops from a Tizi Ouzou rooftop; it was the mocking smile of an old
resistance fighter draped in his burnoose; it was the energy of the women of a mountain village still growing food
and raising animals in the traditional way, in spite of and against everything, without which the blockades of the
region’s economy would never have been so repetitive or so systematic.
2NC A2 Perm
The CP’s opacity is key to localized movements—instead of occupying a compromised
space like the debate community, we should ‘become the territory’ itself
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and intellectuals, (“The
Coming Insurrection”, http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
More and more reformists have started talking these days about the “approach of peak oil,” and about how
in order to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” we will need to “re-localize the economy,” encourage
regional supply lines, short distribution circuits, give up having easy access to imports from far away lands, etc.
What they forget is that the nature of everything that’s done locally in economic matters is that it’s
done under the table, in an “informal” manner; that this simple ecological measure of re-localizing the
economy implies either total freedom from state control, or total submission to it. The present territory is the
product of many centuries of police operations. The people have constantly been pushed back -- out of
their fields, then out of their streets, then out of their neighborhoods, and finally out of their building lobbies , in
the demented hope that all life could be contained within the four sweating walls of a private existence.
The territorial question isn’t the same for us and for the State. For us it’s not about holding onto it. Rather
it’s a matter of creating density in the communes, in our circulation, and in our solidarity, to such a point
that the territory becomes incomprehensible and opaque to all authority. It’s not a question of
occupying, but of being the territory. Every practice brings a territory into existence – the territory of the
deal, or of the hunt; the territory of child’s play, of lovers, of a riot; the territory of farmers, ornithologists, or
gleaners. The rule is simple: the more territories there are superimposed on a given zone, the more circulation
there is between them, and the less Power will find footholds. Bistros, print shops, sports arenas, vague terrains,
second-hand book stalls, building rooftops, improvised street markets, kebab shops, garages, could all easily be
used for purposes other than their official ones if enough complicities can be found there. Local self-
organization, superimposing its own geography over the State’s cartography, jams it and annuls it, and
produces its own secession.
Any risk of potential visibility or cooption outweighs a solvency deficit—only we solve
freedom of action
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and intellectuals, (“The
Coming Insurrection”, http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
In a demonstration, a unionist pulls the mask off an anonymous protester who had just broken a window:
“Assume responsibility for what you’re doing instead of hiding yourself.” To be visible is to be out in the
open – that is, above all to be vulnerable. When the leftists of all nations continually make their cause
more “visible” – whether that of the homeless, of women, or of immigrants – in the hope that it will get taken
care of, they’re doing exactly the opposite of what they ought to. To not be visible, but rather to turn to
our advantage the anonymity we’ve been relegated to, and with conspiracies, nocturnal and/or masked
actions, to make it into an unassailable attack-position. The fires of November 2005 offer a model. No leader,
no demands, no organization, but words, gestures, complicities. To be nothing socially is not a humiliating
condition, the source of some tragic lack of recognition (to be recognized: but by who?), but on the
contrary is the precondition for maximum freedom of action. Not signing your name to your crimes, but
only attaching some imaginary acronym – people still remember the ephemeral BAFT (Tarterets53 Anti-Cop
Brigade) – is a way to preserve that freedom. Obviously, one of the regime’s first defensive maneuvers was to
create a “suburban slum” subject to treat as the author of the “riots of November 2005.” Just take a look at the
ugly mugs of those who are someone in this society if you want help understanding the joy of being no one.
Visibility must be avoided. But a force that gathers in the shadows can’t escape it forever. Our appearance as a
force has to be held back until the opportune moment. Because the later we become visible, the stronger we’ll be.
And once we’ve entered the realm of visibility, our days are numbered; either we’ll be in a position to
pulverize its reign quickly, or it will crush us without delay.
AT: Perm
Double bind---either the perm is unable to solve or it severs--- 1% risk of a link to the
net benefit taints the perm because there is a real tradeoff between visibility and
invisibility---severance is a voting issue because it justifies aff conditionality and sets a
precedent.
INCLUDING ANY ELEMENT of the visible strategy of the 1AC ONLY RISKS shortcircuiting the radical potential of the counterplan by making protest visible. Invisibility
is a precondition for freedom of action
The Invisible Committee 7 [an anonymous group of French professors, phd candidates, and intellectuals, in the book “The
Coming Insurrection” published by Semiotext(e) (attributed to the Tarnac Nine by the French police),
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]
Stay invisible. Put anonymity on the offense. In a demonstration, a unionist pulls the mask off an anonymous
protester who had just broken a window: “Assume responsibility for what you’re doing instead of hiding yourself.” To be
visible is to be out in the open – that is, above all to be vulnerable. When the leftists of all nations
continually make their cause more “visible” – whether that of the homeless, of women, or of immigrants –
in the hope that it will get taken care of, they’re doing exactly the opposite of what they ought to. To not be
visible, but rather to turn to our advantage the anonymity we’ve been relegated to, and with conspiracies,
nocturnal and/or masked actions, to make it into an unassailable attack-position. The fires of November 2005 offer a
model. No leader, no demands, no organization, but words, gestures, complicities. To be nothing socially is not a
humiliating condition, the source of some tragic lack of recognition (to be recognized: but by who?), but on the
contrary is the precondition for maximum freedom of action. Not signing your name to your crimes, but only
attaching some imaginary acronym – people still remember the ephemeral BAFT (Tarterets AntiCop Brigade) – is a way to
preserve that freedom. Obviously, one of the regime’s first defensive maneuvers was to create a “suburban slum” subject to
treat as the author of the “riots of November 2005.” Just take a look at the ugly mugs of those who are someone in this society
if you want help understanding the joy of being no one.
Mann K—Top
Mann K—Top 1NC Shell
The 1AC’s endorsement of a politics of fugitivity relies on the power of the
undercommons to reshape intellectual and social culture – their bringing attention
invites either attack or apathy from the dominant episteme – it’s not about the
accuracy of their 1ac, it’s the strategy it produces – it’s a false hope to those who are
already targets
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, “Stupid Undergrounds,” Postmodern
Culture, vol. 5, http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paul-mann.aspx//RF)
Apocalyptic cults and youth gangs, garage bands and wolfpacks, *colleges* and phalansteries, espionage networks trading in
vaporous facts and networks of home shoppers for illicit goods; monastic, penological, mutant-biomorphic and anarchoterrorist cells; renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units,
paranoid think tanks, unregistered political parties, sub-employed workers councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fanclubs,
acned anorexic primal hordes; zombie revenants, neo-fakirs, defrocked priests and detoxing prophets, psychedelic snake-oil
shills, masseurs of undiagnosed symptoms, bitter excommunicants, faceless narcissists, ideological drag queens, mystical
technophiles, sub-entrepreneurial dealers, derivative *derivistes*, tireless archivists of phantom conspiracies, alien abductees,
dupe attendants, tardy primitives, vermin of abandoned factories, hermits, cranks, opportunists, users, connections, outriders,
outpatients, wannabes, hackers, thieves, squatters, parasites, saboteurs; wings, wards, warehouses, arcades, hells, hives, dens,
burrows, lofts, flocks, swarms, viruses, tribes, movements, groupuscules, cenacles, isms, and the endlessly multiplied
hybridization of variant combinations of all these, and more.... Why this stupid fascination with stupid
undergrounds? What is it about these throwaway fanzines and unreadable rants, these neo-tattoos and
recycled apocalypses, this mountainous accumulation of declassified factoids, these bloody smears, this incredible noise? Why
wade through these piles of nano-shit? Why submit oneself to these hysterical purveyors, these hypertheories and walls of
sound? Why insist on picking this particular species of nit? Why abject criticism, whose putative task was once to
preserve the best that has been known and thought, by guilty association with so fatuous, banal, idiotic,
untenable a class of cultural objects? Why not decline, not so politely, to participate in the tiny spectacle of aging
intellectuals dressing in black to prowl festering galleries and clubs where, sometime before dawn, they will encounter the
contemptuous gaze of their own children, and almost manage to elide that event when they finally produce their bilious
reports, their chunks of cultural criticism? No excuse, no justification: all one can put forward is an unendurable
habit of attention, a meager fascination, no more or less commanding than that hypnosis one enters in the face of
television; a rut that has always led downward and in the end always found itself stuck on the surface; a
kind of drivenness, if not a drive; a *critique*, if you can forgive such a word, that has never located any cultural object whose
poverty failed to reflect its own; a rage to find some point at which criticism would come to an end, and that only intensified as
that end-point receded and shrunk to the size of an ideal. Then if one must persist in investigating these epi-
epiphenomena, perhaps compelled by some critical fashion (no doubt already out of vogue), perhaps merely out of an
interminable immaturity, why not refer the stupid underground back to all the old undergrounds, back to the
most familiar histories? Why not cast it as nothing more than another and another and another stillborn
incarnation of an avant-garde that wallows in but doesn't quite believe its own obituaries, and that one has already
wasted years considering? Why not just settle for mapping it according to the old topography of center and
margin, or some other arthritic dichotomy that, for all their alleged postness, the discourses we are about to breach
always manage to drag along behind them? Why not simply accede to the mock-heroic rhetoric of cultural
opposition (subversion, resistance, etc.) that, after a generation of deconstructions, we still don't have the
strength to shake; or to the nouveau rhetoric of multiplicity (plurality, diversity, etc.), as if all one needed was to add a few
more disparate topic headings to break the hold of a One that, in truth, one still manages to project in the very act of
superceding it? Nothing will prevent us—indeed nothing can save us--from ransoming ourselves again and again
to the exhausted mastery of these arrangements; nothing will keep us from orienting ourselves toward
every difference by means of the most tattered maps. But at the same time we must entertain--doubtless the right
word—the sheer possibility that what we encounter here is not just one more margin or one more avant-garde, however
impossible it will be to avoid all the orders and terms attendant upon those venerable and ruined cultural edifices. We must
remain open to the possibility that this stupid underground poses all the old questions but a few more as well, that it might
suggest another set of cultural arrangements, other topographies and other mappings, however unlikely that might be. In any
case, whatever vicarious attractions the stupid underground offers the bored intellectual groping for a way
to heat up his rhetoric, if not his thought, whatever else we might encounter here, it is important to insist that you will
not find these maps laid out for your inspection, as if on an intellectual sale table, and rated for accuracy and
charm. No claim is being staked here; no one is being championed, no one offered up on the critical auction block as the other
of the month. There is nothing here to choose; all the choices have already been made. One can only hope, in what will
surely prove an idle gesture, to complicate cultural space for a moment or two, for a reader or two, to thicken
it and slow one's passage through it, and, as always, to render criticism itself as painful and difficult as
possible. Indeed, let us suggest that this tour of the stupid underground is above all else designed--according to
a certain imaginary, a certain parody, the curve of a perfectly distorted mirror--not to give us an opportunity to rub elbows with
the natives and feel some little thrill of identification with them, but to expose to criticism its own stupidity, its
impossibility, its abject necessity. Why go there at all? To pursue a renunciation of culture past the limit,
where it precisely leaves us behind, where criticism can no longer observe it, no longer recuperate it; and at
the same time to witness the turning-back and collapse of the critical into the very form and function of
everything it would seek to distance and negate: a double negation that will end up—what else?-reinvesting in the stupidity of culture. No venture could be more idiotic. Shades have been distributed, the bus
is leaving, our stupid-critical theme-park tour is about to begin.
The affirmative will try to claim they are genuine and garner a no link argument, but
that isn’t the question. It’s a question of the fact that the intellectual position sustains
the system that they critique.
Mann 96 [ January 1996, Paul Mann (Professor at Pomona College), “The Nine Grounds of Intellectual Warfare”, online,
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.196/mann.196, RaMan]
The position is surrounded by a “border,” a “margin.” This circular, flat earth topography mirrors larger discursive
models, which still map everything in terms of centers, lines of defense, and antagonistic margins. It is little wonder that
questions of colonialism have become so pressing in current critical practice: here too we encounter an oblique
phenomenalization of the discursive device. Modern critical production consistently sees itself as a matter of
hegemonic centers (e.g., defenses of tradition) and marginal oppositions. But insofar as one wishes to retain
this topography of margins and centers—and in the end there might not be much to recommend it—it might be better to see
the marginal force as a function and effect of the center, the very means by which it establishes its line of defense. Military
commanders might be unlikely to deploy their most troublesome troops along their perimeter, but in
intellectual warfare the perimeter is marked out and held primarily by troops who imagine themselves
in revolt against headquarters. This is the historical paradox of the avant-gardes: they believe they are attacking the
army for which they are in fact the advance guard. The contradiction does not dissolve their importance, it marks
their precise task: the dialectical defense and advance of discursive boundaries. It might therefore
indicate the fundamental instability of cultural positions, but it does nothing to support the strictly
oppositional claims of marginal forces, which is why postcolonial criticism remains a colonial outpost of
an older critical form. Without exception, all positions are oriented toward the institutional apparatus.
Marginality here is only relative and temporary: the moment black studies or women’s studies or queer
theory conceives of itself as a discipline, its primary orientation is toward the institution. The fact that
the institution might treat it badly hardly constitutes an ethical privilege. Any intellectual who holds a
position is a function of this apparatus; his or her marginality is, for the most part, only an operational
device. It is a critical commonplace that the state is not a monolithic hegemony but rather a constellation of disorganized and
fragmentary agencies of production. This is often taken as a validation for the political potential of marginal
critical movements: inside-outside relations can be facilely deconstructed, andcritics can still
congratulate themselves in their “resistance,” but the contrary is clearly the case. The most profitable
intellectual production does not take place at the center (e.g., romance philology), where mostly obsolete weapons are
produced; the real growth industries are located precisely on the self-proclaimed margins. It will be argued that
resistance is still possible, and nothing I propose here argues against such a possibility. I wish only to
insist that effective resistance will never be located in the position, however oppositional it imagines
itself to be. Resistance is first of all a function of the apparatus itself. What would seem to be the transgressive
potential of such institutional agencies as certain orders of gender criticism might demonstrate the entropy of the institution,
Fantasies of resistance most often serve as
mere alibis for collusion. Any position is a state agency, and its relative marginality is a mode of orientation, not an
but it does nothing to prove the counterpolitical claims of the position.
exception. Effective resistance must be located in other tactical forms.
We should silence their criticism and maintain secrecy by keeping the alternative
invisible in order to avoid co-option from circulation and display.
Mann 99 [ 1999, Paul Mann (Professor at Pomona College), “Masocriticism”, Obtained through the University of Michigan
Library Database, E-Book, pg. 106-107, RaMan]
Even so, the first chapter, the text of a lecture entitled “the Afterlife of the Avant-Garde,” follows from my last book, The
Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, and serves as a further introduction to the present body of essays. The chief project of the
earlier book was to develop an analysis of the “discursive economy” in which the productions of both the avant-garde and its
critics inevitably and indifferently circulate. Every manifesto, every exhibition, every review, every monograph,
every attempt to take up or tear down the banner of the avant-gardes in the critical arena, every
attempt to advance the avant-garde’s claims or to put them to rest: no matter what their ideological
strategy or stakes, all end up serving the “white economy” of cultural production. It is, finally, circulation
alone that matters. Even the critique, in recent years, of the structure of this economy—the critique of the
museum and gallery, for instance, in the work of Broodthaers and Haacke—ends up recuperated,
displayed, and circulated for profit. More than the way iconoclasm becomes tradition and the new becomes old, it is
this increasing phenomenalization of the mechanism by means of which the discursive economy whites out ideological
differences and collapses critical distance that constitutes the “death” of the avant-garde, announced in hundreds of obituaries
during the past thirty years. The death of the avant-garde is not an end to its production, which continues
unabated, but a theory-death, the indifferent circulation of its products in a critical atmosphere in which
the very idea of cultural opposition is increasingly problematic, and no less so for being ever more shrilly
proclaimed. The current, renewed interest in oppositional art often functions only by forgetting that
such opposition recycles avant-garde methods and stances recuperated and discredited decades ago. In
those instances where a more “postmodern” critical art and art criticism try to salvage the tasks of cultural opposition without
repeating the mistakes of the avant-garde, with a more self-critical sense of the culture’s extraordinary ability to recuperate
opposition, we still find, beneath the rhetorya ic (“spaces of contestation,” “gaps and fissures,” etc.), artworks for sale and
journal articles for academic symposia and curricula vitarum. If it remains necessary to oppose what Peter Burger
identified as the “institution of art,” all of the critical means for doing so seem rather to further its
interests, and without releasing us from the necessity of opposition. The dilemma of the necessary-impossible
one encounters here haunts all of the present essays: they occupy a perspective from which the impossibility of
criticism is precisely as pressing as its necessity. That, in brief, is where the argument of Theory-Death leaves off, and
where the first essay in this volume begins. What is the relationship between this recuperative economy and
“death,” between the death of the avant-garde and death as it is theorized, for instance, in the late
Freud? What would it mean for criticism to imagine a writing or an art that had undergone a kind of second death, a death no
longer for display and description but one that passed entirely from the screens and relays of the discursive economy? What if
there were an avant-garde that was no longer committed to throwing itself on the spears of its enemies
but operated in utter secrecy? What if the very history of cultural recuperation led us to imagine that some segment of
what had once been the avant-garde must finally have learned from its mistakes and extended its trajectory into silence and
invisibility? It might be necessary then to turn that silence and invisibility back against the critical project; it
might be necessary to inflict that silence on one’s own discourse and suffer it as a kind of wound, a mark
of utter insufficiency, and a way to bind oneself to the surrogate forms of its absent object. This act of
turning the force of criticism against itself should not be mistaken for productive self-criticism. It is the
autoaggressive trace of a death drive that no longer has anything to do with biological instincts (if it ever
did), perhaps only with writing itself, the incipient form of the “masocriticism” pursued in this book, which is explored
most directly and schematically in the title essay. That essay proceeds, moreover, through the book’s most characteristic
strategy: it describes masocriticism by performing it, a theatricalism that is, after all, one of masochism’s
most distinctive traits.
2NC Must Read
The affirmative only recreates the relationship between marginalized and hegemon
and drains meaning from criticism
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, “Stupid Undergrounds,” Postmodern
Culture, vol. 5, http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paul-mann.aspx//RF)
In what one could call, not without historical cause if perhaps too casually, the standard modernist map, the relation
between hegemonic center and oppositional margin is more or less constant. Marginal groups are
suppressed almost to the point of invisibility, or at least to a theoretical *position* of "silence"; centers might
seem to disintegrate, and parties consigned to the margin in one generation might rise to power in the next; one even speaks of
multiple "sites" (all women are marginalized, although caucasian women are more likely to occupy a hegemonic position in
relation to women of color; one can be white-male but gay, straight-female and Asian, etc.); but the general structure of center
The limited exclusion of the margin constitutes the
center's defining boundary. Margins exist insofar as they are held in an orbit, placed at the constitutive
limit of whatever power the center consigns itself. We are hardly breaking any new ground in stating that this
dialectical topography underlies almost all of our cultural criticism, often in the most tacit manner; it has been
exceedingly difficult for anyone to propose more sophisticated models. It is here that we find the first relevance of the
stupid underground. While it readily lends itself to this topographical reduction, it cannot be simply constrained to an
orbit. It is deployed--but by what force? by some hegemonic "Power" or by another, undetermined order of cultural
physics?--as a means of carrying every mode of cultural activity past its limits, to its termination. At times this
and margin remains in a sort of hypertense steady state.^1^
termination seems merely symbolic, as they say: an end-point that might indeed be fatal but is nonetheless reflected back into
the cultural economy as a series of still quite spectacular and profitable images. The death of painting as a mode of painting,
etc. And yet the trajectory of the stupid underground also begins to make the notion of the margin rather
uncertain. One is reminded of the blank spaces at the edges of archaic, flat-earth maps, the monsters that lurk past the
edges of the world. Cartoonish monsters, hardly worthy of a child's nightmare, and yet marking the place of an unimaginable
destruction, of the invisible itself. Not marginal spaces, strictly speaking, since they cannot be mapped, since they are precisely
beyond the limit: but at the same time an extra-cartographic reach that is preserved as a kind of threat, if you will, or seduction,
The stupid underground is not only the newest post-avantgarde, it is also, beyond that, the very image--quite critical, in its way--of the imminent and perhaps immanent suicide
of every marginal project, a suicide that is not a demonstration, a gesture accompanied by notes to the Other,
but the most rigorous renunciation of the symbolic order.^2^ We move from the masterpiece to avant-garde artif you would rather, to the very adventure of marginality.
against-art to non-art (folk, *brut*, etc.) to the end of art (autodestructive art, art strikes) to the most vigilant refusal, a refusal
that never puts itself on display at all; from mainstream rock to punk to industrial music to experiments in subsonic effects
generators (Survival Research Laboratory, Psychic TV, Non) to utter silence; from rock-tour T-shirts to skinhead fascist
costuming to criminal disguise and disappearance from every spectacle and every surveillance; from sexually explicit art to
pornography and soft or "theoretical" S/M (masocriticism itself) to hardcore consensual sadism and masochism to pedophilic
The stupid
underground is the immanence and extension *to fatality and beyond* of becoming-sound, becominganimal, becoming-libidinal, becoming-machine, becoming-alien, becoming-terror; it is the exhilarating
velocity through cultural space of this fatal and yet never simply terminal movement. We should also note that
even as one pursues these trajectories, the underground lends this Deleuzian rhetoric of becoming-X its
most abiding cultural form: becoming-%cliche%, becoming-stupid. In the stupid underground any innovation can
be, at one and the same time, utterly radical and worthless in advance. The trajectory past %cliche% is at stake
here as well, a trajectory that takes us not into further innovation but into repetition itself: the repetition of a
cultural adventure long after its domestication, but as if it were still an adventure. The trajectory is thus
seldom a straight line into the beyond, a singular line of flight through becoming-imperceptible, into the invisible. The
aggression to the consequent "knowledge" of the most violent sexuality carried out in the strictest secrecy.^3^
complexity of these movements suggests four trajectories, or four dimensions of the trajectory as such: to the
apotheosis of stupidity, as sublime becomes ridiculous as if without transition; to the violent limit of the tolerable,
the very limit of recuperability; to disappearance past the boundary of cultural representation, a disappearance
so critical that it gives the lie to every other form of criticism; and to what turns out, in the very midst of an
innovative frenzy, to be stupid repetition, an autonomous, automatic repetition that drains cultural forms of
every meaning, even that of parody: the stupefying force of repetition, which, we are told, is the very trace of the
death drive.
2NC Link—Resistance
Strategies of resistance fail and only help to proliferate the discourse of their
opposition
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, “Stupid Undergrounds,” Postmodern
Culture, vol. 5, http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paul-mann.aspx//RF)
What was once called nihilism has long since revealed itself as a general, integral function of a culture
that, in all its glorious positivism, is far more destructive than the most vehement no. Nothing could be
more destructive, more cancerous, than the positive proliferation of civilization (now there's a critical cliche),
and all the forms of opposition have long since revealed themselves as means of advancing it. As for the
ethos of "resistance": just because something feels like resistance and still manages to offend a few people
(usually not even the right people) hardly makes it effective. It is merely *ressentiment* in one or another
ideological drag. And how can anyone still be deluded by youth, by its tedious shrugs of revolt? Even the young no longer
believe their myth, although they are quite willing to promote it when convenient. Punk nihilism was never more than the
nihilism of the commodity itself. You should not credit Malcolm McLaren with having realized this just because he was once
pro-situ. All he wanted was to sell more trousers without boring himself to death; indeed he is proof that the guy with the
flashiest *ressentiment* sells the most rags. And if he wasn't bored, can he be said to have advanced the same favor to us?
2NC Link—Break from SQ
Attempts to disprove status quo discourse sustain an objective truth that harms
resistance and results in the ‘evacuation of criticism’
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, “Stupid Undergrounds,” Postmodern
Culture, vol. 5, http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paul-mann.aspx//RF)
What animates the stupid underground is not merely heroic madness or libidinal ideology or a drooping IQ *against*
reason, although we still have to listen to all of that repeated, precisely, past the point of endurance; it is something like
stupid intelligence, the manic codification of the inane, the willingness to pursue, absolutely at the risk of
abject humiliation, absolutely at the risk of making oneself a perfect fool, lines of inquiry that official
intelligence would rather have shut down. The dismissal of some dubious scientific fact or method by
official intelligence is taken as a clear sign that the powers that be are hiding something important, and
that by this very means assumes the status of truth. Enormous labors will be devoted to unlocking its secrets and
locating it in a worldview that is as logical as it is laughable, and that sustains the force of truth in large
part by giving the lie to official truth. Reactive research, parody of science. Or of the mission of art and cultural
commentary. Once it was crucial to separate high and low, art and kitsch, for the very good of the human spirit; then one tried
to "transgress" these distinctions, without quite managing to get rid of them. But to copy comic books on vast canvases or
laminate a few thriftshop tchotchkis and exhibit them in a major museum is not what used to be called a critical gesture, no
It is not a critical reflection on the commodification of art, but a means of
rendering the very distance required for such reflection null and void; not a "deconstruction" (sic) of the
institution of art but the evacuation of criticism itself. In this zone, criticism is stupid, hence only
stupidity can be critical. The illogic of this proposition cannot entirely eliminate its force. We are caught up in culture's
inability to purge itself of the inanity utterly native to it. The patent stupidity of certain postmodern works of art,
and of the commentary that tags along behind them, is a symptom of a virulent truth that infects
everything and everyone, the holy blood of Van Gogh, Cezanne at his sublime labors, the Sistine Chapel englobing a void,
matter what the catalogues say.
empty frame after empty frame, vast libraries of special pleading, the whole dumb hollow of culture.
2NC Link—Music
The 1AC’s use of music as a means of dissent exposes their discourse to those who
should not hear it-- ‘hipster critics’ who only wish to be subversive so they can claim
they are--while preventing wide-spread movements
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, “Stupid Undergrounds,” Postmodern
Culture, vol. 5, http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paul-mann.aspx//RF)
"Although functioning as a support for the totalitarian order, fantasy is then at the same time the leftover of the real that
enables us to 'pull ourselves out,' to preserve a kind of distance from the socio-symbolic network. When we become crazed in
Zizek's example here is
precisely popular music, the inane ditty that anchors the fantasy, that runs endlessly in one's head; what one
wishes to add here is the criterion of force, of intensity, of sound so loud that, even though it is a cultural product
from top to bottom, it nonetheless enfolds the audience and isolates it within the symbolic order. The
intensity of loud drowns out the Other. It is the limit of the symbolic, its null point, experienced in the
very onslaught of its signs. Perhaps we could appropriate a Lacanian term for this fantastic volume that goes beyond
fantasy: the *sinthome.* Zizek calls it "subversive," but that, unfortunately, is to offer it to those who
wannabe subversive, to see themselves seen as subversives, to be (to fantasize being) political agents in
an older and ever more current sense.^26^ Let us nonetheless pursue the concept for a moment.
our obsession with idiotic enjoyment, even totalitarian manipulation cannot reach us" (128).
2NC Alt
The aff is neither a subversion of the status quo’s politics nor an ‘intelligent’
movement for change. The ‘stupid underground’ posits itself as valuable knowledge
production, without any ability to solve.
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, “Stupid Undergrounds,” Postmodern
Culture, vol. 5, http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paul-mann.aspx//RF)
Intelligence is no longer enough.^5^ We have witnessed so many spectacles of critical intelligence's dumb
complicity in everything it claims to oppose that we no longer have the slightest confidence in it. One knows
with the utmost certainty that the most intense criticism goes hand in hand with the most venal careerism ,
that institutional critiques bolster the institution by the mere fact of taking part in their discourse, that every
position is ignorant of its deepest stakes. Each school of critical thought sustains itself by its stupidity, often
expressed in the most scurrilous asides, about its competitors, and a sort of willed blindness about its own
investments, hypocrisies, illusory truths. And one can count on each critical generation exposing the founding truths of
its predecessors as so much smoke and lies. Thought, reading, analysis, theory, criticism has transported us to so many Laputas
that we should hardly be surprised to encounter a general--or perhaps not general enough--mistrust of intelligence as such.
What is most "subversive" now is neither critical intelligence nor romantic madness (the commonplace is
that they are two sides of the same Enlightenment coin) but the dull weight of stupidity, spectacularly elaborated,
and subversive only by means of evacuating the significance of everything it touches--including the romance
of subversion itself. To abandon intelligence because it has been duplicitous or built such grandly inane
intellectual systems might seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but if rejecting
intelligence is rejecting too much, never underestimate the stupid exhilaration of *too much*; and flying
babies are a nicely stupid image, quite suitable for a record cover. Let us insist that we are not arguing for poetic madness
breaking out of the prison of reason, nor for the philosophical acephalism of Bataille and his university epigones, still helplessly
playing out the dialectic of the enlightenment. The rationalization of unreason is not much of a remedy; that is why we took the
trouble to diagnose the recuperation and critical evacuation of Bataille. What confronts us in the stupid underground
is also the rationalization of unreason, but it is accompanied by a much more naked idiocy, sheer stupidity
posing as value, as the last truth of culture, value without value, and an irresistible lure for suicidal
reason. That is, for us, the value—precisely worthless--of the expansive, aggressively sophomoric network of the Church
of the SubGenius, of these exaggerated revolutionary claims for a few noisy CDs and nipple piercings, or of the posturing
of the so-called Hakim Bey: "I am all too well aware of the 'intelligence' which prevents action. Every once in a
while however I have managed to behave as if I were stupid enough to try to change my own life. Sometimes I've
used dangerous stupifiants like religion, marijuana, chaos, the love of boys. On a few occasions I have attained some degree of
success."^6^ The only undergrounds that surface any more are moronic: cross-eyed obfuscators, cranks,
latahs,^7^ deadly-serious self-parodists, adolescent fraternities of deep thinkers riding the coattails of
castoff suits. What animates the stupid underground is not merely heroic madness or libidinal ideology or a drooping IQ
*against* reason, although we still have to listen to all of that repeated, precisely, past the point of endurance; it is something
like stupid intelligence, the manic codification of the inane, the willingness to pursue, absolutely at the risk of abject
humiliation, absolutely at the risk of making oneself a perfect fool, lines of inquiry that official intelligence would rather have
shut down. The dismissal of some dubious scientific fact or method by official intelligence is taken as a clear sign that the
powers that be are hiding something important, and that by this very means assumes the status of truth. Enormous labors will
be devoted to unlocking its secrets and locating it in a worldview that is as logical as it is laughable, and that sustains the force
of truth in large part by giving the lie to official truth. Reactive research, parody of science. Or of the mission of art and cultural
commentary. Once it was crucial to separate high and low, art and kitsch, for the very good of the human spirit; then one tried
to "transgress" these distinctions, without quite managing to get rid of them. But to copy comic books on vast canvases or
laminate a few thriftshop tchotchkis and exhibit them in a major museum is not what used to be called a critical gesture, no
matter what the catalogues say. It is not a critical reflection on the commodification of art, but a means of rendering the very
distance required for such reflection null and void; not a "deconstruction" (sic) of the institution of art but the evacuation of
criticism itself. In this zone, criticism is stupid, hence only stupidity can be critical. The illogic of this proposition cannot entirely
eliminate its force. We are caught up in culture's inability to purge itself of the inanity utterly native to it. The patent stupidity
of certain postmodern works of art, and of the commentary that tags along behind them, is a symptom of a virulent truth that
infects everything and everyone, the holy blood of Van Gogh, Cezanne at his sublime labors, the Sistine Chapel englobing a
void, empty frame after empty frame, vast libraries of special pleading, the whole dumb hollow of culture.
The fact that the aff chooses to bring the conversation into the debate space at all
inherently causes its failure. The alt, an ‘underground beneath the underground,’ is
the only way to solve the impacts of the 1AC
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, “Stupid Undergrounds,” Postmodern
Culture, vol. 5, http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paul-mann.aspx//RF)
We have mapped the stupid underground as the capital of the culture of resentment, of a strict, selfindulgent, and self-evacuating reactivity, lamely proposing "new" models and modes of existence that
nonetheless can never be entirely reduced to the dialectics of recuperation, and that, even as they sacrifice
themselves to such a facile criticism, gather their critics into a suffocating embrace and cancel critical distance
itself. But there is more at stake than this peculiar and essential contradiction. Here we will follow the line
of what Deleuze and Guattari call *becoming-imperceptible* toward an underground beneath the
underground, one that does not make itself available to the critic's screens, a strange disappearance
from discourse, from both recuperation and its stupid collapse, an *ars moratorii,* a withdrawal or
disengagement from the discursive economies than render null and void a thousand pretensions to
resistance and subversion, an embryonic turning away, an internal exile (in all the complex associations of that
interiority), a secret that the critic must finally postulate precisely in the absence of all evidence. If, in one sort of analysis, as
we have noted, everything now is coming up signs, everything is rendered instantly spectacular, simulacral, obscene, we must
assume that there are at least a few who have learned their lesson, a few for whom the lacerating parodies of
the stupid underground no longer suffice, a few who have cancelled all bets and turned themselves out, declined
any further reactivity and gone off the map. We should note here that, for Nietzsche, the *man of ressentiment* is a
man of secrets, one who is "neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul *squints;* his spirit
loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as *his* world, *his* security, *his*
refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and
humble."^36^ For Zizek, too, this overt obedience and covert refusal is the mark of a cynical reason that is the proper product
of enlightenment reason itself. Kant's opening of free liberal argument conceals a deeper obedience to the
law, one that is not so much reversed as extended by the cynic: "we know there is no truth in authority,
yet we continue to play its game and to obey it in order not to disturb the usual run of things."^37^ This,
for us as for Zizek, is in fact the normative model of criticism, and it is found most of all in the very place where Kant situated it:
Critical distance is belied by the deep obedience
epitomized in the discursive economy itself, in the consistent material forms by which intellectual
commodities are produced and exchanged whatever their ideological claims to difference; at the level of the
intellectual product, there is clearly no difference between the strictest radical and the wooliest
conservative. The stupid underground is attractive to criticism because it is a mirror in which criticism
can see itself as it is, as a secret order of cynics, even if it does not always recognize itself there, even if the
convenience of its denials drowns out its truth, shining through like the truth of the analysand.
faculties of liberal arts, philosophy departments, and so on.
Their aff is a double turn--It requires visibility to solve the impacts of the 1ac and
cause social change while it uses the discourse of fugitivity in order to advocate for
invisibility--their attempt to be anti-political links them to politics itself which affirms
state-oriented politics to give the aff meaning---only complete invisibility solves
Tsianos et al. ‘8 (Vassilis, teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, Dimitris
Papadopoulos teaches social theory at Cardiff University, Niamh Stephenson teaches social science at
the University of New South Wales. “Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century” Pluto
Press)
In this sense imperceptible politics does not necessarily differ from or oppose other prevalent forms of
politics, such as state-oriented politics, micropolitics, identity politics, cultural and gender politics, civil
rights movements, etc. And indeed imperceptible politics connects with all these various forms of
political engagement and intervention in an opportunistic way: it deploys them to the extent that they
allow the establishment of spaces outside representation; that is, spaces which do not primarily focus on the
transformation of the conditions of the double-R axiom (rights and representation) but on the insertion of new social forces
into a given political terrain. In the previous chapter we called this form of politics outside politics: the politics which opposes
the representational regime of policing. Imperceptibility is the everyday strategy which allows us to move and to act below the
overcoding regime of representation. This everyday strategy is inherently anti-theoretical; that is, it resists any
ultimate theorisation, it cannot be reduced to one successful and necessary form of politics (such as
state-oriented politics or micropolitics, for example). Rather, imperceptible politics is genuinely
empiricist, that is it is always enacted as ad hoc practices which allow the decomposition of the
representational strategies in a particular field and the composition of events which cannot be left
unanswered by the existing regime of control. If imperceptible politics resists theorisation and is
ultimately empiricist, what then are the criteria for doing imperceptible politics? There are three
dimensions which characterise imperceptible politics: objectlessness, totality, trust. Firstly, imperceptible
politics is objectless, that is it performs political transformation without primarily targeting a specific
political aim (such as transformation of a law or institution, or a particular claim for inclusion, etc).
Instead imperceptible politics proceeds by materialising its own political actions through contagious and
affective transformations. The object of its political practice is its own practices. In this sense,
imperceptible politics is non-intentional - and therein lies its difference from state-oriented politics or
the politics of civil rights movements, for example - it instigates change through a series of everyday
transformations which can only be codified as having a central political aim or function in retrospect.
Secondly, imperceptible politics addresses the totality of an existing field of power. This seems to be the difference between
imperceptible politics and micropolitics or other alternative social movements: imperceptible politics is not concerned with
containing itself to a molecular level of action; it addresses the totality of power through the social changes which it puts to
work in a particular field of action. The distinction between molar and molecular (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 275) has only
analytical significance from the perspective of imperceptible politics. In fact imperceptible politics is both molar and molecular,
because by being local situated action it addresses the whole order of control in a certain field. Imperceptible politics is located at
the heart of a field of power and at the same time it opens a way to move outside this field by forcing the transformation of all
these elements which are constitutive of this field. In this sense, imperceptible politics is a driving force which is simultaneously
both present and absent. We described this in the previous chapter by exploring the importance of speculative figurations for
the practice of escape. On the everyday level of escape (a level we called in this chapter imperceptible politics) speculative
figuration can be translated into trust. This is the third characteristic of imperceptible politics; it is driven by a firm
belief in the importance and truthfulness of its actions, without seeking any evidence for, or conducting
any investigation into its practices. This is trust. Imperceptible politics is driven by trust in something
which seems to be absent from a particular situation. Imperceptible politics operates around a void, and
it is exactly the conversion of this void into everyday politics that becomes the vital force for
imperceptible politics.
Movements are coopted from within or externally targeted for eradication as soon as
they become visible---only the alt ruptures politics
The Invisible Committee 7 [an anonymous group of French professors, phd candidates, and intellectuals, in the
book “The Coming Insurrection” published by Semiotext(e) (attributed to the Tarnac Nine by the French police),
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]
Whatever angle you look at it from, there's no escape from the present. That's not the least of its virtues. For
those who want absolutely to have hope, it knocks down every support. Those who claim to have solutions are
proven wrong almost immediately. It's understood that now everything can only go from bad to worse.
"There's no future for the future" is the wisdom behind an era that for all its appearances of extreme normalcy has come
to have about the consciousness level of the first punks. The sphere of political representation is closed. From left
to right, it's the same nothingness acting by turns either as the big shots or the virgins, the same sales shelf heads,
changing up their discourse according to the latest dispatches from the information service. Those who still
vote give one the impression that their only intention is to knock out the polling booths by voting as a pure act of protest. And
we've started to understand that in fact it’s only against the vote itself that people go on voting. Nothing we've
seen can come up to the heights of the present situation; not by far. By its very silence, the populace seems
infinitely more 'grown up' than all those squabbling amongst themselves to govern it do. Any Belleville chibani 1 is wiser in his
chats than in all of those puppets’ grand declarations put together. The lid of the social kettle is triple-tight, and the pressure
inside won’t stop building. The ghost of Argentina’s Que Se Vayan Todos 2 is seriously starting to haunt the ruling heads. The
fires of November 2005 will never cease to cast their shadow on all consciences. Those first joyous fires were
the baptism of a whole decade full of promises. The media’s “suburbs vs. the Republic” myth, if it’s not inefficient, is certainly
not true. The fatherland was ablaze all the way to downtown everywhere, with fires that were methodically snuffed out.
Whole streets went up in flames of solidarity in Barcelona and no one but the people who lived there
even found out about it. And the country hasn’t stopped burning since. Among the accused we find diverse profiles,
without much in common besides a hatred for existing society; not united by class, race, or even by neighborhood. What was
new wasn’t the “suburban revolt,” since that was already happening in the 80s, but the rupture with its established forms. The
assailants weren’t listening to anybody at all anymore, not their big brothers, not the local associations assigned to help return
things to normal. No “SOS Racism which only fatigue, falsification, and media omertà 4 could feign putting an
end. The whole series of nocturnal strikes, anonymous attacks, wordless destruction, had the merit of busting
wide open the split between politics and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious weight of this
assault which made no demands, and had no message other than a threat which had nothing to do with
politics. But you’d have to be blind not to see what is purely political about this resolute negation of
politics, and you’d certainly have to know absolutely nothing about the autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years.
Like abandoned children we burned the first baby toys of a society that deserves no more respect than the
monuments of Paris did at the end of Bloody Week 5 -- and knows it. There’s no social solution to the present
situation. First off because the vague aggregate of social groupings, institutions, and individual bubbles
that we designate by the anti-phrase “society” has no substance, because there’s no language left to
express common experiences with. It took a half-century of fighting by the Lumières to thaw out the possibility of a
French Revolution, and a century of fighting by work to give birth to the fearful “Welfare State.” Struggles creating the language
in which the new order expresses itself. Nothing like today. Europe is now a de-monied continent that sneaks off to make a run
to the Lidl 6 and has to fly with the low-cost airlines to be able to keep on flying. None of the “problems” formulated
in the social language are resolvable. The “retirement pensions issue,” the issues of “precariousness,” the “youth”
and their “violence” can only be kept in suspense as long as the ever more surprising “acting out” they thinly cover gets
managed away police-like. No one’s going to be happy to see old people being wiped out at a knockdown price, abandoned by
their own and with nothing to say. And those who’ve found less humiliation and more benefit in a life of crime
than in sweeping floors will not give up their weapons, and prison won’t make them love society. The rage
to enjoy of the hordes of the retired will not take the somber cuts to their monthly income on an empty stomach, and will get
only too excited about the refusal to work among a large sector of the youth. And to conclude, no guaranteed income
granted the day after a quasi-uprising will lay the foundations for a new New Deal, a new pact, and a new
peace. The social sentiment is rather too evaporated for all that. As their solution, they’ll just never stop
putting on the pressure, to make sure nothing happens, and with it we’ll have more and more police
chases all over the neighborhood. The drone that even according to the police indeed did fly over Seine-SaintDenis 7 last July 14 th is a picture of the future in much more straightforward colors than all the hazy images
we get from the humanists. That they took the time to clarify that it was not armed shows pretty clearly the kind of road
we’re headed down. The country is going to be cut up into ever more air-tight zones. Highways built along the border of the
“sensitive neighborhoods” already form walls that are invisible and yet able to cut them off from the private subdivisions.
Whatever good patriotic souls may think about it, the management of neighborhoods “by community” is most effective just by
its notoriety. The purely metropolitan portions of the country, the main downtowns, lead their luxurious
lives in an ever more calculating, ever more sophisticated, ever more shimmering deconstruction. They
light up the whole planet with their whorehouse red lights, while the BAC 8 and the private security companies’ -- read:
militias’ -- patrols multiply infinitely, all the while benefiting from being able to hide behind an ever more
disrespectful judicial front. The catch-22 of the present, though perceptible everywhere, is denied everywhere.
Never have so many psychologists, sociologists, and literary people devoted themselves to it, each with their
own special jargon, and each with their own specially missing solution. It’s enough just to listen to the songs
that come out these days, the trifling “new French music,” where the petty-bourgeoisie dissects the states of its soul and the
K’1Fry mafia 9 makes its declarations of war, to know that this coexistence will come to an end soon and that a decision is
about to be made. This book is signed in the name of an imaginary collective. Its editors are not its authors. They are merely
content to do a little clean-up of what’s scattered around the era’s common areas, around the murmurings at bar-tables,
behind closed bedroom doors. They’ve only determined a few necessary truths, whose universal repression fills up the
psychiatric hospitals and the painful gazes. They’ve made themselves scribes of the situation. It’s the privilege of
radical circumstances that justice leads them quite logically to revolution. It’s enough just to say what we can see and
not avoid the conclusions to be drawn from i
2NC Turns Case
Underground strategies of resistance ignore history and can never provide change
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, “Stupid Undergrounds,” Postmodern
Culture, vol. 5, http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paul-mann.aspx//RF)
The stupid underground is marked by the simultaneous critical understanding of the fatality of recuperation
and a general indifference to the fact; it ignores what it knows, and knows it. It acts as though it forgets, until it
virtually forgets, what it always recalls. It responds to every critical reminder, even those it throws at itself, with a
*So what, fuck you.* But this very feigned stupidity, this posture of indifference to its own persistent critical knowledge, is
the trace of another trajectory. For if the euphoria of punk nihilism is entirely the nihilism of the commodity, by this same
means, at certain unpredictable moments, it represents the possibility of nihilism turned loose, driven suicidally mad,
*ressentiment* pushed to the brink of the reactive and becoming force. Inane energy, brute energy, energy without reason,
without support, even when it is caught up in what otherwise poses as a critical project. This is not to say that the euphoric
the energy released by the stupid underground
is never anything more than an effect of its very morbidity. It is marketed as novelty, but that is not its truth.
Nor will it ever constitute a base for opposition: it cannot be yoked to any program of reform, nor serve
any longer the heroic myth of transgression. It is merely a symptom of order itself. Everything has been
frenzy of the punk or skinhead is the sign of something new and vital:
recuperated, but what is recuperated and put to death returns, returns ferociously, and it is the return of its most immanent
dead that most threatens every form of order. The repressed does not come back as a living being but as the ghost it always
was, and not to free us but to haunt us. It returns as repetition; when we see it in the mirror, as our mirror, we pretend not to
recognize it. The fury of the punk or skinhead is the fury of this stupid repetition, and it is far more destructive than the most
brilliant modernist invention. It ruins everything and leaves it all still in place, still functioning as if it mattered, never relieving
That is why one cannot
dismiss it according to the logic of the new, whereby the only admissible revolutionary force must
conform to the movement of progress and innovation. The rhetoric of innovation is parroted by the
stupid underground, because it still obeys the superficial form of the avant-garde. But it obeys it long
after it is dead, and as if that death didn't matter, as if history had never occurred in the first place, as if
everything retro just suddenly appeared, in all its original vacuity. As if it were even better, more powerful, once it is
us of its apparition, never pretending to go beyond it, draining it of value without clearing it away.
dead, so long as one insists that it is and pretends that it isn't. It is the blind repetition of every exhausted logic far past the
point of termination that generates the most virulent negation. The stupid persistence of the dead has taken the place of the
critical.
The affirmative’s belief that they can ‘cure’ society of problems causes the same
impacts they desperately attempt to solve
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, “Stupid Undergrounds,” Postmodern
Culture, vol. 5, http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paul-mann.aspx//RF)
The stupid underground can be mapped onto a familiar and perhaps quite objectionable psychotopography: it is a zone of
the repressed of culture and thus, according to this model, both a pathological site giving rise to all sorts of
pathogenic surface effects, and a therapeutic matrix, a place where impacted energies may be guided toward a
proper sublimation. The stupid underground presents itself as both a symptom of the disease of capital and
an indication of the direction of its cure. But in the stupid underground, as in so many other sites, the
direction of the cure often leads back into the disease; or the cure itself turns out to be nothing more
than a symptom. For instance, in the terms of one standard hypothesis, the stupid underground reproduces the
pathology of Other, of the Symbolic order, in the very attempt to avoid it, like the alcoholic's prodigal
son who is so repelled by his father's disease that he can only end by becoming an alcoholic himself; at
the same time, it is a kind of paranoid rechanneling of obsessions and defenses, a way to reconceive the
social world by means of, indeed as a psychosis. Perhaps merely the critical equivalent of lining your hat with
aluminum foil to protect yourself from alien radiation or government microwave transmissions (often: the same thing); perhaps
a more radical form of schizoanalytic political action.
AT: Perm
Double bind---either the perm links or it severs---the link debate determines how you
view perm solvency---1% risk of a link taints the perm because there is a real tradeoff
between visibility and invisibility---severance is a voting issue because it justifies aff
conditionality and sets a precedent.
INCLUDING ANY ELEMENT of the political strategy of the 1AC ONLY RISKS shortcircuiting the radical potential of the alternative by making protest visible. Invisibility
is a precondition for freedom of action
The Invisible Committee 7 [an anonymous group of French professors, phd candidates, and intellectuals, in the book “The
Coming Insurrection” published by Semiotext(e) (attributed to the Tarnac Nine by the French police),
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]
Stay invisible. Put anonymity on the offense. In a demonstration, a unionist pulls the mask off an anonymous
protester who had just broken a window: “Assume responsibility for what you’re doing instead of hiding yourself.” To be
visible is to be out in the open – that is, above all to be vulnerable. When the leftists of all nations
continually make their cause more “visible” – whether that of the homeless, of women, or of immigrants –
in the hope that it will get taken care of, they’re doing exactly the opposite of what they ought to. To not be
visible, but rather to turn to our advantage the anonymity we’ve been relegated to, and with conspiracies,
nocturnal and/or masked actions, to make it into an unassailable attack-position. The fires of November 2005 offer a
model. No leader, no demands, no organization, but words, gestures, complicities. To be nothing socially is not a
humiliating condition, the source of some tragic lack of recognition (to be recognized: but by who?), but on the
contrary is the precondition for maximum freedom of action. Not signing your name to your crimes, but only
attaching some imaginary acronym – people still remember the ephemeral BAFT (Tarterets AntiCop Brigade) – is a way to
preserve that freedom. Obviously, one of the regime’s first defensive maneuvers was to create a “suburban slum” subject to
treat as the author of the “riots of November 2005.” Just take a look at the ugly mugs of those who are someone in this society
if you want help understanding the joy of being no one.
WE ARE POLITICS YOU ARE POLICING – the logic of your system is broken, and we
must escape it lest we fall back into the same traps of reinforcing the minoritization of
graffiti groups within a majoritarian framework that forces them to consent to the will
of US policy community who will appropriate their consent for oppression. ONLY a
politics which refuses the trap of political representation has the possibility of
emancipation -- this is a prior question and STARTING POINT is key
Tsianos et al. 8 Vassilis, teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, Dimitris Papadopoulos teaches social theory at Cardiff
University, Niamh Stephenson teaches social science at the University of New South Wales. “Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st
Century” Pluto Press
To escape policing and start doing politics necessitates dis-identi- fication - the refusal of assigned,
proper places for participation in society. As indicated earlier, escape functions not as a form of exile, nor as mere
opposition or protest, but as an interval which interrupts everyday policing (Ranciere, 1998). Political disputes -
as distinct from disputes over policing - are not concerned with rights or representation or with the
construction of a majoritarian position in the political arena. They are not even disputes over the terms
of inclusion or the features of a minority. They occur prior to inclusion, beyond the terms of the double-R
axiom, beyond the majority-minority duality. They are disputes over the existence of those who have no part (and in
this sense they are disputes about justice in a Benjaminian sense of the word, Benjamin, 1996a). Politics arises from the
emergence of the miscounted, the imperceptible, those who have no place within the normalising
organisation of the social realm. The refusal of representation is a way of introducing the part which is
outside of policing, which is not a part of community, which is neither a minority nor intends to be
included within the majority. Outside politics is the way to escape the controlling and repressive force of
contemporary politics (that is of contemporary policing); or else it is a way to change our senses, our habits,
our practices in order to experiment together with those who have no part, instead of attempting to
include them into the current regime of control. This emergence fractures normalising, police logic. It
refigures the perceptible, not so that others can finally recognise one's proper place in the social order,
but to make evident the incommensurability of worlds, the incommensurability of an existing
distribution of bodies and subjectivities with the principle of equality. Politics is a refusal of
representation. Politics happens beyond, before representation. Outside politics is the materialisation of the
attempt to occupy this space outside the controlling force of becoming majoritarian through the process of representation. If
we return to our initial question of how people contest control, then we can say that when regimes of
control encounter escape they instigate processes of naming and representation. They attempt to
reinsert escaping subjectivities into the subject-form. Outside politics arises as people attempt to evade
the imposition of control through their subsumption into the subject-form. This is not an attempt simply
to move against or to negate representation. Nor is it a matter of introducing pure potential and imagination in
reaction to the constraining power of control. Rather, escape is a constructive and creative movement - it is a
literal, material, embodied movement towards something which cannot be named, towards something
which is fictional. Escape is simultaneously in the heart of social transformation and outside of it. Escape is always here
because it is non-literal, witty and hopeful.
A2: Aff is a prereq
Their arguments artificially construct us as dependent on the necessity of their
advocacy – ultimately depoliticizes us
Hershock '99, East-West Center, 1999. [“Changing the way society changes”, Journal of Buddhist Ethics,
6, 154; http://jbe.gold.ac.uk/6/hershock991.html]
The trouble is that, like other technologies biased toward control, the more successful legislation becomes, the more
it renders itself necessary. Because it aims at rigorous definition -- at establishing hard boundaries or limits -- crossing
the threshold of legislative utility means creating conditions under which the definition of freedom
becomes so complex as to be self-defeating. Taken to its logical end, legally-biased social activism is thus
liable to effect an infinite density of protocols for maintaining autonomy, generating a matrix of limits
on discrimination that would finally be conducive to what might be called "axiological entropy" -- a state
in which movement in any direction is equally unobstructed and empty of dramatic potential. Contrary
to expectations, complete "freedom of choice" would not mean the elimination of all impediments to
meaningful improvisation, but rather an erasure of the latter's conditions of possibility. The effectiveness
and efficiency of "hard," control-biased technologies depend on our using natural laws -- horizons of possibility -- as fulcrums
for leveraging or dictating changes in the structure of our circumstances. Unlike improvised contributions to changes taking
place in our situation, dictating the terms of change effectively silences our situational partners. Technological authority
thus renders our circumstances mute and justifies ignoring the contributions that might be made by the
seasons or the spiritual force of the mountains to the meaning -- the direction of movement -- of our
ongoing patterns of interdependence. With the "perfection" of technically-mediated control, our wills
would know no limit. We would be as gods, existing with no imperatives, no external compulsions, and
no priorities. We would have no reason to do one thing first or hold one thing, and not another, as most
sacred or dear. Such "perfection" is, perhaps, as fabulous and unattainable as it is finally depressing. Yet
the vast energies of global capital are committed to moving in its direction, for the most part quite
uncritically. The consequences -- as revealed in the desecration and impoverishing of both 'external' and
'internal' wilderness (for instance, the rainforests and our imaginations) -- are every day more evident.
The critical question we must answer is whether the "soft" technologies of legally-biased and controlled
social change commit us to an equivalent impoverishment and desecration. The analogy between the
dependence of technological progress on natural laws and that of social activism on societal laws is by no means perfect. Except
among a scattering of philosophers and historians of science, for example, the laws of nature are not viewed as changeable
artifacts of human culture. But for present purposes, the analogy need only focus our attention on the way legal institutions -like natural laws -- do not prescriptively determine the shape of all things to come, but rather establish generic limits for what
relationships or states of affairs are factually admissible. Laws that guarantee certain "freedoms" necessarily also
prohibit others. Without the fulcrums of unallowable acts, the work of changing a society would remain
as purely idealistic as using wishful thinking to move mountains. Changing legal institutions at once
forces and enforces societal reform. By affirming and safeguarding those freedoms or modes of
autonomy that have come to be seen as generically essential to 'being human', a legally-biased social
activism cannot avoid selectively limiting the ways we engage with one another. The absence of
coercion may be a basic aim of social activism, but if our autonomy is to be guaranteed both fair and
just, its basic strategy must be one of establishing non-negotiable constraints on how we co-exist. Social
activism is thus in the business of striking structural compromises between its ends and its means -between particular freedoms and general equality, and between practical autonomy and legal
anonymity. By shifting the locus of freedoms from unique persons to generic citizens -- and in substantial sympathy with both
the Platonic renunciation of particularity and the scientific discounting of the exceptional and extraordinary -- social activist
methodology promotes dramatic anonymity in order to universally realize the operation of 'blind
justice'. Much as hard technologies of control silence the contributions of wilderness and turn us away
from the rewards of a truly joint improvisation of order, the process of social activism reduces the
relevance of the always unique and unprecedented terrain of our interdependence. This is no small loss.
The institutions that guarantee our generic independence effectively pave over those vernacular
relationships through which our own contributory virtuosity might be developed and shared -relationships out of which the exceptional meaning of our immediate situation might be continuously
realized. In contrast with Buddhist emptiness -- a practice that entails attending to the mutual relevance of all things -- both
the aims and strategies of social activism are conducive to an evacuation of the conditions of dramatic
virtuosity, a societal depletion of our resources for meaningfully improvised and liberating intimacy with
all things.
Misc A2 Hip Hop XTs
Policy Making Key
Policy making focus is key—the only way to learn about how to institute change is
through analysis of real life political problems and solutions—hip hop narratives do
nothing
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia
University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan
Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 42-44, DavidK]
We can do better than that kind of politics. There is an old joke in which someone is looking within the light cast by a streetlight
for a dollar bill they dropped. Someone asks why they are looking there when they dropped the dollar bill a block away, and they say "the
light's better here." The politics of hip-hop is exactly like this. Being
oppositional feels good and makes for good rhymes
spit over great beats. But meanwhile, black people's lives are improving in ways that have nothing do with
sticking up their middle fingers. They are overcoming in the real America, the only America they will
ever know. The hip-hop ethos, ever assailing the suits, cannot even see any of this, because it is all about that
upturned middle finger. The beat is better over here. But what about the great things going on where there is no beat?
Hip-hop, quite simply, doesn't care. Why would it? It's music. Too often for it to be an accident, I have found that people making
big claims about the potential for hip-hop to affect politics or create a revolution have mysteriously little
interest in politics as traditionally understood, or political change as it actually happens, as opposed to via dramatic
revolutionary uprisings. Rehashing that too many black men are in prison, they know nothing about
nationwide efforts to reintegrate ex- cons into society. Whipping up applause knocking Republicans,
they couldn't cite a single bill making its way through Congress related to the black condition (and there are
always some). They are not, really, political junkies at all. The politics that they intend when referring to its
relationship to hip-hop is actually the personal kind: to them, politics is an attitude. Attitude alone will
do nothing for that ex-con. Efforts that help that ex-con are sustained in ongoing fashion quite
separately from anything going on in the rap arena or stemming from it. This means that if we are really
interested in moving forward, then in relation to that task, hip-hop does not merit serious interest. Hip-hop is a style,
in rhythm, dress code, carriage, and attitude. But there is style and there is substance. Hip-hop's style, however much it makes the neck
snap, is ill-conceived to create substance for black people or anyone else.
Failure to have a concrete policy option we can debate against guarantees that oppression continues
and efforts for change backfire
Steve 07
(Anonymous member of Black Block and Active Transformation who lives in East Lansing, MI, Date Last Mod. Feb 8,
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/global/a16dcdiscussion.htm, DavidK)
What follows is not an attempt to discredit our efforts. It was a powerful and inspiring couple of days. I feel it is important to always analyze our
actions and be self-critical, and try to move forward, advancing our movement. The
State has used Seattle as an excuse to
beef up police forces all over the country. In many ways Seattle caught us off-guard, and we will pay the
price for it if we don't become better organized. The main weakness of the Black Block in DC was that
clear goals were not elaborated in a strategic way and tactical leadership was not developed to coordinate our actions. By
leadership I don't mean any sort of authority, but some coordination beside the call of the mob. We were being led around DC by
any and everybody. All someone would do is make a call loud enough, and the Black Block would be in motion. We were often lead
around by Direct Action Network (DAN - organizers of the civil disobedience) tactical people, for lack of our own. We were therefore
used to assist in their strategy, which was doomed from the get go, because we had none of our own.
The DAN strategy was the same as it was in Seattle, which the DC police learned how to police. Our only chance at disrupting the IMF/WB
meetings was with drawing the police out of their security perimeter, therefore weakening it and allowing civil disobedience people to break
through the barriers. This needs to be kept in mind as we approach the party conventions this summer. Philadelphia is especially ripe for this
new strategy, since the convention is not happening in the business center. Demonstrations should be planned all over the city to draw police
all over the place. On Monday the event culminated in the ultimate anti-climax, an arranged civil disobedience. The civil disobedience folks
arranged with police to allow a few people to protest for a couple minutes closer to where the meetings were happening, where they would
then be arrested. The CD strategy needed arrests. Our movement should try to avoid this kind of stuff as often as possible. While this is pretty
critical of the DAN/CD strategy, it is so in hindsight. This is the same strategy that succeeded in shutting down the WTO ministerial in Seattle.
And, while we didn't shut down the IMF/WB meetings, we did shut down 90 blocks of the American government on tax day - so we should be
empowered by their fear of us! The root of the
lack of strategy problem is a general problem within the North American
anarchist movement. We get caught up in tactical thinking without establishing clear goals. We need to
elaborate how our actions today fit into a plan that leads to the destruction of the state and capitalism,
white supremacy and patriarchy. Moving away from strictly tactical thinking toward political goals and
long term strategy needs to be a priority for the anarchist movement. No longer can we justify a moralistic
approach to the latest outrage - running around like chickens with their heads cut off. We need to prioritize
developing the political unity of our affinity groups and collectives, as well as developing regional federations and starting the process of
developing the political principles that they will be based around (which will be easier if we have made some headway in our local groups). The
NorthEastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC) is a good example of doing this. They have prioritized developing the political
principles they are federated around. The
strategies that we develop in our collectives and networks will never be blueprints set in
be documents in motion, constantly being challenged and adapted. But without a specific
elaboration of what we are working toward and how we plan to get there, we will always end up making
bad decisions. If we just assume everyone is on the same page, we will find out otherwise really quick
when shit gets critical. Developing regional anarchist federations and networks is a great step for our movement. We should start
stone. They will
getting these things going all over the continent. We should also prioritize developing these across national borders, which NEFAC has also
done with northeastern Canada. Some of the errors of Love and Rage were that it tried to cover too much space too soon, and that it was based
too much on individual membership, instead of collective membership. We need to keep these in mind as we start to develop these projects.
One of the benefits of Love and Rage was that it provided a
forum among a lot of people to have a lot of political
discussion and try to develop strategy in a collective way. This, along with mutual aid and security, could be the priorities
of the regional anarchist federations. These regional federations could also form the basis for tactical leadership at demonstrations. Let me first
give one example why we need tactical teams at large demos. In DC the Black Block amorphously made the decision to try to drive a dumpster
through one of the police lines. The people in front with the dumpster ended up getting abandoned by the other half of the Black Block who
were persuaded by the voice of the moment to move elsewhere. The people up front were in a critical confrontation with police when they
were abandoned. This could be avoided if the Black Block had a decision making system that slowed down decision making long enough for the
block to stay together. With this in mind we must remember that the chaotic, decentralized nature of our organization is what makes us hard to
police. We must maximize the benefits of decentralized leadership, without establishing permanent leaders and targets. Here is a proposal to
consider for developing tactical teams for demos. Delegates from each collective in the regional federation where the action is happening
would form the tactical team. Delegates from other regional federations could also be a part of the tactical team. Communications between the
tactical team and collectives, affinity groups, runners, etc. could be established via radio. The delegates would be recallable by their collectives
if problems arose, and as long as clear goals are elaborated ahead of time with broader participation, the tactical team should be able to make
informed decisions. An effort should be made to rotate delegates so that everyone develops the ability. People with less experience should be
given the chance to represent their collectives in less critical situations, where they can become more comfortable with it. The reality is that
liberal politics will not lead to an end to economic exploitation, racism, and sexism. Anarchism offers a truly radical alternative. Only a radical
critique that links the oppressive nature of global capitalism to the police state at home has a chance of diversifying the movement against
global capitalism. In
order for the most oppressed people here to get involved the movement must offer the
possibility of changing their lives for the better. A vision of what "winning" would look like must be
elaborated if people are going to take the risk with tremendous social upheaval, which is what we are calling for. We
cannot afford to give the old anarchist excuse that "the people will decide after the revolution" how this
or that will work. We must have plans and ideas for things as diverse as transportation, schooling, crime prevention, and criminal
justice. People don't want to hear simple solutions to complex questions, that only enforces people's opinions of us
as naive. We need practical examples of what we are fighting for. People can respond to examples better than
unusual theory. While we understand that we will not determine the shape of things to come, when the system critically fails someone
needs to be there with anti-authoritarian suggestions for how to run all sorts of things. If we are not prepared for that we can
assume others will be prepared to build up the state or a new state.
Revolution Fails
Hip-hop is too anti-establishment to result in political change.
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia
University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan
Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 85-86, DavidK]
Check this out: in
2004, P. Diddy spearheaded a voter registration campaign and called it "Vote or Die."
Never mind how little came of it. As far as Nas was concerned, it was a sellout operation. Here was Nas's
considered opinion: “Hip-Hop is not ‘Vote or Die.’ That's not Hip-Hop. No disrespect to Diddy and Russell and them— those
are my heroes—but Hip-Hop is not ‘Vote or Die’ . . . Hip-Hop is anti-establishment. Ice Cube and them were always that way. In
order for Hip- Hop to change our point of view, it means for us to have a candidate that understands Hip-Hop. If you say ‘Vote or Die’ then you
are saying it's all good that Anheuser-Busch supports ‘Vote or Die.’” So, hip-hop
politics denies the legitimacy of the way
America operates and always will—i.e., real politics. Hip- hop stands outside of the political
establishment, seeking a brand-new day. Nas has no reason to think that politics of that brand has the
slightest chance of helping the black people he raps about. The only way a recreationally radical stance
such as his makes any kind of sense is that hip-hop is not about politics at all—it is about being oppositional
regardless of the outcome. This is why the Hip-Hop Revolution never seems to actually happen, and never
could.
No revolution—hip hop has tried and failed for more than 25 years
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia
University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan
Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 100-101, DavidK]
Something interesting about the Hip-hop Revolution is that, like the uprising of the proletariat that Marxists predicted,
it seems to be ever in the future. We move ever further into the future in real life, but never any closer
to that marvelous time when hip-hop becomes "a political tool" and starts improving lives. It's been a while
now. For example, the 1989 "Self Destruction" video speaking against black-on-black violence is now a period piece, and the rate of homicides
among black teens remains appalling. It's
been a quarter of a century since writers first got excited about the
"political potential" of this music. It's not as if writers today excited about hip-hop's "political potential" are referring to a music
that emerged only ten years ago, not long enough to expect results just yet. Writers were depicting rap as possibly sparking
a political revolution a quarter of a century ago, in the era of Hill Street Blues, Michael Jackson's Thriller, and the Rubik's
Cube; when VCRs were a new luxury item; the media was abuzz with profiles of "yuppies" and "preppies"; e-mail, laptops, CDs, the Internet,
and cell phones did not exist; most people had never had sushi or Thai food; and Madonna was the girl singing that new hit "Holiday." It's
been a long, long time. What's taking so long? Think even about the "conscious" hip-hop tracks that
take a break from the fist-in-the-air posture and urge the black community to look inward. Take, say, the
"Skinz" track on Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth's Mecca and the Soul Brother, which one could justifiably have thought of as a positive message in
1992. It urges black people to use condoms, which would be especially germane nowadays with the AIDS crisis in black communities. One
may well have listened to "Skinz" in 1992 and thought that maybe hip-hop of the conscious kind might forge
a revolution in black communities in terms of responsibility for sexual behavior. The thing is, though, that
1992 was more than a decade and a half ago. No revolution yet. Teen pregnancy rates are down since then, yes, but
it'd be hard to say that the "Skinz" or any of the other rap tracks addressing similar themes is the reason for that. And really, pregnancy rates
are just down a tad, not enough to create any noticeable sea change in black communities where, obviously, women
having babies as
teenagers remains very common and perfectly ordinary. Dream now of hip-hop creating some kind of
revolution, and consider that people had the exact same dream fifteen years ago—and started having it
ten years before that. Do we really have any reason to suppose that revolution is more likely to happen
now than in 1992? Could it not be that this music is not, in the America we live in and know, going to create a revolution at all? Is the idea
that hip-hop is "revolutionary" an actual engagement with reality, or is it, like so many of the routines in the music
itself, such as the gunplay and recreational misogyny, a pose? Black America needs more than an attitude dressed up
as an intention.
We don’t need a revolution, we need a blueprint for political change
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia
University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan
Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 130-133, DavidK]
A question that must be asked is also just what a black revolution would even be about today. Certainly
black America has serious problems. However, a revolution does not consist solely of howling grievances.
For a revolutionary effort to be worth anyone's time, the demands have to be ones that those being revolted against
have some way of fulfilling. In one episode of the animated version of Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks, there is an articulate
depiction of the idea that black people need to Rise Up as a group and Make Demands. Huey, whose bitter frown is as ingrained in his design as
a vapid smile is on Mickey Mouse, imagines that Martin Luther King comes back to life and inspires a revolution in black America, graphically
indicated as hordes of blacks swarming the gates at the White House. "It's fun to dream," Huey concludes, the idea being that black people
know what to rise up against, but that they would run up against the heartless moral cesspool that is AmeriKKKa, where, say, "George Bush
doesn't care about black people." But the question is: what
would the people at the gates, if attended to, demand? Fifty
years ago, the demands were obvious: dismantle Jim Crow. And since then, a lot more has been given:
affirmative action, the transformation of welfare from a stingy program for widows to an open- ended dole for any unmarried woman with
children (done largely as riot insurance in the late 1960s, called for by leftist activists including black ones) ... I could go on. So—yes,
black
America still has problems. Yes, there is still racism. But what is it that the White House should do now, in
2008, that is staring everyone in the face but hasn't happened because white people just "don't care" and
the black community has failed to "demand" it? What? Precisely? I am not implying that what needs to happen is black
people getting acquainted with those "bootstraps" we hear so much about. But the problems are not the kind that could be
solved by simply buckshotting whitey with the usual cries of "racism." Would the people at the gates be calling for
inner city schools to get as much money as schools in leafy white suburbs? If they did, they would see the same thing that has happened when
exactly that was done in places like New Jersey and Kansas City: nothing changes. Obviously something needs to be done about the schools. But
what, of the sort that should be shouted through the White House fence? How
many of the shouters would know about
poor black kids kicking academic butt in KIPP schools? Or in other charter schools filled with kids there
because of—oh dear—vouchers, in Ohio and Florida? Let's face it—most of the people at that fence would draw a
blank on what KIPP schools even were, much less the good that vouchers are doing. Some revolution.
Would the people at the gates be calling for police forces to stop beating up on young black men and
sometimes killing them? Well, that's a legitimate concern. But the revolution on that is already
happening, in every American city making concerted efforts to foster dialogue between the police and
the street. We're not there yet, but things are better. Anyone who says that the shooting death of Sean Bell in
2006 in New York was evidence that nothing had changed since the death of Amadou Diallo in 1998 knows little
of what the relationship between the police and black people was like in New York and so many other places before
the nineties. In 1960, the death of Amadou Diallo would have made the local papers only, for one day, and, even in those papers, on some back
page. It wouldn't have been considered important news. Going through newspapers of that era, one constantly comes across stories about
things that happened to "Negroes," on page A31, that today would be front-page breaking news. We
are blissfully past that
America. And back to the main point: what could the White House do to prevent things like the Diallo and Bell incidents? What simple,
wave-the-wand policy point would make it so that never again would a young black man be killed by the police in dicey circumstances where
everybody lost his head for a minute or so? The
relationship between police forces and black people is not as simple
as something that could be changed by storming through a gate, which is obvious from how persistent that problem has
been despite profound changes on so many other fronts.
No Social Change
Note: This card uses the F-word
Hip hop isn’t a good avenue for social change—it is too radical and insulated as art.
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley, lecturer @ Columbia
University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan
Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 10-12, DavidK]
I am concerned with what
of hip-hop has to tell us about where to go after we erupt with the idle, reactive eruption of Fuck. And where does hiphop tell us to go? Boiling down the "revolutionary" statements by rappers of all kinds and their band of
chroniclers, one gleans a manifesto that goes roughly like this: The Civil Rights, revolution only took us
halfway. Some lucky ducks rose into the middle class, there are more blacks in the movies and on TV, and some blacks have
risen high in the government—although they are merely apologists for AmeriKKKa. Still, vast numbers of black people remain
poor and/or in jail, and the reason is that white people are holding them down. Racism remains black America's
If the message of this supposedly revolutionary music is just "Fuck!" the message is weak. Fuck! is tap water.
the "politics"
main problem, and the solution is for whites to finally come to a grand realization that there is still work for them to do. In the sixties the white
man only took one hand off our necks. The job of the informed black person is to rage against the machine, with the plan of forcing the white
man to take that other hand off. Otherwise, we can expect little of black America except what it is. That
way of looking at black
America's problems is considered as obvious by a great many people as the sky is blue. I, however, believe that
it is mistaken, for reasons I will present. Hip-hop's politics are sincere, but its proponents are unaware that
these politics are a dead end. Yet my implication is not that the alternative is "Pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps." There is a
third way. The manifesto would go something like this: Black America's politics must be about helping people be their best within the American
system as it always will be, divorced of romantic, unfeasible notions of some massive transformation of basic procedure along the lines of what
happened in the sixties. If that sounds strange or vaguely unexciting, this is only because a hangover from the victories of the sixties has
conditioned so many of us to think that the only significant change is the kind that makes for good TV (and has a catchy beat). I, for one, am
quite excited about the prospects of black America right now. However, any
sense of black politics implying that we must
seek some kind of dramatic rupture with current reality is a black politics that can go nowhere, misses
opportunities to forge real change in the real world, and misses changes already going on. Hip-hop, with
its volume, infectiousness, and the media-friendly array of celebrities it has created, is a primary conduit of this "revolutionary" brand
of black politics, held about up as enlightenment to a black America notoriously conflicted as to how to move ahead. This is
dangerous and retrograde. We are infected with an idea that snapping our necks to black men chanting
cynical potshots the Powers That Be in surly voices over a beat is a form of political engagement. We are
taught that this is showing ourselves to have broad horizons. On the contrary, this music has less to teach us than we are
told. Hip-hop fans ridicule critics of the music as taking the violence and misogyny too seriously. "It's
just music," they often say—but then at the same time, thrill to people talking about hip-hop as political
and revolutionary. In fact, they too are taking hip-hop too seriously. Hip- hop presents nothing useful to
forging political change in the real world. It's all about attitude and just that. It's just music. Good music, but
just music.
Their focus on revolutionary split divorces focus from avenues that can lead to real progressivism
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley, lecturer @ Columbia
University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan
Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 12-13, DavidK]
The fashionable pretense otherwise discourages serious progressive thought of the kind that the old Civil Rights
heroes who made our America possible would recognize. It clouds our eyes and ears with a dream vision of black
America spitting verses so fierce and true that white America once again realizes that black people are
America's biggest problem, gets down on its knees, begs forgiveness, sheds all vestiges of racist bias, and starts coughing up. Folks,
that's never going to happen again. That vision has no hope of coming true, and I will explain why. It's not only
that there will be no hip-hop revolution. There will be no revolution at all. And yet there is no reason to
see this as a message of hopelessness. Black America has all reason at this moment to be hopeful, and I will
show why. What we can be hopeful about is that change will happen. Not rupture, but change. Slow but
sure. Faster than just fifteen years ago, even, but overall, slowly. Mesmerized by the idea that the only meaningful
change in black America will be abrupt, dramatic, and will leave whitey with egg on his face—that is, "hiphoperatic"—we miss signs of real change right under our noses, unable to see that anything is going on
worth our support and participation. We will not be satisfied just proving that we know life isn't fair. We
will not rest until we are actually moving something.
Black/White Binary Bad
The paranoid us versus them dichotomy of hip hop prevents instituting any
meaningful change
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley, lecturer @ Columbia
University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan
Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 37-39, DavidK]
In terms of how rappers address social and political issues relevant to solving black America's biggest
problems, we also see that attitude alone has pride of place over sincere interest in making a difference.
The leading cause of death for black Americans aged twenty- five to forty-four is not gunfire but AIDS. Every year these
days, two-thirds of new AIDS cases are black women. How does rap, so "political" and "revolutionary,"
approach this? For every rap urging people to use condoms, such as "Skinz" on Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth's Mecca and
the Soul Brother, there are two reminding us that AIDS was foisted upon blacks by whites to sterilize us. You
hear this again and again in hip-hop: Kanye West pulls it in the "Heard 'Em Say" opener to his Late Registration, such a gorgeous piece of work,
but tainted in his tossing this street-corner BS off as if it were simple fact. Why?
Because airing that paranoid us-againstthem analysis makes for better hip-hop than the truth that serious scientists are devoting their careers
to, which is that AIDS infected humans through a monkey bite. No one could even begin to make a case that the scientists working out the
details on this are closet racists blowing a smoke screen. Nor would anybody want to write a rap about people getting AIDS from a monkey
bite. And that is because what
is front and center in hip-hop's take on AIDS is belligerence, because it fits the
hip-hop "feel." Belligerence is what makes the music good. But in this case, the belligerence is based on a dopey cartoon
street myth, spread by books and pamphlets that sway readers under the impression that what is printed must be true, especially if it
appeals to their gut instincts (one thinks of the anti-Western fundamentalist Muslims fond of conspiracy theories about the West who
earnestly defend their claims by saying "It's on the Internet!"—or, in fact, Amiri Baraka saying the same thing in defending his claim that the
attack on the Twin Towers was known in advance by Israelis). Again, the fist
in the air has pride of place, because that, in itself, is
the soul of the music. Fine, but what about the black women living with nausea, diarrhea, and exhaustion from
their sickness? Constructive politics: use condoms. Attitude: whites cooked up AIDS and spread it among
black people while Church's Chicken was injecting a serum into their drumsticks to sterilize them. I'm sorry, but this is not politics
for a people with any respect for themselves in a literate, post- Enlightenment society.
Hip Hop Bad — Violence Turn
Depictions of violence, drugs, and brutality in hip hop may not be universal but it
pervades the genre and means that the music cannot be a strategy for change
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley, lecturer @ Columbia
University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan
Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 30-32, DavidK]
I know there is conscious rap that urges clean living, and we'll get to conscious rap in the next chapter, but the overall
tendency is clear: using and even selling drugs is a huge part of the hip-hop soundscape. On Guerillas in tha
Mist, Ice Cube's character in his guest shot "All on My Nutsac" is even a dealer. "All on My Nutsac" is, in itself, one of the best things on the
album, a fun duet with J-Dee. But still, how constructive
is a message like that? Is the revolution going to be that
all young black men start selling drugs? The simple reason that things like community policing and
employment counseling don't make it into hip-hop is that they wouldn't be as much fun to rap about, or
to listen to. That's because the sound and the attitude of hip-hop is all about noise—wonderful, raucous noise.
Noise lends itself to rapping about the po-po, complete with gunshots laced into the track, the sound of
prison doors clanking shut, sirens, the sound of a gun cocking, etc. Guns and clicks sound good set to rap
music because the beats already sound kind of like guns, and gunshots are inherently dramatic. Think, say,
of the tight and right "Careful" (the "click click" one) from the Wu-Tang Clan's The W. But does anyone think that fighting the
police, even on a "symbolic" level, is how to solve black people's problems with them? It's one thing to enjoy Tupac's
cartoon idea of black men rising up against the police with their hands on their gats. But what about real life? Isn't it, rather, that this
metaphorical solution is only so attractive to hip-hop fans because the notion of fighting the police
lends itself well to young men "spraying" lyrics in a confrontational tone over sharp, loud rhythmic patterns? Again and again, rappers calling themselves "serious" pull things that spell nothing useful for us here
in the world outside of rap albums, but make perfect sense if we see the main goal as being confrontational and only that. In his
N.W.A. days, for example, Ice Cube thought of himself not as a gangsta rapper but as a "reality" rapper. Thus the reality in "Fuck tha Police" on
Straight Outta Compton, where Ice Cube assails the police but admits gang membership. Did he want more young black men to join gangs? Of
course not. He was just making a statement to the Powers That Be that because of injustice, we niggaz are going to rise. But how
are
things going with the uprising in question? Four years after Straight Outta Compton was released, there
was, in fact, a black uprising right in South Central L.A.—the riots after the acquittal of the officers who subdued Rodney King. It is now
agreed by those of all persuasions that it led to no political change of any importance.
Hip hop fails as a revolution—it entrenches violence that prevents success
McWhorter 03-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley, Lecturer @ Columbia
University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan
Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John H, City Journal, “How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back,”
Summer 2003, http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_3_how_hip_hop.html, DavidK]
Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a revolutionary potential,
in rap and hip-hop. They couldn’t be more wrong. By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered
blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly “authentic”
response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success. The venom that suffuses rap had
little place in black popular culture—indeed, in black attitudes—before the 1960s. The hip-hop ethos can trace
its genealogy to the emergence in that decade of a black ideology that equated black strength and
authentic black identity with a militantly adversarial stance toward American society. In the angry new mood,
captured by Malcolm X’s upraised fist, many blacks (and many more white liberals) began to view black crime and violence
as perfectly natural, even appropriate, responses to the supposed dehumanization and poverty inflicted
by a racist society. Briefly, this militant spirit, embodied above all in the Black Panthers, infused black popular culture,
from the plays of LeRoi Jones to “blaxploitation” movies, like Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which celebrated
the black criminal rebel as a hero. But blaxploitation and similar genres burned out fast. The memory of whites blatantly
stereotyping blacks was too recent for the typecasting in something like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song not to offend many blacks.
Observed black historian Lerone Bennett: “There is a certain grim white humor in the fact that the black marches and demonstrations of the
1960s reached artistic fulfillment” with “provocative and ultimately insidious reincarnations of all the Sapphires and Studds of yesteryear.” Early
rap mostly steered clear of the Sapphires and Studds, beginning not as a growl from below but as happy party music. The first big rap hit, the
Sugar Hill Gang’s 1978 “Rapper’s Delight,” featured a catchy bass groove that drove the music forward, as the jolly rapper celebrated himself as
a ladies’ man and a great dancer. Soon, kids across America were rapping along with the nonsense chorus: I said a hip, hop, the hippie, the
hippie, to the hip-hip hop, ah you don’t stop the rock it to the bang bang boogie, say up jump the boogie, to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.
A string of ebullient raps ensued in the months ahead. At the time, I assumed it was a harmless craze, certain to run out of steam soon. But
rap took a dark turn in the early 1980s, as this “bubble gum” music gave way to a “gangsta” style that picked up where
blaxploitation left off. Now top rappers began to write edgy lyrics celebrating street warfare or drugs and
promiscuity. Grandmaster Flash’s ominous 1982 hit, “The Message,” with its chorus, “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how
I keep from going under,” marked the change in sensibility. It depicted ghetto life as profoundly desolate: You grow in the ghetto, living second
rate And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate. The places you play and where you stay Looks like one great big alley way. You’ll admire all the
numberbook takers, Thugs, pimps and pushers, and the big money makers.
Hip hope glamorizes ghettos as a ruthless war zone and entrenches the nihilistic
belief that poverty is inescapable
McWhorter 03-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley, Lecturer @
Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor
@ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John H, City Journal, “How
Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back,” Summer 2003, http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_3_how_hip_hop.html, DavidK]
The idea that rap is an authentic cry against oppression is all the sillier when you recall that black
Americans had lots more to be frustrated about in the past but never produced or enjoyed music as
nihilistic as 50 Cent or N.W.A. On the contrary, black popular music was almost always affirmative and
hopeful. Nor do we discover music of such violence in places of great misery like Ethiopia or the Congo—
unless it’s imported American hip-hop. Given the hip-hop world’s reflexive alienation, it’s no surprise that its explicit
political efforts, such as they are, are hardly progressive. Simmons has founded the “Hip-Hop Summit Action Network” to bring
rap stars and fans together in order to forge a “bridge between hip-hop and politics.” But HSAN’s policy positions are mostly tired bromides.
Sticking with the long-discredited idea that urban schools fail because of inadequate funding from the stingy, racist white Establishment, for
example, HSAN joined forces with the teachers’ union to protest New York mayor Bloomberg’s proposed education budget for its supposed lack
of generosity. HSAN has also stuck it to President Bush for invading Iraq. And it has vociferously protested the affixing of advisory labels on rap
CDs that warn parents about the obscene language inside. Fighting for rappers’ rights to obscenity: that’s some kind of revolution! Okay, maybe
rap isn’t progressive in any meaningful sense, some observers will admit; but isn’t it just a bunch of kids blowing off steam and so nothing to
worry about? I think that response is too easy. With music videos, DVD players, Walkmans, the Internet, clothes, and magazines all making
hip-hop an accompaniment to a person’s entire existence, we need to take it more seriously. In fact, I would argue that it is seriously
harmful to the black community. The rise of nihilistic rap has mirrored the breakdown of community
norms among inner-city youth over the last couple of decades. It was just as gangsta rap hit its stride
that neighborhood elders began really to notice that they’d lost control of young black men, who were
frequently drifting into lives of gang violence and drug dealing. Well into the seventies, the ghetto was a
shabby part of town, where, despite unemployment and rising illegitimacy, a healthy number of people were doing
their best to “keep their heads above water,” as the theme song of the old black sitcom Good Times put it. By the
eighties, the ghetto had become a ruthless war zone, where black people were their own worst enemies. It would be
silly, of course, to blame hip-hop for this sad downward spiral, but by glamorizing life in the “war zone,” it
has made it harder for many of the kids stuck there to extricate themselves. Seeing a privileged star like
Sean Combs behave like a street thug tells those kids that there’s nothing more authentic than ghetto
pathology, even when you’ve got wealth beyond imagining.
Hip hop represents a narrow, commodified vision of urban life where criminal activity and patriarchal
norms are celebrated.
Ali 09-Staff Writer @ The Washington Examiner, writers @ the magazine empower, specializes in social awareness and activism [Aisha, The
Examiner, “Hip-hop meets its ultimate fate: Hip-hop surrenders to capitalism,” May 4, 2009, http://www.examiner.com/dc-in-washingtondc/hip-hop-meets-its-ultimate-fate-hip-hop-surrenders-to-capitalism-dollar-dollar-bill-ya-ll, DavidK]
For many years, hip-hop
has been surviving on life support. Therefore, it was no surprise when Nas finally
pronounced its death with Hip Hop Is Dead in 2006. Yet, Nas’ CD title said nothing different than what hip-hop critics had
been saying for years: hip-hop has suffered a fatality. With its brain-dead music in mass production, life has
disappeared from much of hip-hop music. During hip-hop’s prime, the eighties and early nineties, some of hip-hop’s most
popular artists created groundbreaking, socially-conscious music, sans lyrical content based on materialism, sex, and violence, which has
dominated airwaves during the late nineties and millennia. Public Enemy, Arrested Development, and A Tribe Called Quest, along with
individuals like KRS-One, created positive-minded, Afrocentric, stimulating hip-hop music. Now, mainstream hip-hop
artists mostly
create music exploiting ways of ghetto life: the body count tied to a “burner”; the amount of “ho’s” in a
repertoire; the riches acquired, mostly through ill-gotten gains; and/or how “icy” a person is. Of course, the
biggest debate has been the influence hip-hop music has had on youths. During my childhood and adolescence,
which were the eighties and early nineties, hip-hop music was diverse. Throughout this time frame, male youths were offered a varied range of
hip-hop role models to admire, such as Chuck D, Big Daddy Kane, Too Short, or Doug E. Fresh. It was almost as if record labels and artists were
saying, “You can get with this, or you can get with that"— remember those lyrics? When regarding choices female youths had, there was
Roxanne, Queen Latifah, Mc Lyte, Salt-N-Peppa and Spinderella, Yo-Yo, Da Brat, and Smooth— amongst others. The images of female hip-hop
artists varied: there were female rap vixens, while others had a “you-better-R-E-S-P-E-C-T-me-or-get-slapped” tomboyish persona. In the
eighties and early nineties, women were not all portrayed as sex symbols, and those that were not, were still able to achieve popularity and
success. This delivered a message to female youths that a strong, intelligent, and witty female, who held herself in high esteem, could be
successful and gain respect not based on looks. Although the appearances of Salt-N-Peppa and Spinderella were more seductive, they still made
meaningful songs: “Let’s Talk About Sex,” which cautions youths against having unprotected sex and educates the public on AIDS awareness;
“Expression,” which encourages youths to be comfortable in their own skin; “Ain’t Nuthin’ but a She Thing,” which promotes feminism; and “It’s
None of Your Business,” which combats sexism. Of course, there was Smooth, “The Female Mack,” who represented those females that wanted
to prove males could be outwitted at the “art of pimpin”. Yet, for the most part, many of these hip-hop female artists, who started out as
teenagers themselves, seem to have fought earnestly to be respected in hip-hop, which was and still is a male-dominated industry. Now,
when female youths look to female hip-hop artists as role models, all that is primarily seen is women
half- or completely naked, spewing out just as crass lyrics as their male counterparts. The efforts hip-hop female
predecessors made to prevent their followers from struggling to be respected, now seems to have been in vain. The “rap divas” of
today leave much to be desired. As hip-hop became less diversified, options youths had for role models
lessened. Hip-hop artists, who do not fit the “pop artist” mold, find themselves steadily trying to make their way up from the underground
from whence they heavily dwell. Distinguishing one's self from the “norm” in modern hip-hop, which endorses
violence, defames females, and boasts about riches not only takes courage, but may also prove
detrimental to one’s career. With majority of hip-hop lyrics being misogynistic, violent, and materialistic,
it is almost taboo to speak of more cerebral issues in songs without being considered “soft” or “on some
other [expletive]”. As Kanye West once said during a MTV interview, “Anything opposite of hip-hop is considered gay in the hip-hop
community”— a statement with which I totally concur, especially when concerning the hip-hop socialization of black male youths. If you’re
a male who grew up in the suburbs rather than in the hood, you’re considered “soft,” which equals gay.
If a male wears fitted shirts and pants that don’t sag off his derrière so the whole world can see his goods, then he is
considered “soft,” which equals gay. This very perception is what often forces youths, especially black male if not
strong-minded, to
pursue a life of crime in order to appear “hard” to his peers. There is a huge
overrepresentation of criminal aspects of black youth culture in videos and songs. Although there are always
news reports exposing youth criminal activity, there is a percentage of youths not on the streets “slinging rocks” nor shooting their peers and
There are many black youths who are honor roll students and have honest jobs. However,
these kids are not represented in music, as youths with such lifestyles as a topic would not sell music.
robbing elders.
Nevertheless, the pressure felt from peers and the media can potentially cause youths, who do not wish to engage in such dangerous lifestyles,
to falsely portray a gangster to feel accepted. Sadly, even grown men attempt to falsely portray themselves as gangsters, as many rappers have
been ousted for perpetuating a false thuggish persona to meet record sale quotas— little do black male youths know who want to emulate this
lifestyle: the mansion, Escalade, and ice are rented until these artists make enough money to pay off their record companies for “loaning” these
material goods to them to fit the image that will bring in millions.
AT “Conscious” Hip Hop
Even if they do not play offensive music, their defenses of the political potential of
music means that they need to defend the genre.
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley, lecturer @ Columbia
University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan
Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 33-35, DavidK]
A point I should make before we go on: there are some who will object that if I am trying to make a
point about politics and rap, then I should address only the likes of either Public Enemy back in the day or
Talib Kweli now, and leave out the more commercial acts in between like N.W.A. I reject that argument.
Rap's fans, including its academic ones, refer constantly to rappers in general when proposing that there
is something political about the music. Writers like Nelson George, Tricia Rose, Michael Eric Dyson, William Van DeBurg, Imani
Perry, Robin Kelley, Cheryl Keyes, Bakari Kitwana, and others do not primly restrict their arguments to the albums only
the buffs and fanatics know. They, while well aware that some rappers like Lil Jon are largely irrelevant as "conscious" goes, are
referring to hip-hop in general. And this is because most of even the mainstream rappers have their
"conscious" moments. These cuts are now even cliches, formulas, just like the ones about guns and bitches. A rapper who
wants to be taken seriously is almost required to dip into the "conscious" well at least one or two times per album.
The Wu-Tang Clan came up with cuts like "Can It All Be So Simple?" and "Tearz"; then there are always tracks like Das EFX's "Can't Have
Nuttin'," Ludacris's "Hopeless," and Young Jeezy's "Dreamin'," or Ice Cube saluting Afrika Bambatta and Public Enemy at the end of AmeriKKKa's
Most Wanted. This means that this book is not flawed in addressing rappers like Jay-Z and The Game as well as Pete Rock and Mos Def. A
book on whether hip-hop is useful politics that left out the rappers the world loves the most would
make no sense, since they constantly toss their two cents in on what they think of as politics. Making
sense about what rap means for black politics requires, then, bringing Jadakiss into the discussion as well
as KRS-One. Upon which, I will.
AT Policing
Even if they are right about police brutality being a status quo problem—hip hop
politics leaves no blueprint change
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia
University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan
Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 27-28, DavidK]
And while
we're on the police, the relationship between them and young black men is an especially
urgent issue in the black community. This one issue, in fact, grounds the whole conception of hip-hop as
politics. Much of the reason hip-hop is now considered significant rather than infectious is that so many
rappers have had so much to say about police brutality. But the question is how useful is what they have
said in terms of helping to change the situation? Hip-hop is supposedly going to lead to a revolution:
things are going to be really different. Has hip-hop given any indication of this in terms of what it has to say about
the cops? Let's take Da Lench Mob's Guerillas in tha Mist as an example, although countless other recordings would serve equally well.
The general message of Guerillas in tha Mist is that blacks need to, somehow, fight the police—or at least, get
back at them with attitude. In "Lost in tha System," J- Dee is in court before the judge and "He added on another year 'cause I dissed
him / Now here I go gettin' lost in the system." The diss in question was a suggestion that the judge suck upon his penis. This is typical of the
attitude toward the police and the criminal justice system on a great many rap albums, including ones celebrated as among the best recordings
of all time such as Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted. But
if the idea is that hip-hop is "political" in the simple
message that relations between police forces and young black men are often rough, then this is a highly
static form of politics, especially if what we get over twenty-five years is endless variations on that same
message. That there is felt to be a need to air this "political" message over so much time suggests that the problem is not an easy one to
resolve—i.e., that simply complaining about it to a beat does not have a significant effect. It would seem that effective engagement with this issue would require more than mere complaint. Especially if we're talking about
some kind of revolution. Yet all we get year after year for two decades and a half from rappers is "the police hate
us, so hate them back" while "hip-hop intellectuals" cheer from the sidelines that this is politics. Yet this is a "politics" that
has nothing to do with doing something—or even suggesting what might be done. If this posturing is a
"politics" black America should be proud of, then black America is accepting nothing as something: stasis as
progress, gesture as action.
Capitalism Links
The use of hip hop as a strategy for activism fails because it is inevitably coopted by
capitalism—voices won’t be heard
Coates 07-senior editor @ The Atlantic, staff writer @ TIME, B.A. @ Howard University [Ta-Nehisi, TIME Magazine, “Hip-hop’s down beat,”
August 17, 2007, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1653639-1,00.html, DavidK]
When the political activist Al Sharpton pivoted from his war against bigmouth radio man Don Imus to a war on bad-mouth gangsta rap, the
instinct among older music fans was to roll their eyes and yawn. Ten years ago, another activist, C. Delores Tucker, launched a very similar
campaign to clean up rap music. She focused on Time Warner (parent of TIME), whose subsidiary Interscope was home to hard-core rappers
Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur. In 1995 Tucker succeeded in forcing Time Warner to dump Interscope. Her victory was Pyrrhic. Interscope
flourished, launching artists like 50 Cent and Eminem and distributing the posthumous recordings of Shakur. And the
genre exploded
across the planet, with rappers emerging everywhere from Capetown to the banlieues of Paris. In the
U.S. alone, sales reached $1.8 billion. The lesson was Capitalism 101: rap music's market strength gave
its artists permission to say what they pleased. And the rappers themselves exhibited an entrepreneurial
bent unlike that of musicians before them. They understood the need to market and the benefits of line
extensions. Theirs was capitalism with a beat. Today that same market is telling rappers to please shut up. While musicindustry sales have plummeted, no genre has fallen harder than rap. According to the music trade publication Billboard, rap sales have dropped
44% since 2000 and declined from 13% of all music sales to 10%. Artists who were once the tent poles at rap labels are posting disappointing
numbers. Jay-Z's return album, Kingdom Come, for instance, sold a gaudy 680,000 units in its first week, according to Billboard. But by the
second week, its sales had declined some 80%. This year rap sales are down 33% so far. Longtime rap fans are doing the math and coming to
the same conclusions as the music's voluminous critics. In February, the filmmaker Byron Hurt released Beyond Beats and Rhymes, a
documentary notable not just for its hard critique but for the fact that most of the people doing the criticizing were not dowdy church ladies
but members of the hip-hop generation who deplore rap's recent fixation on the sensational. Both rappers and music execs are clamoring for
solutions. Russell Simmons recently made a tepid call for rappers to self-censor the words nigger and bitch from their albums. But most insiders
believe that a
debate about profanity and misogyny obscures a much deeper problem: an artistic vacuum at
major labels. "The music community has to get more creative," says Steve Rifkin, CEO of SRC Records. "We have to start betting
on the new and the up-and-coming for us to grow as an industry. Right now, I don't think anyone is
taking chances. It's a big-business culture." It's the ultimate irony. Since the 1980s, when Run-DMC attracted sponsorship
from Adidas, the rap community has aspired to be big business. By the '90s, those aspirations had become a
reality. In a 1999 cover story, TIME reported that with 81 million CDs sold, rap was officially America's top-selling music
genre. The boom produced enterprises like Roc-A-Fella, which straddled fashion, music and film and in 2001 was worth $300 million. It
produced moguls like No Limit's Master P and Bad Boy's Puff Daddy, each of whom in 2001 made an
appearance on FORTUNE's list of the richest 40 under 40. Along the way, the music influenced everything from advertising
to fashion to sports.
Hip hop has become commoditized and voices have been co-opted and manipulated by capitalism
Philosog 11-[Philosog, “Concerning Hip Hop, Capitalism, and Politics,” March 2, 2011, http://philosog.com/Jonesing/concerning-hip-hopcapitalism-and-politics/, DavidK]
Simply stated, current
hip hop is the commoditized reflection of corporate profit mongering. Corporations
with their financiers manipulate the message by manipulating the artist into making music that will sell the
fastest which often means appealing to the lowest common denominator. The hip hop that used to be
balanced is now tilted in the most banal direction. In the past for every Kool G. Rap there was a KRS One, for every N.W.A.
there was a X-Clan. Now there is only Young Money and gangsterism and criminality with no Native Tounges
to balance the situation. Hip hop then is taken from something that could be a force for good into a
form of audible junk food, feeding people stuff that is no good for them. Group conflict is the context for the black political agenda.
Capitalism is the context for American politics. Merging group conflict and capitalist development, merging the black political agenda and
American politics, we are able to intelligently discuss the morass that is hip hop. Capitalism
creates a stratified, divided society
where the labor of the many is exploited to enrich the few. The once pure hip hop of the Cold Crush and the
Treacherous Three was introduced into a system of economic development that at its heart produces an
exploited and alienated workforce. Cultural product like hip hop is reduced to something to be bought and
sold to merely to generate profit, social justice issues be damned.
The get rich or die trying mentality of hip hop has led to it becoming a forum to be dominated by
capitalist beliefs consistent with the neo-conservative agenda
Johnson 08-Professor of Economics and Geography @ the Coggin College of Business, University of Florida, PhD in Economics @ University
of Alabama, B.S. in Economics and Mathematics @ the University of Alabama, writes for the Journal of Pan-African Studies, specializes poverty
and inequality in Urban and Regional Economics [Christopher, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, “Danceable Capitalism: Hip-Hop’s Links to
Corporate Space,” June 2008, Volume 2, Number 4, pg. 91, http://www.jpanafrican.com/docs/vol2no4/2.4_Danceable_Cap.pdf, DavidK]
It is true that Black
Nationalist sentiment within popular hip-hop has faded, but the message of Black
capitalism has (not surprisingly) increased over the last decade. To discount the validity of capitalist sentiment one would have to
ignore the rise of prosperity ministries within the Black church, the increase in Black business ownership, and the high percentage of Black
college students enrolled in business programs. An
assimilationist embrace of European capitalist practice has
coexisted (if uncomfortably at times) with programs based wholly within the African American community.
Rapper 50 Cent’s message of “get rich or die trying” is based in a long history of capitalist struggle, one
that fits very comfortably within the conservative and neoconservative orientation of American
economics and politics in the last quarter century. There is no shortage of “messages” within hip-hop at present. What is in
short supply is a diversity of theoretical frameworks from which to choose. Individualistic pursuit of capital and pleasure has
replaced most notions of community in the Pop Era. The Pop Era that followed was a success for a few Black
entrepreneurs such as Sean Combs, Russell Simmons, Master P, Dr. Dre, and 50 Cent. They were able to further aid in the
commodification of the music resulting in great financial rewards for themselves, and thus their commercial
success was pointed to as a triumph for the Black music artist, although their individual financial gains seldom trickled
down to other hip-hop artists affiliated with them.
Capitalism forces any political meaning in rap to the way side and dictates what artists can and cannot
say
Ali 09-Staff Writer @ The Washington Examiner, writers @ the magazine empower, specializes in social awareness and activism [Aisha, The
Examiner, “Hip-hop meets its ultimate fate: Hip-hop surrenders to capitalism,” May 4, 2009, http://www.examiner.com/dc-in-washingtondc/hip-hop-meets-its-ultimate-fate-hip-hop-surrenders-to-capitalism-dollar-dollar-bill-ya-ll, DavidK]
So, the
suits behind the corporate desks are the real pimps. This is an organized crime model at its best. As hip-hop
became more influential and accepted in pop mainstream, capitalism dominated how artists were to
portray themselves to gain enough popularity needed to control airwaves. However, capitalism cannot be
only associated with today’s hip-hop, as it has been a dominating factor. Old school rappers in hip-hop spoke of
escaping impoverished conditions through money gained from their record sales as “dope emcees”. If capitalism was the killer of hip-hop, then
it was suicidal. In “Paid In Full,” one of my favorite old school hip-hop “joints” by Eric B and Rakim, along with “Don’t Sweat The Technique,”
Rakim describes a situation of a young, “stick–up kid,” who realized this path led to a dead end, ultimately deciding to use his lyrical talents as a
positive means to gain the materialistic lifestyle desired. Now, whether Rakim is referring to himself, another individual, or just a fictional
character in a hypothetical situation is debatable; yet, the fact remains this song discusses materialism, just as songs today. Although Rakim’s
style and talent is greater than 95 percent of mainstream rappers today, this song and others like it, still paved way to hip-hop
songs
today that discuss materialism— not to mention, many emcees or rappers were decked out in thick, gold
rope chains and the freshest Adidas warm-up suits and Kangol bucket hats. While hip-hop was inherently political
and originators’ intentions were righteous, as hip-hop began as a story of marginalized people with limited resources in underserved
communities, explicit, hardcore attempts to be political, while occasionally entertaining, had a superfluous impact. The end result: followers
wanted to top the next hip-hop artist as being the most controversial, as many hip-hop artists wanted to
hoard attention from consumers, which led to mega records sales which in turn led to mega bucks,
stemming from lyrics based on materialism, violence, and sex. Rap’s degradation from its glorious past has been
attributed to the rise of the crack epidemic in urban communities during the mid eighties. Due to the heavy influence of the crack trade, the
values of many black youths have disintegrated. Much of the materialism, misogyny, violence, and the absolute die-hard mentality for trivial
things derive from the crack era and its music. This mentality paired with struggles against discrimination, racism, and unparalleled poverty
when compared to other races, is a disastrous mix for black youths. The
lifestyle of fast money becomes the resolution to
many problems youths experience in underserved communities, especially since hip-hop music glorifies
this lifestyle and youths very seldom think of the dire consequences related to a life of organized crime
and fast living. This image became heavily enforced and more visible during the nineties with the introduction of NWA. NWA’s
albums explicitly dealt a hardcore lifestyle of violence, drugs, and sex, and when sales exploded— based on
black and white teenagers— the themes in rap songs became darker and edgier. With the introduction of “crack music,”
politically conscious groups like Public Enemy were pushed aside, as record labels became hungrier to match
enormous sales of NWA’s monetary success. From this moment onward, record labels primarily pursued
individuals that could replicate the winning style: money, ho’s, and violence. The West Coast rap offered a new
twist that many people had not heard. The mega success of Suge Knight’s Death Row Records, the music empire that manufactured Dr. Dre and
Snoop Dogg, dominated the new direction in which hip-hop was to go, as this became the archetype for success. Simultaneously, these
same negative images began to dominate hip-hop. In a sense, hip-hop became the images opposers had branded for
this genre at its inception— a lifestyle of violence. Yet, at its inception, hip-hop was used as a means of expression against injustices and
poverty, education, and an outlet to relieve tension (feel-good, party music). Giant record companies have profited huge
selling ghetto culture to the American mainstream, as the drug trade has dominated the ghettos. Many record
companies lack creativity of past producers, which were able to cultivate and build new. So instead, they sink to the lowest
common denominator for a fast buck. However, the problems extend beyond record labels. Hip-hop artists also share
the blame, as they very seldom dare to be different. Artists want to get paid so badly they are reluctant to push the
bar.
Cede the Political Link
Hip hop is so anti-establishment that it fails to produce viable visions for social
change.
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley, lecturer @ Columbia
University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan
Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 26-27, DavidK]
Tupac thought that welfare had always offered payments for kids on an open-ended basis, and that the
problem was just that there had always been some small-minded people like Brenda's mother. Tupac would likely have laughed
along with most blacks at the welfare office's posted slogan in Eddie Murphy's Claymation series The PJs about life in the
projects: "Keeping You in the Projects Since 1965." But if he was aware of Bill Clinton's promise in 1992 to
end "welfare as we know it," he likely thought of it as covertly racist—this was the standard position at the time
among people of his leftist politics. Like so many, he likely had never considered the cognitive dissonance between
laughing at that sign in The PJs and resisting welfare reform. Because—for him there was no dissonance
at all. Rap is about dissing. You diss the "poverty pimps" at the welfare office who want to keep people
on welfare in order to keep themselves employed ("Word!") and you diss white congressmen who want to
time-limit welfare ("Word!"). That's hip-hop's "politics." To Tupac, then, Brenda was, as a poor black girl, "invisible" to America,
and otherwise just up against the seamier side of human nature in the family circle sense. That's the hip-hop way of looking at things: antiestablishment, angsty. But just
as KRS-One today cannot see the death of welfare as we knew it as good news
hip-hop way of looking at things could not perceive, in 1991, what one of
Brenda's [the] main sociopolitical problems was: welfare as we knew it. In 1991, welfare as we knew it was
every bit as important to the fate of Tupac's people as the police and how he got treated at stores now and then (as he
chronicled in "I Don't Give a Fuck" on the same album 2Pacalypse Now). I'm well aware that welfare reform would not, let's face it,
make much of a rap track. I am aware of one cut that makes a kind of stab at it, "She's Alive," on OutKast's smashing
for the black employment situation, the
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, actually weaving in interview clips with single mothers doing their best. But that one cut is just an exception, as
are the handful of others in the whole body of hip-hop that one might smoke out. Overall,
welfare reform is quite low on
rappers' list of what is relevant to the black condition. It isn't spiky enough. It wouldn't make music that
would sell. Fine. But that means that hip-hop politics, once again, misses the action.
Gender Links
NOTE: this could also work as a good link to the cap K
Hip hop is a sphere for gendered violence where women are a secondary class and are
objectified to serve the male narrative—women are silenced
Smith 08-Professor Constitutional Law, Criminal law, and criminal procedure @ Florida State School of Law, J.D. @ Howard University School
of Law, B.A. @ Spellman College [Nareissa, Feminist Law Professors, “Hip Hop, Capitalism, and Taking Back the Music,” December 9, 2008,
http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=4419, DavidK]
Weiner is correct that the
development of hip hop has led to female rappers being reduced to beautiful,
talented moons orbiting around their male counterparts. However, I believe that capitalism and sexism are
very much to blame for this development. How does capitalism come into play? What hip hop critics might not
know that hip hoppers have known for some time is that rap was not always this way. Rap music used to have a rich diversity.
You had some people that made party records, like LL Cool J, others, like KRS-ONE and Public Enemy, which educated while they entertained,
some that made gangsta rap, some, like D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, that made us laugh, and some that just said whatever they felt. And
that was the point – there was a time in hip hop where one could pretty much say anything. See, in the time period I am discussing, record
labels still hadn’t figured out how to make money off of hip-hop. Because there was not yet any set formula, creativity reigned, and songs about
anything and everything imaginable were made. That meant that all comers – including women – could find a place at the table. But
unfortunately, the industry eventually figured it out. The formula has become to take whatever rapper is
popular at the moment, and have each rapper copy that person. Currently, the model is some version of a
guy that has been shot multiple times, sold drugs, or been shot multiple times while selling drugs. The
exceptions to this rule – such as Kanye West and Outkast – are dealt with by marketing them primarily as pop acts. For female emcees,
it means no place at the table – the reservation has been cancelled. While hip hop has always celebrated the
masculine, this new hypermasculinity is difficult for a female emcee to realistically portray. If 50 Cent
gets shot nine times, it proves he’s not only a man, but a strong man, a really “REAL” man – almost a
superman. If a woman gets shot nine times, it proves . . . what exactly? The fact that the question is so
difficult to answer speaks volumes about how violent women and violent men are portrayed in our society.
Male violence is tacitly accepted, almost encouraged, but female aggression is a no-no. Even black women,
who are usually considered less ‘feminine” than their counterparts, will find it hard to pull out of that difficult binary. So,
old stereotypes such as Lil Kim’s oversexed Jezebel are rehashed ad infinitum as a proxy for
hypermasculinity. But it’s a poor facsimile. In fact, the intersection of capitalism and sexism has had another interesting effect on women
in hip hop. First, the sexism – As Weiner states, there have always been women in hip hop – first, as stand-alone acts, then, as
the “kid sister” or apprentice to a male rapper. But now, women in rap are even further marginalized.
The only women that one sees in rap videos these days (so I hear, as I refuse to watch anymore) are so called “video
vixens,” scantily clad women whose sole purpose in her objectification is to serve the male gaze and
narrative around her. So I ask: if the current iteration of hip hop is predicated on women being objects as
opposed to subjects, and is predicated on removing any independent agency, where is the place for a woman to speak of
her own authority – or at all? Moreover, the capitalism plays a role in sustaining the “vixen” role, and not just in
the usual “sex sells” fashion. The African American female form has been commodified for centuries. In the 1880s, Ms. Sarah
Baartman was taken around the world and displayed as the “Hottentot Venus.” Her buttocks and genitalia were prominently displayed. She was
an object of fascination and curiosity. There is a wonderful YouTube video essay that chronicles the relationship between Sarah Baartman and
the young women in today’s videos better than my words ever could. The comparison is startling, but the politics are the same – the
bodies
of women of color are to be fetishized and objectified for any paying customer. Thus, I find it completely
unsurprising that the female emcees that have any success in the current climate try to put their own spin on this narrative. Women of
color were and are a large part of the hip hop fans base. We are trying to “take back the music,” as Essence
Magazine calls its campaign on the issue. But until the current keepers of the castle decide that this particular
formula of hip hop has lost its flavor, women will continue to be further marginalized for the near – and
perhaps distant – future.
Capitalism has transformed the message of hip hop from real to one of misogyny and sexism—we
have to reject it
Ciaccio 04-Professor @ University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee [Nichali, ZNet, “Hip Hop, Gender, Race, and Capitalism,” June 5, 2004,
http://www.zcommunications.org/hip-hop-gender-race-and-capitalism-by-nichali-ciaccio, DavidK]
Mark Anthony Neal was insightful to point out that the
industry thrives on sexism, and that asking artists to promote a feminist
vision would be asking them to drop their contracts and start selling far fewer records. After all, radical acts like the Coup are, despite
their vision, small players in the industry as a whole. Yet clearly by playing this game, the major artists are
responsible for proliferating sexism the potency of which alters the mores of huge segments of the
youth population. This insight turns our attention to an issue fundamentally important if we want to
address the pervasiveness of sexism in hip-hop and society in general: the role of capitalism in not just
reinforcing but actively promoting the dominant views (which are, at this time, reactionary towards women, the LGBTQ
community, etc). Acting according to demand, major record companies produce and distribute music that people will buy. So as long as music is
produced via a demand system and sexism continues to exist, so will its presence in music. With the exception of extremely rare artists who
have both attained a national audience and are brave enough to challenge their base, it seems artists
lack the capacity to change
the system themselves without a large change in the consumer base. In lieu of some form of direct censorship (or
indirect, in the case of Wal-Mart, whose "family-based" approach to music has artists censoring themselves out of fear of losing a huge
market)-which I am personally opposed to-there is little chance that the industry itself will change this paradigm on its own. On the other hand,
as spokespeople for hip-hop and (in some cases, worldwide) celebrity-idols, artists actively
promote misogynistic viewpoints.
They aren't simply passive elements of capitalism but participants whose voice greatly influences youth
opinion and continue to reinforce the same views in new generations of music listeners and makers. By
making sexism part of their image they aren't just allowing it to become acceptable among youth groups but
setting a standard by which youth are supposed to treat each other as a prerequisite for acceptance. Thus
challenging the sexism in hip-hop and rap requires not only looking at sexism writ large in society but
how capitalism continues to promote it. Developing a larger, dynamic and holistic strategy to this problem means addressing
distribution as well as the product itself. Sexism cannot be cured without understanding its influence on, and how it is
influenced by, capitalism. Building a thoughtful and dynamic radical theory requires addressing every issue of oppression. This means
looking at the interactions not only between capitalism and sexism, but politics and racism as well. In this case, there are a few things we can do
to make small changes in the system now, but the effects of which become larger over time. First, we can promote the activities of students like
those of Spelman College, whose level of consciousness can alter youth consciousness in a dramatic way. When
it comes down to it,
what really influences behavior is not the celebrities themselves but whether or not our peers accept us.
If positive visions can grow, very understandable fears of non-acceptance could fall apart. This
challenges both predominant gender views and the consumer base of major corporations-and we know
how much they fear the vacillation of youth opinion (as is seen in their struggles to control it).
Hip hop objectifies women as sexual objects
Weiner 08-music, movies, and pop culture writer @ Slate, writer @ the New York Times [Jonah, Slate, “Ladies! I Can’t Hear
You! No, Really, I Can’t Hear You!” November 6, 2008, http://www.slate.com/id/2203360/pagenum/2, DavidK]
If the pervasive spirit of female rap's early days was defiance, the mid-'90s gave rise to a sort of
radical compliance. In their porno-grade raps, Lil' Kim, Foxy Brown, and Trina offered
themselves up almost as grotesques, inhabiting lewd sexual fantasies almost to the point of
caricature. Kim—who offset constant demands for cunnilingus with a famous brag about "how I make a Sprite can disappear in
my mouth"—was the best of these, and the only pop star in history to serve as muse to both Notorious B.I.G. and Marc Jacobs. Her
take-no-shit attitude appealed to hardened hip-hop fans, while her hypersexualized camp made her a gay icon. Hip-hop
femininity is often described in binary: Women are either "independent"—they pay their own bills and,
conveniently, ask men for nothing—or
they are hos. Lil' Kim made the case for the independent ho. (Sometimes another
why has female hip-hop made so few
lasting inroads over 30 years? For one thing, what most of the women mentioned above have in common is that their
music rebuts and responds to guy-spun gender narratives. One effect of this is to make female
rap seem second class, occurring outside the "real," "primary" work of hip-hop canon building, even
as it argues for first-class citizenship. When we hear the word rappers, we think of black males; they're what feminists
option, cited in the case of confident female rappers, appears: lesbian.) So
would call hip-hop's unmarked category. This makes tough going for pretenders outside of this category, and it's meant that many of
the identities that female comers have carved for themselves—Boss' gangsta bitch, Kim's badass nympho, or,
recently, Lil' Mama's lunchroom alpha girl—have registered as one-offs or fads. (We see the same thing with white
rappers, whether it's the Beastie Boys' nerdy boogie or Eminem's white-trash horror-core.)