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Performance Tool Box!
(It’s a grab bag of cards! Good luck!)
PERFORMANCE TOOL BOX! ......................................................................................................................................................... 1
MIDDLE PASSAGE 1AC ................................................................................................................................................................. 4
MIDDLE PASSAGE 1AC ................................................................................................................................................................. 5
MIDDLE PASSAGE 1AC ................................................................................................................................................................. 6
MIDDLE PASSAGE 1AC ................................................................................................................................................................. 7
MIDDLE PASSAGE 1AC ................................................................................................................................................................. 8
MIDDLE PASSAGE 1AC ................................................................................................................................................................. 9
1NC (AMBER) ............................................................................................................................................................................. 10
STYLE GOOD .............................................................................................................................................................................. 20
BODIES IN DEBATE GOOD .......................................................................................................................................................... 21
BODIES IN DEBATE GOOD .......................................................................................................................................................... 23
EMBODIMENT GOOD ................................................................................................................................................................. 24
THE PERSONAL IS KEY ................................................................................................................................................................ 25
DISCUSSING RACE IN DEBATE GOOD ......................................................................................................................................... 26
RACISM IN DEBATE BAD / TRADITIONAL PEDAGOGY BAD ......................................................................................................... 27
DEBATE IS KEY SPACE................................................................................................................................................................. 29
WHITENESS IMPACTS................................................................................................................................................................. 30
WHITENESS IMPACTS – PHALLICIZED WHITENESS ...................................................................................................................... 32
DISRUPTING WHITENESS SOLVES CAP/LAW/STATE ................................................................................................................... 35
ALTERNATIVE – NEW POLITICAL SUBJECTS/MULTITUDE ............................................................................................................ 36
ALTERNATIVE/SOLVENCY – BECOMING MINOR/WOMAN ......................................................................................................... 37
STATE ACTION BAD .................................................................................................................................................................... 39
CIVIL SOCIETY BAD ..................................................................................................................................................................... 42
A/T: CAP K ................................................................................................................................................................................. 43
A/T: THE MARXISM K ................................................................................................................................................................. 44
QUEERING SPACE GOOD ............................................................................................................................................................ 45
QUEER SPACE GOOD .................................................................................................................................................................. 46
A/T: WE SHOULD JUST BE OPEN ................................................................................................................................................ 47
A/T: MULTICULTURALISM .......................................................................................................................................................... 48
ALTERNATIVE – DISRUPT EPISTEMOLOGY .................................................................................................................................. 49
A/T: WHITENESS STUDIES GOOD / ANTI-RACISM ...................................................................................................................... 51
IMPACT – EPSITEMOLOGICAL VIOLENCE .................................................................................................................................... 52
NO STORIES BAD........................................................................................................................................................................ 53
SOLVENCY - EPISTEMOLOGY ...................................................................................................................................................... 55
IMPACT - ETHICS ........................................................................................................................................................................ 57
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AT: NARRATIVE FOCUS IS DOGMATIC/ANTI-DEBATE ................................................................................................................. 58
UTOPIAN DEMANDS ON THE STATE GOOD ................................................................................................................................ 59
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Middle Passage 1AC
Performance Here. This should explain the middles passage long lasting effects and how this just a replication this on
going grammar suffering. This should have the idea of middle passage as a transport or key to America infrastructure.
The more specific to something that relates transportation and today suffering.
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Middle Passage 1AC
The transport of Africans, via the middle passage, is now being used to support ideas of
ethnicity that are used to sanitize the horrors of slavery. De-historicizing the middle passage
turns it into a frozen object, stripped away from the ongoing middle passage.
Dayan 96 Paul Gilroy's Slaves, Ships, and Routes: The Middle Passage as MetaphorAuthor(s): Joan Dayan ,Reviewed work(s):Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 27,
No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 7-14Published
Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness-a cartography of celebratory journeys-reads like an expurgated epic history. The Black
the Middle Passage, the journey from Africa to the New
World, as a kind of origin myth for later chosen tales of ocean crossings by Wright, Du Bois, Douglass, and others who make a modern journey from the
Americas to Europe. Yet, there is something oddly dissembling about those sites of what Gilroy calls "contamination." For the idea of slavery, so
central to his argument (and so necessary to our understanding of what he calls the
enlightened" complicity of reason and terror") becomes nothing more than a metaphor. How this
happens demands some discussion. Although Gilroy argues against" Africentrism" and its cult of Africa-the nostalgia for Pharaoh's
treasures instead of the liberation of the Exodus story-in Gilroy's story, the slave ship, the Middle Passage, and finally slavery
itself become frozen, things that can be referred to and looked back upon, but always wrenched
out of an historically specific continuum. What is missing is the continuity of the Middle Passage
in today's world of less obvious, but no less pernicious enslavement. Although I can appreciate the terms used, and
laud Gilroy's call for retrieval of a past either ignored or misrepresented, something is not quite right about this
heroics of choice and collaboration. As terms like "hybridity,"" contamination," "mixture," and "cultural fusion"
were repeated, I wondered about their grounding in history. What history? Whose history? The
answer is apparently simple: black history-a "transnational, diasporic "history of black slaves
with the "slave ship" as vessel of transit and means to knowledge . In Gilroy's attempt to anchor
"black modernism" in "a continued proximity to the unspeakable terrors of the slave
experience," the slave experience becomes an icon for modernity; and in a strangely magical
way, the Middle Passage becomes a metaphor, anchored some-where in a vanishing history. In
Gilroy's transit there is no historical past except as an empty fact turned into a fashionable call
that dulls any response that could carry the Middle Passage, slavery, ships, and routes into the
present transnational drive of global capital and political terror. Gilroy stops short of questioning the choice of exile and
Atlantic refers to, and stresses again and again, the rites o f
passage by a minority of educated elites whose names we remember: Delaney, Douglass, Du Bois, and Wright, to name a few of Gilroy's chosen, along with the
Gilroy's Middle Passage and his celebration of
"crosscultural circulation" and "nomadism" lend a false idea of choice to forced migration.
conveyors of "hip-hop," soul music, and rap in Gilroy's new, "keep on moving," world.
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We have an ethical obligation to discuss the ongoing middle passage. Objectifying events in history
force African descent to disappear in the face of white supremacy and Eurocenturism.
Moore 2005 (T Owens Moore, Professor @ Clark Atlanta University “A Fanonian Perspective on Double Consciousness” The Journal of Black Studies July 2005 pp 757-759)
Historically, people of African descent living in America have been acculturated to believe in a
Eurocentric version of world events. The common thread of Eurocentrism leads one to believe
that Africans were savages who had to be enslaved to be civilized. The horrors of chattel slavery
are normally glossed over as if it was a time in history that did not mean too much. A correct
view of his-tory reveals that Europeans destroyed many old and well-function-ing societies,
usually for political and economic gain. When history is read correctly, double consciousness is not needed. A proper view of
history that puts the reader at the center and not the periphery can help to develop a singleminded consciousness. The goal of a single-minded consciousness would be to obtain mental
liberation. It should never be forgotten that African Americans are former slaves who are still
living in the presence of their former oppres-sors. Because freedom from chattel slavery was not fought for but granted in the form
of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Afri-cans who were stolen and brought to America have never known true independence. According to Fanon (1952/1967),
"The Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom, for he has not fought for it. From time to time he has fought for Liberty and Justice, but these were always white
liberty and white justice" (p. 221). Fanon believed that the American Negro was in a precarious position and there were reasons that Fanon never had an interest to
visit the United States. From his evaluation, In the United States, the Negro battles and is battled. There are laws that, little by little, are invalidated under the
Constitution. There are other laws that forbid certain forms of discrimination. And we can be sure nothing is given free. (p. 221) John Henrik Clarke (1991) has often
reminded us that "history is a clock that people use to tell their time of day. It is a compass that people use to locate themselves on the map of human geography" (p.
25). As it stands today, it appears as though the African Ameri-can community has lost the compass, the map, and all sense of geography. Many African Americans
are currently guided by fads and fashions and whatever the media see fit for them to follow. How tragic it is that education is no longer as valued as it was in the past.
Generations have lost their way because the previous generation did not properly prepare the
next generation for the future. A common mistake that has been made by many Black families is
the refusal to teach the vivid story of how we were enslaved. One can understandth e desiret o sheltera child fromh orror,
buti t is neg-ligent to avoid teaching what it meant to struggle for freedom. A generation of parents did not want their children to suffer as they did so they did not
remind them of the past. The youth today have very few guides from the past because parents were ashamed to dis-cuss the enslavement process that destroyed
their mind, their com-munity, and their culture. There
is no denying how significant the effect of slavery was to our
present state, but double consciousness will make you forget the past. Vacillating between being
a Negro or an American has fractured the psyches of numerous generation so f stolen Africans.
Rather than being who they were when they were brought here, the effects of White supremacy
forced double con-sciousness to the forefront as a coping mechanism. It is time to reevaluate
this thought process and perhaps develop a single-minded consciousness.
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White supremacy over determines the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that
compose American globality and constitute the common sense that is organic to its ordering.
Rodriguez 2007, Dylan ,Professor University of California Riverside, November 2007 Kritika Kultura” American Globality and The U.S. Prison Regime: State violence and
White Supremacy from
Abu Ghraib to Stockton to Bagong Diwa”
Variable, overlapping, and mutually constituting white supremacist
regimes have in fact been fundamental to the formation and movements of the United States,
from racial chattel slavery and frontier genocide to recent and current modes of neoliberal land
displacement and (domestic-to-global) warfare. Without exception, these regimes have been
differently entangled with the state’s changing paradigms, strategies, and technologies of human incarceration and
punishment (to follow the prior examples: the plantation, the reservation, the neoliberal sweatshop,
and the domestic-to-global prison). The historical nature of these entanglements is widely
acknowledged, although explanations of the structuring relations of force tend to either isolate
or historically compartmentalize the complexities of historical white supremacy. For the theoretical purposes
of this essay , white supremacy may be understood as a logic of social organization that produces
regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized “human” difference,
enforced through coercions and violences that are structured by genocidal possibility
(including physical extermination and curtailment of people’s collective capacities to socially,
culturally, or biologically reproduce). As a historical vernacular and philosophical apparatus of
domination, white supremacy is simultaneously premised on and consistently innovating
universalized conceptions of the white (European and euroamerican) “human” vis-à-vis the
rigorous production , penal discipline, and frequent social, political, and biological neutralization
or extermination of the (non-white) sub- or non-human. To consider white supremacy as
essential to American social formation (rather than a freakish or extremist deviation from it)
facilitates a discussion of the modalities through which this material logic of violence
overdetermines the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that compose American
globality and constitute the common sense that is organic to its ordering.
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Middle Passage 1AC
PLAN TEXT— We as members (the debaters) of the debate community demand that the USFG
should substantially increase its transportation infrastructure in the United States by revealing
the ongoing racialized violence of the middle passage. This de-historicizes and destabilizes
the idea of naturalized whiteness and is a critical step that must be taken before any
discussions of transporting people today.
The role of the ballot is to judge who best performatively liberates the oppressed.
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Whiteness maintains its supremacy by masking its own historicity. Genealogies of whiteness
destabilize white supremacy by revealing its limits and contingency. Our project (or
Affirmative or performance) is a practice affirms our existences in the face of life-denying
hegemony.
Yancy, 04, George, What White Looks Like, chapter 5; A FOUCAULDIAN (GENEALOGICAL) READING OF WHITENESS The Production of the Black Body/Self and the
Racial Deformation of Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Published in 2004 by Routledge
A genealogical examination of whiteness, following the lead of Foucault and Nietzsche, involves showing how
whiteness is not a natural given, or has to do with an ontology that cuts at the joints of nature,
but a kind of historical emergence (Entstehung). Upon examination, whiteness, contrary to its
historical performance as a natural occurring kind, emerges as a value code deployed by a
certain raciated (white) group of people that delimits and structures what it deems intelligible,
valuable, normal, abnormal, superior, inferior, beautiful, ugly, and so on. As the presumed
sovereign voice, treating itself as hypernormative and unmarked, whiteness conceals its status
as raciated, located, and positioned. Because of its presumed a historical stability and
ontological “givenness,” whiteness is an appropriate target for genealogical examination.
Commenting on the value, aim, and practical consequences of genealogy, Alexander Nehamas, with Nietzsche in mind, writes : Genealogy takes as
its objects precisely those institutions and practices which, like morality, are usually thought to
be totally exempt from change an development. It tries to show how such changes escape our
notice and how it is often in the interest of these practices to mask their specific historical
origins and character. As a result of this, genealogy has direct practical consequences because,
by demonstrating the contingent character of the institutions that traditional history exhibits as
unchanging, it creates the possibility of altering them. Nehamas’s point concerning how certain practices attempt to mask
themselves is key to understanding whiteness; for the hegemony of whiteness is partly contingent upon its capacity
to conceal or mask its own historicity, thus representing itself as universal, decontextual, and
ahistorical.With equal insight, Fred Evans writes: The values and practices that genealogists evaluate present
themselves as “universal” or as “true” in an unqualified sense. By revealing the value creating
power that these values and practices serve and disseminate, however, genealogists show their
“grounds” or basis—how it was possible for them to appear universal or true without
qualification—and their limits, that is, their necessary partiality. In carrying out this critique, moreover, genealogy
itself is a value-creating power, one opposed to the “life-denying” and hegemonic tendencies of
practices that the genealogy attempts to critically evaluate and overcome.
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OUR PERFORMATIVE PEDAGOGY IS A COUNTER HEGEMONIC AESTHETIC THAT INTERUPT
THE REITERATIVE PROCESS THAT HOLD WHITE SUPREMACY IN ITS PLACE.
Warren and Fassett, 2004 [John T. is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, Deanna L., assistant
professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University, The Johns Hopkins University Press Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) pg. 411-430]
To do this work, we look outward from these spectacular instances of violence and examine the
minute and mundane processes that make these acts possible. In our courses, we examine how
instances of racism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression are generated through
everyday communicative/performative acts—that is, both aesthetic and reiterative. Thus, we seek
to understand difference (specifically race) as a performative construct that is always already
aesthetic (that is, constructed for an audience or public) and reiterative (that is, repeated and
ongoing). By focusing on race as one form of oppression, we examine whiteness as a systematic
production of power—as a normative social process based upon a history of domination,
recreating itself through naturalized everyday acts—much like heteronormativity or misogyny.
Though in this writing we address whiteness, in particular, as a system of power and privilege, such
an exploration helps mark the unmarked (Phelan)—making visible the workings of a number of
oppressive social relationships. To render whiteness visible requires careful analysis and
constant critique of our taken-for-granted norms. But, as our students question, to what end do we do what
we do? We both base our courses, at least in part, in critical race theory, asking how systems of power
are reiterated and reaffirmed through our collective communicative, performative, and aesthetic
interactions. The foundation of critical race theory and cultural studies means that we infuse all course
content with issues of power, refusing to allow matters of race and difference to be [End Page 411]
marginalized.
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1NC (Amber)
In 1993, Toni Morrison said this as she accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature:
"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise." Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a
griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.
"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise."
In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small
house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both
the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to
places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.
One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her
clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they
enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference
from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before
her, and one of them says, "Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or
dead."
She does not answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding living or dead?"
Still she doesn't answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She
does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.
The old woman's silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.
Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. "I don't know", she says. "I don't know whether the
bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your
hands."
Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have
killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it
is your responsibility.
For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for
the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts
attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is
exercised.
Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but
especially so now thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choose to
read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She is worried about how the
language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her
for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly
as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency - as an act with
consequences. So the question the children put to her: "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal
because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only
by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the
corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content
to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language , censored and censoring. Ruthless in its
policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own
narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without
effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential.
Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell
another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a
suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb,
predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots,
summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.
She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of
esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise.
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In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of
speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned
altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she
knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power
merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak
only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.
The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its
nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language
does more than represent violence ; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of
knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media;
whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the
malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in
its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps
vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the
bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are
typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or
encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue;
no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed
and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards;
stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to
countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women,
to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the
language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute;
language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language
crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.
Underneath the eloquence, the glamor, the scholarly associations, however stirring or seductive, the heart of such language
is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all - if the bird is already dead.
She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been
forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and representations of dominance required - lethal discourses
of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded.
The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That
it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower's failed
architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would
have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of
Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other
languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have
been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven
as post-life.
She would not want to leave her young visitors with the impression that language should be forced to stay alive merely to
be. The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its
speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a
substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States
thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say
here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because
they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize,
disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words
signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her,
that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language
can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to
do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.
Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet,
the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not
know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how
many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?
Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human
difference - the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our
lives.
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"Once upon a time, ..." visitors ask an old woman a question. Who are they, these children? What did they make of that
encounter? What did they hear in those final words: "The bird is in your hands"? A sentence that gestures towards
possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps what the children heard was "It's not my problem. I am old, female, black,
blind. What wisdom I have now is in knowing I cannot help you. The future of language is yours."
They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose the visit was only a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to,
taken seriously as they have not been before? A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse
about them, for them, but never to them? Urgent questions are at stake, including the one they have asked: "Is the bird we
hold living or dead?" Perhaps the question meant: "Could someone tell us what is life? What is death?" No trick at all; no
silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise one. An old one. And if the old and wise who have lived
life and faced death cannot describe either, who can?
But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without
commitment. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged
space.
Nothing, no word follows her declaration of transfer. That silence is deep, deeper than the meaning available in the words
she has spoken. It shivers, this silence, and the children, annoyed, fill it with language invented on the spot.
"Is there no speech," they ask her, "no words you can give us that helps us break through your dossier of failures? Through
the education you have just given us that is no education at all because we are paying close attention to what you have
done as well as to what you have said? To the barrier you have erected between generosity and wisdom?
"We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands
something you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don't you remember being young when language was magic
without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see?
When questions and demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?
"Do we have to begin consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you have already fought and lost leaving us with
nothing in our hands except what you have imagined is there? Your answer is artful, but its artfulness embarrasses us and
ought to embarrass you. Your answer is indecent in its self-congratulation. A made-for-television script that makes no sense
if there is nothing in our hands.
"Why didn't you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were?
Did you so despise our trick, our modus operandi you could not see that we were baffled about how to get your attention?
We are young. Unripe. We have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in
the catastrophe this world has become; where, as a poet said, "nothing needs to be exposed since it is already barefaced."
Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we
are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when
we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?
"You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no
poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult.
The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world.
Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach
exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the
reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it
properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the
street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear.
Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the
language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness
of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
"Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have
no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your
company.
"Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how
they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest
shoulder that the next stop would be their last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting
their faces as though it was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and
his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse's void steams into the snow beneath its hooves
and its hiss and melt are the envy of the freezing slaves.
"The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in
three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread,
pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each
woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed."
It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence.
"Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look.
How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together."
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To recover our history, the history of the Venus of the middle passage, of the Venus in
captivity, is to narrate an impossible story. It is to discover the impossibility that undergirds
the possibility of witnessing. When we tell stories about our history, we are always telling a
story about ourselves, about how we have come to be, and about the potentiality of
recognizing a state of freedom in the midst of our enslavement. We cannot romanticize nor
historicize the Venus as a story of mythical lack. Rather we must witness the unspeakability
that calls attention to the resistance of the object – the resistance and the practices of freedom
that we always have the potential to engage in. We must think remembrance as a practice of
freedom rather than an origin narrative that regulates how we must relate to pasts, ourselves
and each other. This does not mean disavowing the overdeterministic nature of the archive,
but rather discovering through what cannot be represented, the resistances and agency of the
slave.
Hartman 2008 [Saidiya, knows more than you do, also prof. African-American studies @ Columbia, “Venus in Two
Acts”]
In this incarnation, she appears in the archive of slavery as a dead girl named in a legal indictment against a slave ship captain tried for the murder of two Negro girls.
But we could have as easily encountered her in a ship’s ledger in the tally of debits; or in an overseer’s journal—“last night I laid with Dido on the ground”; or as an
amorous bed-fellow with a purse so elastic “that it will contain the largest thing any gentleman can present her with” in Harris’s List of Covent- Garden Ladies; or as
the paramour in the narrative of a mercenary soldier in Surinam; or as a brothel owner in a traveler’s account of the prostitutes of Barbados; or as a minor character
she is found everywhere in
the Atlantic world. The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the
cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroom—
turn out to be exactly the same place and in all of them she is called Venus. What else is there to
know? Hers is the same fate as every other Black Venus: no one remembered her name or recorded the
things she said, or observed that she refused to say anything at all.² Hers is an untimely story
told by a failed witness. It would be centuries before she would be allowed to “try her tongue.”³ I could say after a famous philosopher that what we
in a nineteenth-century pornographic novel.¹ Variously named Harriot, Phibba, Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda, and Sally,
know of Venus in her many guises amounts to “little more than a register of her encounter with power” and that it provides “a meager sketch of her existence.”4 An
act of chance or disaster produced a divergence or an aberration from the expected and usual course of invisibility and catapulted her from the underground to the
surface of discourse. We stumble upon her in exorbitant circumstances that yield no picture of the everyday life, no pathway to her thoughts, no glimpse of the
vulnerability of her face or of what looking at such a face might demand. We only know what can be extrapolated from an analysis of the ledger or borrowed from the
world of her captors and masters and applied to her. Yet the exorbitant must be rendered exemplary or typical in order that her life provides a window onto the lives
cannot ask, “Who is Venus?” because it would be impossible to answer
such a question. There are hundreds of thousands of other girls who share her circumstances and these circumstances
have generated few stories. And the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about the violence,
excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, transformed them into
commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off as insults and crass jokes.
The archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an
inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an
asterisk in the grand narrative of history. Given this, “it is doubtless impossible to ever grasp [these lives] again
in themselves, as they might have been ‘in a free state.’ ”5 Out of the World and Back But I want to say more than this. I
want to do more than recount the violence that deposited these traces in the archive. I want to
tell a story about two girls capable of retrieving what remains dormant—the purchase or claim of
their lives on the present—without committing further violence in my own act of narration. It is a
story predicated upon impossibility — listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words,
and refashioning disfigured lives—and intent on achieving an impossible goal: redressing the
violence that produced numbers, ciphers, and fragments of discourse, which is as close as we
come to a biography of the captive and the enslaved. Yet how does one recuperate lives
entangled with and impossible to differentiate from the terrible utterances that condemned them
to death, the account books that identified them as units of value, the invoices that claimed them
as property, and the banal chronicles that stripped them of human features? “Can the shock of [such]
words,” as Foucault writes, “give rise to a certain effect of beauty mixed with dread?”6 Can we, as NourbeSe Philip
suggests, “conjur[e] something new from the absence of Africans as humans that is at the heart of
the text”?7 And if so, what are the lineaments of this new narrative? Put differently, how does one rewrite the
chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a
counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom? How can narrative embody life in words and at
the same time respect what we cannot know? How does one listen for the groans and cries, the
undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the
shouts of victory, and then assign words to all of it? Is it possible to construct a story from “the
locus of impossible speech” or resurrect lives from the ruins?8 Can beauty provide an antidote
to dishonor, and love a way to “exhume buried cries” and reanimate the dead?9 Or is narration its own gift
of the enslaved in general. One
and its own end, that is, all that is realizable when overcoming the past and redeeming the dead are not? And what do stories afford anyway? A way of living in the
world in the aftermath of catastrophe and devastation? A home in the world for the mutilated and violated self?¹0 For whom—for us or for them? The scarcity of
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There is not one extant
autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage. This silence in
the archive in combination with the robustness of the fort or barracoon, not as a holding cell or
space of confinement but as an episteme, has for the most part focused the historiography of the
slave trade on quantitative matters and on issues of markets and trade relations.¹¹ Loss gives
rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a
form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive. As a writer
African narratives of captivity and enslavement exacerbate the pressure and gravity of such questions.
committed to telling stories, I have endeavored to represent the lives of the nameless and the forgotten, to reckon with loss, and to respect the limits of what cannot
narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a
history of present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of
the ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of
violence.¹² As I understand it, a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our
experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to
imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated
future of this writing. This writing is personal because this history has engendered me, because
“the knowledge of the other marks me,”¹³ because of the pain experienced in my encounter with
the scraps of the archive, and because of the kinds of stories I have fashioned to bridge the past
and the present and to dramatize the production of nothing —empty rooms, and silence, and lives reduced
to waste. What are the kinds of stories to be told by those and about those who live in such an
intimate relationship with death? Romances? Tragedies? Shrieks that find their way into speech
and song? What are the protocols and limits that shape the narratives written as counterhistory, an aspiration that isn’t a
prophylactic against the risks posed by reiterating violent speech and depicting again rituals of torture? How does one
revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence? Is the “terrible beauty” that resides
be known. For me,
in such a scene something akin to remedy as Fred Moten would seem to suggest?¹4 The kind of terrible beauty and terrible music that he discerns in Aunt Hester’s
screams transformed into the songs of the Great House Farm or in the photograph of Emmett Till’s destroyed face, and the “acuity of regard,”¹5 which arises from a
willingness to look into the open casket. Do the possibilities outweigh the dangers of looking (again)? If “to read the archive is to enter a mortuary; it permits one final
viewing and allows for a last glimpse of persons about to disappear into the slave hold,”¹6 then to what end does one open the casket and look into the face of death?
Why risk the contamination involved in restating the maledictions, obscenities, columns of losses and gains, and measures of value by which captive lives were
inscribed and extinguished? Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence? Or are the merchant’s words the bridge to the dead or the
scriptural tombs in which they await us? Such concerns about the ethics of historical representation, in part, explain the “two acts” of the title. I need to revisit and
revise my own earlier account of Venus’s death in “The Dead Book”;¹7 and, as well, the two acts announce the inevitable return of Venus, as both “haint,” that is, one
who haunts the present, and as disposable life. The merchant’s account of mortality makes plain the inevitability of the repetition: Melancholy, dysentery, ditto, ditto.
Rather than the wasted effort of a striking a line through “meager girl” or a “refuse boy,” the ledger introduces another death through this shorthand. And it returns the
dead to us “in the very form in which they were driven out of the world.”¹8 The Open Casket, the Scandal of the Archive Scandal and excess inundate the archive: the
raw numbers of the mortality account, the strategic evasion and indirection of the captain’s log, the florid and sentimental letters dispatched from slave ports by
homesick merchants, the incantatory stories of shocking violence penned by abolitionists, the fascinated eyewitness reports of mercenary soldiers eager to divulge
The libidinal
investment in violence is everywhere apparent in the documents, statements and institutions
that decide our knowledge of the past. What has been said and what can be said about Venus
take for granted the traffic between fact, fantasy, desire, and violence. Confirmations of this abound. Let
us begin with James Barbot, the captain of the Albion Frigate, who attested to the coincidence of
the pleasures afforded in the space of death. It was difficult to exercise sexual restraint on the
slave ship, Barbot confessed, because the “young sprightly maidens, full of jollity and good
humor, afforded an abundance of recreation.”¹9 Falconbridge seconds this, amplifying the
slippage between victims and sweethearts, acts of love and brutal excesses: “On board some
ships, the common sailors are allowed to have intercourse with such of the black women whose
consent they can procure. And some of them have been known to take the inconstancy of their
paramours so much to heart, as to leap overboard and drown themselves.” Only Olaudah Equiano depicts the
“what decency forbids [them] to disclose,” and the rituals of torture, the beatings, hangings, and amputations enshrined as law.
habitual violence of the slave ship without recourse to the language of romance: “It was almost a common practice with our clerks and other whites, to commit violent
depredations on the chastity of the female slaves. . . . I have known our mates to commit these acts most shamefully, to the disgrace, not of Christians only, but of
men. I have even known them [to] gratify their brutal passion with females not ten years old; and these abominations some of them practiced to such scandalous
excess, that one of our captains discharged the mate and others on that account” (emphasis added).²0 The situation worsens on the plantation. Tomas
Tistlewood’s serial rapes and excremental punishments offer a graphic account of the pleasures
exacted from the destruction and degradation of life and, at the same time, illuminate the
difficulty of recovering enslaved lives from the annihilating force of such description: “Gave him
a moderate whipping, pickled him well, made Hector shit in his mouth, immediately put a gag in it
whilst his mouth was full & made him wear it 4 or 5 hours.”²¹ While the daily record of such
abuses, no doubt, constitutes a history of slavery, the more difficult task is to exhume the lives
buried under this prose, or rather to accept that Phibba and Dido exist only within the confines of
these words, and that this is the manner in which they enter history. The dream is to liberate
them from the obscene descriptions that first introduced them to us. It is too easy to hate a man
like Thistlewood; what is more difficult is to acknowledge as our inheritance the brutal Latin
phrases spilling onto the pages of his journals. Upon entering the archive of slavery, the
unimaginable assumes the guise of everyday practice, which we can never fail to forget as we gape at the grim faces and
stripped torsos of Delia, Drana, Renty, and Jack, or recoil from the mutilated body of Anarcha, or admire a naked Diana, so lovely that even “the most splendid
Others appear under the pressure and incitement of discourse: A
flagellant and a Hottentot. A sulky bitch. A dead negréss. A syphilitic whore. Infelicitous speech,
obscene utterances, and perilous commands give birth to the characters we stumble upon in the
archive. Given the condition in which we find them , the only certainty is that we will lose them
apparel cannot give any additional elegance.”²²
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again, that they will expire or elude our grasp or collapse under the pressure of inquiry. This is the
only fact about Venus of which we can be sure. So is it possible to reiterate her name and to tell a story about degraded
matter and dishonored life that doesn’t delight and titillate, but instead ventures toward another mode of writing? If it is no
longer sufficient to expose the scandal , then how might it be possible to generate a different set of
descriptions from this archive? To imagine what could have been? To envision a free state from this order of
statements? The dangers entailed in this endeavor cannot be bracketed or avoided because of
the inevitability of the reproduction of such scenes of violence, which define the state of
blackness and the life of the ex-slave. To the contrary , these dangers are situated at the heart of
my work, both in the stories I have chosen to tell and in those that I have avoided. Here I’d like to return to a story that I preferred not to tell or was unable to
tell in Lose Your Mother. It is a story about Venus, the other girl who died aboard the Recovery and to whom I only made a passing reference. The Second Act Two
girls died on board the Recovery. The captain, John Kimber, was indicted for having “feloniously, wickedly and with malice aforethought, beaten and tortured a
female slave, so as to cause her death: and he was again indicted for having caused the death of another female slave.”²³ On 7 June 1792, Mr. Pigot, the counsel for
the prisoner, bellowed the name Venus in his cross-examination of the surgeon "omas Dowling, one of the two witnesses from the crew of the ship who testified that
they had seen Captain John Kimber murder a Negro girl. According to the surgeon’s testimony, the captain flogged her repeatedly with a whip and “successively for
several days, very severely” causing her death.²4 Venus was not that Negro girl but another one who died at the hands of the captain and who was mentioned briefly
during the trial. Pigot questioned the surgeon about her: Question: Was there not a girl bought of [the trader] Jackamachree, who was in the same state as the girl we
have been talking of? Answer: I do not know. Question: Was there not a girl of the name of Venus? Answer: "ere was. Question: Was she not in the same state?
Answer: Not that I know of.²5 “"ere was another girl on board the Recovery . . . whom they named Venus, and she too had the pox.”²6 When the captain was
acquitted for the murder of the first girl, he was also found not guilty of the second charge. “As there was no evidence to support the second indictment, than what
supported the first, the jury also acquitted the prisoner on it.”²7 These were the only words spoken of Venus during the trial. I wrote two sentences about Venus in
“The Dead Book,” masking my own silence behind Wilberforce’s. I say of him: “He chose not to speak of Venus, the other dead girl. "e pet name licensed debauchery
and made it sound agreeable.”²8 I decided not to write about Venus for reasons different from those I attributed to him. Instead I feared what I might invent, and it
would have been a romance. If I could have conjured up more than a name in an indictment, if I could have imagined Venus speaking in her own voice, if I could
have detailed the small memories banished from the ledger, then it might have been possible for me to represent the friendship that could have blossomed between
two frightened and lonely girls. Shipmates. "en Venus could have beheld her dying friend, whispered comfort in her ear, rocked her with promises, soothed her with
Picture them: The relics of two girls, one cradling the other,
plundered innocents; a sailor caught sight of them and later said they were friends. Two worldless girls found a country in each other’s arms. Beside the defeat and the terror, there would be
this too: the glimpse of beauty, the instant of possibility. The loss of stories sharpens the
hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none.
To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited. To fabricate a witness to a death not
much noticed. In a free state, it would have been possible for the girls to attend to the death of a
friend and shed tears for the loss, but a slave ship made no allowance for grief and when
detected the instruments of torture were employed to eradicate it. But the consolation of this
vision—a life recognized and mourned in the embrace of two girls—was at odds with the
annihilating violence of the slave ship and with virtually everything I had ever written. Initially I thought I wanted to represent the
“soon, soon” and wished for her a good return.
affiliations severed and remade in the hollow of the slave ship by imagining the two girls as friends, by giving them one another. But in the end I was forced to admit
that I wanted to console myself and to escape the slave hold with a vision of something other than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic. In the
end, I could say no more about Venus than I had said about her friend: “I am unsure if it is possible to salvage an existence from a handful of words: the supposed
murder of a negro girl.”²9 I could not change anything: “The girl ‘never will have any existence outside the precarious domicile of words’ that allowed her to be
murdered.”³0 I could not have arrived at another conclusion. So it was better to leave them as I had found them. Two girls, alone. The Reprise I chose not to tell a
story about Venus because to do so would have trespassed the boundaries of the archive. History pledges to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive,
even as those dead certainties are produced by terror. I wanted to write a romance that exceeded the fictions of history—the rumors, scandals, lies, invented
evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive and determine what can be said
about the past. I longed to write a new story, one unfettered by the constraints of the legal documents and exceeding the restatement and transpositions, which
comprised my strategy for disordering and transgressing the protocols of the archive and the authority of its statements and which enabled me to augment and
intensify its fictions. Finding an aesthetic mode suitable or adequate to rendering the lives of these two girls, deciding how to arrange the lines on the page, allowing
the narrative track to be rerouted or broken by the sounds of memory, the keens and howls and dirges unloosened on the deck, and trying to unsettle the
arrangements of power by imaging Venus and her friend outside the terms of statements and judgments that banished them from the category of the human and
The romance of resistance that I
failed to narrate and the event of love that I refused to describe raise important questions
regarding what it means to think historically about matters still contested in the present and
about life eradicated by the protocols of intellectual disciplines. What is required to imagine a free state or to tell an
decreed their lives waste³¹—all of which was beyond what could be thought within the parameters of history.
impossible story? Must the poetics of a free state anticipate the event and imagine life after man, rather than wait for the ever-retreating moment of Jubilee? Must the
future of abolition be first performed on the page? By retreating from the story of these two girls, was I simply upholding the rules of the historical guild and the
“manufactured certainties” of their killers, and by doing so, hadn’t I sealed their fate?³² Hadn’t I too consigned them to oblivion? In the end, was it better to leave them
If it is not possible to undo the violence that inaugurates the sparse record
of a girl’s life or remedy her anonymity with a name or translate the commodity’s speech, then to
what end does one tell such stories? How and why does one write a history of violence? Why
revisit the event or the nonevent of a girl’s death? The archive of slavery rests upon a founding violence.
This violence determines, regulates and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made
about slavery and as well it creates subjects and objects of power.³³ The archive yields no exhaustive account of the
as I found them? A History of Failure
girl’s life, but catalogues the statements that licensed her death. All the rest is a kind of fiction: sprightly maiden, sulky bitch, Venus, girl. The economy of theft and the
power over life, which defined the slave trade, fabricated commodities and corpses. But cargo, inert masses, and things don’t lend themselves to representation, at
least not easily? In Lose Your Mother I attempted to foreground the experience of the enslaved by tracing the itinerary of a disappearance and by narrating stories
which are impossible to tell. The goal was to expose and exploit the incommensurability between the experience of the enslaved and the fictions of history, by which I
And how does one tell impossible stories? Stories
about girls bearing names that deface and disfigure, about the words exchanged between
shipmates that never acquired any standing in the law and that failed to be recorded in the
archive, about the appeals, prayers and secrets never uttered because no one was there to
receive them? The furtive communication that might have passed between two girls, but which no one among the crew observed or reported affi rms what
mean the requirements of narrative, the stuff of subjects and plots and ends.
we already know to be true: The archive is inseparable from the play of power that murdered Venus and her shipmate and exonerated the captain. And this
knowledge brings us no closer to an understanding of the lives of two captive girls or the violence that destroyed them and named the ruin: Venus. Nor can it explain
why at this late date we still want to write stories about them.
Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of
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the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a
grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival
research, and by that I mean a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended
both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling. The conditional
temporality of “what could have been,” according to Lisa Lowe, “symbolizes aptly the space of a
different kind of thinking, a space of productive attention to the scene of loss, a thinking with
twofold attention that seeks to encompass at once the positive objects and methods of history
and social science and the matters absent, entangled and unavailable by its methods.”³4 The
intention here isn’t anything as miraculous as recovering the lives of the enslaved or redeeming
the dead, but rather laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible. This
double gesture can be described as straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural
history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives
of the captives precisely through the process of narration. The method guiding this writing
practice is best described as critical fabulation. “Fabula” denotes the basic elements of story, the building blocks of the narrative. A
fabula, according to Mieke Bal, is “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused and experienced by actors. An event is a transition from
By playing
with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in
divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of
the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have
happened or might have been said or might have been done. By throwing into crisis “what
happened when” and by exploiting the “transparency of sources” as fictions of history, I wanted
to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave trade and, as well, in the discipline of
history), to describe “the resistance of the object,”³6 in all the stories that we cannot know and that
will never be recovered. This formidable obstacle or constitutive impossibility defines the
parameters of my work. The necessity of recounting Venus’s death is overshadowed by the
inevitable failure of any attempt to represent her. I think this is a productive tension and one
unavoidable in narrating the lives of the subaltern, the dispossessed, and the enslaved. In retelling the
one state to another. Actors are agents that perform actions. ("ey are not necessarily human.) To act is to cause or experience and event.”³5
story of what happened on board the Recovery, I have emphasized the incommensurability between the prevailing discourses and the event, amplified the instability
and discrepancy of the archive, flouted the realist illusion customary in the writing of history, and produced a counter-history at the intersection of the fictive and the
historical. Counter-history, according to Gallagher and Greenblatt, “opposes itself not only to dominant narratives, but also to prevailing modes of because (1) my
own narrative does not operate outside the economy of statements that it subjects to critique; and (2) those existences relegated to the nonhistorical or deemed
waste exercise a claim on the present and demand us to imagine a future in which the afterlife of slavery has ended. "e necessity of trying to represent what we
cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a
liberated future. My effort to reconstruct the past is, as well, an attempt to describe obliquely the forms of violence licensed in the present, that is, the forms of death
unleashed in the name of freedom, security, civilization, and God/the good. Narrative is central to this effort because of “the relation it poses, explicit or implied,
between past, presents and futures.”40 Wrestling with the girl’s claim on the present is a way of naming our time, thinking our present, and envisioning the past which
has created it. Unfortunately I have not discovered a way of deranging the archive so that it might recall the content of a girl’s life or reveal a truer picture, nor have I
succeeded in prying open the dead book, which sealed her status as commodity. "e random collection of details of which I have made use are the same descriptions,
verbatim quotes, and trial transcripts that consigned her to death and made murder “not much noticed,” at least, according to the surgeon.4¹ "e promiscuity of the
archive begets a wide array of reading, but none that are capable of resuscitating the girl. My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by
placing yet another demand upon the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, by finding in it a lesson for our future or a hope for history. We all
know better. It is much too late for the accounts of death to prevent other deaths; and it is much too early for such scenes of death to halt other crimes. But in the
meantime, in the space of the interval, between too late and too early, between the no longer and the not yet, our lives are coeval with the girl’s in the as-yetincomplete project of freedom. In the meantime, it is clear that her life and ours hang in the balance. So what does one do in the meantime? What are the stories one
tells in dark times? How can a narrative of defeat enable a place for the living or envision an alternative future? Michel de Certeau notes that there are at least two
ways the historiographical operation can make a place for the living: one is attending to and recruiting the past for the sake of the living, establishing who we are in
relation to who we have been; and the second entails interrogating the production of our knowledge about the past.4² Along the lines sketched by de Certeau,
Octavia Butler’s Kindred offers a model for a practice.4³ When Dana, the protagonist of Butler’s speculative fiction, travels from the twentieth century to the 1820s to
encounter her enslaved foremother, Dana finds to her surprise that she is not able to rescue her kin or escape the entangled relations of violence and domination, but
instead comes to accept that they have made her own existence possible. With this in mind, we must bear what cannot be borne: the image of Venus in chains. We
begin the story again, as always, in the wake of her disappearance and with the wild hope that our efforts can return her to the world. "e conjunction of hope and
defeat define this labor and leave open its outcome. "e task of writing the impossible, (not the fanciful or the utopian but “histories rendered unreal and fantastic”44),
has as its prerequisites the embrace of likely failure and the readiness to accept the ongoing, unfinished and provisional character of this effort, particularly when the
arrangements of power occlude the very object that we desire to rescue.45 Like Dana, we too emerge from the encounter with a sense of incompleteness and with
the recognition that some part of the self is missing as a consequence of this engagement.
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The question is, how do we speak in the language of the master from the position of the slave?
Do we attempt to “master” language so as to enslave others with our language? That is one
strategy, exemplified by the Moore evidence of the Affirmative. Moore’s rage stems from
resentment that black people have not “properly” taught the history of our people. That we
have forgotten the correct telling of the story of the middle passage, that our families are
improper, that our ways of remember are improper, and ultimately, that this impropriety – this
impurity stems from the perspective of double-consciousness – that in seeing the world from
the perspective as an internal other – both as an American and as a Black in the sense
DuBouis meant it, that we have lost sight of the “True” history of our people. But I am a queer
black woman who was raised by woman to believe that history is cyclical, that there remains
some continuity between the generations – that, as Zora Neal Hurston said, “black woman is
the mule of the world.” Remains true throughout the ages, but that also discontinuity, that
passages through time, that passages through experiences in life, through lovers, through
friends, through estrangement from family as once travels further away in order to “break the
cycle” must be honored too. I don’t relate to my mother merely because we are the same, but
because when we talk on the phone we are speaking and relating upon the unbridgeable gulf
of the fact that her day to day is working long hours as a mail carrier, and that I am here
teaching you all, having gone off on a journey my mother has never known, that only began
with the movement from home 18 to college.
So how do we honor my mother, who was the condition of possibility for me being here? And
how do we honor my grandmother, their tiny revolutions, and how will my children honor
mine? I would like to honor them and be honored not in terms of what I have lost, or what I
lack, but in terms of how we have made do. How our impurities, our improprieties, and our
non-normal families have been the source of power, instead of trying to enforce a “proper view
of history.” Fuck proper views of history, fuck proper forms of family making. My family is a
queer family, and the truth is, that even when I lived with my momma, my family was queer
even then too. No republican would have embraced our “family values,” and no Afro-centrist
would have either.
The forms of knowledge production demonstrated by the Affirmative would have us believe
that in order to be true agents, in order to find our own subjectivities, ie, in order to matter and
to be able to act in the world, that we have to place ourselves at the center of history. This
move is a disavowal. It disavowals the fact that we can have agency without needing agency
to be in the position of the “center” – ie, the white, the masculine, and thus it reaffirms the idea
that the margins are a place from which we cannot be empowered, and privileges the model of
history and of subjectivity that is ultimately a European model.
Zora Neal Hurston said at the beginning of Janie’s story in Their Eyes Were Watching God,
which is also, our story, that:
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide.
For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher
turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of
men.
Now, women forget those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they
don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
Hurston’s description of how men relate to language and to memory, echo’s Kafka’s parable of
the man who stands before the law, waiting to be allowed to enter. Men wait for the tide to
come in, for the ship of desire to acknowledge them. The power of the feminine is to exceed
that relationship of lack, to forget what needs forgetting, to remember what must be
remembered, and to do what must be done.
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There is no truth. The dream is the truth. We must live the dream, and dream the fabulous
stories of our pasts. We must not regulate how we embrace the trauma of our history.
Gayatri Spivak says, in Death of a Discipline:
“Why have I written largely of women to launch the question of recognition of ceaselessly
shifting collectivities in our disciplinary practice? Because women are not a special case, but
can represent the human, with the asymmetries attendant upon any such representation.” (70)
This is why Toni Morrison does not write tragedies, though her stories are tragic. And even in
Beloved, she reminds us that “It is not a story to pass on.”
So we embrace the asymmetry of social relation, of finding the power there, of divesting for
historicity, of the infrastructure that determines the passage of Africans into blacks, abut also
the passages of us today through life, through our relationships. Instead of trying to be, we
should become, embrace the feminine, become-woman.
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Totalizing conception of black history reinscribes White categories of history
Paul Gilroy 1993 [The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 187-9]
THE IDEA OF tradition bas a strange, mesmeric power in black politidiscourse. Considering its special force and usage
seems an appropriate ration with which to begin the end ofa book about blacks and moderTradition crops up frequently in
the cultural criticism that hascultia dialogue with black political discourse. It operates as a means to rt the dose kinship
ofcultural forms and practices generated from the pressible diversity of black experience. This suggests th~t, in th~ hands
some black intellectuals and artists at least, the purSUIt of SOCIal and .ca] autonomy has turned away from the promise of
modernity and d new expression in a complex term that is often understood to be dernity's antithesis. This can be explained
partly through the threat .ch the maelstrom of modernity poses to the stability and coherence of the racial self. That self can
be safely cultivated and I'emain secure behind the dosed shutters of bIack particularity whiIe the storms rage outside. We
have already examined the work of several black writers who held! out against this form of retreat and opted instead to
embrace the fragmentation of self (doubling and splitting) which modernity seems to promote.. However, this option is less
fashionable these days. Appeals to the notion ofpurity as the basis ofradal solidarity are more popular. These appeals are
often anchored in ideas of invariant tradition and provisioned equally by positivistic certainty and an idea of politics as a
therapeutic activity. The first aim of this chapter is to rethink the concept oftradition so that it can no longer function as
modernity's polar opposite. This necessitates a brief discussion ofthe idea ofAfricentricity, 1 which may be useful in
developing communal discipline and individual self-worth and even in galvanising black communities to resist
theencroachmellts ofcrack cocaine, but which supplies a poor basis for the writing ofcultural history and the calcula~on of
political choices. The Africentric project has an absolute and perverse reliance ona model ofthe thinking, knowing racial
subject whi,ch is a long way away from the double -consciousness that fascinated black-modernists. Its European,
Cartesian outlines I."emain visible beneath a new lick of Kemetic paint: '~ocentricity is African genius and African values
created, recreated, reconstructed, and! derived from our history and experiences in our best interests ... It is an uncovering
of one's true self, it is the pinpointing ofone's centre,. and it is the clarity and focus through which black people must see
the world in order to escalate"2 (emphasis added). The idea of ttadition gets understandably invoked to underscore th.e
historical continuities, subcultural conversations, intertextual and intercultural cross-fertilisations which malce the notion of a
distinctive and selF conscious black culture appear plausibk This usage is important and inescapable because racisms work
insidiously and consistently to deny both historicity and cultural integrity to the artistic and cultural fruits of black life. The
discourse oftt~dition is thus frequently articulated within the critiques ofmodernity produced by blacks in the West. It is
certainly audible inside the racialised countercultures to which modernity gave birth. However, the idea oftradition is often
also the culmination, or centre-piece, of a rhetorical gesture that asserts the legitimacy ofa blade political culture locked in a
defensive posture against the unjust powers ofwhite supremacy. This gesmre sets tradition and modernity against each
other as simple polar alternatives as starkly differentiated and oppositional as the signs black and white. In these conditions,
where obsessions with origin and myth can rule contemporary political concerns and the fine grain of history, the idea of
tradition can constitulCe a refuge. It provides a temporary home in which mmunity (imagined or otherwise) can be found.. It
is interesting that in s understanding ofthe position ofblacks in the modem, western world, door to tradition remains weqged
open not by the memory ofmodern slavery but in spite of it. Slavery is the site of black victimage and s oftradition's intended
erasure. When the emphasis shifts towards the ents ofinvariant tradition that heroically survive slavery, any desire to ember
slavery itself becomes something of an obstacle. It seems as if complexity of slavery and its location within modernity has to
be acIy forgotten if a dear orientation to tradition and thus to the present umstances ofbbcks is to be acquil'ed. Rebel Me's
moving assertion in track "Soul Rebel" that "there's more than just slaV'ery to the history; have dignity"3 typifies the best of
these I'evisionist impulses.. However, ere is a danger that, apart from the archaeology of traditional survivals, ery becomes
a duster of negative associations that are best [eft behind. 'fhe history of the plantations and sugar mills supposedly offers
little that ;isvaluable when compared to the ornate conQeptions ofAfrican antiquity ';against which they are unfavourably
compared. Blades are urged, if not to rget the slave experience which appears as an aberration from the story of greatness
told in African history, then to replace it at the centre of our thinking with a mystical and ruthlessly positive notion ofAfrica
that is in- 'fferent to intraracial variation and is frozen at the point where blacks borarcied the ships that would carry them into
the woes and horrors of the passage. Asante dismisses the idea ofracial identity as a locally spesocial, and historical
construction by associating it with the outand pejorative term "Negro": One cannot study Africans in the United States or
Brazil or Jamaica without some appreciation for the historical and cultural significance ofAfrlca as source and origin. A
reactionary posture which claims Mricoiogyas ''African Slave Studies" is rejected outright because it disconnects the Mrican
in America from thousands of years of history and tradition. Thus, if one concentrates on studying Africans in the inner cities
of the Northeast United States, which is reasonable, it must be done with the idea in the back ofthe mind that one is
studying Mrican people, not "made-in-America Negroes" without historical depth.4
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Style Good
Engaging style might be a tactical attack on the viability and maintenance of the traditional
system.
Rose 2008, THE HARSH REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL
PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, PHD, University of Georgia
The stylistic norms of the policy debate community are inextricably attached to the social
performance of identity. In other words, if the stylistic norms privilege the stylistic choices of white,
straight, economically privileged males, as is clearly indicated by their statistical representation
at the heights of competitive success, then difference marks one as other unless the individual
performs according to those stylistic and identity-based norms. Racially and/or ethnically
different bodies must perform themselves according to the cultural norms of the debate
community. For UDL students it can often mean changing one’s appearance, standardizing
language practices, eschewing cultural practices at least while participating in debate. In essence,
students of color are performatively whitened in order to have an opportunity for achieving in
debate competitions . “Acting black” or brown is problematic because those performative
identities are not privileged in terms of successful participation. In fact, they signify a difference,
an opposite, a negative differential. It is not that the debate community actively operates to
exclude based on race, instead it is an exclusion based on racial performance, i.e., how the
differentially colored body chooses to style itself. So, if the stylistic procedures and practices of
the national policy debate community function to exclude those considered other, then engaging
style might be a tactical attack on the viability and maintenance of the traditional system. Once
Warner became critical of the UDL he made the difficult choice of rejecting the traditional debate practices he had
heretofore participated in and developed new methods of debate competition, judging, and coaching
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Bodies in Debate Good
Must use our bodies to change the space of debate
Reid Brinkley 2008 [Shanara is the Director of Debate at the Univeristy of Pittsburgh, “THE HARSH REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN
POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, Dissertation.]
The use of hip hop and personal experience function as a check against the homogenizing
function of academic and expert discourse. Note the reference to bell hooks, Green argues that without alternative
perspectives, “radical libratory theory becomes rootless.” The term rootless seems to refer to a
lack of grounded-ness in the material circumstances that academics or experts study. In other words,
academics and experts by definition represent an intellectual population with a level of objective
distance from that which they study. For the Louisville debaters, this distance is problematic as it prevents
the development of a social politic that is rooted in the community of those most greatly affected
by the status of oppression. The use of hip hop by the Louisville debaters signifies on the normative
construction of expertise. Hip hop and rap artists are hardly considered intellectuals. And yet,
the Louisville debaters dub hip hop practitioners “organic intellectuals.” A phrase taken from Mari Matsuda, the use
of “organic intellectuals” as a basis for evidentiary claims repeats the significance of evidenced
based claims, but revises by making hip hop artists experts on race and racism in America. In
Green’s First Negative Constructive or 1NC in the double-octo-final round against Emory University’s Allen and Greenstein
(ranked in the “sweet sixteen”), she argues: “Mari Matsuda, a Hawaiian American discusses her
connections and parallels to the African American community and concluded that when we
approach change, she felt that listening and opening up space for organic intellectuals are key
ways in which we can begin to construct knowledge in a different way.”62 According to Matsuda
and the Louisville debaters, it is the intermingling of alternative knowledge practices with current
practices that can lead to different methods of knowledge construction. For them, the
introduction of “organic intellectuals” into the normative processes of knowledge production is
a critical tool in developing new methodologies. Green notes further: “Not only do you open up space
but you listen to them and follow some of their approaches, follow some of their methods. They
have the power to construct a counter- hegemonic discourse to challenge power relations that is
not through academia that is just as powerful at dismantling walls of institutional racism through
their dissemination of subversive ideas.”63 That Green distinguishes opening up space for organic
intellectuals and actually listening to and following their methods, is a crucial discursive choice.
Within debate rounds that are oriented toward critical interrogations of policy, debaters often
argue for the importance of “opening up space” for those individuals and voices that might
normally be excluded from policy discussions. However, simply opening space for those
individuals to participate is often a maneuver by which dominant discourse can maintain itself.
In other words, you can open up space within a dominant discourse for those who have been
excluded to speak, but such an action does not necessitate that the dominant discourse respond
to the call of the new voices. Signifyin’ on the Body and the Speaking Flesh. Throughout this project I have argued
that the bodies of debaters of color are critically relevant to their engagement in public
argumentation . In this section of this chapter I want to turn our attention more directly to the raced and gendered bodies of the Louisville debaters. In
chapter one, I argued that bodies signify to onlookers within particular cultural contexts. As we've discussed , the race and gender
constructions attached to bodies are critically important in defining and determining success
and achievement in educational contexts.
CONT’D…
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CONT’D…
Specifically, recall Warren's discussion of the purity of educational environments where the body is invisibilized in favor of a focus on the mind. Thus, as Warren
argues,
the black body exceeds the purity of that social space as that body can never be fully
hidden. The Louisville debaters find themselves in a space of public deliberation and education
where the body is deemed irrelevant in favor of a dependence on the power of the mind. Yet, only
those bodies that can remain un-marked, or unremarkable, in its social and competitive space
can remain relatively invisible thus maintaining purity. Black bodies in particular are notable in
these spaces if only because they are so few. Their bodies cannot be hidden or ignored, they
exceed attempts to constrain them. However, these bodies can go through a process of
purification by which the black body attempts to signify itself within and through the normative
discourses that marks one as an in-group member. This is the process of integration and at its extremes, assimilation. The
Louisville debaters engage the normative practices of the community by resisting attempts to
capture and purify their colored bodies. In other words, they make their bodies more visible.
They signify on their bodies, bringing them forth to participate within competition and public
deliberation, crowding out the visual normativity of whiteness. Other scholars have noted that
body rhetoric has been a critical strategy of confrontation amongst radical or protest groups. 64
Deluca argues that it is an absolute necessity that social movement scholars analyze "the body
when attempting to understand the effects of many forms of pubic argument, especially social
protest rhetoric."65 Deluca's essay speaks specifically to protest movements that have the ability to gain television coverage. Thus , it is
critically important for those protest groups to use their bodies to effectively make arguments
within a very small window of media coverage. While this type of study of the uses of the body in
protest rhetoric are important to the study of rhetoric in the media age, it is equally critical that
those studying the rhetoric of the body engage in the analysis of the body in social protest that
occurs without broad media coverage. As Richard Jensen and John Hammerback note, communication scholars have studied large scale
movements and protests or the rhetoric of particular national figures or leaders resulting in a limited understanding of social movements and protest rhetoric, with the
Civil Rights Movement as their specific example.66 Thus, they argue that communication scholars must concern themselves with local, grassroots examples of social
movements for these are the building blocks of larger, more visible movements. While the Louisville Project has received some media attention, that it is not a
nationally visible movement makes it no less useful for critical and theoretical analysis. Even without media attention, the Louisville debaters find their bodies to be
useful spaces of public argumentation. That is not to say that the project has not been represented through mediated discourse. College Station Televison (CSTV)
produced documentaries of the NDT between 2004 and 2006 which were aired on their station. Jones and Green in particular are featured in the documentary in
2004
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Bodies in Debate Good
Cultural explanations of race not enough, must justify your cultural performance and bring it
back to the body
Reid Brinkley 2008 [Shanara is the Director of Debate at the Univeristy of Pittsburgh, “THE HARSH REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN
POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, Dissertation.]
This project will not directly analyze the representation of young blacks in public rhetoric about the “acting white” thesis.
Instead, I use this public and academic discussion as a critical example of the changing public discourse about race and
educational inequality. The term “acting” in reference to acting White, Black or Latino does imply that race is simply a
performance. If race is only a performance then one can choose what to perform. Thus, those who
perform cultures that are outside the normative mainstream have made a choice and must be
accepting of the consequences. Such a stance constitutes an ambivalent position by which one
believes and actively supports efforts to ensure racial equality while simultaneously insisting
that help must come with socially responsible behavior. Stereotypical images and
representations strengthen this ambivalence. Racial stereotypes are par for the course in public
discourse. As the public and the media engage in argumentation about the education crisis,
racial stereotypes function to make the discussion intelligible. And, it is not just the black body
that must be intelligible, but the discussion depends on the very intelligibility of the white body.
Cultural explanations of race may prevail, and yet, the body remains a specter of the natural, that
thing that cannot be changed. And, the stereotype remains tied to it. Public representation of
poor, black students is bound within this complex narrative of race, culture, and performance.
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Embodiment Good
PERFORMATIVE PEDAGOGY DEMANDS THE THEORIES OF IDENTITY BE EMBODIED
Warren and Fassett, 2004 [John T. is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, Deanna L., assistant
professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University, The Johns Hopkins University Press Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) pg. 411-430]
Recent work in performative pedagogy has created a rich context for (re)considering whiteness
literature. Performative pedagogy is an approach to education that moves meaning to the body,
asking students to engage in meaning-making through their own living and experiencing bodies:
A critical, performative pedagogy asks students and teachers to be embodied researchers—to
take learning to the body in order to come to know in a more full and powerful way. It is to
liberate the body from the shackles of a dualism that privileges the mind over the visceral. It is to
ask students to be more fully present, to be more fully engaged, to take more responsibility and
agency in their own learning. (Warren, "Performative Pedagogy" 95) Performative pedagogy demands
that students think about identity as performative—to place the question of identity in the space
of performance.
PERFORMATIVE PEDAGOGY LOCATES CULTURAL POWER IN THE BODY AND ASKS
QUESTIONS THAT ARE THE CONDITON OF POSSIBLITY FOR THE SUBVERSION OF
WHITENESS.
Warren and Fassett, 2004 [John T. is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, Deanna L., assistant
professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University, The Johns Hopkins University Press Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) pg. 411-430]
Performative pedagogy, as a method and theory of the body, can ask questions in a way that
points to the structure and machinery of whiteness. It can put flesh to the concept of whiteness. It
can point to whiteness's perceived absence. It can name the norm. Performative pedagogy, in this
way, can serve as a pedagogy of the oppressor—it can ask those in positions of power (via sex, race, class,
or sexuality) to question their own embodied experiences by demanding that they encounter the
other through the mode of performance. For if whiteness functions in dominant discourse as the
unmarked center of cultural power, then a performative pedagogy can and must ask how we can
create a ground for subversion. Performative pedagogy, as a method of enfleshment that brings
theory to the body, can question the normal, stable, inevitable actualization of race, nurturing
subversive possibility. Thus, in order to foreground and engage such constitutive performances,
we designed a series of workshops that serve to create space for students to take up and take apart
whiteness in their bodies, to make discernable what is already physical by adding heightened
critical reflection to that embodiment. These workshops are a means for participants to consider
whiteness, to consider the role they play in the making and unmaking of cultural oppression, and
to begin subverting the invisibility of whiteness.
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The Personal is Key
Their objective epistemology is an illusion: we need to acknowledge our own perspectives to
be able to challenge prejudice
Shari Stone-Mediatore, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University. in 2007
(Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural Classrooms
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stone-mediatore.html)
Continued appeals to objectivity as a touchstone of legitimacy in many academic and
professional circles is curious, given that this concept has been largely discredited by
Marxist, feminist, hermeneutic, postcolonial, and poststructuralist theorists. Certainly, calls
for objectivity reflect legitimate concerns, such as the concern to make our knowledge claims
accountable to a broad public and to test our claims against close empirical investigations.
Unfortunately, however, these concerns were pursued by Enlightenment and many twentiethcentury analytic philosophers in problematic attempts to use the natural sciences as models of
methodological certainty, and even the subtle and varied arguments of these philosophers have
since been reduced to a simplistic notion of "objectivity": the idea that universal, bias-free
knowledge can be attained by cleansing our knowledge practices of all emotional, social, and
cultural factors.1
Critics of objectivity argue that the demand to eradicate subjective influences from
knowledge is incoherent because we cannot know our world except as fully engaged
human beings who belong to the same world that we study and who make sense of that
world through culturally given starting points. Arendt, for instance, defends what some
have called her "subjective" account of Nazi death camps by explaining that, if she were to
eliminate all of her morally and emotionally rich descriptions, this would not make her study
more rigorous but only strip the death camps of their essence as human phenomena (1953,
78–9). Feminist standpoint theorists argue, furthermore, that we always view the world from our
specific locations within it, such that even our society's most credible beliefs arise from socially
situated, interest-driven inquiry.2 Hermeneutic theorists add to this argument that our
culturally given worldviews are a necessary starting point for making sense of the world.
We should certainly test and revise our received beliefs as we study specific phenomena,
but we cannot expect to avoid prejudices by assuming a transcendent "universal
standpoint"; indeed, the naive idea that we have done so usually leaves our most
entrenched prejudices intact.3
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Discussing Race in Debate Good
Bringing the debate back to race in education is critical to educational opportunities
Reid Brinkley 2008 [Shanara is the Director of Debate at the Univeristy of Pittsburgh, “THE HARSH REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN
POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, Dissertation.]
Contemporary racism is reproduced and maintained through discursive constructions that are
circulated through ideologies. Ideologies help to make stereotypical representations intelligible
to an audience. As long as racism remains a social phenomenon in our society, racial ideologies
will likely remain a critical tool by which racial difference is signified. All racial ideologies do not
function the same way; they are often complicated by intersections of class, gender, sexuality
and context. And, as ideologies often function to dominate, they also create circumstances for resistance.
This project seeks to engage both dominance and resistance; how racial ideologies reproduce social dominance, and how
those affected by that dominance attempt to resist it. The rhetoric surrounding race and education offers one
space from which to analyze the social reproduction of racial dominance. Looking to specific
contexts through which we analyze the significance of racial ideologies allows us as scholars to
map out the forces of power active through racial difference. Specifically, a rhetorical focus can
map the public discursive maneuvers that (re)produce and resist these social ideologies. The
rhetoric surrounding race, culture, and performance within educational discourse is of critical
importance to the future course of educational opportunity in American society. We need to
understand the strategies of signification that are most persuasive and powerful to the general public audience. What
representations of racial others are most intelligible to the public and how might racial others respond to that intelligibility?
As our previous discussion of the “acting white” thesis and the rise of cultural explanations of racial difference indicate,
contemporary ideological representations of race have changed and in some ways remained the same. We must
interrogate the use of ideological representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality as
rhetorical strategy in public deliberations. And, it is important to read the social actors involved
and watching as embodied.
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Racism in Debate Bad / Traditional Pedagogy Bad
Debate has become an educational policing apparatus that reifies the maintenance of the purity of
white civil society. Schooling much like debate represents a contaminant free zone where the black
body is rendered absent in order to focus on the mind and contrived coherence. Framework is an
attempt to make us have a head without a body- Educational spaces dominated by whiteness make
the black body invisible but the black body exceeds attempts to make it absent. This stain in an
academic space such as debate is seen as something that must be confined and intellectually
imprisoned.
THE DSRB 2008 [Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, "THE HARSH REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICANAMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND
STYLE"page 15]
Particularly, I am interested in the speaking body of the other, that body that pollutes, or darkens the purity of the holistic
social body. Post-structural education theorist John Warren describes schooling in terms of maintenance of
purity. Schools represent at their best, a pollutant and contaminant free environment, as critical to the educational and social maturation of
student minds. Warren notes that "the body is perceptually rendered absent in an effort to center perceptual attention on the mind."
In other words, in the school environment the presence of the body is a social pollutant of the educational space. The body must be
invisible in order to focus on the mind. The educational system attempts "to erase the impact of the body." Warren suggests that
bodies of color, in particular, exceed attempts to render them absent. For cultural theorists Homi Bhabha and
Franz Fanon, the colored, or more specifically, the black body signifies a difference from white bodies that makes the
colored body significantly more visible in majority white societies. The black body represents dirt or a stain , or to use symbolic
anthropologist Mary Douglas' language, a “pollutant,” on and in the social body, one that must be controlled and
contained. Color is written on the skin, encrusted on the “flesh” of the body at the “surface” level.
The Deleuzian metaphor of a body without organs is particularly useful here. For it is the flesh
that signifies, not the internal processes of the body. And, yet the flesh signifies on such
internal processes of the biological body. The colored body signifies a biological difference, an inherent difference, from
non-colored or white bodies. In other words, despite the fact that significant gains have been made in reducing the social belief in the
biological difference between the races, American public and social discourse tends toward that belief, while political
correctness reduces the ways in which such beliefs can be expressed. Such an ambivalent
stance results in the shading of the consistencies between all human bodies, resulting in a body without organs, where the surface level
of the skin comes to (re)present biological difference.
Traditional knowledge production within the debate community privileges those with institutional
and economic power while excluding other forms of knowledge production. Our usage of hip hop
within debate makes alternative forms of knowledge production legitimate and checks the
homogenizing function of 'expert' discourse.
THE DSRB 2008 [Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, "THE HARSH REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICANAMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND
STYLE" pages 81-83]
The process of signifyin’ engaged in by the Louisville debaters is not simply designed to critique the use of
traditional evidence; their goal is to “challenge the relationship between social power and
knowledge.” In other words, those with social power within the debate community are able to
produce and determine “legitimate” knowledge. These legitimating practices usually function to
maintain the dominance of normative knowledge-making practices, while crowding out or
directly excluding alternative knowledge-making practices. The Louisville “framework looks to the people
who are oppressed by current constructions of power.” Jones and Green offer an alternative framework for
drawing claims in debate speeches, they refer to it as a three-tier process: A way in which you can validate
our claims, is through the three-tier process. And we talk about personal experience, organic
intellectuals, and academic intellectuals. Let me give you an analogy. If you place an elephant in the room and
send in three blind folded people into the room, and each of them are touching a different part of the elephant. And they
come back outside and you ask each different person they gone have a different idea about what they was talking about.
But, if you let those people converse and bring those three different people together then you can achieve a greater
truth.” Jones argues that without the three tier process debate claims are based on singular
perspectives that privilege those with institutional and economic power. The Louisville debaters do
not reject traditional evidence per se, instead they seek to augment or supplement what counts
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as evidence with other forms of knowledge produced outside of academia. As Green notes in the
double-octo-finals at CEDA Nationals, “Knowledge surrounds me in the streets, through my peers,
through personal experiences, and everyday wars that I fight with my mind.” The thee-tier process:
personal experience, organic intellectuals, and traditional evidence, provides a method of argumentation that taps into
diverse forms of knowledge-making practices. With the Louisville method, personal experience and organic
intellectuals are placed on par with traditional forms of evidence. While the Louisville debaters see the
benefit of academic research, they are also critically aware of the normative practices that exclude racial and ethnic
minorities from policy-oriented discussions because of their lack of training and expertise. Such exclusions prevent radical
solutions to racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia from being more permanently addressed. According to Green: bell
hooks talks about how when we rely solely on one perspective to make our claims, radical liberatory
theory becomes rootless. That’s the reason why we use a three-tiered process. That’s why we use
alternative forms of discourse such as hip hop. That’s also how we use traditional evidence and our personal
narratives so you don’t get just one perspective claiming to be the right way. Because it becomes a
more meaningful and educational view as far as how we achieve our education.The use of hip hop
and personal experience function as a check against the homogenizing function of academic
and expert discourse. Note the reference to bell hooks, Green argues that without alternative perspectives, “radical
libratory theory becomes rootless.” The term rootless seems to refer to a lack of grounded-ness in the
material circumstances that academics or experts study. In other words, academics and experts by
definition represent an intellectual population with a level of objective distance from that which
they study. For the Louisville debaters, this distance is problematic as it prevents the
development of a social politic that is rooted in the community of those most greatly affected by
the status of oppression.
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Debate is Key Space
The debate is a space the replicates academia’s desire to create containment strategies for
Blacks, structurally adjusting them into other identifies like democratic citizens, which
normalizes the gratuitous violence that creates the Black.
Wilderson 2010 [Frank Wilderson- Red , White, and Black- Cinema and the Strucutre of Us- antagonisms- 51-52]
This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the
possibility of ontology because it positions the Black in an infinite and indeterminately
horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject.
As such, "the black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man" or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity.
8 How is it that the Black appears to partner with the senior and junior partners of civil society
(Whites and colored immigrants, respectively ), when in point of fact the Black is not in the world?
The answer lies in the ruse of analogy. By acting as //the Black is present, coherent, and above all human, Black film theorists are
"allowed" to meditate on cinema only after "consenting" to a structural adjustment. 9 Such an adjustment, required for the "privilege" of participating in the political
economy of academe, is not unlike the structural adjustment debtor nations must adhere to for the privilege of securing a loan: signing on the dotted line means
feigning ontological capacity regardless of the fact that Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form. It means theorizing Blackness as "borrowed
institutionality." 10 Ronald Judy's book (Dis)Forming the American Canon: AfricanArabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular and his essay "On the Ques Page(s):
51, Red, white & black by Frank B. Wilderson tion of Nigga Authenticity" critique the Black intelligentsia for building aesthetic canons out of slave narratives and
hardcore rap on the belief that Blacks can "write [themselves] into being." 11 Judy acknowledges that in such projects one finds genuine and rigorous attention to the
issue that concerns Blacks as a social formation, namely, resistance. But he is less than sanguine about the power of resistance which so many Black scholars
impute to the slave narrative in particular and, by extension, to the "canon" of Black literature, Black music, and Black film: In
writing the death of
the African body, Equiano['s eighteenth-century slave narrative] gains voice and emerges from the abject
muteness of objectivity into productive subjectivity. It should not be forgotten that the abject muteness of the
body is not to not exist, to be without effect. The abject body is the very stuff, the material, of experiential effect. Writing
the death of the African body is an enforced abstraction. It is an interdiction of the African, a
censorship to be inarticulate, to not compel, to have no capacity to move, to be without effect, without
agency, without thought. The muted African body is overwritten by the Negro , and the Negro that emerges in
the ink flow of Equiano's pen is that which has overwritten itself and so becomes the representation of the very body it sits
on. 12 Judy is an Afro-pessimist, not an Afrocentrist. For him the Negro is a symbol that cannot "enable the representation
of meaning [because] it has no referent." 13 Such is the gratuitousness of the violence that made the
Negro . But it is precisely to this illusive symbolic resistance (an aspiration to "productive subjectivity"), as opposed to the Negro's "abject muteness," and
certainly not to the Slave's gratuitous violence, that many Black scholars in general, and Black film theorists in particular, aspire when interpreting their cultural
objects. My claim regarding Black film theory, modeled on Judy's claim concerning Black studies more broadly, is that it tries to chart a project of resistance with an
ensemble of questions that fortify and extend the interlocutory life of what might be called a Black film canon. But herein lies the rub, in the form of a structural
adjustment imposed on Black film scholars themselves. "Resistance through canon formation," Judy writes, must be "legitimated on the grounds of conservation, the
conservation of authenticity's integrity." 14 A tenet that threads through Judy's work is that throughout modernity and postmodernity (or postindustrial society, as
Judy's echoing of Antonio Negri prefers )
"Black authenticity" is an oxymoron, a notion as absurd as "rebellious
property ," 15 for it requires the kind of ontological integrity which the Slave cannot claim. The
structural adjustment imposed on Black academics is, however, vital to the well-being of civil
society. It provides the political economy of academia with a stable "collegial" atmosphere in
which the selection of topics, the distribution of concerns , esprit de corps , emphasis, and the
bounding of debate within acceptable limits appear to be "shared" by all because all admit to
sharing them.
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Whiteness Impacts
WHITNESS IS A PERFORMATIVE CONSTRUCT THAT IS MADE AND RE MADE EVERY TIME
THE SIMPLE EVERYDAY ACTIONS WHICH PROP IT UP ARE REITERATED. PERFORMATIVE
PEDAGOGY IS AN ACTIVE PROCESS OF DISMANTLING WHITE SUPREMACY BY
INTERUPTING ITS REPRODCUTION NAD MAKING VICERAL AND PRESENT ITS INVIIBLE
NATURE.
Warren and Fassett, 2004 [John T. is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, Deanna L., assistant
professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University, The Johns Hopkins University Press Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) pg. 411-430]
In the last ten years, a variety of cross-disciplinary scholars have illuminated (and, in that effort, sought
to deconstruct) racial privilege and disadvantage by examining whiteness as a cultural, political
location—as an identity created and maintained through our everyday communication.1 In some of
these studies, whiteness is revealed as a strategic rhetoric, a means by which people, working in
concert and often unreflectively, levy power and cultural influence. For example, communication and film
scholars examine rhetorical constructions of whiteness (see Crenshaw; Dyer; Nakayama and Krizek; Shome). While this
perspective may help us understand the role of language (and how social systems and
individuals work in concert to create racial oppression) recent efforts by scholars to maintain a
focus on the white subject have underscored the importance of deconstructing and challenging
white subjectivity in order to promote a more equitable and socially just society. Research here has
taken many forms. Critical scholars in theatre have led the way, creating critical performances of whiteness
(see Jackson; O'Brien; Warren and Kilgard) that function to mirror, particularly to white audiences, the
mechanisms and machinations of their oppressive actions, however unreflective. Ethnographic
portraits of whiteness have given depth and immediacy to our understandings of people in lived
context (Hartigan; hooks; Warren, Performing). Autoethnographers, because they plumb their lived
experience for particular details and contradictions about how they create and are created by
culture, have constituted a rich repository for the study of how each of us works to understand
his or her own ethnic identity (Clark and O'Donnell; Pelias; Warren, "Absence"). Studies in education have
also created a critical context for understanding how whiteness permeates our classrooms (see
Giroux; Hytten and Adkins; McIntyre); such work functions to remind us of the power of pedagogy to help
us see and re-see the actions we take, challenge, or leave unquestioned. In an earlier essay, one of us
organized, from across the variety of disciplinary perspectives , four key scholarly approaches to the study of
whiteness to help create a nuanced understanding of this seemingly inescapable and overwhelming political and
cultural thicket (Warren, "Whiteness"). First, scholars [End Page 412] have analyzed whiteness in order to
promote antiracism. For example, Ruth Frankenberg, in her classic book White Women, Race Matters, deconstructs white women's talk in order to
uncover (and to help them discover) how racism and whiteness saturate their talk. Second, many researchers have investigated how whiteness is embedded in
literature, film, and scholarship. Such works explore how taken-for-granted sites, including popular cultural texts or scholarly research, are never politically neutral.
For instance, in Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison uncovers how writers of American literature almost always assume a white reader to the exclusion of other ways of
seeing or interpreting a text or series of events. Third, scholars who advocate an understanding of whiteness as a rhetorical construct have shifted researchers'
attention from whiteness as a stable identity (i.e., this person is or is not white) to whiteness as a discursive way of levying power (i.e., whiteness as a discursive
space, existing in our communicative interactions). For instance, communication scholar Christina W. Stage explores how a small-town celebration discursively
invokes and rewards whiteness through a series of powerful communication strategies—that is, through the re-historicizing of the community, members recreate the
past and locate that past within the discursive space of white power (e.g., settlement narratives that locate the beginnings of the town within a white subject). The
fourth and final research trend involves reading whiteness as a performative construct. Judith Butler's analysis of Nella
Larsen's Passing provides a thought-provoking example of how whiteness as an identity is
communicatively reproduced through our everyday actions. In her analysis, white identity is
considered a discursive construct that is made and remade through our reiterative patterned
communication choices. We draw strength from each of these modes of analysis as they function to
call out whiteness as a political and social force. However, what is often absent from the extant literature are strategies for actively
and publicly deconstructing and undermining whiteness as the cultural center. That is, these microanalyses provide hope and incisive critique, but lack sufficient
theorizing to change our behavior. In this way, all the approaches here are ways of seeing and critiquing, but few are actively documenting progressive action with
others. Alice McIntyre, an education scholar, perhaps comes closest with her action-research-oriented teacher groups in which she debates and teaches about
whiteness as she draws her dissertation research data from them; however, the members of the research team have long disbanded by the time the book is written.
CONT’D…
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CONT’D…
what we see missing is an action-oriented research project that holds accountable ourselves
and the members of the community we want to inform. How do you make meaningful the
critiques above in a way that experientially demands that participants put their bodies on the
line? Is there a research process that could make the invisible and naturalized processes of
whiteness more visible, more visceral, more present? We begin this essay with this political and ethical claim: as
researchers concerned with whiteness as a means of levying power and privilege over others,
we must articulate a process for combating whiteness as a political force in our schools, in our
homes, and in our communities. In this writing, we offer our own attempt to call out and combat
whiteness: a series of workshops for white students (although nonwhite students were not excluded) that asked
them to move past apologia and guilt for their ethnic identity, toward the development of actions
that have the potential to challenge cultural oppression. For us, such a process must be both an
exercise of the mind and a rethinking through the [End Page 413] body—it must hold both our
everyday talk and our everyday actions accountable for the ways we each reproduce whiteness
as a socially powerful, culturally centered location. We grounded the frame and method for our
workshops in Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, employing his methodology for critical
literacy groups. This participatory, ethnographic method is ideally suited for engaging and
incorporating the body into theories of liberation, thus helping us to maintain our focus on the
process, the performances, by which individuals come to enact and constitute oppressive social
systems. In addition to articulating our use of this method for enfleshing, engaging, and
challenging whiteness, our essay explores how such a mode of engagement allows for participants to
see whiteness as a performative process
Thus,
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Whiteness Impacts – Phallicized Whiteness
Phallicized Whiteness is Wack!
Shannon Winnubst 2006 [Queering Freedom]
The project of critically examining whiteness will, in our lifetimes, always be a dangerous one. Ruth Frankenberg’s general
diagnosis of the shifting borders of “whiteness” and the differing perceptions of racial order from place to place seems
correct. Depending on where you find yourself—in Manhattan or Lincoln, Nebraska; in Seattle or Oklahoma City or a small
rural community in Alabama; or in the more global settings of Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, Baghdad, Hong Kong, Moscow, or
Lima—a differing discourse of “whiteness” is at work. While these discourses most often work to render whiteness invisible,
allowing it to circulate as the unmarked master signifier, we also live in a time when whiteness perceives itself to be in some
“trouble”— a time when the category of whiteness appears to itself to be becoming unstable, internally and externally. 3 The
dominant culture of whiteness sometimes, but not always, perceives itself to be under attack. The risks of studying and
critically examining whiteness are thus high, running the gamut from playing into cultural discourses of white supremacy, to
uncritically fixing white superiority, to reinscribing whiteness at the center of concern and focus.We must remain suspicious
of discussions of whiteness, lest those discussions reinscribe the very same dominant set of cultural signifiers and practices
that they aim to displace.4 As Frankenberg, Naomi Zack (1997), Chris Cuomo and Kim Hall (1999), and many others have
articulated, the danger is that an interrogation of whiteness might serve to recenter and even reinvigorate, rather than
decenter, the dominant signifier.5 So, what do I mean when I read late modern western cultures and their normative
concepts of freedom as cultures of phallicized whiteness? I have developed the short-hand of “phallicized whiteness” to
signify how the interlocking epistemological and political systems of domination function within late modern western
cultures, particularly in their proclamations of freedom. Emerging out of feminists’ and other anti-racist theorists’ sustained
theoretical engagement with systems of domination over the last forty years, this shorthand of “phallicized whiteness” draws
on the feminist development of the psychoanalytic category of morphology and Lacan’s fundamental insights about how
power works always to veil itself. It consequently emerges, also, out of the fraught histories of feminist and anti-racist
movements in the U.S. that helped to bring theorists to this category of morphology. _ _ _ In ways that do and do not mirror
the knots involved in the sex/gender distinction in feminist theory, anti-racist theorists must grapple with the role of the body
in racist cultural symbolics such as the one we inhabit in the contemporary U.S. 6 The temptation to employ the conceptual
schema of sex/gender—or of biology/culture, the larger categorical framework on which the sex/gender distinction turns—
for questions of racial difference may be strong. It seems to appeal to several, even oppositional, political desires. For
example, the biology/culture distinction appeals to a desire to maintain racial difference as biological, while ascribing racism
to the cultural readings of that biology, thereby grounding an anti-racist politics of resistance. But, in more convoluted ways,
the biology/culture framework also allows for an essentializing of culture that is nonetheless racializing, thereby grounding
emergent strands of ultranationalism that parade under the banner of “ethnicity.” As Paul Gilroy has shown, the allegiances
to “raciological thinking” (2000) may enmesh groups on either side of the domination/oppression fault line in deep fealties to
concepts of race, whether located in biological or cultural instantiations.7 Either side of the dichotomy, biology or culture, is
easily susceptible to essentialism: the move from race to ethnicity, a move that can be framed along the lines of the
sex/gender distinction, does not ensure a move to liberatory, anti-racist politics or epistemologies. Moreover, as the
dominant narrative now circulates, the political history of the sex/gender distinction is particularly troublesome for anti-racist
theorizing. Emerging as a political tool to combat the subordination of sexism to racism in the anti-racist movements of the
Civil Rights Movement, it was pitted against racism from the beginning. 8 While scholars have complicated this simplistic
narrative from a variety of angles, the sex/gender distinction has nonetheless always been implicated in perpetuating a
perverse competition between sexism and racism.9 It institutionalized a strict separation of gender from race, which turns on
the prior separation of biology from culture. In so doing, the sex/gender distinction became a pawn in larger social dynamics
that effectively raced gender and gendered race: the anti-sexist movement became a ‘white problem’ and the anti-racist
movement became a ‘male problem,’ a dynamic that still haunts feminist and anti-racist theorizing and politics. The
sex/gender distinction thus emerged as a way to deflect attention away from racism; and this prioritizing of sexism over
racism, predicated on an oppositional logic, continues to haunt its workings.10 Following its expression in the late ’80s and
early ’90s in the essentialism/constructionism debates, we can find its latest incarnation in the academic discipline of
philosophy and the separation of ‘critical race theory’ from ‘feminist theory.’We seem to be still working out the heritage of
the politics and theories of the ’60s, when race and the battles of anti-racism developed as and remained a manly pursuit,
and the category of gender emerged as the terrain of white women and the problem of whites. Race is masculine; gender is
white; and the hegemonic white patriarchy must be laughing. In arguing against the use of the sex/gender distinction to
approach racial difference, I am not suggesting that feminist theory has nothing to offer anti-racist theory. To the contrary,
feminists of color, Anglo-American, “French,” and Australian feminists have, since the mid-’80s, problematized the
fundamental category of embodiment. This work not only calls into question the body/culture division, but also pluralizes the
categories of difference from an essentialized focus on gender alone. The demand to think simultaneously across, about,
through, and with multiple differences has radically altered the modes of rationality and politics appropriate for such tasks,
thereby also calling into question the conservative politics that the sex/gender distinction spawned under the name of
classical liberalism. It is this broader work by feminists on the category of embodiment that has much to offer our
approaches to racial difference, and our thinking about difference more generally. Moving from simplistic approaches to the
body as a self-evident physical given, feminists have developed a more complex sense of embodiment as a nexus of
historical, social, psychic, and physiological forces. In her pathbreaking texts of Borderlands _ La Frontera: The New
Mestiza (1987), for example, Gloria Anzaldu´a powerfully mixes Spanish with English to show how bodies are written on, by,
and through language: her mestiza consciousness is the expression of her mestiza body, history, language, politics, and
desires. This is an example, even if not usually categorized in this way, of what Judith Butler describes as undertaking “a
critical genealogy of [the] formation” of materiality (1993, 32). Whether using conceptual tools from the history of European
philosophy or their own experiences in this racialized and sexualized world, feminists that we might group under the
awkward and inadequate heading of ‘post-structuralist’ have complicated the meanings and possibilities of ‘materiality’ and
‘embodiment’ considerably.11 Resignifying the scope, mode, and limit of rationality from its ahistorical, disembodied
Enlightenment perch, these feminist theorist-activists teach us how to approach materiality as a historicized phenomenon.
They teach us how to approach our bodies and our lived experiences as the effects of historical, economic, social, and
discursive matrices. This radical reorientation toward materiality as a historicized phenomenon, rather than a natural given,
alters the ways we understand the abstractions of various epistemological categories. For example, not only does the
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category of biology no longer have an extra-discursive, non-historical referent, but neither do the contemporary categories
of identity, such as sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality. As feminists attuned to a historicized materiality
began to reconceive domination, the salient social categories of feminism expanded to include all of these categories. But
rather than positing this “list of differences” as merely an accumulation of discrete categories, the shift toward a historicized
materialism challenges the separation of these categories from one another. Reading these categories as the effects of
material dynamics, feminists grasp how aspects of contemporary identity emerge out of intersecting and overlapping
historical formations. To take the example that troubles the sex/gender distinction most directly, Judith Butler’s reworking of
gender, sex, and sexuality in Gender Trouble renders none of these categories separable from one another; but neither are
any of them separable from the simultaneous registers of ‘materiality’ and historical discourse. Butler’s work traces out a
Foucaultian Herkunft (genealogy as discursive descent12) in the specific registers of sexuality, sex, and gender, showing
how historical discourses of heterosexual normativity affect our lived, material experiences of ‘the body.’ 13 Historical
discourses of heterosexual normativity affect both the kinds of bodies we have (e.g., intersexed bodies are a medically and
legally regulated category through the widespread practice of sex assignment at birth in the U.S. 14) and the ways we
experience such bodies (e.g., the kinds of pleasures scripted onto our bodies as viable and legitimate produce varying kinds
of eroticized bodies and body parts and, subsequently, varying politics15). Moreover, historical discourses of heterosexual
normativity have also affected, in a dialectical relation of mutual formation, the ways we read and experience racial and
class signifiers across the bodies of individuals, institutions, and cultures. 16 As the work of bell hooks has shown for some
time, the matrix of white supremacist, heterosexist, capitalist patriarchy yields race sexualized and sex racialized, leaving all
of our bodies marked by the confusion of what we try to understand as ‘desire’ in such a setting. 17 The theoretical category
that captures this work of historicizing materiality most fully may be, ironically for the historical narrative to which I alluded
above, one that the Belgian feminist Luce Irigaray has been developing for some time: the category of sexual difference. 18
This category differs considerably from the categories of sex and gender as they have been deployed in Anglo-American
work. Sexual difference, as Tina Chanter has explained lucidly, articulates the nexus of the body and history, which is
reducible to neither.19 It turns largely on recuperating a concept of the body, and implicitly of nature, as historicized, rather
than as static, fixed, or universally given. While Irigaray has continued to be read by many as prioritizing sexual difference
over all other differences,20 particularly racial difference, the conceptual model out of which sexual difference springs—i.e.,
the psychoanalytic model of morphology, which bridges the alleged distinction between biology and culture—has much to
offer our analyses of racial difference. The larger irony here thus may be my attempt, in chapter 2, to trouble the Lacanian
model and turn psychoanalysis against itself. Precisely through employing the concept of morphology as a way to read
whiteness, I will shore up the limitations and blind spots of Lacanian psychoanalysis around the dynamics of race. In
reading whiteness through the concept of morphology and as phallicized, I will show how we can better use psychoanalysis
through realizing its limits and, more generally, through realizing its complicit role in grounding our white supremacist
phallocentric symbolic. So, is race biological or cultural? Or is it perhaps neither and both? As many have articulated quite
clearly by now,21 race has no biological or physiological corollary or referent: nineteenth-century scientific racism should be
long dead. But to argue that race is then ‘socially constructed,’ a rejoinder that dominates much contemporary work in this
field, also seems to beg a number of questions, as scholars from a wide range of philosophical and ideological orientations
have argued.22 (Not to mention the ways that this dichotomy between biology and social construction reinscribes the
conceptual model at work in the sex/gender distinction.) To say that race is socially constructed is thus a shorthand that I
find increasingly dangerous. It plays all too easily into conservative aims to flatten out the social field of power at work in
racial distinctions, evacuating us all of agency or responsibility with the simple exclamation, “we are all socially constructed.”
As I have seen too often in classrooms, it shuts down rather than opens up conversation: to say that race is socially
constructed must heed Joan Scott’s warnings about the category of “experience” (1993) and be the beginning, rather than
the conclusion, of a critical examination. If we are to read race, and whiteness particularly, as both biological and cultural
(and thus reducible to neither), the psychoanalytic concept of morphology opens ways to read the role of the body, as a
nexus of cultural and biological signifiers, in the play of racial difference in racist symbolics. Irigaray understands
morphology as the ways that concepts shape bodies and bodies shape concepts. Placing racial difference in this conceptual
framework, I interrogate ‘whiteness’ as a historically emergent phenomenon in which the role of the body—and of
embodiment more broadly—becomes a central site of power. Embodiment becomes this site of power not only as the
surface on which the concepts of white supremacy are written, but also as a primary vehicle whose logic shapes those very
concepts—and in this, whiteness functions as the phallus in the socio-psychic field. When read as phallicized, the signifier
‘whiteness’ becomes both the structuring element and the effect of a set of cultural practices and discourses that historically
confer disproportionate, and often abusive, power on some persons over and in excess of others. As the structuring
element, ‘whiteness’ functions much as the phallus does in Lacan’s diagnosis: it is the dominant or ‘master’ signifier around
which all other signifiers and practices are oriented— it shapes the ways they do and do not interact, the blind spots they do
and do not perpetuate, the entities, acts, and desires they do and do not proclaim meaningful and thereby valuable. 23 As an
effect of these cultural practices and discourses, ‘whiteness’ is sedimented by repetition into a pattern that appears as solid,
as ‘natural,’ posing as a prediscursive, ahistorical, ontological given.24 If we read this master signifier as a historically
enacted set of power relations, we see what Frankenberg diagnoses: the characteristics which constitute this ‘whiteness’
are always in flux. Its borders “have proved malleable over time” (1997b, 633), granting it the power to regulate social fields
of symbols (epistemology) and power (politics) while always remaining invisible. Employing the psychoanalytic category of
morphology here, I discern the role of embodiment in what Richard Dyer calls the “semiotic flexibility” (1997, 21) of
whiteness. Two necessary conditions allow ‘whiteness’ to emerge as the dominant, phallic signifier and, in turn, allow the
set of cultural practices and discourses which it engenders to dominate our socio-political field: 1) ‘Whiteness’ naturalizes
and universalizes its structural advantage through remaining unmarked and unnamed as a specific, historical set of cultural
practices and discourses. Following the pattern of privileged subject positions, whiteness poses as the universal and
naturalized ‘order of things.’ In mutually grounding gestures, it renders itself both invisible and ubiquitous. These dynamics
then sediment one another: the more transparent and invisible whiteness becomes, the more normalized and omnipresent it
becomes, and so on. In this dual functioning of self-erasure and self-empowerment, whiteness relies on the continued
veiling of its ongoing, historical shifting of categories, actions, inclusions, and exclusions that is necessary to keep its power
intact. It must not surface as a historical set of signifiers. In this specific manner, I am suggesting that whiteness functions
as the phallus functions in the Villa of Mysteries of Pompeii: only through remaining veiled can it control the signifying field
as the master signifier. To historicize whiteness and mark it socially, therefore, is a critical tool in delimiting and localizing
this alleged universal and totalizing grasp.25 To historicize whiteness is to unveil its functioning as the phallus and displace
its power. 2) ‘Whiteness’ relies on a slippery play of embodiment/disembodiment that the dualism of biology/social
construction perpetuates and the psychoanalytic category of morphology diagnoses. Following Stuart Hall, I argue that
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whiteness operates as a structural set of cultural practices and discourses that historically confer disproportionate and often
abusive power not only on specific persons, but on specific bodies— i.e., that this advantage is granted on the basis of
bodily characteristics, DuBois’s haunting “hair, skin and bone” (Hall 1996b). Regardless of how much we hear from
contemporary science (e.g., the much acclaimed Human Genome Project) about how race is not biologically grounded, U.S.
culture will nonetheless continue to make racial distinctions—consciously, unconsciously, overtly, covertly, politically,
personally, medically, and legally—on the basis of how bodies appear. The very appeal to biological science to ‘prove’ the
falsity of race already places race in the domain of the body. The body—and particularly the body as surface appearance—
simply will not go away in the carving up of racial distinctions and categories. It remains the intensely cathected site of and
vehicle for the historically specific and changing discourse of race. Reading whiteness as phallicized thereby affords many
opportunities: we can unravel how whiteness functions as a historical set of cultural practices and discourses that poses as
ahistorical and attempts to function structurally; we can read racial and sexual difference as cathected through the same
nexus of signifiers in this phallicized symbolic, thereby grasping how power is negotiated differently for raced and sexed
bodies, and the myriad combinations thereof; we can read racism as working through a binary logic that expresses itself as
anti-black racism; and, as a primary location of these dynamics, we can begin to map the ways that the body, particularly
“the body as seen” in the register of visibility, functions as the site through which a racist and sexist symbolic operates, thus
ushering us into the thorny relations between the visible and language—or, in Lacanian terminology, between the imaginary
and the symbolic.26 If ‘whiteness’ is the dominant, phallic signifier in the present discourses of race and if those discourses
of race are centered on bodily distinctions, despite scientific and philosophical arguments exposing the lack of biological
corollaries, then we need to interrogate the roles of embodiment and disembodiment in these discursive deployments of
whiteness. How does whiteness’s deployment of cultural and discursive practices ensure a continued fascination with the
body, while simultaneously marking out the space of ‘the disembodied’ or transcendent as the space of power? How does
whiteness inhabit the body in such a way as to ensure that it transcends the body and becomes a ‘subject,’ while non-white
bodies are fully reducible to the body and thus objects or abjected others? The twin dynamics of universalism and
disembodiment collude to produce systems of power that allow ‘whiteness’ to emerge as the dominant, phallic signifier and,
in turn, engender a specific set of cultural practices and discourses in the socio-political field. To frame these interlocking
systems of domination as a system of “phallicized whiteness” is to argue that we can trace contemporary systems of
domination, and their various interconnections, through these hallmarks of whiteness—namely, universalism and
disembodiment. In the following six chapters, I trace how this system of phallicized whiteness expresses itself doubly: (1) in
the identity categories of class and religion (chapters 1 and 6), race (chapter 2), sexual difference (chapter 3), sexuality
(chapters 3 and 4), and nationality (chapter 5); and (2) in normative concepts of space (chapters 1–3) and temporality
(chapters 4–6). My hope is that, through becoming more conscious of how domination writes itself on our bodies, we may
better resist its seduction of freedom.
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Disrupting Whiteness Solves Cap/Law/State
We must rethink freedom/enclosure/boarders/liberalism/the law/identity in order to challenge
whiteness
Shannon Winnubst 2006 [Queering Freedom]
So, why queer freedom? As queer theory has demonstrated for some time, categories of identity narrow our field of vision,
and subsequently our fields of resistance. They constrict our experiences into parameters that are too sharply delineated
and differentiated from one another: none of us experiences this complex world as only a gender or a race or a class or a
nationality or a sexuality, and so on. The infamous ‘and so on’ already renders any such listing of identities incomplete. And
yet identity categories, and the identity politics that they spawn, claim completion: they claim to totalize our experience of
ourselves and of the world. To queer freedom is not to disavow the political work of calling out the power differentials buried
in these identity categories: it is not to return us to the allegedly neutral space of ‘the human.’ To queer freedom is, on the
contrary, to deepen our grasp of the historicity of these categories. The conflation of dominant subjectivities with the posture
of neutrality that we find in our contemporary cultures of phallicized whiteness did not occur recently. It reaches back, at a
minimum, to the emergence of classical liberalism in the seventeenth century and its valorization of particular kinds of labor,
rationality, temporality—and thereby of particular bodies, particular identities. We need to return to those roots of classical
liberalism and trace out its subtle valorization of these characteristics, if we are to historicize the categories of identity that
have since become some of its best tools.27 This work of historicizing our categories of identity is, among other activities, the
work of queering freedom. It will both give us a deeper sense of how these categories emerged and show how the
categories themselves intersect and interact to perpetuate the systems of domination in which we now find ourselves living.
I develop much of this through the logic of the limit, a kind of logic that binds classical liberalism to phallicized whiteness
through the shared value of individualism—a cornerstone, in turn, of advanced capitalism. Individualism simultaneously
demands two apparently contradictory moves: 1) that we transcend material differences and understand ourselves as “just
human”; and 2) that we conceive of ourselves through the rigid categories of identity that lock us into raced, sexed, classed
(and so on) individuals. Individualism demands both identity and difference: the first of these perpetuates the Myth of
Sameness, while the second reduces our subjectivities to the delimited categories of difference. But these categories of
difference are ultimately that which must be transcended—erased—if we are to ascend into the treasured neutrality of
humanity. And, even more perniciously, these categories of difference only lock us into politics of alleged resistance,
wherein difference is pitted against difference (e.g., the old story of race or gender), while the one who transcends such
differences altogether walks away unscathed. In Hegelian parlance, difference is always only mediated by identity here. The
logic of the limit shows how these concepts of identity and difference are ultimately two sides of the same coin—namely, the
currency of phallicized whiteness. It also rings a loud cautionary note about the viability of any politics of resistance that
grounds itself in identity. The logic of the limit thereby helps to excavate how classical liberalism presents a hollow concept
of freedom. In classical liberalism, freedom holds itself out as the transgression of boundaries and liberation from constraint.
For example, we might think that we will liberate ourselves from domination if we engage in transgressive behaviors that
violate our designated race, sex, gender, class, nationality, or religion. But the logic of the limit shows, as Bataille and
Foucault among others also see, that such notions of freedom as the transgression of boundaries or liberation from
constraint only enmesh us further in the very systems of domination we seek to resist. To queer freedom we must learn not
only to resist the limited notions of difference enacted in categories of identity, but to resist differently altogether. Yet,
despite all this talk about identity and difference, ‘queer’ has a distinct ring of identification and identity. Let’s not fool
ourselves: being queer is about sexuality. So, what role does the specific identity category of sexuality play in queering
freedom? If we trace the roots of present identity categories to some of their historical emergences, the conflation of race
and gender (and, less explicitly, class and religion) occurs through the dynamic of sexuality. Nineteenthcentury laws against
miscegenation, the one-drop rule, and practices of lynching all expose how sexuality serves as the nexus through which
male and white domination are enacted in the psycho-social field. Moreover, given the historical and epistemological tension
between whiteness and heterosexuality that I will demonstrate, sexuality is the Achilles’ heel of phallicized whiteness’s
domination of the social field. The field of sexuality is thereby the most effective site in our historical present of late
modernity for intervention into fixed concepts of subjectivity and freedom. But we cannot reduce such an insight to a claim
about identity. The projects of gay/lesbian liberation have been flawed in their conceptions of resistant politics as yet
another kind of identity politics. The emergence of ‘the homosexual identity’ and its identity politics is ultimately just another
clever tool of phallicized whiteness. To queer freedom we must therefore avoid this error of identification, while
simultaneously embracing the field of sexuality as the most effective site of intervention into present systems of domination.
In addition to its pivotal role in the politics of sexism and racism, what is it about sexuality that frames it as this specific site
of intervention and resistance? Another way of understanding the limitations of gay/lesbian liberation movements is through
their reading of the gay/lesbian subject as a subject of desire. Desire enacts particular forms of spatiality and temporality
that feed contemporary forms of domination. When we conceive of ourselves primarily as subjects of desire, we begin to
understand ourselves as discrete bodies with desires that are essential to who we are. But as contained subjects, we lack
that which we want. Consequently, we project ourselves outwardly both spatially and temporally: spatially, we conceive of
other bodies as discrete entities that we must overcome, perhaps even master, to answer to our needs; temporally, we
project ourselves into the future as the horizon on which we will find our satisfaction. A bound body that models itself on
private property and a futural teleology that places desire in an infinite pursuit take hold as the normative spatiality and
temporality in which meaning is forged. If we can excavate the normative spatial and temporal registers through which our
experiences are cathected in systems of domination, we locate radical ways to intervene—and to queer our lives. While
sexuality will remain the historically privileged site for such interventions, this work of queering freedom places it in a more
general economy of desires, pleasures, spaces, and times. It thereby opens onto resistances that we may signify as “queer”
and yet that are not bound by or reducible to one’s sexuality. Abandoning the spatial model of private property and turning
toward temporalities of ‘lost pasts,’28 we may transform our lives from ones of anxiety endemic to desire, toward ones of joy
that open onto freedom.
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Alternative – New Political Subjects/Multitude
We need a new political subjectivity. We lack nothing, we already have the capacity and the
creativity to build a new world. Institutions, discipline, sovereignty captures our imaginations for
thinking a world otherwise. The Affirmative posits two false choices: between relying on the status
quo institutions to save us, and the possibility of a much worse reality. We must refuse this false
distinction and embrace instead our capacities for fashioning new relations and ways of being. We
have to develop a new political consciousness.
Passavant 2010 [Paul, Paul A. Passavant is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith
Colleges. He is the author of No Escape: Freedom of Speech and the Paradox of Rights (NYU Press, 2002), and the
editor (with Jodi Dean) of Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (Routledge, 2004). He is also the author of
numerous essays in law and political theory, including "The Strong Neo-liberal State: Crime, Consumption, and
Governance," which appeared in Theory & Event 8:3 (2005). “Theory, Political Manifesto,” Theory & Event, vol. 13,
issue 4]
Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's Commonwealth is the third book of their trilogy theorizing the emergence of global
sovereignty, developments in capitalism, and contemporary prospects for communist revolution and absolute democracy. It
diagnoses the present, explains how we got here, and calls for new political subjects to surpass those
political and economic institutions repressing, capturing, and feeding off of our creative labors.
One of the strengths of this trilogy is the way that it encourages us to see all the ways that we are already strong. We
already possess the capacity to live autonomously. We think that we need things like law, the
state, and systems of discipline and organization to supplement something that we lack.
Actually, we lack nothing. Creativity is immanent to our being, and that which we think we need to force us
to be productive, to come together for the purposes of government, in fact captures us, and leeches
off our constant invention of new ways of being all the time. We are independent of the system that steals
the fruits of our labors and tells us that we are dependent on this organized theft.
And yet we don't revolt. The problem with sovereignty since Thomas Hobbes is that we are presented
with two choices: the current political structure, or the chance that things could be worse. Much
worse. Presented with this choice, we opt for what is merely bad to avoid the worst. We lack political imagination,
hope, and faith in others so we won't continue to be blackmailed to accept the bad lot we are presently given by
politics today. We don't recognize how the structure channeling our productivity into a form that can
be captured and stolen is a parasite feeding off of what we create. The structure is represented
as a product of either knowledge or necessity, rather than as a system of oppression, and we
lack a proper critical consciousness to see through this misrepresentation. The system of
exploitation needs to be represented for what it is. Finally, and this is one of the most significant contributions
of Commonwealth, we need the perseverance to see through an effort to put in place something
better than what we have at present. We lack the capacity currently to become otherwise than we
presently are, and we lack the institutions to sustain us in this revolutionary endeavor.
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Alternative/Solvency – Becoming Minor/Woman
Alternative – we must divest from the infrastructure of the state and corporate form and
become-minority. We think we should make new connections, and use space in ways that the
USFG or the market would not appreciate. We should engage in a different kind of politics
than the rigged game of the Affirmative and become a war machine against Empire. Becoming
minority is a divestment from the axiom of gridded space in favor of embracing the multiplicity
of our relations with the world and each other. We negate the idea that the market or the state
will save us in favor of recognizing how we are always already saving ourselves.
Deleuze & Guattari 1987 [Giles & Felix, nomads of the universe, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Shizophrenia, 469-71]
6. Minorities. Ours is becoming the age of minorities. We have seen several times that minorities are not
necessarily defined by the smallness of their numbers but rather by becoming or a line of fluctuation, in
other words, by the gap that separates them from this or that axiom constituting a redundant
majority ("Ulysses, or today's average, urban European"; or as Yann Moulier says, "the national Worker,
qualified, male and over thirty-five"). A minority can be small in number; but it can also be the
largest in number, constitute an absolute, indefinite majority. That is the situation when authors,
even those supposedly on the Left, repeat the great capitalist warning cry: in twenty years,
"whites" will form only 12 percent of the world population. . . Thus they are not content to say that the
majority will change, or has already changed, but say that it is impinged upon by a nondenumerable and
proliferating minority that threatens to destroy the very concept of majority, in other words, the
majority as an axiom. And the curious concept of nonwhite does not in fact constitute a denumerable set. What defines a
minority, then, is not the number but the relations internal to the number. A minority can be numerous, or even infinite; so
can a majority. What distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the relation internal to the number
constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite, but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a
nondenumerable set, however many elements it may have. What characterizes the nondenumerable is neither
the set nor its elements ; rather, it is the connection, the "and" produced between elements ,
between sets, and which belongs to neither, which eludes them and constitutes a line of flight.
The axiomatic manipulates only denumerable sets, even infinite ones, whereas the minorities constitute "fuzzy,"
nondenumerable, nonaxiomizable sets, in short, "masses," multiplicities of escape and flux.
Whether it be the infinite set of the nonwhites of the periphery, or the restricted set of the
Basques, Corsicans, etc., everywhere we look we see the conditions for a worldwide movement: the
minorities recreate "nationalitarian" phenomena that the nation-states had been charged with controlling and quashing. The
bureaucratic socialist sector is certainly not spared by these movements, and as Amalrik said, the dissidents are nothing, or
serve only as pawns in international politics, if they are abstracted from the minorities working the USSR. It matters
little that the minorities are incapable of constituting viable States from the point of view of the
axiomatic and the market, since in the long run they promote compositions that do not pass by
way of the capitalist economy any more than they do the State-form. The response of the States, or of
the axiomatic, may obviously be to accord the minorities regional or federal or statutory autonomy, in short, to add axioms.
But this is not the problem: this operation consists only in translating the minorities into denumerable sets or subsets, which
would enter as elements into the majority, which could be counted among the majority. The same applies for a status
accorded to women, young people, erratic workers, etc. One could even imagine, in blood and crisis, a more radical
reversal that would make the white world the periphery of a yellow world; there would doubtless be an entirely different
axiomatic. But what we are talking about is something else, something even that would not resolve: women, nonmen,
as a minority, as a nondenumerable flow or set, would receive no adequate expression by
becoming elements of the majority, in other words, by becoming a denumerable finite set. Nonwhites would
receive no adequate expression by becoming a new yellow or black majority, an infinite denumerable
set. What is proper to the minority is to assert a power of the nondenumerable, even if that minority is composed of
a single member. That is the formula for multiplicities. Minority as a universal figure, or becomingeverybody/everything (devenir tout le monde). Woman: we all have to become that, whether we are
male or female. Non-white: we all have to become that, whether we are white, yellow, or black.
Once again, this is not to say that the struggle on the level of the axioms is without importance; on
the contrary, it is determining (at the most diverse levels: women's struggle for the vote, for abortion, for jobs; the
struggle of the regions for autonomy; the struggle of the Third World; the struggle of the oppressed masses and minorities in
the East or West...). But there is also always a sign to indicate that these struggles are the index of
another, coexistent combat. However modest the demand, it always constitutes a point that the
axiomatic cannot tolerate: when people demand to formulate their problems themselves , and to
determine at least the particular conditions under which they can receive a more general solution (hold to the Particular as
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an innovative form). It is always astounding to see the same story repeated: the modesty of the
minorities' initial demands, coupled with the impotence of the axiomatic to resolve the slightest
corresponding problem. In short, the struggle around axioms is most important when it manifests, itself opens, the
gap between two types of propositions, propositions of flow and propositions of axioms. The power of the minorities
is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt within the majority system ,
nor even to reverse the necessarily tautological criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the
force of the non-denumerable sets, however small they may be, against the denumerable sets, even
if they are infinite, reversed, or changed, even they if imply new axioms or, beyond that, a new axiomatic. The issue is
not at all anarchy versus organization, nor even centralism versus decentralization, but a
calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets.
Such a calculus may have its own compositions, organizations, even centralizations; nevertheless, it proceeds not
via the States or the axiomatic process but via a pure becoming of minorities.
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State Action Bad
We are the coded. Becoming uncoded requires more than state action- it requires walking in
another’s shoes, even if we do not like the person whose path we are taking. Staying coded
doesn’t allow for the recognition of others.
Deleuze '4 (Gilles. Desert Islands and other texts. p. 252-260)
We are familiar with the great instruments of encoding; societies are not that different in this
respect; there are only so many means of encoding at their disposal. The three principle means are: the law, the
contract, and the institution. For example, the relationship to books which people have or have had exhibits all three. There are books of law: here the relation of the
reader to the book passes through the law. In particular, moreover, they are called codes, canons, or sacred books. And the other sort of book you have passes
through the contract, the bourgeois contractual relation. This other book is the basis of secular literature and book-selling: I purchase, and you give me something to
read—a contractual relation in which everyone is caught: author, publisher, reader. And there is the third sort of book, the political book, preferably revolutionary,
which is presented as a book of institutions, either present or to come. You find every possible combination of the three: contractual or institutional books considered
sacred, etc. This
is because every type of code is so present, and so underlies every other code, that
we find each in the other. Take an entirely different example: madness. The attempt to encode madness has been carried out in three forms. First,
the forms of law, i.e. the hospital, the asylum—this is the repressive code, locking someone away, but the old style of locking someone away, which is destined to
become a last hope, when people will say: "those were the good old days when they used to lock us away, because much worse is in store for us." And then you
have this brilliant move which was psychoanalysis: it was understood that there were people who escaped the bourgeois contractual relation as it was man- ifested in
medicine, and those people were the disturbed, because they couldn't be contractual parties, they were juridically "incapable." Freud's stroke of genius was to get at
least some of the disturbed, in the largest sense of the word, the neurotics, to pass through the contractual relation, proving that a contract with such people could be
done (thus he abandons hypnosis). This is finally the novelty of psychoanalysis: Freud was the first to introduce into psychiatry the bourgeois contractual relation
which up to that point had been excluded from psychiatry. And then there are the still more recent attempts to encode madness, whose political implications, and at
times revolutionary ambitions, are clear; such attempts are called institutional. In this case, we find the triple means of encoding: either it will be the law, or if it is not
the law, it will be the contractual relation; if not the contractual relation, it will be the institution. And it is thanks to these encodings that our bureaucracies flourish.
Faced with the way in which our societies come uncoded, codes leaking away on every side,
Nietzsche does not try to perform a recoding. He says: this hasn't yet gone far enough, you're nothing but children ("the equalization
of European individuals is the great irreversible process: we should accelerate it still more.") In terms of what he writes and thinks, Nietzsche's
enterprise is an attempt at uncoding, not in the sense of a relative uncoding which would be the
decoding of codes past, present, or future, but an absolute encoding—to get something through
which is not encodable, to mix up all the codes. It is not so easy to mix up all the codes, even at the level of the simplest writing,
and language. The similarity I see here is with Kafka, what Kafka does with German, in accordance with the linguistic situation of the Jews in Prague: he builds a warmachine in German against German; through sheer indetermination and sobriety, he gets something through in the German code which had never been heard
before. Nietzsche, for his part, wants to be or sees himself as Polish with respect to German. He seizes on German to build a war-machine which will get something
through that will be uncodable in German. That's what style as politics means. More generally, how do we characterize such thought, which claims to get its flows
through, underneath the laws by challenging them, and underneath contractual relations by contradicting them, and underneath institutions by parodying them? Let
me come back quickly to the example of psychoanalysis. In what respect does a psychoanalyst as original as Melanie Klein still remain within the psychoanalytic
system? She explains it herself quite well: the partial objects that she tells us about, with their explosions, their flows, etc., are only fantasy. The patients bring lived
experiences, intensely lived experiences, to Melanie Klein and she translates them into fantasy. There you have a contract, specifically a contract: give me your lived
experiences, and I will give you fantasies. And the contract implies an exchange, an exchange of money and words. In this respect, a
psychoanalyst like Winnicott truly occupies the limit of psychoanalysis, because he feels that this procedure is no longer appropriate after a certain point. There
comes a point where it is no longer about translating, or interpreting, translating into fantasies, interpreting into signifiers and signifieds—no, not in the least.
There comes a point where you will have to share, have to put yourself in the patient's shoes, go
all the way, and share his experience. Is it about a kind of sympathy, or empathy, or identification? But surely it's more complicated than
that. What we feel is rather the necessity of a relation that would be neither legal, nor contractual, nor institutional. That's how it is with Nietzsche. We read an
texts like that cannot be understood by the
establishment or the application of a law, or by the offer of a contractual relation, or by the
foundation of an institution. Perhaps the only conceivable equivalent is something like "being in
the same boat." Something of Pascal turned against Pascal. We're in the same boat: a sort of
lifeboat, bombs falling on every side, the lifeboat drifts toward subterranean rivers of ice, or
toward rivers of fire, the Orenoco, the Amazon, everyone is pulling an oar, and we're not even supposed to like one
another, we fight, we eat each other. Everyone pulling an oar is sharing, sharing something,
beyond any law, any contract, any institution. Drifting, a drifting movement or
"deterritorialization": I say all this in a vague, confused way, since this is an hypothesis or a vague impression on the originality of Nietzsche's texts. A
aphorism or a poem from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But materially and formally,
new kind of book. So what are the characteristics of a Nietzschean aphorism that give this impression? There is one in particular that Maurice Blanchot has brought
to light in The Infinite Conversation? It is the relation with the outside. Indeed, when we open at random one of Nietzsche's texts, it is one of the first times we no
longer pass through an interior, whether it is the interior of the soul or consciousness, the interior of essence or the concept, in other words, that which has always
constituted the principle of philosophy. What constitutes the style of philosophy is that the relation to the exterior is always mediated and dissolved by an interior, in
an interior. On the contrary, Nietzsche grounds thought, and writing, in an immediate relation with the outside. What is this: a beautiful painting or a beautiful
drawing? There
is a frame. An aphorism has a frame, too. But whatever is in the frame, at what point
does it become beautiful? At the moment one knows and feels that the movement, that the line
which is framed comes from elsewhere, that it does not begin within the limits of the frame. It
began above, or next to the frame, and the line traverses the frame. As in Godard's film, you paint the painting with the
wall. Far from being the limitation of the pictorial surface, the frame is almost the opposite, putting
it into immediate relation with the outside. However, hooking up thought to the outside is, strictly speaking, something philosophers
have never done, even when they were talking about politics, even when they were talking about taking a walk or fresh air. It is not enough to talk about fresh air, to
talk about the exterior if you want to hook thought up directly and immediately to the outside. "...They show up like destiny, without cause or reason, without
consideration or pretext, there they are with the speed of lightning, too terrible, too sudden, too conquering, too other even to be an object of hatred..." This is
Nietzsche's famous text on the founders of States, "those artists with eyes of bronze" (The Genealogy of Morals, II, 17). Or is it Kafka, writing The Great Wall of
China?. "It's impossible to understand how they made it all the way to the capital, which is nonetheless quite far from the frontier. But there they are, and every
morning seems to increase their number. [...] Impossible to converse with them. They don't know our language. [...] Even their horses are meat-eaters!"4 Well then,
what I am saying is that texts
like these are traversed by a movement which comes from the outside, which
does not begin in the page of the book, nor in the preceding pages, which does not fit in the
frame of the book, and which is totally different from the imaginary movement of representations
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or the abstract movement of concepts as they are wont to take place through words and in the
reader's head. Something leaps from the book, making contact with a pure outside. It is this, I believe, which for Nietzsche's work is the right to misinterpret.
An aphorism is a play of forces, a state of forces which are always exterior to one another. An aphorism doesn't mean anything, it
signifies nothing, and no more has a signifier than a signified. Those would be ways of restoring
a text's interiority. An aphorism is a state of forces, the last of which, meaning at once the most recent, the most actual, and the
provisional-ultimate, is the most external. Nietzsche posits it quite clearly: if you want to know what I mean, find the force that
gives what I say meaning, and a new meaning if need be. Hook the text up to this force. In this way, there are no problems of
interpretation for Nietzsche, there are only problems of machining: to machine Nietzsche's text, to find out which actual external force will get something through, like
a current of energy. In this respect, we come across the problem raised by some of Nietzsche's texts which have a fascist or anti-Semitic resonance... And since we
are discussing Nietzsche today, we must acknowledge that he has inspired and inspires still many a young fascist. There was a time when it was important to show
how Nietzsche was used, twisted, and completely distorted by the fascists. This was done in the revue Acephale, with Jean Wahl, Bataille, and Klossowski. Today,
however, this is perhaps no longer the problem. It is not at the level of the text that we must fight. Not because we are incapable of fighting at that level, but because
such a fight is no longer useful. Rather,
we must find, assign, join those external forces which give to any
particular Nietzschean phrase its liberating meaning, its sense of exteriority. It is at the level of method that the
question of Nietzsche's revolutionary character is raised: it is the Nietzschean method that makes Nietzsche's text not something about which we have to ask: "is this
fascist, bourgeois, or revolutionary in itself?"—but a field of exteriority where fascist, bourgeois, and revolutionary forces confront one another. And if we pose the
problem in this way, the answer that necessarily conforms with the method is: find the revolu- tionary force (who is superman?) always calling on new forces which
come from the exterior, and which traverse and intersect with the Nietzschean text in the frame of the aphorism. There is your legitimate misinterpretation: to
treat the aphorism like a phenomenon awaiting new forces that will "subjugate" it or make it
work or explode. The aphorism is not only relation with the outside. Its second characteristic is relation with the intensive. And they're the same thing.
Klossowski and Lyotard have said all there is to say on the matter. What I said about lived experiences a moment ago, how
they mustn't be translated into representations or fantasies, how they mustn't be made to pass
through the codes of law, contract, or institution, they mustn't be cashed in—it's quite the
opposite: they must be treated as flows which carry us always farther out, ever further toward
the exterior; this is precisely intensity, or intensities. The lived experience is not subjective, or
not necessarily. It is not of the individual. It is flow and the interruption of flow, since each
intensity is necessarily in relation to another intensity, in such a way that something gets
through. This is what is underneath the codes, what escapes them, and what the codes want to
translate, convert, cash in. But what Nietzsche is trying to tell us by this writing of intensities is: don't exchange the intensity for representations.
The intensity sends you back neither to signifieds which would be like the representations of things, nor to signifiers which would be like the representations of words.
So in what does intensity consist, as both agent and object of uncoding? This is where Nietzsche is at his most mysterious. The intensity has to do with proper
names, and these are neither representations of things (or persons), nor representations of words. Whether they are collective or individual names, the pre-Socratics,
the Romans, the Jews, Christ, the Anti-Christ, Julius Caesar, Borgia, Zarathoustra, all the proper names which come and go in Nietzsche's texts are neither signifiers
or signifieds, but designate intensities on a body which can be the body of the Earth, the body of the book, as well as Nietzsche's own suffering body: I am every
name in history... There is a kind of nomadism, a perpetual migration of the intensities designated by proper names, and these interpenetrate one another as they are
lived on a full body. The intensity can be lived only in relation to its mobile inscription on a body, and to the moving exteriority of a proper name, and this is what it
means for a proper name to be always a mask, the mask of an operator. The relation of the aphorism to humor and irony is the third point. Whoever reads Nietzsche
without laughing, and laughing heartily and often and sometimes hysterically, is almost not reading Nietzsche at all. This is true not only for Nietzsche, but for all the
authors who comprise the same horizon of our counter-culture. What shows us our own decadence and degeneracy is the way we feel the need to read in them
anguish, solitude, guilt, the drama of communication, the whole tragedy of interiority. Even Max Brod tells us how the audience would laugh hysterically when Kafka
used to read The Trial. And Beckett, I mean, it is difficult not to laugh when you read him, moving from one joyful moment to the next. Laughter, not the signifier.
What springs from great books is schizo-laughter or revolutionary joy, not the anguish of our pathetic narcissism, not the terror of our guilt. Call it the "comedy of the
superhuman," or the "clowning of God." There is always an indescribable joy that springs from great books, even when they speak of ugly, desperate, or terrifying
things. The transmutation already takes effect with every great book, and every great book constitutes the health of tomorrow. You cannot help but laugh when you
mix up the codes. If you put thought in relation to the outside, Dionysian moments of laughter will erupt, and this is thinking in the clear air. It often happens that
Nietzsche comes face to face with something sickening, ignoble, disgusting. Well, Nietzsche thinks it's funny, and he would add fuel to the fire if he could. He says:
keep going, it's still not disgusting enough. Or he says: excellent, how disgusting, what a marvel, what a masterpiece, a poisonous flower, finally the "human species
is getting interesting." For example, this is how Nietzsche looks at and deals with what he calls unhappy consciousness. Thus, there are the Hegelian commentators,
those commentators of interiority, who really have no sense of humor. They say: you see, Nietzsche takes the unhappy consciousness seriously; he makes it one of
the moments in the becoming-spirit of spirituality. They pass over quickly what Nietzsche makes of spirituality because they sense the danger. So we see that while
Nietzsche entitles legitimate misinterpretations, there are also misinterpretations which are totally illegitimate, those which are explained by the spirit of seriousness,
by the spirit of gravity, by the monkey of Zarathoustra, in other words, by the cult of interiority. Laughter in Nietzsche always harks back to the external movement of
humors and ironies, and this is the movement of intensities, as Klossowski and Lyotard have made clear: the way in which there is a play of high and low intensities,
the one in the other, such that a low intensity can undermine the highest intensity and even be as high as the highest, and vice versa. This play of levels of intensity
controls the peaks of irony and the valleys of humor in Nietzsche, and it is developed as the consistency or the quality of what is lived in relation to the exterior. An
aphorism is the pure matter of laughter and joy. If you cannot find something to make you laugh in an aphorism, a distribution of irony and humor, a partition of
intensities, then you have found nothing. There is one last point. Let's come back to that great text, The Genealogy of Morals, on the State and the founders of
empires: "They show up like destiny, without cause or reason...." In this we recognize the men of that social production known as Asiatic. On the foundation of
primitive rural communities, the despot sets up his imperial machine which over-codes everything, with a bureaucracy, an administration that organizes major
enterprises and appropriates the surplus work for itself ("wherever they appear, in no time at all you find something new, a sovereign machinery that has come alive,
in which every part, every function is defined and determined with respect to the whole...")- But we can ask ourselves whether this text does not bring together two
forces that are in other ways distinct—which Kafka, for his part, kept separate and even opposed in The Great Wall of China. Because when we seek to learn how
primitive segmentary communities gave way to other formations of sovereignty, a question which Nietzsche raises in the second essay of his Genealogy, we see two
It is true that rural communities at their center are
caught and transfixed in the despot's bureaucratic machine, with its scribes, its priests, its
bureaucrats; but on the periphery, the communities embark on another kind of adventure,
display another kind of unity, a nomadic unity, and engage in a nomadic war-machine, and they
tend to come uncoded rather than being coded over. Entire groups take off on a nomadic
adventure: archeologist have taught us to consider nomadism not as an originary state, but as an adventure that erupts in sedentary groups; it is the call of the
phenomena produced which are strictly correlative, but quite different.
outside, it is movement. The nomad and his war-machine stand opposite the despot and his administrative machine, and the extrinsic nomadic unity opposite the
intrinsic despotic unity. And yet they are so interrelated or interdependent that the despot will set himself the problem of integrating, internalizing the nomadic warmachine, while the nomad attempts to invent an administration for his conquered empire. Their ceaseless opposition is such that they are inextricable from one
another. Imperial unity gave birth to philosophical discourse, through many an avatar, the same avatars which lead us from imperial formations to the Greek citystate. Even in the Greek city-state, philosophical discourse maintains an essential relation to the despot or the shadow of a despot, to imperialism, to the
administration of things and persons (you will find ample evidence in the books by Strauss and Kojeve on tyranny).5 Philosophical discourse has always maintained
an essential relation to the law, the institution, and the contract, all of which are the Sovereign's problem, traversing the ages of sedentary history from despotic
formations to democracies. The "signifier" is in fact the latest philosophical avatar of the despot. And if Nietzsche does not belong in philosophy, perhaps it is because
he is the first to conceive of another kind of discourse, a counter-philosophy, in other words, a
discourse that is first and foremost nomadic, whose utterances would be produced not by a
rational administrative machine—philosophers would be the bureaucrats of pure reason—but by
a mobile war-machine. Perhaps this is what Nietzsche means when he says that a new politics
begins with him (Klossowki calls it the conspiracy against his own class). We know all too well that nomads are unhappy in our regimes: we use any
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means necessary to pin them down, so they lead a troubled life. And Nietzsche lived like a nomad, reduced to this shadow, wandering from one furnished room to
another. But also, the nomad is not necessarily someone who moves around: some journeys take place in the same place, they're journeys in intensi- ty, and even
the nomadic adventure begins
when they seek to stay in the same place by escaping the codes. As we know, the revolutionary
problem today is to find some unity in our various struggles without falling back on the despotic
and bureaucratic organization of the party or State , apparatus: we want a war-machine that would not recreate a State
historically speaking, nomads don't move around like migrants. On the contrary, nomads are motionless, and
apparatus, a nomadic unity in relation with the Outside, that would not recreate the despotic internal unity. This is perhaps Nietzsche at his most profound, a measure
of his break with philosophy, as it appears in the aphorism: to have made a war-machine of thought, to have made thought a nomadic power. And even if the journey
goes nowhere, even if it takes place in the same place, imperceptible, unlooked for, underground, we must ask: who are today's nomads, who are today's
Nietzscheans?
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Civil Society Bad
Policing the space – keep black people in their place. Goes ignored. White civil society is
fucked.
Martinot & Sexton 2003 [Steve & Jared, Steve is a lecturer at San Francisco State University in the Center for
Interdisciplinary Programs Jared is Associate Professor African American Studies School of Humanities Associate
Professor, Film & Media Studies School of Humanities at UC Irvine Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley,
Comparative Ethnic Studies, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003
p.171-172]
They prowl, categorising and profiling, often turning those profiles into murderous violence
without (serious) fear of being called to account, all the while claiming impunity. What jars the
imagination is not the fact of impunity itself, but the realisation that they are simply people working a job, a job they secured
by making an application at the personnel office. In events such as the shooting of Amadou Diallo, the true excessiveness is
not in the massiveness of the shooting, but in the fact that these cops were there on the street looking for this event in the
first place, as a matter of routine business. This spectacular evil is encased in a more inarticulable evil of
banality, namely, that the state assigns certain individuals to (well-paying) jobs as hunters of
human beings, a furtive protocol for which this shooting is simply the effect. But they do more than prowl. They
make problematic the whole notion of social responsibility such that we no longer know if the police are
responsible to the judiciary and local administration or if the city is actually responsible to them,
duty bound by impunity itself. To the extent to which the police are a law unto themselves, the
latter would have to be the case. This unaccountable vector of inverted social responsibility
would resonate in the operating procedures in upper levels of civil administration as well. That
is, civil governmental structures would act in accordance with the paradigm of policing— wanton
violence legitimised by strict conformity to procedural regulations. For instance, consider the recent case of a 12year-old African-American boy sentenced to prison for life without parole for having killed a 6-year-old African-American girl while acting out the moves he had seen
in professional wrestling matches on TV. In demanding this sentence, the prosecutor argued that the boy was a permanent menace to society and had killed the girl
out of extreme malice and consciousness of what he was doing. A 12-year-old child, yet Lionel Tate was given life without parole. In the name of social sanctity, the
judicial system successfully terrorised yet another human being, his friends, and relatives by carrying its proceduralism to the limit. The corporate media did the rest;
several ‘commentators’ ridiculed Tate’s claim to have imitated wrestling moves, rewriting his statement as a disreputable excuse: ‘pro wrestling made me do it’ (San
Francisco Chronicle, 25 March 2001). Thus, they transformed his naive awareness of bodies into intentional weaponry and cunning. One could surmise, with greater
justification than surmising the malice of the child, that the prosecutor made a significant career step by getting this high-profile conviction. Beyond the promotion he
would secure for a job well done, beyond the mechanical performance of official outrage and the cynicism exhibited in playing the role, what animus drove the
prosecutor to demand such a sentence? In the face of the prosecution’s sanctimonious excess, those who bear witness to Tate’s suffering have only inarticulate
With recourse only to the usual rhetorical expletives about racism, the
procedural ritualism of this white supremacist operation has confronted them with the absence
of a real means of discerning the judiciary’s dissimulated machinations. The prosecutor was the
banal functionary of a civil structure, a paradigmatic exercise of wanton violence that parades as
moral rectitude but whose source is the paradigm of policing. All attempts to explain the
malicious standard operating procedure of US white supremacy find themselves hamstrung by
conceptual inadequacy; it remains describable, but not comprehensible. The story can be told, as the
outrage to offer as consolation.
41 bullets fired to slaughter Diallo can be counted, but the ethical meaning remains beyond the discursive resources of civil
society, outside the framework for thinkable thought. It is, of course, possible to speak out against such white supremacist
violence as immoral, as illegal, even unconstitutional. But the impossibility of thinking through to the ethical dimension has a
hidden structural effect. For those who are not racially profiled or tortured when arrested, who are not
tried and sentenced with the presumption of guilt, who are not shot reaching for their
identification, all of this is imminently ignorable. Between the inability to see and the refusal to
acknowledge, a mode of social organisation is being cultivated for which the paradigm of
policing is the cutting edge. We shall have to look beyond racialised police violence to see its logic. The
impunity of racist police violence is the first implication of its ignorability to white civil society.
The ignorability of police impunity is what renders it inarticulable outside of that hegemonic
formation. If ethics is possible for white civil society within its social discourses, it is rendered
irrelevant to the systematic violence deployed against the outside precisely because it is
ignorable. Indeed, that ignorability becomes the condition of possibility for the ethical coherence of the inside. The
dichotomy between a white ethical dimension and its irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is the very structure of
racialisation today. It is a twin structure, a regime of violence that operates in two registers, terror
and the seduction into the fraudulent ethics of social order; a double economy of terror,
structured by a ritual of incessant performance. And into the gap between them, common sense, which cannot
account for the double register or twin structure of this ritual, disappears into incomprehensibility. The language of common
sense, through which we bespeak our social world in the most common way, leaves us speechless before the enormity of
the usual, of the business of civil procedures.
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A/T: Cap K
AT: Cap K - Control societies reinforce and replicates capitalism. By resisting the means by
which capitalist appropriations regulate society the flow of capitalism can be disrupted
Deleuze, 1990 (Gilles, French philosophers, “Postscript on Control Societies”, Negotiations, 180-181)
It's easy to set up a correspondence between any society and some kind of machine, which isn't to say that their
machines determine different kinds of society but that they express the social forms capable of producing them and making
use of them. The old sovereign societies worked with simple machines, levers, pulleys, clocks; but recent disciplinary
societies were equipped with thermodynamic machines presenting the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of
sabotage; control societies function with a third generation of machines, with information technology and
computers, where the passive danger is noise and the active, piracy and viral contamination. This technological
development is more deeply rooted in a mutation of capitalism. The mutation has been widely recognized and can be
summarized as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism was concentrative, directed toward production, and proprietorial. Thus
it made the factory into a site of confinement, with the capitalist owning the means of production and perhaps owning other
similarly organized sites (worker's homes, schools). As for markets, they were won either through specialization, through
colonization, or through reducing the costs of production. But capitalism in its present form is no longer directed toward
production, which is often transferred to remote parts of the Third World, even in the case of complex operations like textile
plants, steelworks, and oil refineries. It's directed toward metaproduction. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer
sells finished products: it buys finished products or assembles them from parts. What it seeks to sell is services, and what it
seeks to buy, activities. It's a capitalism no longer directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or
markets. Thus it's essentially dispersive, with factories giving way to businesses. Family, school, army, and factory
are no longer so many analogous but different sites converging in an owner, whether the state or some private power,
but transmutable or transformable coded configurations of a single business where the only people left are administrators.
Even art has moved away from closed sites and into the open circuits of banking. Markets are won by taking control rather
than by establishing a discipline, by fixing rates rather than by reducing costs, by transforming products rather than by
specializing production. Corruption here takes on a new power. The sales department becomes a business center or "soul."
We're told businesses have souls, which is surely the most terrifying news in the world. Marketing is now the instrument
of social control and produce-- the arrogant breed who are our masters. Control is short-term and rapidly shifting,
but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite, and discontinuous. A
man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt. One thing, it's true, hasn't
changed--capitalism still keeps three quarters of humanity in extreme poverty, too poor to have debts and too numerous to
be confined: control will have to deal not only with vanishing frontiers, but with mushrooming shantytowns and ghettos.
Program
We don't have to stray into science fiction to find a control mechanism that can fix the position of any element at
any given moment-- an animal in a game reserve, a man in a business. Felix Guattari has imagined a town where
anyone can leave their flat, their street their neighborhood, using their (dividual) electronic card that opens this or that
barrier; but the card may also be rejected on a particular day, or between certain times of day; it doesn't depend on the
barrier but on the computer that is making sure everyone is in a permissible place, and effecting a universal modulation.
We ought to establish the basic sociotechnological principles of control mechanisms as their age dawns, and
describe in these terms what is already taking the place of the disciplinary sites of confinement that everyone says
are breaking down. It may be that older means of control, borrowed from the old sovereign societies, will come back into
play, adapted as necessary. The key thing is that we're at the beginning of something new. In the prison system: the
attempt to find "alternatives" to custody, at least for minor offenses, and the use of electronic tagging to force offenders to
stay at home between certain hours. In the school system: forms of continuous assessment, the impact of continuing
education on schools, and the related move away from any research in universities, "business" being brought into education
at every level. In the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctors or patients" that identifies potential cases and
subjects at risk and is nothing to do with any progress toward individualizing treatment, which is how it's presented, but is
the substitution for individual or numbered bodies of coded "dividual" matter to be controlled. In the business system: new
ways of manipulating money, products, and men, no longer channeled through the old factory system. This is a fairly limited
range of examples, but enough to convey what it means to talk of institutions breaking down: the widespread progressive
introduction of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions is whether trade unions still have
any role: linked throughout their history to the struggle against disciplines, in sites of confinement, can they adapt,
or will they give way to new forms of resistance against control societies? Can one already glimpse the outlines of
these future forms of resistance, capable of standing up to marketing's blandishments? Many young people have a
strange craving to be "motivated," they're always asking for special courses and continuing education; it's their
job to discover whose ends these serve, just as older people discovered, with considerable difficulty, who was
benefiting from disciplines. A snake's coils are even more intricate than a mole's burrow.
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A/T: THE MARXISM K
Purist notions of revolution are bullshit
Passavant 2010 [Paul, Paul A. Passavant is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith
Colleges. He is the author of No Escape: Freedom of Speech and the Paradox of Rights (NYU Press, 2002), and the
editor (with Jodi Dean) of Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (Routledge, 2004). He is also the author of
numerous essays in law and political theory, including "The Strong Neo-liberal State: Crime, Consumption, and
Governance," which appeared in Theory & Event 8:3 (2005). “Theory, Political Manifesto,” Theory & Event, vol. 13,
issue 4]
The paradox afflicting radically democratic efforts (those sharing some sort of a relation to the Marxist legacy) to change our
collectively worsening political and economic lives is the following. Political concepts and institutions like law, the state,
and systems of representation, or "sovereignty," have stunted our capacity to imagine being otherwise.
"Discipline" has increased the capacity of labor, hence the profits extracted from those who labor. Institutions
organize and stabilize these exploitive systems. In order to reject, totally, systems of exploitation, some may be tempted
to eschew not only the substantive concepts and institutions that have captured us and then fooled us into accepting our
capture as the best life has to offer, but transcendentals, discipline and institutions period. The obsession with revolutionary
purity can become messianic, satisfied with nothing less than seeking or waiting for entirely new grounds to begin life again,
ones that are totally unrelated to, and uncontaminated by, the corruption that has preceded us and gives place to us. Or,
this kind of obsessive purity can itself capture revolutionary energies and keep them suspended in (re)enacting
"spontaneous" revolt and destructive violence, since any "structure" would be a limit to life's unthinkable potential. In
refusing all limits, however, this manner of "revolution" becomes infinitely destructive of efforts to constitute and conserve
better ways for us to be, collectively. It is self-immolating or suicidal. Yet, in seeking to institutionalize democratic gains
against reaction, to support economies sustaining our collective welfare and happiness against necessity and the
fearfulness necessity breeds, to create the new political subjects capable of sharing in these collective efforts, and the
institutions that will sustain these new political subjects, do we not risk limiting our potential if we repress some possibilities,
and if we create institutions that appear differentiated from, if not alien to, certain life flows? Is this not another manner of
suicide? In sum, to choose the first option, we are led to reject what we have, winding up with nothing, and if we choose the
second, we risk winding up becoming that which we set out to refuse.
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Queering Space Good
We make queer space – find multiple uses for space. The confrontational use of space of our
project is necessary for politics. To grid space is to cede the political, to use space in the
proper way is to push us back in the closet. Also, no perm – it’s not about the possibility for
us to all queer space. We queer space and embrace the possibility of doing so. The AFF
forecloses this possibility and then attempts to take our queer space and to assimilate it into
the politics of the AFF.
Reed 1996 [Christopher, Professor of English and Visual Culture @ Penn State, “Imminent Domain: Queer Space in
the Built Environment,” Art Journal, Vol. 55, No. 4, We're Here: Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art History
(Winter, 1996), pp. 64-70]
Such arguments contain a kernel of truth: queer space is the collective creation of queer people. But that
doesn't mean it disappears when we leave. I am interested in the way our traces remain to mark
certain spaces for others-to their delight or discomfort-to discover. Gianni and Weir, in contrast, propose
an invisible queerness. They accept that in the suburbs, "difference is accommodated as long as it
is kept out of sight." Their design refrains from "breaching the social contract of community consensus." Its
queerness is "not visible on the exterior." This they call "playing it straight." But playing it straight is not
queer at all, not in your face (the phrase implies a visual confrontation) and is perilously close to the closet
(a withdrawal from contested space). In fact, studies of so-called suburban homosexuals correlate their
rejection of queer neighborhoods with closeting and with attitudes described as apolitical,
"intensely individualist and assimilationist."4 I am unwilling to cede the constitutive potential of
queer space, especially at a time when some spaces-gay neighborhoods and lesbian communes,
for instance-signify queerness clearly enough to come under homophobic attack.5
Arguments for the impossibility of queer space rely on a false binary, one that has been ably critiqued as
a myth of spatial immanence and a fallacy of spatial relativism. The first is the notion, self-evidently bizarre on close
inspection... that there is a singular, true reading of any specific landscape involved in the
mediation of identity. On the other hand, it is invidious and disingenuous to suggest that each and every reading of a
specific landscape is of equal value or of equal validity; such notions lead to an entirely relativist notion of spatiality.6
In short, no space is totally queer or completely unqueerable, but some spaces are queerer than
others. The term I propose for queer space is imminent: rooted in the Latin imminere, to loom
over or threaten, it means ready to take place. For both advocates and opponents, the notion of queerness is
threatening indeed. More fundamentally, queer space is space in the process of, literally, taking place, of
claiming territory.
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Queer Space Good
Queer Space is sweet! They keep trying to make us look straight! Stop telling me to
assimilate! <re-tag>
Reed 1996 [Christopher, Professor of English and Visual Culture @ Penn State, “Imminent Domain: Queer Space in
the Built Environment,” Art Journal, Vol. 55, No. 4, We're Here: Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art History
(Winter, 1996), pp. 64-70]
The unrecognizability of the Homomonument as art links it to vernacular queer monuments in many cities. One of the most
touching examples of queer space I know lies along the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago's Lincoln Park. There a series of
carefully tended little gardens abutting the gay sunbathing area are dedicated (for instance, with a red ribbon painted on a
rock) to the memory of the community's dead. Colorful graffiti marks the shoreline rocks with rainbow flags, quotations from
queer books, and names of famous queers (fig. 3). The pounding winter surf makes the perseverance of the gardens and
graffiti evidence of constant work by many hands. On hot summer weekends, this space is the center of a queer spectacle
of nearly naked flesh and competing boom boxes; on rainy, cooler days the space remains as a physical index of queerness
within the normative public (read straight) realm of the park.
More than formal monuments, such collective and ad hoc interventions into the landscape typify the spaces of queer
community. It is important to stress the novelty of 66 such signs, however. In the seventies an architecture journal
bemoaned "the almost total invisibility of gay life in LA," while a study of the shuttered and camouflaged street facades,
mazelike entryways, and intimidating signage of gay and lesbian bars concluded that these spaces "incorporate and reflect
certain characteristics of the gay community: secrecy and stigmatization. They do not accommodate the eyes of outsiders,
they have low imageability." 9 This look (or antilook) characterized not only bars, but the women's bookstores and cafes of
the 1970s that, in the name of safety, faced the public with barriers, curtained windows, and intimidating signage. By the
early 1990s, however, academic studies and popular media alike were noting the adaptation of "Queer Street [to] an
increasingly confident generation of lesbians and gay men whose sense of Pride means that they want to be visible."'
Scholars in a variety of fields have documented the historical formation, physical boundaries, and social structures of such
neighborhoods. Their standard methods privilege verbal and quantifiable data, however, overlooking issues of symbolic
space. The more avant-garde methodologies of cultural geography are worse, evincing an outright spectophobia that
disdains "visual presencing" in favor of imagined space.12 Thus the claim that "there are no public expressions of lesbian
sexualities; no mark on the landscape that 'lesbians live here.'"13 Queer space is short-changed either way. The
conventional scholarship homogenizes queer space, often ignoring nonresidents who seek out such neighborhoods to
socialize and shop, thus overlooking the way demographically gay or lesbian neighborhoods become home to a wide variety
of queers. This shortcoming grows more important as the waning of seventies separatism imposes-or, arguably, restores-a
queer cast on previously gender-segregated communities.14 At the same time, the total exclusion of visual analysis from
recent cultural geography belittles the impulses and achievements of communities that create queer space, and neglects
the habits of vision queers develop to recognize it.
There are obvious signs of queer space, both institutional and symbolic: lesbian archives and gay bars among the former,
rainbow flags and Amazon bumper stickers among the latter. Of course, no single sign creates a space, but their
accumulation, an index of the impulses of many individuals, marks certain streets as queer space.
Other signs are subtler and respond to the specific social forms of queer culture. For instance, queer space is marked by a
high density of storefront and house front display, responding to the presence of significant pedestrian traffic even in cities
that are otherwise automobile-based and at times when other areas are deserted. This passage could describe queer
districts in any number of American or European cities, though its referent is farther afield: "While most of downtown
Johannesburg is deserted by six or seven in the evening, Hillbrow stays open all night. There are sidewalk cafes, book and
record shops, movie theatres, and Indian and Near Eastern restaurants. Vendors hawking sandstone hippos and wooden
sculpture set up shop on sidewalks."15
The apparently international ubiquity of queer space exemplifies the expression of identity under capitalism, though there is
no evidence for the common claim that queer culture is more commercial than other forms of identity. Such claims combine
stereotypes of wealthy gay men with research carried out in bars and discos that present obvious and distinctive-though not
necessarily representative- queer loci. Overlooked are the student groups, social service and political organizations, potluck
clubs, and other noncommercial venues where many of us came to conceive our sexuality as the basis of community.
Assumptions about the nonmarket bases of comparative forms of identity, moreover, are sustained only by ignoring the
commercial aspect of Chinatowns or Little Italies. Indeed, queer space in the public realm echoes the forms of diasporic
ethnic neighborhoods under capitalism, offering analogous symbolic markers (bumper stickers, graffiti, banners, official and
unofficial monuments) and institutional amenities (specialty shops, meeting places, and places to post announcements).16
The pedestrian attraction (pedephilia?) of queer space runs deeper, however. Sally Munt has analyzed the figure of the
"lesbian flaneur," counterpart of the male strollers depicted or implied in the urban spaces of Impressionist paintings.
Closely allied with the dandy, the flaneur has long been associated with a risque male sexuality, but Munt traces a female
heritage, running from the transvestite George Sand, through Djuna Barnes and Renee Vivien, to Joan Nestle and Sarah
Schulman. It is not this literary legacy that made Munt herself a flaneur, however.
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A/T: We should just be open
MULTICULTURALISM CREATES A FALSE IMPRESSION OF REFORM BUT REALLY BOLSTERS
WHITESUPREMACY.
Vijay Prashad 2006
Journal of Asian American Studies 9.2 (2006) 157-176 –“ Ethnic Studies Inside Out
Prashad is Professor and Director of International Studies at Trinity College,-SAE-BCD
Multiculturalism emerges, in its own clumsy way, to preserve this white supremacy from above.
The cultural logic of this ideology is that the world is constituted by a diversity of cultures, each of
which has relatively impermeable boundaries, and each of which has a logic of its own. Thus,
"Chinese" culture can be identified as Confucian, whereas Indian can be trotted up to being Hindu (or some such
incarnation). Importantly, the gatekeepers of what counted as the culture of the lesser were often the guardians of
"Western Civilization." Colonial anthropology adopted the prejudices of the orthodoxy in each of the
spaces of the world, and developed their contested views as the cultural consensus. This
orthodoxy was often prone to a masculine and hierarchical world-view that favored theological
explanations for the world rather than any other. In India, the Brahmin world-view stood in for an "Indian" one,
while the historical and sociological challenges from others could not be accommodated in this view of "Indian culture."
Modernity would then be the preserve of "Western [End Page 161] Civilization," while this or that Tradition would
smother others. The idea of "respect" and "diversity" became an alibi to constrain any critique of
these cultural worlds. Such is the paucity of the category of "culture" mobilized within the
mainstream strands of multiculturalism.
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A/T: Multiculturalism
THE DIVERSITY ALLOWED BY MULTICULTURALISM IS SHALLOW – IT FAILS TO CONFRONT
THE FUNDAMENTAL PRIVILEGE OF WHITE POWER
Vijay Prashad 2006
Journal of Asian American Studies 9.2 (2006) 157-176 –“ Ethnic Studies Inside Out
Prashad is Professor and Director of International Studies at Trinity College,-SAE-BCD
Multiculturalism allows the entry of various forms of cultural life into the curriculum and into campus life, but only in this
guise—as cultural lives that are separate and different, as well as being obviously inferior to the heritage of Europe
and of Western Civilization. The histories of interchange and subordination, and the contradictions within the
delineated cultural worlds, are generally ignored in this rendition of multiculturalism. Analogously, on college
campuses, a major site for the transfusion of culture in our society, upwardly mobile students found the college
administration in line with the creation of "cultural organizations," which are often mapped onto racial formations—for
example, the Black Students Union, La Raza or La Voz Latina, Asian Americans Students Association, and others.
Colleges tend to accept these organizations, often provide space for them (even if grudgingly), and tender them the
hands-off respect they have come to expect. The overall hierarchical culture of the campus is not disrupted, whereas
in sheltered zones these "cultures" have been allowed to express their diversity. It is this expression that provokes the
query in bad faith: "Why do the black kids sit together in the cafeteria?" Few ask, "Why do the white kids sit together,"
or questioning more deeply, what kinds of social compacts are forged on the college campus to welcome a superficial
diversity alongside the preservation of a white supremacist culture? 4
SHALLOW MULTICULTURALISM ABSORBS THE ENERGY OF RADICAL POLITICS – THE
ALTERNATIVE IS CONSTANT CHALLENGE TO RACISM
Vijay Prashad 2006
Journal of Asian American Studies 9.2 (2006) 157-176 –“ Ethnic Studies Inside Out
Prashad is Professor and Director of International Studies at Trinity College,-SAE-BCD
Such was not the aim of a diverse group of students led by the Black Students Union at San Francisco State College
in 1968–1969. As Robert Allen put it, the BSU students did not only want Black Studies, nor did they want to play a
"skin game," disassociating themselves from other students, whether white or of color. What they called for was
"nothing short of a campus revolution." They wanted the creation of a Black Studies Department that would be
institutionally autonomous: "The black students at San Francisco State knew that black studies could not be
complacent; that it must be consciously disruptive, always seeking to expose and cut away those aspects of American
society that oppress black people; that it [End Page 162] could not be modeled after other departments and accept
the constraints imposed on them, because one function of these departments is to socialize students into a racist and
oppressive society."5 The space to exert cultural presence had to be constituted, for the masquerade of cultural
diversity within a genteel racist institution would not suffice. Anti-racism, for them, was the ethos, not cultural diversity:
the point was to dismantle inherited structures rather than to simply graft on their story as a footnote of the real march
of civilization. The cruel tragedy of these demands was that they were radical in the context of Jim Crow racism, but
they would become impenetrable in the world of post-Civil Rights racism. In the latter, the "skin game" would be
central, and the revolution of campus institutions would be seen as unrealistic, even juvenile.
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Alternative – Disrupt Epistemology
Our aff is an impact turn to their framework. The fears around analysis of epistemologies of
ignorance, including that they’re not rigorous or unfalsifiable, are themselves manifestations
of racial ignorance. Incorporating our analysis is the BEST way to break down theses
epistemologies and to improve both intuitional and alternative scholarship by creating spaces
where we speak and debate across difference. The only alternative in intellectual mediocrity
Frank Margonis- professor at University of Utah- 2007[ John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke: A Case Study in White Ignorance and Intellectual - Segregation - Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance- p.189-192]
If we employ Mills’s concept of “global white supremacy,” then recent U.S. wars in the Middle East
appear to be an extension of the process whereby the nation is struggling with European powers for access to
the wealth and labor of the region—the very process criticized by Du Bois and Locke during World War I. Were contemporary
philosophers to use the concept of global white supremacy, then they would be directedto see the ways in
which U.S. foreign policy obeys the color line while do- mestic policies reinforce what Massey and Denton refer to as
“American Apartheid” (Massey and Denton 1993). Use of a concept such as global white supremacy would probably
violate the methodological scruples of many contemporary European American philosophers—as it would have
violated Dewey’s methodological principles. However, this tension forces us to consider the ways in which
methodological commitments may themselves further the epistemology of ignorance. For Dewey, a commit- ment to
scientific conceptions of definition helped maintain his racial ig- norance. The same scientific scruples that led Dewey to reject the use of racial
words such as “Anglo Saxon” also prohibited the use of structural words such as “bourgeoisie” and the Marxist analysis that went with the word.
Consider Dewey’s criticism of class analysis: Any one habituated to the use of the method of science will view with considerable suspicion the
erection of actual human beings into fixed entities called classes, having no overlapping interests and so internally unified and externally separated
that they are made the protagonists of history—itself hypothetical. Such an idea of classes is a survival of a rigid logic that once prevailed in the
sciences of nature, but that no longer has any place here. (Dewey lw.11.56) The word “proletariat,” like the word “white,” offers a theoretical—that is,
nonempirical—prediction that a heterogenous group of people will share the same interests and will act in the same way. Instead of relying
upon a theory of classes or utilizing a macroscopic theoretical tool such as global white supremacy, Dewey’s social analysis
tended to focus on the empirical traits of specific situations. While such a methodology has the advantage of
avoiding the importation of a theory a priori, it has the dis- advantage of allowing the philosopher to miss
definite patterns that a theory of class or race may have enabled the theorist to see. When a white philosopher
suffering from the epistemology of ignorance utilizes the situation-specific epistemology espoused by Dewey,
then he is very likely to build white common sense—as well as white ignorance—into the explanation. Here
Mills’s concept of a global white supremacy would force a European American philosopher to consider racial patterns that might otherwise be
entirely neglected. 6 Had Dewey considered the operations of a white global supremacy in explaining the outbreak of World War I, his attention
would have been directed to a significant range of evidence that he appears to have ignored. Similarly, had Dewey studied The Philadelphia Negro,
he would have encountered evidence that problematized the way he was thinking of racial separation in the city. Even though Dewey was known in
philo- sophical circles as someone who was committed to building bridges 190 Frank Margonisbetween his own discipline and psychology,
sociology, and anthropology, his methods remained far less factually driven than either Du Bois’s or Locke’s. Du Bois’s extensive writings on the
international political econ- omy, as well as his empirical studies of cities and rural areas, reveal a scholar who devoted considerable time to
understanding his historical circumstance. Du Bois’s ability to theorize by starting with a concrete his- torical context provides eloquent testimony to
the value of philosophy that is informed by its own historical location and a factual portrait of what is happening in the larger society and world. Had
Dewey been in meaningful contact with Du Bois and Locke, his rather problematic understandings of World
War I and cultural plural- ism would have received a much more stringent intellectual test. Even though Dewey was
sharply criticized by European American theorists for his stand regarding World War I, the most common criticism was that he had not maintained
his idealism (see, e.g., Bourne 1964). Locke and Du Bois would have brought a very different set of lenses to this discussion. And, indeed, it is
Dewey’s lack of exposure to the works of Du Bois and Locke that is the most alarming lesson to learn from Dewey’s
racial blind- ness. It is difficult to find evidence to explain why white U.S. philoso- phers in the early part of the twentieth century were not
studying a monumental figure such as Du Bois or a profound writer such as Locke. Perhaps methodological disagreements with white
philosophers pre- vented the latter from studying Du Bois and Locke. Perhaps Du Bois and Locke were framing questions in ways
white philosophers had difficulty understanding. Perhaps white philosophers were afraid to listen atten- tively
to or read carefully the works of authors who might call their own privilege into question. 7 Perhaps Du Bois and
Locke were thought to hail from a group that was unlikely to produce profound thought. 8 Perhaps this intellectual segregation
embodies the same denial of Black human- ity as housing segregation. Regardless of the explanation,
intellectual segregation ensured that Dewey was not exposed to the insight of Du Bois and Locke, and it is clear that
the profundity of Dewey’s thought suffered in the process. Contem- porary European American philosophers should
scrutinize their own work to see if they too are suffering from the intellectual mediocrity pro- duced by
intellectual segregation. U.S. philosophy has lagged behind the arts in benefitting from cross-race exchange, and a perusal of most
Euro- pean American philosopher’s citations will show that we mostly work from a European American
cannon and debate the insights of other white philosophers. Consequently, the methodological standards that
govern these debates themselves reflect the insularity of the participants. It should be profoundly humbling to
acknowledge the truth of Lucius Out- law’s demonstration that instead of engaging the substance of African John
Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois 191philosophical views European American scholars spent four decades de- bating whether
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Africans have philosophy, because African conceptions of the true, good, and beautiful were not offered in
accordance with the methodological principles hammered out by a small group of European American
philosophers (Outlaw 1996, 51–73). Just as there is a need for a plurality of ideas, there is a need for a plurality of
methods, and European American philosophers must consider the possibility that their tendency to dismiss
particular ways of thinking as “not rigorous” is itself a practice that maintains the epistemology of ignorance. The separatist
tendencies that one finds among European American philosophers today were clearly present in the early twentieth century. Dewey, it appears, felt
no need to cross the color line in his philosophical endeavors, while both Du Bois and Locke felt a pressing need for cross- race exchange. Both Du
Bois and Locke commented upon the existence of intellectual segregation (while, characteristically, Dewey was silent on the topic). Locke argued
that “the most unsatisfactory feature of our pre- sent stage of race relationships” was that “the most intelligent and repre- sentative elements of the
two race groups have at so many points got quite out of vital touch with one another” (Locke 1925, 9). In Locke’s view, intellectuals have the
responsibility to speak meaningfully across racial divisions, and even though he did not say so, he probably mourned the
unwillingness of white intellectuals to engage in those discussions. An often assumed aspect of philosophical methodology is the process whereby a
theorist’s work is critically discussed and reviewed by the larger intellectual community. Racial segregation within the academy operates to artificially
limit membership in the intellectual community and conse- quently to lower the standards to which theorists will be held. The most potent
weapon against the epistemology of ignorance is the development of personal and institutional commitments
to diversify the intellectual community so the perspectives of individuals ranging from all groups and all
cultural traditions have a place in shaping the nature of the discussion and the insights brought to the table.
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A/T: Whiteness Studies Good / Anti-Racism
AT:Whiteness studies/Method/Anti-racism
Ahmed, 04; Reader in Race and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, Sara, Declarations of Whiteness: The NonPerformativity of Anti-racism; Borderlands e-journal, Volume 3 Number 2, 2004
This story is not simply about assimilation or the risks of the critical being co-opted, which would be
a way of framing the story that assumes ‘we’ were innocent and critical until we got misused (in
other words, this would maintain the illusion of our own criticalness). Rather, it reminds us that the
transformation of ‘the critical’ into a property, as something we have or do, allows ‘the critical’ to
become a performance indicator, or a measure of value. The ‘critical’ in ‘critical whiteness studies’
cannot guarantee that it will have effects that are critical, in the sense of challenging relations of
power that remain concealed as institutional norms or givens. Indeed, if the critical was used to describe the
field, then we would become complicit with the transformation of education into an audit culture, into a culture that measures value
through performance. My commentary on the risks of whiteness studies will involve an analysis of how whiteness gets reproduced
through being declared, within academic texts, as well public culture. I will hence be reading Whiteness Studies as
part of a broader shift towards what we could call a politics of declaration, in which institutions as
well as individuals ‘admit’ to forms of bad practice, and in which the ‘admission’ itself becomes
seen as good practice. By reading Whiteness Studies in this way, I am not suggesting that it is a symptom of bad practice:
rather, I think it is useful to consider ‘turns’ within the academy as having something to do with other cultural turns. The examples
are drawn from the UK and Australia, as the two places in which my own anti-racist politics have taken shape. My argument is
simple: anti-racism is not performative. I use performative in Austin’s (1975) sense as referring to a particular class of
speech. An utterance is performative when it does what it says: ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action’ (1975,
6). I will suggest that declaring whiteness, or even ‘admitting’ to one’s own racism, when the declaration
is assumed to be ‘evidence’ of an anti-racist commitment, does not do what it says. In other words,
putting whiteness into speech, as an object to be spoken about, however critically, is not an antiracist action, and nor does it necessarily commit a state, institution or person to a form of action
that we could describe as anti-racist. To put this more strongly, I will show how declaring one’s
whiteness, even as part of a project of social critique, can reproduce white privilege in ways that
are ‘unforeseen’. Of course, this is not to reduce whiteness studies to the reproduction of whiteness, even if that is what it can
do. As Mike Hill suggests: ‘I cannot know in advance whether white critique will prove politically worthwhile, whether in the end it will
be a friendlier ghost than before or will display the same stealth narcissism that feminists of color labeled a white problem in the late
1970s’ (1997, 10).
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IMPACT – EPSITEMOLOGICAL VIOLENCE
Impact: Objective, detached epistemologies produce the worst kind of violence: they reinforce
privilege and justify atrocities.
Shari Stone-Mediatore, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University. in 2007
(Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural Classrooms
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stone-mediatore.html)
Even if objectivity is a myth, the valorization of traits associated with objectivity can have
real—and dangerous—historical effects. In particular, an unqualified valorization of distance
and detachment promotes the kind of moral numbness that facilitates
institutionalized violence. Certainly, a theorist should have some degree of distance from her subject matter
insofar as her knowledge claims should not be immediate personal reactions but well considered and publicly accountable
reflections. However, when we confuse absolute emotional and geographic distance from one's subject matter with "objectivity," we
forget that such distance is itself a social location, namely, one of isolation from social problems. As a result, when we
sanctify sheltered social standpoints as "professional distance," we privilege the voices of
those who can remove themselves from social ills while we undervalue the voices of those
who experience social suffering more directly.4 Likewise, when we valorize detachment, we
overlook the qualities of the world that are known through physical and emotional
closeness. Dedicated forest defender Joan Norman indicated the importance of knowledge gained through closeness to phenomena when
she attributed her appreciation for forests to her walks in the woods with her grandson. "You cannot [End Page 57] just read about wild places," she
says, "you have to go there" (O'Shea 2005, 42). Social critics Arundhati Roy and Paul Farmer practice a similar creed when they travel, respectively,
Only
"compassion and solidarity," says Farmer, allow a writer to break the conditioned silence of
subjugated people and to hear expressions of pain and struggle that await sympathetic ears
(2003, 27).5 Ultimately, when we confuse distance and detachment with rigor, we promote, under
the guise of professional responsibility, an irresponsible inattention to living beings and a
concomitant ethics of callousness and indifference. Nazi administrators exemplified such
contradictions of objectivity when they assumed an "objective attitude" toward the death
camps, attending to technicalities of mass execution as coolly as if they were managing
to Adivasi communities in India and to rural Latin America to walk among and offer support to people subjected to economic violence.
a bank (Arendt 1992, 69). Although ordinary academics and bureaucrats are less directly
involved in murder, our disciplined aloofness can similarly bury violence in technical
abstractions while our conscience defers to "professionalism." For instance, purportedly
objective French reporters and United Nations members refrained from taking a stand on
French colonialism in Algeria, only to model apathy in the face of colonial violence, while today's
"experts, from anthropologists to international health specialists choose to collude" with
economic violence by ignoring it in the name of "neutrality" (Fanon 1963, 77–8; Farmer 2003, 10, 17).
"Objective" discourses facilitate this charade, as when planners of India's big dams shield themselves from ethical
questions raised by the displacement of hundreds of thousands of individuals by reducing these people to the category "Project Affected People," or
simply "PAP," a term which conveniently "mutate[s] muscle and blood into cold statistics" (Roy 1999, 32).
For Nazi bureaucrats,
French colonial reporters, and contemporary analysts alike, objectivity provides a
convenient alibi for turning our back to pain and suppressing compassionate
impulses that would otherwise be troubled by violence.
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No Stories Bad
Their failure to seriously engage direct personal experiences is not a link of omission: it
reflects a practice that insulates their technocratic discourse from criticism and marginalizes
oppressed voices to the point where even their deaths are insignificant.
Shari Stone-Mediatore, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University. in 2007
(Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural Classrooms
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stone-mediatore.html)
Objectivity is also stacked against women and marginalized groups insofar as it demands
an abstraction from personal experience and restriction to generalized and public-sphere
analysis. Texts with such a focus may appear perspective-free, but they tend to reflect the
perspective of people who have greater access to public institutions and who relate to the
world through abstract analysis. At the same time, they overlook the perspective of those
whose knowledge is based on direct experience, who endure the harms of public policies in
their private lives, and who, when they protest such harms, are denied access to the public
arena and can express their resistance only through "unofficial" channels, such as
community speak-outs, hunger strikes, or even suicide.11
When we mystify abstract discourses as objective, we not only privilege the detached standpoints of scholars
and technocrats but also insulate their standpoints from critical feedback. For when abstract accounts of the social world
are treated as reality, people who are positioned to test abstract theory against everyday experience, such as nurses, mothers, social workers, and
research assistants, must fit the world they experience into received categories, with the result that "[e]verything going on in the everyday settings
. . . that does not fit the prescribed frameworks of reporting is left unsaid" (Smith 1990, 100). Moreover, when the institutions that determine the
"prescribed frameworks of reporting" regularly neglect the human costs of social policies, on the one hand, and the social causes of human ailments,
on the other, social suffering and its systemic causes tend to be the "unsaid." 12
The mystification of abstract, depersonalized analysis likewise allows scholars who use detached technical
discourses to appear dignified and "self-confident" while writers who turn to more engaged and creative,
nontechnical language to recover "unsaid" human aspects of the social world tend to have their work
dismissed as "unprofessional" or even "an injury to human dignity" (Cohen 2003, 65; Marx 1997, 280, emphasis in original).
For instance, World Bank economists David Dollar and Aart Kraay convey authority, in part, by virtue of their distance from the social processes they
study and their reduction of the latter to abstract public indices. Granted, statements such as, "[t]he aggregate annual per capita growth rate of the
globalizing group accelerated steadily from one percent in the 1960s to five percent in the 1990s" can offer relevant information about countries that
have joined the global economy (Dollar and Kraay 2002, 121); however, when we mistake such technocratic statements for objective truth, we
obscure the diverse and contested human implications of the global economy for specific communities, while we allow people who try to express
those human meanings to be summarily dismissed—as Roy was, when the Supreme Court charged her with "pollut[ing] the [End Page 61] stream of
justice," upon her attempt to express some of the human costs of India's "economic growth" (Roy 2001b, 97).
"Objective" scholarship does not always exclude personal stories entirely, for the latter often
help to concretize and support analytic claims; however, the devaluation of experience allows scholars to invoke
personal stories in merely instrumental ways to serve preconceived arguments, while ignoring the complexity
and challenges that personal experience can present when approached as a source of fresh insight. For instance,
Columbia University professor, Jagdish Bhagwati, states that the social merits of "globalization" are easy to
see, "once one starts thinking about the matter deeply and empirically." His supposedly deep empirical
investigations, however, refer only abstractly to "Japanese housewives" who came to "the West" with their
husbands and who subsequently learned "how women could lead a better life," and to "[w]omen in poor
countries" who work for transnational corporations and find that "work away from home can be liberating" (2002, 5). He
does not cite any of the actual women for whom he is supposedly speaking and, as a result, can elide such
women's ample (even if "unofficial") expressions of discontent with transnational corporations.13
Micklethwait and Wooldridge cite specific individuals, but only superficially to show their acknowledgment of poverty-related suffering, not to explore
dimensions and mechanisms of poverty that they have not yet theorized. For instance, the authors offer a brief story of a young unemployed
Brazilian couple whose odd jobs barely allow them to feed their child. This story and the accompanying statistics on poverty seem to provide
balance to the authors' pro-globalization argument; however, the authors quickly reduce the Gobetti couple to an example of "nonstarters: woefully
underequipped people living miserable lives" and then suggest that such misery arises from their country's "backwardness" (Micklethwait and
Wooldridge 2000, 255). They proceed to claim that "[o]nly the most idiotic critic would try to lay all these failings [i.e., poverty, unemployment] directly
at the feet of globalization," and they illustrate their point by citing an unemployed Brazilian magician who attributes his ill fate to a Las Vegas
performer who appeared on television and gave away his secrets (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2000, 258). This unemployed magician may be an
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easy-to-refute "idiotic critic," but as the only critic the authors cite here, his brief story (and that of the Gobetti's) merely substitute for genuine
engagement with opposing views.
Certainly, personal experience does not always favor the underdog and even a sensitive integration of personal experience within an analysis of current trade
institutions cannot settle definitively the question of those institutions' merits. Nevertheless, attentive engagement with historical experience opens up discussion to
the rich and complex aspects of social phenomena, including aspects that contradict dominant worldviews, [End Page 62] while the practice of avoiding close
engagement with experience ensures that ruling conceptual frameworks remain unchallenged.
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Solvency - Epistemology
Our epistemology involves including the perspective of the oppressed in ways that are crucial
understanding and addressing oppression
Shari Stone-Mediatore, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University. in 2007
(Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural Classrooms
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stone-mediatore.html)
The Epistemic Value of Stories and Testimony
When we specify the contradictions of the methodological and discursive practices that pass as "objective," we clear a
space for more "subjective" marginal-standpoint texts; however, we still need to explain the epistemic value of the
latter. Taking feminist standpoint theory a step further, I [End Page 64] examine below how texts that anchor their
analysis in the lived experiences of people who have suffered and resisted oppression have value not only as
alternative standpoints on the world but also as alternative forms of knowledge whose simultaneously
empirically grounded, engaged, and creative formats play a unique intellectual role. My claim, which builds
upon transnational feminist analysis of experience-oriented writing, is not that all stories enhance our thinking but
that some engagement with experience-sensitive, passion-driven stories (just as some engagement with data
and theory) is crucial to rigorous and responsible inquiry.
The Marginalized Standpoint as Story
Building on Hegel and Marx, feminist standpoint theorists argue that knowledge practices that begin from the
standpoint of people living under conditions of oppression or exploitation can bring under scrutiny
entrenched beliefs and institutions. The marginalized standpoint has this critical power because people in
socially subordinate positions confront, in their daily lives, the contradictions of our social order while their
resistance to oppression and exploitation can expose the power relations that maintain our seemingly
"natural" ways of life. Thus, knowledge that begins from the standpoint of oppressed, exploited, and resisting
lives can provide critical insight into ruling beliefs and practices, thereby helping us to confront more selfconsciously and effectively the factors that shape our lives.21
However, while feminist standpoint theorists present a compelling case for knowledge that begins from the standpoint
of marginalized lives, they leave largely unexamined the story-like, "unprofessional" format in which this knowledge
often appears. Transnational feminist writers help to explain the need for unorthodox writing in responding to the
struggles of marginalized groups. Critics such as Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty investigate the specific
transnational institutions that govern our lives, including economic institutions such as the World Bank and World
Trade Organization as well as gender and ethnic hierarchies, which economic institutions often exploit and reinforce.
They point out that the contradictions between the claims of ruling institutions and their actual historical effects are
most acute for third world women, for these women tend to remain the most oppressed within "free" and "democratic"
societies. At the same time, their multi-pronged resistance to sexism, authoritarianism, and exploitation can indicate
the complex character of contemporary power relations and the kind of work necessary to transform them. Thus,
transnational feminist thinkers emphasize the particular importance of theorizing the social world from the standpoint of
third world women and, most importantly, connecting these women's lived experiences of struggle to far-reaching
relations of domination.22 [End Page 65]
Alexander and Mohanty recognize, furthermore, that engaging third world women's experiences as a resource for
critical insight and transformative politics is not a straightforward process. "[T]he point is not just 'to record' one's
history of struggle" says Mohanty, but "the way we read, receive, and disseminate such imaginative records is
immensely significant," that is, we need to address experiences of struggle in a way that does not simply treat
them as evidence of oppression or "difference" but instead respects the complexity of the experiences,
locates the experiences within transnational relations of domination in which all of us are situated, and
identifies elements of resistance, even within the most marginalized communities (1991a, 34).23 Such nuanced
analysis demands empirical rigor as well as creative and engaged inquiry for, as Mohanty emphasizes and as
the above texts on globalization illustrate, standard academic approaches to narrating others' lives tend merely to
reduce those lives to preconceived theories and objectifying categories.24 Thus, thinking that genuinely
pursues the standpoint from others' lives cannot be expected to conform to "what counts as scholarly or
academic ('real?') historiography" but will likely mix historical analysis with empathetic and creative narration in
order to address experiences outside the public spotlight and irreducible to received theories (Mohanty 1991a, 36).
Emotionally sensitive and innovative narration is also crucial to the process of thinking from the standpoint of
marginalized lives because, as some standpoint theorists have acknowledged, resistant experiences are
rarely self-evident but tend to be "inchoate" and "a struggle to articulate" (Smith 1987, 58; Harding 1991, 282).
This occurs, in part, because a person's experiences of frustration with or resistance to social norms can be
overshadowed by her ideologically formed consciousness. Compounding this problem, the categories by which
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we interpret experience—categories of identity as well as categories such as "advanced" and "backward" or "home"
and "work"—are formed from the standpoint of the dominant culture, so that experiences incongruent with
white, upper middle-class, male-centered culture often cannot be articulated in straightforward prose.25 Gloria
Anzaldúa, for instance, could turn her frustration with society's dichotomy between "American" and "Mexican" into
critical insight only through soul searching and experimental writing, by which she sifted through painful memories and
wove autobiography with history and poetry, so as to trace her "mixed breed" status to the history of U.S. exploitation
of Mexican resources and to revise her seemingly schizophrenic identity in terms of new metaphors that embrace
cultural intermingling and cross-border alliances (1990b). Other times, sentiments of resistance to ruling institutions
defy easy articulation because people in marginalized positions are unable to act on their resistant impulses so that the
latter emerge only in contradictory and incomplete gestures. Roy, for instance, recounts the story of a displaced
indigenous man who protests [End Page 66] that his baby would be better off dead than living in the resettlement site,
even while he rocks the baby gently in his arms (1999, 54).
Given the elusive, difficult to articulate character of many experiences of oppression and resistance, it is not surprising
that (like Anzaldúa) some of the most powerful critics of the global economic order, including Roy, Galeano,
Fanon,26 and Farmer27 forgo academic conventions to experiment with styles more responsive to the
existential richness and ethical pull of marginalized people's experiences. Elsewhere, I have described such
writing as "storytelling": writing that, whatever its particular content or style, begins from fully engaged reckoning with
the complexities and contradictions of specific people's experiences and then uses this engagement with experience
as a springboard for fresh perspectives on our shared world. Such nonfiction storytelling is accountable to rules of
evidence and accuracy and thus often cites public records and reports; however, in "storytelling," emotionally
close, attentive engagement with specific experiences overrides adherence to preconceived categories and
disciplinary norms, rather than the other way around.28
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Impact - Ethics
We are the only ethical epistemology: we disrupt the dominant structures that stand in the way
of an understanding of the marginalized Other.
Shari Stone-Mediatore, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University. in 2007
(Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural Classrooms
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stone-mediatore.html)
Writers such as Barrios, Roy, and Galeano offer illuminating perspectives on the historical world,
yet these perspectives are neither certain, universal, nor objective. The conventional response
toward the incongruence of such texts with academic norms has been to exclude such texts from
rigorous inquiry; however, a more honest alternative (and one crucial to the defense of marginalstandpoint texts) is to rethink rigorous knowledge and responsible pedagogy in light of the vital
contribution of "storytelling" to our thinking.
We might describe the intellectual contribution of texts like those described above as advancing the kind of
mindfulness by which we orient ourselves reflectively and responsibly in the world. Engaged and innovative
narration of historical experience can guide our thoughtful orientation in the world by prompting us to
consider overlooked and inchoate phenomena, by destabilizing ossified categories and entrenched narrative
paradigms so as to open up new ways of viewing familiar events, and by bridging emotional connections
between ourselves and the characters narrated, so as to sensitize us to our place as beings living amongst
others.
"Rigor," when viewed in light of this epistemic role of storytelling, calls for full-person attention to the
nuances of specific phenomena—an effort that is thwarted when a writer erects emotional barriers between
herself and those she studies. Certainly, careful inquiry demands moments of stepping back from one's immediate
experience and considering one's subject matter from a broader standpoint; however, complete detachment from one's
subject matter does not constitute rigor but, on the contrary, insensitivity to living realities. Likewise, "accountability,"
when viewed as a function of storytelling, does not demand universal and definitive conclusions but rather
tentative and admittedly partial stories, which are open to others' responses. Finally, when we confront the
contribution of storytelling to human thinking, we see that intellectual aims are inseparable from ethical ones, for
ethical values such as recognition of others as living persons, responsibility for the social effects of our
actions, and participation in democratic communities are essential to a rich and rigorous understanding of
our world as a world we share with others and a world in whose web of relationships historical phenomena
have meaning. In effect, whereas "objectivity" endorses an ethics of indifference in the name of neutrality, an
affirmation "storytelling" asserts that responsible knowledge practices demand ethical orientations, in
particular sensitivity toward others and mindful participation in our communities.
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AT: Narrative focus is Dogmatic/anti-debate
Our approach opens space for critical understanding. Narration is essential to self reflection,
challenging privilege
Shari Stone-Mediatore, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University. in 2007
(Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural Classrooms
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stone-mediatore.html)
To teach in a way that affirms the value of storytelling and its ethical aims is risky. It risks acknowledging that not only the
texts but also we educators ourselves are situated in the world we study and motivated by ethical concerns. Nonetheless,
we can distinguish an acknowledged social location and a general ethical orientation from dogmatism, if we
recognize that perspective and ethical concern do not end debate but, on the contrary, open up new questions. For
instance: If we study the world with the aim of orienting ourselves in our communities responsibly, then what light
can the text throw on our own historical location and relationships? If we are related to the material we study, then
how do our own lives look differently if we weave them into the text's narrative? And if we always read from
particular social and cultural positions, then what aspects of our world are obscured and what aspects elucidated
by the author's (and our own) standpoints? Upon reading Roy's essay, for instance, my Critical Thinking class explored
how the marketed-oriented values that govern India's dam industry might influence our own lives, how we (not unlike
middle-class Indians) might employ objectifying categories that distance us from our neighbors, and how the standpoint of
India's Adivasi communities, seemingly so distant from us, can throw new light on our own lifestyle and values. We also
thematized Roy's unorthodox writing style asking, for instance, whether the empirical claims that Roy presents are any more
trustworthy than those she criticizes and whether her sarcasm and emotionally laden metaphors promote more critical or
more ideological thinking. Such questions are vexing, but they impressed on students their responsibility as readers to
evaluate the effects that each text has on us.
We also can distinguish ethically oriented engagement with marginal-standpoint texts from mere "politicized teaching" by
comparing such texts to more conventional ones in order to force into the open questions about the politics of knowledge.
For instance, students in my Global Ethics course initially responded to Galeano's Open Veins with indignance toward the
unabashed anger that colors his writing. The text might serve as a supplement to regular history, students suggested, but it
is not history proper. When, however, we compared specific sections in Galeano's book to sections covering similar topics in
a standard textbook, some students began to recognize how both texts were shaped by socially constituted perspectives
and rhetorical devices, so that the question of what constitutes "real" history, what role interests and emotion play in
historical analysis, and which text, if any, was central and which was "merely supplemental" became topics of lively debate.
An engaged reading of marginal-standpoint narratives also differs from dogmatic teaching insofar as it exposes the
limitations of our own theories and standpoints. Such exposure denies us the pretense of objectivity but also
demonstrates to students the intellectual value of self-awareness and humility. For instance, when my Feminist
Philosophy students read Barrios's testimony, we discuss how her distrust of feminism challenges us to examine how our
own feminist projects might be viewed by differently situated women. We also discuss how her stories move us personally,
provoking us to view our own routines and comforts as part of a world in which others struggle to feed their children. When I
share with students how Barrios' passionate dedication to her community leads me to question my own inability to act more
fully on my moral passions, I forgo "expert" status, but I encourage students to risk self-examination and to face the
tough questions about their own social locations that thinking from others lives ultimately demands. Such
unsettling questions about our own social identities and about the politics of different discursive strategies have
no place in the "objective" classroom. Nevertheless, such self-reflective and explicitly political questions are
integral to serious engagement with creatively written, passion-driven marginal-standpoint texts. Thus, securing a
place in our classrooms for marginalized views demands no less than a rethinking of basic academic norms. Against those
who valorize rhetoric- and emotion-free "objectivity," we must affirm that knowledge of our world is always already in
narrative form, that our lives are already bound up with the web of life that we study, and that intellectual rigor,
therefore, is achieved not by detached experts but by a community of storytellers who continually rethink our
categories and reconsider our projects as we exchange stories with one another and let ourselves be moved by
each other's struggles.
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Utopian Demands on the State Good
Utopian Demands on the State Good
Zizek 04
(Slavoj, a slick guy, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle)
There are (also) political acts, for politics cannot be reduced to the level of strategic pragmatic interventions. In a radical political act, the opposition
between 'crazy' destructive gesture and a strategic political decision momentarily breakdown, which is why it is theoretically and politically wrong
to oppose strategic political acts, risky as they may be to radical 'suicidal' gestures a la Antigone: gestures of pure self-destructive ethical insistence with,
apparently, no political goal. The point is not simply that, once we are thoroughly engaged in a political project, we are ready to put everything at stake for it, including our lives, but
more precisely, that only such an 'impossible' gesture of pure expenditure can change the very coordinates of what is strategically possible within a
historical constellation. This is the key point: an act is neither a strategic intervention in the existing order, nor its 'crazy' destructive negation, an act
is an excessive trans-strategic intersection which refines the rules and contours of the existing order.
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