Model Minority K
The US categorization of Muslims as either “good” or “bad” is a particular
formation of the model minority stereotype. The Affirmatives redemption
of “bad” Muslims into the category of “good” Muslims perpetuates the
dichotomy, making hyper-visible those who do not conform to the ideal
societal position ascribed to them
Jackson and Kim 11(John L. Jackson is Dean of the University of Pennsylvania's School of
Social Policy and Practice. He also is the Richard Perry University Professor of Communication,
Africana Studies, and Anthropology in the Standing Faculty of the Annenberg School for
Communication and the Standing Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences. David K. Kim is a
Professor of Religious Studies , Chair of the Religious Studies Department , and Associate
Professor in American Studies at Connecticut College. “Race, Religion, and Late Democracy”
https://books.google.com/books?id=f0dcGarZj0AC&pg=PA192&lpg=PA192&dq=model+minority
+islam&source=bl&ots=pbOVG4ECMU&sig=9zhvyJBJAVBhK9WBJQnAdzJBr3U&hl=en&sa=X
&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAmoVChMItd_zq6jixgIVgZeACh3IeABK#v=onepage&q=model%20minority
%20islam&f=false)
Asian Americans as model minorities operated to discipline African Americans as an
example of racial success, yet the emphasis on minority status reaffirmed the super
position of whites. Unlike the use of the foreignness trope to serve foreign policy, the model
minority trope is domestic and serves to discipline African Americans. The model minority is
also a pan-Asian category: it is applied to most Asian Americans, not limited to a particular
national origin. Together, the two tropes offer a more complete racial landscape for Asian
Americans. The “good Asian” performs racially as a model minority, assimilated and successful.
But if there is resistance to racial subordination organized through ethnic or group identity, those
ethnic excesses can be labeled as foreign. Labeling a racial performance as foreign is an
invitation to discrimination and disciplinary actions against the “bad Asian.”
Furthermore, in the case of conflict with an Asian nation, the raced bodies of Asian
Americans are available through the trope of foreignness as a mobilization point for
Americans. “Good Muslim” Corresponding to the Asian American model minority, we
can see the emergence of the ”good Muslim” and “bad Muslim” stereotypes. While the
“Muslim terrorist” is now well established, the scripting of the “good Muslim” is a work in
progress. The new republican majority in Congress is holding congressional hearings on the
threat of “Islamic radicalization.” The first noncongressional witness to testify was Zuhdi Jasser,
A Republican and self-identified Muslim; founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy,
he is politically active and appears often in conservative media. He is reported as “calling on
Muslim leaders to aggressively oppose a “culture of separatism” and urges Islamic clerics “to
disavow scripture that belittles non-Muslims and women and to renounce a role for Islam in the
government” (Boorstein 2011). Jasser’s appearances on controversial television commentator
Glen Beck’s show suggest that this is not a doctrinal or sectarian dispute among Islamic faithful.
This is an example of the crafting of the “model minority” for the racial category of Muslims. We
should expect continued efforts to create a script for the proper racial performance of the “good
Muslim.” The emergence of the possibility of the “good Muslim” suggests that the Muslim
racial category will follow the dual track of Asian American racialization with two
different ascribed racial sterotypes: the Muslim terrorist and the good Muslim. The
Muslim terrorist is an extreme example of the foreignness trope, providing a domestic
body in the service of our foreign military operations in Iraw and Afghanistan. For those
Americans who are collected in then Muslim category, the disciplinary function of the
“good Muslim” corresponding to the “model minority” is available for use against
Muslims or those with Asiatic brown bodies who protest or disagree with American
domestic or foreign policy. The loose framework for the Muslim racial category and its racial
trope, the “Muslim terrorist,” makes organizing difficult. Mosques offer important centers for faith
and community. But it is unclear how a faith-based community can organize to include nonMuslims against a racial trope. One promising development was the support given by Asian
Americans to the victims of hate crimes after 9/11. The racial category of Asian Americans as a
panethnic group could, over time, encompass faith-based communities. The implications of the
racialization of Islam for American foreign policy considerations are less ambiguous but more
discouraging. The racialization of Islam through the Muslim racial category seems to be
following the model of Asian American racialization. There is a simplistic duality. One side is
the bad Muslim, the “Muslim terrorist,” useful to further American foreign policy goals. On the
other side is the good Muslim, assimilating to conventional American secular ideals. While that
awkward binary may be adequate for domestic racial politics, it is clearly inadequate to address
Islam and democracy in the world today. The democratic upheavals in North Africa and the Arab
world are far more complex and subtle than the gross categories offered by American
racialization.
Hypervisible bodies are simultaneously marginalized and rendered
invisible through specular abstraction by the privileged observer
Traise Yamamoto, 2000, "In/Visible Difference: Asian American Women and the Politics of
Spectacle on JSTOR," Race, Gender & Class Journal,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41675310?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
You will find, this season, signs of yourself everywhere, but while Asian fashion accessories can be worn "as accents or top-to-toe" ( Marie Claire , 134)
in order to achieve that eponymous "China Girl" look, not a single Asian American model is to be found in these pages. Inclusion of "Asianness"
Such
magazines perfectly emblematize the function of difference in this age of spectacle and
multi –cultural display, and the ways in which the appearance of inclusion (as well as the
inclusion of appearance) substitutes specular, commodified representations for
structural visibility as national subjects. The insidiousness of difference as spectacle is
expands style horizons, extends the fashion frontier, but Asian bodies remain firmly on the other side of the geo-sartorial border.
that it is just as often used to lay claim to a supposed ideology of inclusion, as it is to
demarcate the boundaries beyond which colored bodies may not go . This was made all too clear by
the now infamous cover of the March 24th, 1997, issue of National Review magazine, which depicts Al Gore and Bill and Hilary Clinton as a Chinese
monk, peasant and Maoist, respectively. Outfitted with cues, slanted eyes, and the requisite buck teeth, the three Manchurian Candidates" (the lead
article's title) are a stark figuration of what it means to be hyper visible as a racialized object - the parsed, exaggerated and fetishized signs of which
circulate in a discursive and representational arena in which the
Asian American body, like all bodies of color in
the United States, is primarily useful as ideological cultural capital. French political theorist Guy DeBord
asserts that "The Spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image " (1 965/1 997), and these magazines collectively display that
the ideological work of demarcating and delimiting national subjects is enacted through infinitely manipulable images of Asianness, which run the
gamut from politically-charged yellowface to fashionable chinoiserie. In both cases, signs of Asianness, orientaba, mark the cutting edge of or
transgression beyond the border of normative whiteness. Lauren Beriant, among others, has argued that national
identity is
formulated through the ways in which historical or "everyday" persons are abstracted
and "reconstituted as a collective subject, or citizen" (1991). That is, the individual person
"acquires a new body by participation in the political public sphere. The American
subject is privileged to suppress the fact of his historical situation in the abstract
'person': but then, in return, the nation provides a kind of prophylaxis for the person, as
it promises to protect his privileges," one effect of which "is to appear to be disembodied
or abstract while retaining cultural authority" ( 1 99 1 a). Yet, this process of privileged
abstraction implicitly assumes a subject whose particularities of race, gender, class and
sexuality are coded as normative and therefore invisible. The male, white, heterosexual
and propertied subject is structurally visible in direct proportion to that subject's
invisibility as a site of marked embodiment. But what obtains for those whose marked particularity
remains, in a sense, uncollectible, unabstractable, who are marked "as precisely not abstract, but as
imprisoned in the surplus embodiment of a culture that values abstraction" (1991a). Women, people
of color, the poor, the queer are subject to an enforced embodiment wherein the
particularity of their hyper-visible bodies defines their status as the obverse of American
ideality, or more accurately as the obverse upon which the idea of American national
identity depends.
The myth of model minority demonizes and makes other POCs hyper
visible by reinforcing existing racial prejudices—countering this stereotype
is a prerequisite to any aff solvency
Noy Thrupkaew, 3-25-2002 "The Myth of the Model Minority," American Prospect,
http://prospect.org/article/myth-model-minority AC
The Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), an advocacy group in Washington,
estimates that more than 2.2 million Southeast Asians now live in the United States. They
are the largest group of refugees in the country and the fastest-growing minority. Yet for
most policy makers, the plight of the many Mali Keos has been overshadowed by the wellknown success of the Asian immigrants who came before and engendered the myth of
the "model minority." Indeed, conservatives have exploited this racial stereotype -arguing that Asians fare well in the United States because of their strong "family values"
and work ethic. These values, they say, and not government assistance, are what all minorities
need in order to get ahead. Paradoxically, Southeast Asians -- supposedly part of the model
minority -- may be suffering most from the resulting public policies. They have been left in
the hands of underfunded community-assistance programs and government agencies that, in
one example of well-intentioned incompetence, churn out forms in Khmer and Lao for often
illiterate populations. But fueled by outrage over bad services and a fraying social safety-net,
Southeast Asian immigrants have started to embrace that most American of activities, political
protest -- by pushing for research on their communities, advocating for their rights, and
harnessing their political power. The model-minority myth has persisted in large part because
political conservatives are so attached to it. "Asian Americans have become the darlings of the
right," said Frank Wu, a law professor at Howard University and the author of Yellow: Race
beyond Black and White. "The model-minority myth and its depiction of Asian-American
success tells a reassuring story about our society working." The flip side is also appealing
to the right. Because Asian Americans' success stems from their strong families and their
dedication to education and hard work, conservatives say, then the poverty of Latinos
and African Americans must be explained by their own "values": They are poor because
of their nonmarrying, school-skipping, and generally lazy and irresponsible behavior,
which government handouts only encourage.
Specifically, model minority obscures the identity of Southeast Asians and
increase their vulnerability to poverty and similar problems faced by black
and Latino communities
Noy Thrupkaew, 3-25-2002 "The Myth of the Model Minority," American Prospect,
http://prospect.org/article/myth-model-minority AC
What most dramatically skews the data, though, is the fact that about half the population of Asian (or, more precisely, Asian-Pacific
The
plight of refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, who make up less than 14 percent
of Asian Americans, gets lost in the averaging. Yet these refugees, who started arriving in the United States
after 1975, differ markedly from the professional-class Chinese and Indian immigrants who started coming 10 years earlier. The
Southeast Asians were fleeing wartime persecution and had few resources. And those
disadvantages have had devastating effects on their lives in the United States. The most
Islander) Americans is made up of the highly educated immigrants who began arriving with their families in the 1960s.
recent census data available show that 47 percent of Cambodians, 66 percent of Hmong (an ethnic group that lived in the
mountains of Laos), 67 percent of Laotians, and 34 percent of Vietnamese were impoverished in 1990 -- compared with 10 percent
of all Americans and 14 percent of all Asian Americans. Significantly ,
poverty rates among Southeast Asian
Americans were muchhigher than those of even the "nonmodel" minorities : 21 percent of
African Americans and 23 percent of Latinos were poor. Yet despite the clear inaccuracies created by lumping
populations together, the federal government still groups Southeast Asian refugees under the overbroad category of "Asian" for
research and funding purposes. "We've labored under the shadow of this model myth for so long," said KaYing Yang, SEARAC's
executive director. "There's so little research on us, or we're lumped in with all other Asians, so people don't know the specific needs
and contributions of our communities." To get a sense of those needs, one has to go back to the beginning of the Southeast Asian
refugees' story and the circumstances that forced their migration. In 1975, the fall of Saigon sent shock waves throughout Southeast
Asia, as communist insurgents toppled U.S.-supported governments in Vietnam and Cambodia. In Laos, where the CIA had trained
and funded the Hmong to fight Laotian and Vietnamese communists as U.S. proxies, the communists who took over vowed to purge
the country of ethnic Hmong and punish all others who had workedwith the U.S. government. The first refugees to leave Southeast
Asia tended to be the most educated and urban, English-speakers with close connections to the U.S. government. One of them was
a man who wishes to be identified by the pseudonym John Askulraskul. He spent two years in a Laotian re-education camp -punishment for his ability to speak English, his having been educated, and, most of all, his status as a former employee of the
United States Agency for International Development (USAID). "They tried to brainwash you, to subdue you psychologically, to work
you to death on two bowls of rice a day," Askulraskul told me recently. After being released, he decided to flee the country. He, his
sister, and his eldest daughter, five and a half years old, slipped into the Mekong River with a few others. Clinging to an inflated
garbage bag, Askulraskul swam alongside their boat out of fear that his weight would sink it. After they arrived on the shores of
Thailand, Askulraskul and his daughter were placed in a refugee camp, where they waited to be reunited with his wife and his two
other daughters. It was not to be. "My wife tried to escape with two small children. But my daughters couldn't make it" -- he paused,
drawing a ragged breath -- "because the boat sank." Askulraskul's wife was swept back to Laos, where she was arrested and placed
in jail for a month. She succeeded in her next escape attempt, rejoining her suddenly diminished family. Eventually, with the help of
his former boss at USAID, they moved to Connecticut, where Askulraskul found work helping to resettle other refugees. His wife,
who had been an elementary-school teacher, took up teaching English as a second language (ESL) to Laotian refugee children. His
daughter adjusted quickly and went to school without incident. Askulraskul now manages a project that provides services for at-risk
Southeast Asian children and their families. "The job I am doing now is not only a job," he said. "It is part of my life and my sacrifice.
My daughter is 29 now, and I know raising kids in America is not easy. I cannot save everybody, but there is still something I can
do." Like others among the first wave of refugees, Askulraskul considers himself one of the lucky ones. His education, U.S. ties, and
English-language ability --everything that set off the tragic chain of events that culminated in his daughters' deaths -- proved
enormously helpful once he was in the United States. But the majority of refugees from Southeast Asia had no such advantages.
Subsequent waves frequently hailed from rural areas and lacked both financial resources and formal schooling. Their psychological
scars were even deeper than the first group's, from their longer years in squalid refugee camps or the killing fields. The ethnic
Chinese who began arriving from Vietnam had faced harsh discrimination as well, and the Amerasians -- the children of Vietnamese
women and U.S. soldiers -- had lived for years as pariahs. Once here, these refugees often found themselves trapped in poverty,
providing low-cost labor, and receiving no health or other benefits, while their lack of schooling made decent jobs almost impossible
to come by. In 1990, two-thirds of Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong adults in America had less than a high-school education -compared with 14 percent of whites, 25 percent of African Americans, 45 percent of Latinos, and 15 percent of the general AsianAmerican population. Before the welfare-reform law cut many of them off, nearly 30 percent of Southeast Asian Americans were on
welfare -- the highest participation rate of any ethnic group. And having such meager incomes, they usually lived in the worst
neighborhoods, with the attendant crime, gang problems, and poor schools. But shouldn't the touted Asian dedication to schooling
have overcome these disadvantages, lifting the refugees' children out of poverty and keeping them off the streets? Unfortunately, it
didn't. "There is still a high number of dropouts for Southeast Asians," Yang said. "And if they do graduate, there is a low number
going on to higher education." Their parents' difficulty in navigating American school systems may contribute to the problem. "The
parents' lack of education leads to a lack of role models and guidance. Without those things, youth can turn to delinquent behavior
and in some very extreme cases, gangs, instead of devoting themselves to education," said Narin Sihavong, director of SEARAC's
Successful New Americans Project, which interviewed Mali Keo. "This underscores the need for Southeast Asian school
administrators or counselors who can be role models, ease the cultural barrier, and serve as a bridge to their parents." "Sometimes
families have to choose between education and employment, especially when money is tight," said Porthira Chimm, a former
The picture that emerges -of high welfare participation and dropout rates, low levels of education and income -- is
startlingly similar to the situation of the poorest members of "nonmodel" minority
groups. Southeast Asians, Latinos, and African Americans also have in common
significant numbers of single-parent families. Largely as a result of the killing fields, nearly a quarter of
SEARAC project director. "And unfortunately, immediate money concerns often win out."
Cambodian households are headed by single women. Other Southeast Asian families have similar stories. Sihavong's mother, for
example, raised him and his five siblings on her own while his father was imprisoned in a Laotian re-education camp. No matter how
"traditional" Southeast
Asians may be, they share the fate of other people of color when they are
denied access to good education, safe neighborhoods, and jobs that provide a living
wage and benefits. But for the sake of preserving the model-minority myth, conservative
policy makers have largely ignored the needs of Southeast Asian communities. One such
need is for psychological care. Wartime trauma and "lack of English proficiency, acculturative stress, prejudice, discrimination, and
racial hate crimes" place Southeast Asians "at risk for emotional and behavioral problems," according to the U.S. surgeon general's
2001 report on race and mental health. One random sample of Cambodian adults found that 45 percent had post-traumatic stress
disorder and 51 percent suffered from depression. John Askulraskul's past reflects trauma as well, but his education, Englishlanguage ability, and U.S. connections helped level the playing field. Less fortunate refugees need literacy training and language
assistance. They also need social supports like welfare and strong community-assistance groups. But misled by the model-minority
myth, many government agencies seem to be unaware that Southeast Asians require their services, and officials have done little to
find these needy refugees or accommodate them. Considering that nearly two-thirds of Southeast Asians say they do not speak
English very well and more than 50 percent live in linguistically isolated ethnic enclaves, the lack of outreach and translators
effectively denies them many public services. The problem extends beyond antipoverty programs, as Mali Keo's story illustrates.
After her husband left her, she formed a relationship with another man and had two more children. But he beat the family for years,
until she asked an organization that served Cambodian refugees to help her file a restraining order. If she had known that a shelter
was available, she told her interviewer, even one without Khmer-speaking counselors, she would have escaped much earlier.
Where the government hasn't turned a blind eye, it has often wielded an iron fist. The welfare-reform law of 1996, which cut off
welfare, SSI, and food-stamp benefits for most noncitizens -- even those who are legal permanent residents -- sent Southeast Asian
communities into an uproar. Several elderly Hmong in California committed suicide, fearing that they would become burdens to their
families. Meanwhile, the
lack of literacy programs prevented (and still does prevent) many
refugees from passing the written test that would gain them citizenship and the right to
public assistance.
Thus we advocate a counterhegemonic storytelling of the myth of the
model minority. Challenging this racism is key to solving for the
institutional discrimination of POC and creating real social change.
Caroline Hargreaves, 2010, "How Important is Discourse to Social Change? Case: Microblogging Community Tumblr," London School of Economics and Political Science
https://www.academia.edu/1635691/How_Important_is_Discourse_to_Social_Change_Case_Mi
cro-blogging_Community_Tumblr
Discourse can be described as a set of values and beliefs that informs our social responses and actions,
More importantly, a thorough understanding of the discursive forces that shape our social
fabric presents a valuable opportunity and instrument for resistance groups to challenge
dominant discourses. Foucault's famous work on the relationship between power and knowledge
brings the debate to another level, where discourses serve as the meeting place of these two forces. This
conception opens up possibilities to bring about change, as power in a Foucauldian perspective is
ubiquitous and operates without agency, beyond traditional notions of the state and through culturally
embedded factors. Foucault rejects the liberal notion that knowledge can flourish only in the absence of
power (see Evans, 2005), which allows alternative discursive methods onto the scene. These can
challenge the way in which relations and structures of power are embedded in everyday
life by providing alternative values and norms as well as morally validating the identities
and perspectives of those oppressed by the existing relations and structures of powe r
(Stammers, 1999). This is why much attention should be paid (by actors seeking to challenge the
status quo) towards discourse in particular in terms of locating both opportunities and
constraints for social change. As argued by Hacking (1999:58) "Politics, ideology and power matter
more than metaphysics to most advocates of construction. Talk of construction tends to undermine the
authority of knowledge and categorization. It challenges complacent ways of doing things not by refuting
or proposing better, but by ‘unmasking’." This will reveal how categories of knowledge are used
in power relationships and towards moulding the global society in a particular way. With
reference to the discourse of human rights, Hunt (1990) argues that the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemony make it possible to
advance a positive evaluation certain strategies within progressive politics. The 'discursive war of position' is here seen as taking practical
measurements to bring about shifts and modifications in popular consciousness. In discourse specifically, Mouffe (2005:18) explains that "[e]very
hegemonic order is susceptible of being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices, i.e.
practices which will attempt to disarticulate the existing order so as to install other forms
of hegemony." Hegemony then becomes a process that generates a question of
culturally altering social consciousness, reworking what already exists and introducing
elements that transcend dominant narratives of issues and movements. Without going too
far into the reasons behind resisting the mainstream media logic, the main concerns are to what
extent this logic can be seen as representative of the larger voice of society, locally and globally.
Mass culture has been perceived to be an instrument of ideological dominance over ‘social
consciousness’ (see Gramsci, 1971), or what Hirst (1976:386) later labeled the ‘imaginary’,
shaping social subjects. Discourses are therefore not deliberately created narratives, but
rather ideological extensions of the hegemonic forces in play on both macro- and micro
levels of society. The democratic deficits inherent in a media system dominated by corporate and
commercial structures are apparent alongside inequalities of access, representation and ideological
power (Carroll and Hackett, 2006). At every point in history when a larger minority has felt
oppressed by a smaller majority, revolutions have taken place, often manifested in large
social movements. Melucci (1996:84) also takes the constructivist approach and writes that at the core of social movements is the
construction of collective identity, an interactive process that addresses the question of how a collective becomes a collective. Since our
identities and cultures are ultimately shaped through cognitive perceptions and flows of
information, its democratization is integral to the collective welfare and progression.
Collective action therefore becomes a way of communicating a message to the rest of society. As argued by Faiclough and Wodak
(1997: 258), discourse
is “constitutive both in the sense that it helps to sustain and
reproduce the social status quo, and in the sense that it contributes to transforming it.”
From the mere conception of ideas to the distribution of messages through e.g. self-mediation, policy-makers, marketingcompanies, social movements and NGOs, the significance
clear.
of discourse to progressive social change is
Queer Pessimism
Top
Violence against queerness results in the annihilation of identity—this is a
form of soul murder
Yep, Lovaas, and Elia 03 Professors, San Francisco University (Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual
Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, pp. 18,)
These are the internal injuries that individuals inflict upon themselves. Very
early in life children learn from
interpersonal contacts and mediated messages that deviations from the heteronormative
standard, such as homosexuality, are anxiety-ridden, guilt-producing, fear-inducing,
shame-invoking, hate-deserving, psychologically blemishing, and physically threatening.
Internalized homophobia, in the form of self-hatred and self-destructive thoughts and
behavioral patterns, becomes firmly implanted in the lives and psyches of individuals in
heteronormative society. Exemplifying the feelings and experiences of many people who do not fit in the
heteronormative mandate, Kevin Jennings (1994) tells us his personal story: I was born in 1963. . . . [I] realized in grade school that
I was gay. I felt absolutely alone. I had no one to talk to, didn’t know any openly gay people, and saw few representations of gays in
the media of the 1970s. I imagined gay people were a tiny, tiny minority, who had been and would always be despised for their
“perversion.” Not once in high school did I ever learn a single thing about homosexuality or gay people. I couldn’t imagine a happy
life as a gay man. So I withdrew from my peers and used alcohol and drugs to try to dull the pain of my isolation. Eventually, at age
seventeen I tried to kill myself, like one out of every three gay teens. I saw nothing in my past, my present, or (it seemed) my future
suggesting that things would ever get any better. (pp. 13-14) Heteronormativity
is so powerful that its
regulation and enforcement are carried out by the individuals themselves through
socially endorsed and culturally accepted forms of soul murder. Soul murder is a term
that I borrow from the child abuse and neglect literature to highlight the torment of
heteronormativity (Yep, 2002). Shengold (1999) defines soul murder as the “apparently willful abuse
and neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and frequency to be
traumatic . . . [so that] the children’s subsequent emotional development has been
profoundly and predominantly negatively affected” (p. 1). Further explaining this concept, Shengold (1989)
writes, “soul murder is neither a diagnosis nor a condition. It is a dramatic term for
circumstances that eventuate in crime–the deliberate attempt to eradicate or compromise
the separate identity of another person” (p. 2, my emphasis). Isn’t the incessant policing and
enforcement, either deliberately or unconsciously, by self and others, of the
heteronormative mandate a widespread form of soul murder?
Links
Econ
The 1ACs focus on productivity relies on the assumption that we are all
individual autonomous subjects who are treated equally under the law—
this assumption is simply not true for the queer body
Mortimer-Sandilands 05 (Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona [Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands
has a B.A. from Victoria University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from York University. She is currently
the Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture in the Faculty of Environmental
Studies at York University.]. “Unnatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology.” University
of Rochester: Invisible Culture, 2005.
https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/sandilands.html)//ALepow
Queering ecological politics: The
final section of this paper turns our attention away from the
ways in which sexuality and ecology have been linked as power relations having a
negative (if still productive) influence on both queers and nature, and toward the ways in
which a queer perspective offers us a unique standpoint on resisting these destructive
relations. That said, if I were to judge only from televisions shows like Will and Grace,
Queer as Folk, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, I would hardly nominate queers as
the world’s best nature stewards. Quite the opposite, in fact: Gay culture, in the
mainstream – which, in all of these shows, means affluent urban white men – is
extraordinarily tied to lifestyle consumerism. As Andil Gosine writes, “gay men, the story goes, shop. Urban
gay men live in chic condominium apartments, buy a lot of hair and body care products, [and] have great taste in cars, clothes, and
interior design.” Although
one might be tempted to celebrate in these shows the general
public’s apparently increased acceptance of queers, I think it is only a very narrow band
of queerness – that portion tied to the fetishistic exchange of aesthetic commodities –
that ends up being at all “acceptable.” Queers are OK not because they are queer, but
because they are exemplary consumers in a society that judges all people by their
ability to consume. Note that working-class queer folk, lower income or anti-aesthetic
lesbians, and older, sicker, or even HIV+ gay men, are not the ideal subjects of Will and
Grace. Not only is this band of North American “acceptance” of queer culture thus very
narrow, but the continuing mainstream political process by which queers strive to be
“accepted” in consumer society limits the full scope of political possibility potential in
queer communities. For example, although I would be lying if I didn’t say that I was
moved by Canada’s legalization of same sex marriage, our pursuit, as queers, for a
family form “just like heterosexual marriage" seems, to me, to blunt the critical potential
inherent in the fact that queers have developed alternative forms of family that do not
necessarily replicate all of the problems of legal, nuclear heterosexuality. To quote Tony
Kushner, “it’s entirely conceivable that we will one day live miserably in a thoroughly
ravaged world in which lesbians and gay men can marry and serve openly in the army
and that’s it.” My argument is thus that we should reorient our politics and take on what I
am calling a queer ecological perspective, to work toward more critical possibilities
responsive to the kinds of complex relations of power that I have thus far outlined. Here,
I am advocating a position not only of queering ecology, but of greening queer politics.
While it is true that the hegemonic pairing of heterosexuality and ecology has had a generally oppressive impact on both queers and
nature, the fact is that queers have also used ideas of nature and natural spaces as sites of resistance.
Extinction
Narratives of impending apocalypse rely on the notion of reproductive
futurity and the importance of “securing a future”—this notion emphasizes
the importance of reproductivity, excluding the possibility of queerness
from our future
Kouri-Towe ’13 (Natalie; 6/16/13; Fuse, “Queer Apocalypse: Survivalism and Queer Life at the End”
http://fusemagazine.org/2013/06/36-3_kouri-owe)
Queer adjective • Strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric. Also: of questionable character; suspicious, dubious. noun informal • colloq.
(freq. derogatory). A homosexual; esp. a male homosexual. verb informal • To put out of order; to spoil. Also: to spoil the reputation
or chances of (a person); to put (a person) out of favour (with another). • To cause (a person) to feel queer; to disconcert, perturb,
The apocalypse is coming and queers are going to spoil it. As
narratives of impending apocalypse and postapocalyptic survival permeate
our cultural and political landscapes, it becomes increasingly easy to imagine our end. Whether
the end of a sustainable environment, the end of culture, or the end of
global capitalist economies, the end of life as we know it is both a terrifying
possibility and a promising fantasy of a radically different form of life
beyond the present. Mainstream depictions of postapocalyptic survival
largely centre on the archetypical figure of the male saviour or hero, and
advance a familiar patriarchal instrumentalization of women’s bodies as
vessels for the survival of the human species. But what alternate stories
might we tell about the end, and how might a queer framework reshape our
apocalyptic narratives? The proposal to think queerly about the apocalypse
is not an attempt to rescue apocalypse stories from the insidious
reproduction of hegemonic relations; rather it is an opportunity to playfully
consider what queer approaches to survival at the end might offer to our
rethinking of the present. Apocalyptic narratives are appealing because we
find it hard to imagine a radically different social and political world without
the complete destruction of the institutions and economies that were built
and sustained through colonial and imperial violence and exploitation. If
we are already thinking and talking about the apocalypse, then queer
thinking about the apocalypse serves as an opportunity for rethinking
narratives of politics in both the future and the present. As global,
structural, economic and political asymmetries accelerate, more people live
in conditions lacking basic resources like food and water, and increasingly
suffer from criminalization and incarceration. It is clear that postapocalyptic
survival is also not simply a fiction but a daily reality for many people. From refugee
unsettle. Now rare. [1]
camps to welfare reforms, survival is more than an exercise in imagining a different world. But, even for those who are not living
We take pleasure in imagining
how we might prepare or attempt survival in a shifted environment because
to imagine how we might live differently is to introduce new realms of
possibility for living differently in our present. So how can we reconcile both the demand for
through conditions of catastrophic loss, thinking about apocalypse is enticing.
eerness might offer us
some considerations for rethinking the apocalypse and narratives of
survival. Queer Survivalism Survivalism noun • A policy of trying to ensure one’s own survival or that of one’s social or
national group. • The practicing of outdoor survival skills. [2] If survivalism is wrapped up in the
preservation of the nation state, of race, of gender or of our social order in
general, then the first contribution of queerness to the apocalypse is its
disruption to the framing of who and what survives, and how. There can be
no nation in queer postapocalyptic survival, because the nation presents a
foundational problem to queer survival. The nation, which regulates gender
and reproduction, requires normalized organizations of sexual and family
life in order to reproduce or preserve the national population. If we are
already at the end, then why not consider survival without the obligation of
reproduction and the heteronormative family? Masculinist narratives of
postapocalyptic survival deploy the male protagonist as the extension of the nation.
attending to the crisis of survival in the present and the fantasy of postapocalypse? Here qu
Here, the male hero stands in the place of the military, the police or the law by providing safety and security to his family and “weak”
Queer survivalism, on the other hand, disrupts the normative
embodiments of survivalism by redirecting our desires to queer bodies,
opening up survival to those outside of the prototypes of fitness and
health. Because postapocalyptic narratives replicate racist and ableist
eugenic tropes of “survival of the fittest,” a queering of survivalism opens
up space for thinking about, talking about and planning for more varied
and accessible frameworks for doing survival. Conversely, a queering of survival
might also open up the option of choosing not to survive, through the
refusal of reproduction or the refusal of life itself. The Queer Apocalypse Apocalypse noun •
survivors like children and animals.
More generally: a disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment, esp. on a global scale; a
cataclysm. [3] If we are going to imagine the destruction of the world as we know it, then why not make these fictions meaningful to
If queerness is
a kind of end to the norms and structures of our world, then it makes sense
that queerness might say something meaningful about imagining the end.
Narratives of postapocalyptic survival function primarily as stories of
individual survival against a hostile world, and often a hostile other — in
the form of dangerous strangers or zombies. These narratives privilege the
individual as the basic unit for survival, replicating the neoliberal values of
individualism. At best, these narratives expand beyond the individual survivor when he is joined by his immediate family
or builds a new family. Queer models of kinship offer alternate frameworks for
imagining survival beyond the individual, through collectivity and
alternative kinships. If we are going to imagine surviving either our present
or our impending futures, we need collectives to survive. This is old news to people who
have long survived through collective struggle and collective support. This is not to simply produce a
romantic fantasy of a utopian community, but rather to acknowledge and
recognize that strength comes from organizing together. If capitalist,
the present? Lee Edelman has argued that queerness is “the place of the social order’s death drive.” [4]
nationalist, patriarchal, heteronormative and neoliberal logics tell us that
we’re each responsible for our own lives, then what better queering can we
offer than to reimagine stories of how we think about survival, or even to
refuse to survive? So what tools do we need for queer survival? First, we need alternative models
for building survival strategies. For instance, learning how to repurpose everyday
objects, everyday networks and everyday resources. [5] Second, we need to
consider models of communalism, and to develop better ways of
communicating and working through conflict. Third, we need to strategize
collectively, share skills, build skills and foster collaboration. And lastly,
we need to mobilize what queers do best — spoiling, twisting and
perverting the normative narratives that dominate survivalism and stories
of apocalypse.
Handmaid’s Tale
The 1AC’s description of women as solely persons with vaginas
reinscribes gender binaries and static notions of sexuality—their emphasis
on women as being valued for their “unique reproductive organs” is one
that excludes Trans* and gender queer women—are they not women too?
Seawell 14
(Sophia Seawell, Blue Stockings Magazine, “Not Buying Into It: On Language, Capitalism and
Menstruation,” http://bluestockingsmag.com/2014/02/05/edit____title-menstruation/, 2/5/2014)
On July 27, 2011, I added a new post on my feminist coming-of-age blog (now inactive) This Girl on Girls, titled ‘Why is
Menstruation Taboo?’ In it, I discussed the sexist stigmas attached to menstruation, including but not limited to the prescribed
silence and shame around the process. It was certainly a well-intentioned piece, and I still believe that society (or more specifically,
sexism) uses menstruation as a marker of the dirtiness or impurity of the female body and female sexuality. But what I can now
discourses about menstruation, whether they are
medical or academic or everyday and whether they are sexist or feminist, are prone to falling
into a cissentric trap of framing menstruation as inherently a ‘female’ experience . In
my post, I wrote things like “menstruation is completely normal and natural,” and that when a
woman menstruates, “her body is doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing. We should
recognize that I didn’t at the time is the way in which
all embrace that.”
I can see what I was trying to do: destigmatize menstruation and work towards accepting and
potentially celebrating it. I think this is a worthwhile project but that it needs to be executed with care and intentionality and not, for
Talking about menstruation as
if it is something only women-identified people experience erases the experience of people
who may not identify as women but still have uteri, as well as of those who do identify as
starters, by emphasizing the heightened stigma in “other cultures,” as I did at the time.
women but do not have uteri, like trans women. And are they not women? There are also
cisgender women who, often for health-related reasons, do not menstruate. Are they not
women? While on a conscious level most of us who talk about women and menstruation are
not intentionally trying to exclude the experiences of trans, genderqueer or gender nonconforming people, our language can and does have that effect. This kind of essentializing
language reflects our binarist conceptualization of gender, sex and the body as neatly
corresponding to either male or female—that, I would argue, is the larger problem. In
summary: not all women menstruate, and not all people who menstruate are women . Another
layer I’d like to add to my initial discussion of menstruation is how it relates to industry and the environment. The tropes used to
convince people who menstruate to buy a particular product often involve presenting menstruation as a problem to be fixed or
avoided, and this product is often a bleached tampon that puts users at risk for Toxic Shock Syndrome. It’s not healthy and it’s not
environmentally friendly—a person who menstruates and uses tampons/pads will produce 62,415 pounds of garbage over their
lifetime—but hey, you should buy it! As the video above mentions, there are other options: there are menstrual cups like the
Keeper, made from latex, and the Divacup, made from silicone. Because they are non-absorbent, they don’t harbor bacteria like
tampons, and there’s also no risk of TSS. For people who menstruate who don’t want to or can’t use internal products, GladRags
are the reusable counterpart to more commercially available pads. Of course it’s crucial to recognize that these choices still involve
purchasing a product and that, though they save money and waste in the long run, these particular products are more expensive
than the non-reusable options on the market. The arguments I’ve put forth, particularly in relation to cissexist language, are also
And while many argue that changing the
language would muddle the message, I’m not interested in a political movement that
privileges progress for cisgender women at the expense of trans women or other genderapplicable to other ‘women’s issues’ such as reproductive justice.
oppressed people. The project of resistance to sexism necessarily entails resistance to
cissexism, and to pretend otherwise means getting nowhere, fast.
Prisons
Our discursive record of violence done against prisoners produces an
epistemology that haunts the neoliberal-carceral state’s legalistic
discourse of “freedom” and “justice” even beyond a court decision – any
legalistic attempt to bracket our discussion is the same political move that
allows the law to possess and legitimize the violence of the carceral state.
Dillon 13 (Stephen, “Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State,” May 2013, Stephen Dillon,
assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in
Critical Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota.//RJ)
Many accounts of sexual violence committed against women in prison
concern exceptional cases where a guard violated the law or other inmates
perpetrate the violation. In this the case, sexual violence was performed by the
state in the name of the safety of the state . As the captain put it, the state simply has
the right to sexually assault those in their custody. Whether the cavity search is authorized by
the consent of the prisoner or not, consent is not available to the captive who is always
already subject to the systems of violence and force available to the
prison. As Angela Davis observes, if strip searches and cavity searches
were performed by men in plain clothes on the street, there would be no
question that an act of sexual violence was taking place.515 Yet, the body of
the prisoner is ontologically a threat to the state and the public, and thus
violence performed on the captive body preempts the violence the
prisoner is perpetually waiting to unleash . Simply, a rape is not a rape—it
is safety and security. This particular act of state violence did not occur because prisoners are “juridical nonpeople” as Dylan Rodríguez would have it.516 Instead, sexual violence was authorized and
performed by the law and through the law. The women were even given the non-choice of signing a
legal document authorizing the terror that was coming regardless of their forced consent. Torres and Rosenberg
were viewed as legal subjects who could authorize their own violation. For
example, when Amnesty International wrote the FBP about the assault, the Associate Director responded: Regarding the particular
search conducted of Ms. Torres and Susan Rosenberg prior to their transfer to Lexington, our careful review indicates that the
search was not punitive nor outside of agency policy. This very isolated occurrence involved a search that was performed in a
professional manner by a qualified physician’s assistant.517
The sexual assault was the law, policy,
and procedure of the prison. It was professional and part of the larger system of the prison’s humane care of
the prisoner. Like the unimaginable violence at Guantánamo, the women at Lexington were not
beyond the safety of the law—they were possessed by it. Rosenberg
countered state violence and terror: “I found a new way to survive by
reading and writing and thinking with purpose.”518 Her lawyer told her to write down the forms of
violation, pain, and horror that were too numerous to catalogue during their visits, were so unimaginable they could not be conveyed
by speech, or were simply unspeakable.
Rosenberg’s lawyer framed this process as building
an archive that would contradict the state’s account of Lexington and thus
would produce a different conception of the truth. Rosenberg writes: “Write it down,
for the record. I half believed that keeping a record was a futile effort, and
she half believed it would be of use in fighting for justice, but that sentence
became a signal between us, a way to reference acts of violence too
difficult to discuss.”519 The “record” in this formulation was a legal account
that could potentially contest the state in court, but it was also an
alternative record of events that could live on in places and times beyond
the state’s determination of what is real and true.
In this way,
writing became a
way of producing an epistemology that haunts the neoliberal-carceral
state’s discourses of freedom, equality, and justice. Writing became a way
to document the violence of the law—violence the law itself could not
register.
The Prison industrial Complex operates far beyond the walls of the prison
to capture queerness. And it isn’t broken its working well – endless cycles
of reform make a façade of freedom while simultaneously reproducing the
cycle of anti-queer violence that happens within it.
Stanley 11 – (Eric A., Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz, UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSD
edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex)
Trans/gender-non-conforming and queer people, along with many others,
are born into webs of surveillance. The gendering scan of other children at an early age
(“Are you a boy or a girl?”) places many in the panopticon long before they enter a
prison. For those who do trespass the gender binary or heteronormativity, physical violence,
isolation, detention, or parental disappointment become some of the first
punishments. As has been well documented, many trans and queer youth are routinely harassed at school and kicked out
of home at young ages, while others leave in hopes of escaping the mental and physical violence that they experience at schools
Many trans/queer youth learn how to survive in a hostile world.
Often the informal economy becomes the only option for them to make
money. Selling drugs, sex work, shoplifting, and scamming are among the
few avenues that might ensure they have something to eat and a place to
sleep at night. Routinely turned away from shelters because of their gender presentation, abused in residential living
and in their houses.
situations or foster care, and even harassed in “gay neighborhoods” (as they are assumed to drive down property values or scare off
they are reminded that they are alone. Habitually picked up for
truancy, loitering, or soliciting, many trans/queer people spend their youth
shuttling between the anonymity of the streets and the hyper-surveillance
of the juvenile justice system. With case managers too overloaded to care,
or too transphobic to want to care, they slip through the holes left by
business),
others. Picked up—locked up—placed in a home—escape—survive—
picked up again. The cycle builds a cage, and the hope for anything else
disappears with the crushing reality that their identities form the
parameters of possibility.10 With few options and aging-out of what little resources there are for “youth,” many
trans/queer adults are in no better a situation. Employers routinely don’t hire “queeny” gay men, trans women who “cannot pass,”
butches who seem “too hard,” or anyone else who is read to be “bad for business.” Along with the barriers to employment, most jobs
that are open to folks who have been homeless or incarcerated are minimum-wage and thus provide little more than continuing
poverty and fleeting stability. Back to where they began—on the streets, hustling to make it, now older—they are often given even
. While this cycle of poverty and incarceration speaks to more
current experiences, the discursive drives building their motors are
nothing new. Inheriting a long history of being made suspect, trans/queer
people, via the medicalization of trans identities and homosexuality, have
been and continue to be institutionalized, forcibly medicated, sterilized,
operated on, shocked, and made into objects of study and experimentation.
longer sentences
Similarly, the historical illegality of gender trespassing and of queerness have taught many trans/queer folks that their lives will be
intimately bound with the legal system. More recently, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has turned the surveillance technologies inward.
One’s blood and RNA replication became another site of susceptibility that continues to imprison people through charges of bioterrorism, under AIDS-phobic laws. Living through these forms of domination are also moments of devastating resistance where
people working together are building joy, tearing down the walls of normative culture, and opening space for a more beautiful, more
lively, safer place for all. Captive Genders remembers these radical histories and movements as evidence that our legacies are
In the
face of the overwhelming violence of the PIC, abolition—and specifically a
trans/queer abolition—is one example of this vital defiance. An abolitionist
politic does not believe that the prison system is “broken” and in need of
reform; indeed, it is, according to its own logic, working quite well. Abolition
fiercely imaginative and that our collective abilities can, and have, offered freedom even in the most destitute of times.11
necessarily moves us away from attempting to “fix” the PIC and helps us imagine an entirely different world—one that is not built
upon the historical and contemporary legacies of the racial and gendered brutality that maintain the power of the PIC. What this
means is that abolition is not a response to the belief that the PIC is so horrible that reform would not be enough. Although we do
abolition radically restages our
conversations and our ways of living and understanding as to undo our
reliance on the PIC and its cultural logics. For us, abolition is not simply a
reaction to the PIC but a political commitment that makes the PIC
impossible. To this end, the time of abolition is both yet to come and
already here. In other words, while we hold on to abolition as a politics for
doing anti-PIC work, we also acknowledge there are countless ways that
abolition has been and continues to be here now. As a project dedicated to
radical deconstruction, abolition must also include at its center a reworking
of gender and sexuality that displaces both heterosexuality and gender
normativity as measures of worth.12
believe that the PIC is horrible and that reform is not enough,
Prison reforms continue the violent policing of gender and sexuality by the
state while neglecting to bring the failings of the system to the forefront of
their work. The law does not treat everyone equally and it never will absent
the destruction of the state.
Ware 11 (Ware, Wesley [Wesley Ware is the founder of BreakOUT!, a project of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana
(JJPL) that fights for justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning youth in the juvenile justice system and
the author of the recently released report, Locked Up & Out: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth in Louisiana’s Juvenile
Justice System. Wes serves on the Advisory Board for the Equity Project, a national initiative to bring fairness and equity to LGBT
youth in juvenile delinquency courts. At JJPL, he coordinated the investigation for a class-action lawsuit on behalf of youth detained
in an abusive youth jail in New Orleans and monitors the conditions of three state-run youth prisons in Louisiana.]. 2011 “Rounding
Up the Homosexuals: The Impact of Juvenile Court on Queer and Trans/Gender-Non-Conforming Youth” in “Captive Genders:
Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex” Pg. 77 (Eds. Smith & Stanley) 2011 AK press. Accessed: 7/17/2015.
http://theloon2013.wikispaces.com/file/view/Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-Trans-Embodiment-and-Prison-IndustrialComplex.pdf)//ALepow
However, with the juvenile justice system’s intent to provide “treatment” to young people, many queer/trans youth inherit the
As sexual and gender
transgressions have been deemed both illegal and pathological, queer and trans
youth, who are some of the most vulnerable to “treatments,” are not only
subjected to incarceration but also to harassment by staff, conversion therapy,
and physical violence.6 Moreover, with the juvenile justice system often housed
under the direct authority of state correctional systems and composed of youth
referred directly from state police departments, it should not be surprising that
young people locked up in the state juvenile system, 80 percent of whom are
black in Louisiana,7 are often actually destroyed by the very system that was
created to intervene. Worse than just providing damaging outcomes for youth once they are incarcerated, this
rehabilitative system funnels queer and trans/gendernon-conforming youth into
the front doors of the system. Non-accepting parents and guardians can refer
their children to family court for arbitrary and subjective behaviors, such as being
“ungovernable.”8 Police can bring youth in for status offenses, offenses for which
adults cannot be charged, which often become contributing factors to the
criminalization of youth. Charges can range from truancy to curfew violations to
running away from home. Like in the adult criminal justice system, queer and trans youth can be
profiled by the police and brought in for survival crimes like prostitution or theft.
Youth may be referred for self-defense arising from conflict with hostile family
members or public displays of affection in schools that selectively enforce
policies only against queer and trans youth. Although youths’ rights were greatly expanded in 1967 when
ideology that they are “wrong” or in need of “curing,” as evidenced by their stories.
the Supreme Court decided that the juvenile system was not operating according to its original intent,9 youth continue to struggle in
the courts with fewer protections than adults. Defense lawyers for youth, who are sometimes the only advocates young people have
in court, have at times confused their role, advocating for what they believe to be the “best interest” of the youth rather than
defending their client’s “expressed interest.” Juvenile court judges with little accountability have similarly expanded their role with the
this effort to
rehabilitate “deviant” children and without the right to a jury trial for delinquent
offenses, the issue of guilt versus innocence can fall to the wayside. Further
aggravated by the public’s fear of youth sexuality and our desire to control 80
young people and their bodies, juvenile court presents a unique opportunity to
intent to provide services, through incarceration, to every youth that comes through their courtrooms. In
destroy the lives of queer and trans/gender-non-conforming youth. The agenda of
juvenile court then, for queer and trans youth at least, often becomes to
“rehabilitate” youth into fitting heteronormative and gendertypical molds. Guised
under the “best interest of the child,” the goal often becomes to “protect” the
child—or perhaps society—from gender-variant or non-heterosexual behavior.
While not as explicit as the sumptuary laws (laws requiring people to wear at least three items of gender-appropriate clothing) or
the policing of sexuality and
state regulation of gender has continued to exist in practice—perhaps nowhere
more than in juvenile courts. In many ways, the system still mirrors the adult
criminal justice system, whose roots can be traced to slavery, the
commodification of bodies as free labor, institutionalized racism, and state
regulation of low-income people of color, immigrants, and anyone deemed
otherwise “deviant” or a threat to the political norm. Combined with the Puritan beliefs that helped
spark the creation of juvenile courts, it becomes clear that, borrowing the words of Audre Lorde, queer and trans youth
of color “were never meant to survive.” In fact, one youth in a Louisiana youth prison responded to the
number of queer and trans youth incarcerated by stating, “I’m afraid they’re rounding up the homosexuals.” Once locked
up, queer and trans youth experience the same horrors that their adult
counterparts in the system do, but magnified by a system designed to control,
regulate, and pathologize their very existence. In Louisiana’s youth prisons,
queer and trans youth have been subjected to “sexual-identity confusion
counseling,” accused of using “gender identity issues” to detract from their
rehabilitation, and disciplined for expressing any gender-non-conforming
behaviors or actions. Youth are put on lockdown for having hair that is too long or
wearing state-issued clothing that is too tight. They are instructed how to walk,
talk, and act in their dorms and are prohibited from communicating with other
queer youth lest they become too “flamboyant” and cause a disturbance. They
are excessively punished for consensual same-sex behavior and spend much of
their time in protective custody or in isolation cells. In meetings with representatives from the Juvenile
Justice Project of Louisiana, directors of youth jails have referred to non-heterosexual
identities as “symptoms” and have conflated youth adjudicated for sex offenses
with youth who are queer. In addition, 81 when advocates asked what the biggest problem was at a youth prison in
sodomy laws of the past that led to the Compton’s Riots and Stonewall Rebellion,
Baker, Louisiana, guards replied, “the lesbians.” Even more troubling, unlike the adult criminal justice system where individuals
either “ride out their time” or work toward “good time” or parole, youths’ privileges in prison and eventual release dates are often
determined by their successful completion of their rehabilitative programming, including relationships with peers and staff.
Thus,
youth who are seen as “deviant” or “mentally ill,” or who otherwise do not
conform to the rules set forth by the prison, often spend longer amounts of time
incarcerated and are denied their opportunity for early release. For queer and
trans/ gender-non-conforming youth, this means longer prison terms. In fact, in the last
four years of advocacy on behalf of queer and trans youth in prison in Louisiana at the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, not one
openly queer or trans youth has been recommended for an early release by the Office of Juvenile Justice. While protections
afforded to youth in the juvenile justice system like a greater right to confidentiality are extremely important for youth, they can also
be another strike against queer and trans youth seeking to access resources or support networks while inside.
Like queer
and trans adults in the criminal justice system who have difficulty receiving
information that “promotes homosexuality,” youth are unable to access affirming
information during a particularly formative time in their lives, which can already
be plagued with confusion and questioning. The right to confidentiality for youth
in prison can result in their being prohibited from communicating with pen pals or
seeking services from community organizations. Other rights are afforded to
adults but not to minors, such as accessing legal counsel to challenge the
conditions of their confinement. Youth under 18 must rely on their guardians to
assist with filing a civil complaint, despite the fact that many queer and trans
youth have had difficulty with their families prior to their incarceration—and that
those family members may have contributed to their entering into the system in
the first place. This barrier also holds true for transgender youth who are minors
and seeking healthcare or hormones. These youth may need the approval from a guardian or judge in order
to access these services—or approval from a guardian in order to file a civil complaint to request them. Meanwhile, as state
institutions are placing queer and trans/gendernon-conforming youth behind bars
and effectively silencing their voices, prominent gay activists are fighting for
inclusion in the very systems that criminalize youth of color (such as increased
sentencing for hate crimes) 82 under the banner of “we’re just like everybody
else.” A far stray from the radicalism of the early gay rights movement,
mainstream “gay issues” have become focused on the right to marry and “don’t
ask, don’t tell” policies in the military, despite the fact that queer youth of color
have consistently ranked these at the bottom of their list of priorities of issues
that impact their lives.10 Likewise, the public “face of gay” as white, middle-class
men has become a further detriment to queer and trans youth in prison,
particularly in the South where queer youth of color are often not “out,” and
individuals, like in all areas of the country, have difficulty discussing the two
issues at the center: race and sexuality.11 As a result of the invisibility of so many incarcerated queer
and trans youth, especially youth of color, juvenile justice stakeholders in the South often mistake queer and trans youth to be white,
vulnerable youth usually charged with a sex offense, if they acknowledge them at all. As a result, they assume that any concern for
these youth to be coming from white advocates who believe that queer and trans youth have been funneled into a system made for
“poor black children;” in other words, into a system that is “OK for some children, but not for others.” We must be clear about why we
do this work—it is not because some children belong locked away at night and others do not—it is because no child should be
behind bars. Further, the data tells us that queer and trans youth in detention are equally distributed across race and ethnicity, and
comprise 15 percent of youth in detention centers. So far, the data has been consistent among youth in different regions in the
United States, including the rural South.12 Since queer and trans youth are overrepresented in nearly all popular feeders into the
juvenile justice system—homelessness, difficulty in school, substance abuse, and difficulty with mental health13—the same societal
ills, which disproportionately affect youth of color—it should not be surprising that they may be overrepresented in youth prisons and
Since incarcerated youth have so few opportunities to speak out, it is
critically important for individuals and organizations doing this work to keep a
political analysis of the failings of the system at the forefront of the work—
particularly the inherent racial disparities in the system—while highlighting the
voices of those youth who are most affected and providing vehicles through
which they can share their stories. Despite the targeting and subsequent
silencing of queer and trans/ gender-non-conforming youth in youth prisons and
jails as well.
jails across Louisiana, young people have developed creative acts of resistance
and mechanisms 83 for self-preservation and survival. By failing to recognize the
ways that young people demonstrate their own agency and affirm each other, we
risk perpetuating the idea of vulnerable youth with little agency; victims rather
than survivors and active resisters of a brutal system. Perhaps the most resilient
of all youth in prison in Louisiana, incarcerated queer and trans youth have
documented their grievances, over and over again, keeping impeccable paper
trails of abuse and discrimination for their lawyers and advocates. When confronted by the
guards who waged wars against them, one self-identified gay youth let it be known, “You messin’ with the wrong punk.” Although
prohibited from even speaking publicly with other queer youth in prison, queer and trans youth have formed community across three
youth prisons in the state, whispered through fences, and passed messages through sympathetic staff. They have made matching
bracelets and necklaces for one another, gotten each other’s initials tattooed on their bodies, and written letters to each other’s
mothers. They have supported each other by alerting advocates when one of them was on lockdown or in trouble and unable to
.
call Trans-feminine youth have gone to lockdown instead of cutting their hair and used their bed sheets to design curtains for their
cells once they got there. They have smuggled in Kool-Aid to dye their hair, secretly shaved their legs, colored their fingernails with
markers, and used crayons for eye shadow. When a lawyer asked her trans-masculine client to dress more “feminine” for court,
knowing that the judge was increasingly hostile toward gender-non-conforming youth, her client drew the line at the skirt, fearlessly
and proudly demanding that she receive her sentence in baggy pants instead. Queer and trans/gender-non-conforming youth have
made us question the very purpose of the juvenile justice system and holding them behind bars in jails and prisons made for kids.
By listening to their voices it becomes apparent that until we dismantle state
systems designed to criminalize and police young people and variant
expressions of gender and sexuality, none of us will be free. And to my younger client recently
released from a youth prison, yes, the world is more beautiful now. Welcome home.
The law has been historically used to criminalize queer, Trans*, and gender
non-conforming bodies. Reforms are unable to solve for the underlying
hetero and cis normative roots of the prison industrial complex and merely
result in the continuation of an unethical system
Lamble 11 (Lamble, S. [S. Lamble has been involved in social justice, antipoverty and prisoner solidarity work in Ontario,
Canada and London, England. Lamble currently teaches at Birkbeck Law School, University of London and is a founding member of
the Bent Bars Project, a collective which coordinates a letter writing program for queer, Trans and gender-non-conforming prisoners
in Britain.]. 2011 “Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans
Analysis and Action” in “Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex” Pg. 235 (Eds. Smith & Stanley)
2011 AK press. Accessed: 7/17/2015. http://theloon2013.wikispaces.com/file/view/Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-TransEmbodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex.pdf)//ALepow
Queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming people have been historically subject
to oppressive laws, gender policing, and criminal punishment—a legacy that
continues today despite ongoing legal reforms. Law enforcement officials (including
police, courts, immigration officers, prison guards, and other state agents) have a long history of targeting,
punishing, and criminalizing sexual dissidents and gender-non-conforming
people.12 While many overtly homophobic and transphobic laws have been
recently overturned in Canada, the United States, and Britain, the criminalization
and punishment of queer and trans people extends well beyond formal
legislation.13 State officials enable or participate in violence against queer, trans,
and gender-non-conforming communities by (a) ignoring everyday violence
1.
against queer and trans people; (b) selectively enforcing laws and policies in
transphobic and homophobic ways; (c) using discretion to over-police and enact
harsher penalties against queer and trans people; and (d) engaging in acts of
violence, harassment, sexual assault, and discrimination against queer and trans
people.14 While some police departments are increasingly putting on a “gay-positive” public face, the problem of state violence
against queer and trans people nonetheless persists and has been well documented by numerous police- and prison-monitoring
This ongoing legacy of violence should make queer and trans people both
cautious of the state’s power to criminalize our lives and wary of the state’s claim
to protect us from harm. Although some people believe that we can train
transphobia out of law enforcement agents or eliminate homophobic
discrimination by hiring more LGBT prison guards, police, and immigration
officials, such perspectives wrongly assume that discrimination is a “flaw” in the
system, rather than intrinsic to the system itself. Efforts to make prison and police
institutions more “gay-friendly” perpetuate the myth that such systems are in
place to protect us. But as the uneven history of criminalization trends in Canada, the United States, and Britain so
clearly demonstrate (that is, the way that the system targets some people and not others), the prison industrial
complex is less about protecting the public from violence and more about
controlling, labeling, disciplining, Captive Genders 240 and in some cases killing
particular groups of people—especially those who potentially disrupt the social,
economic, and political status quo.16 While the state might stop harassing,
assaulting, and criminalizing some people within queer and trans communities
(namely those upwardly mobile, racially privileged, and property-owning folks),
the criminal system will continue to target those within our communities who are
deemed economically unproductive, politically threatening, or socially
undesirable. As people who have historically been (and continue to be) targeted
by this unjust system, queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming communities
must move away from efforts to make the prison industrial complex more “LGBTfriendly” and instead fight the underlying logic of the system itself.
groups.15
Attempts to reform prisons will always fail because prisons require and
foster violence as part of their punitive function—prisons are sites of
physical, social, and civil death, and a continuation of the system is a
continuation of these issues
Lamble 11 (Lamble, S. [S. Lamble has been involved in social justice, antipoverty and prisoner solidarity work in Ontario,
Canada and London, England. Lamble currently teaches at Birkbeck Law School, University of London and is a founding member of
the Bent Bars Project, a collective which coordinates a letter writing program for queer, Trans and gender-non-conforming prisoners
in Britain.]. 2011 “Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans
Analysis and Action” in “Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex” Pg. 235 (Eds. Smith & Stanley)
2011 AK press. Accessed: 7/17/2015. http://theloon2013.wikispaces.com/file/view/Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-TransEmbodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex.pdf)//ALepow
Prisons are harmful, violent, and damaging places, especially for queer, trans,
and gender-non-conforming folks. Prisons are violent institutions. People in
prison and detention experience brutal human rights abuses, including physical
assault, psychological abuse, rape, harassment, and medical neglect. Aside from these
4.
violations, the act of putting people in cages is a form of violence in itself. Such violence leads to extremely high rates of self-harm
These problems are neither exceptional nor
occasional; violence is endemic to prisons. It is important to bear in mind that
prison violence stems largely from the institutional structure of incarceration
rather than from something supposedly inherent to prisoners themselves. Against the
and suicide, both in prison and following release.35
popular myth that prisons are filled with violent and dangerous people, the vast majority of people are held in prison for non-violent
crimes, especially drug offenses and crimes of poverty.36 For the small number of people who pose a genuine risk to themselves or
other words, prisons are dangerous not because of
who is locked inside, but instead prisons both require and foster violence as part
of their punitive function. For this reason, reform efforts may reduce, but cannot
ultimately eliminate, prison violence. The high number of deaths in state custody speaks to the devastating
others, prisons often make those risks worse. In
consequences of imprisonment. Between 1995 and 2007, the British prison-monitoring group Inquest documented more than 2,500
deaths in police and prison custody.37 Homicide and suicide rates in Canadian prisons are nearly eight times the rate found in noninstitutional settings.38 In the United States between 2001 and 2006, there were 18,550 adult deaths in state prisons,39 and
between 2003 and 2005, there were an additional 2,002 arrest-related deaths.40 It is extremely rare for state officials to be held
accountable for these deaths. For example, among the deaths that Inquest has documented in Britain, not one police or prison
officer to date has been held criminally responsible.41 Deaths in custody are symptomatic of the daily violence and harm that
Queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming people are subject to these
harms in specific ways: • High risk of assault and abuse: Queer, trans, and
gender-non-conforming people are subject to widespread sexual assault, abuse,
and other gross human rights violations, not only from other prisoners, but from
prison staff as well.42 Captive Genders 244 • Denial of healthcare: Many prisoners must fight to
even see a doctor, let alone get adequate medical care. Trans people in
particular are regularly denied basic medical needs, especially surgery and
hormones. Many prisons have no guidelines for the care of trans and gendervariant persons, and even where guidelines exist, they are insufficient or not
followed.43 Inadequate policy and practice on HIV/AIDS and Hep C prevention is
another major health problem in prison, where transmission rates are
exceptionally high.44 These risks increase dramatically for trans people, who
already experience high rates of HIV/AIDS.45 This combination of high
transmission risks, poor healthcare provision, inadequate sexual health policies,
and long-term health effects of imprisonment (including shorter life
expectancies), mean that prison is a serious health hazard for queer and trans
people. • Subject to solitary confinement and strip-searching: Trans and gender-non-conforming
prisoners are regularly placed in solitary confinement as a “solution” to the
problem of sex-segregated prisons. Even when used for safety purposes,
“protective custody” constitutes a form of punishment, as it usually means
reduced access to recreational and educational programs, and increased
psychological stress as a result of isolation. Trans and gendernon-conforming
prisoners endure.
people are also frequently subject to humiliating, degrading, abusive, and overtly
transphobic strip-searches.46 • High risk of self-harm and suicide: Queer and trans people, especially youth, have
higher rates of suicide attempts and self-harm. Such risks increase in prison and are heightened in segregation, particularly when
prisoners are isolated from queer and trans supports.47 These risks are not limited to incarceration but continue after release. A
study in Britain for example, found that men who leave prison were eight times more likely to commit suicide than the general
The prison system is
literally killing, damaging, and harming people from our communities. Whether
we consider physical death caused by self-harm, medical neglect, and state
violence; social death caused by subsequent unemployment, homelessness, and
stigmatization; or civil death experienced through political disenfranchisement
and exclusion from citizenship rights, the violence of imprisonment is undeniable
population, and women released from prison were thirty-six times more likely to commit suicide.48
Gender and sexual norms are at the very heart of the prison industrial
complex—a reform of the system can never solve the institutional
necessity of prisons to reinforce, perpetuate, and entrench these norms
Lamble 11 (Lamble, S. [S. Lamble has been involved in social justice, antipoverty and prisoner solidarity work in Ontario,
Canada and London, England. Lamble currently teaches at Birkbeck Law School, University of London and is a founding member of
the Bent Bars Project, a collective which coordinates a letter writing program for queer, Trans and gender-non-conforming prisoners
in Britain.]. 2011 “Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans
Analysis and Action” in “Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex” Pg. 235 (Eds. Smith & Stanley)
2011 AK press. Accessed: 7/17/2015. http://theloon2013.wikispaces.com/file/view/Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-TransEmbodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex.pdf)//ALepow
Prisons reinforce gender and sexual norms
in three key ways: First, sex-segregated prisons restrict people’s right to
determine and express their Captive Genders 242 own gender identity and
sexuality. Because most prisons divide people according to their perceived
genitals rather than their self-expressed gender identity, prisoners who don’t
identify as “male” or “female” or who are gender-non-conforming are often sent to
segregation or forced to share a cell with prisoners of a different gender, often
with little regard for their safety. In Britain, even trans people who have obtained a Gender Recognition
3. Prisons reinforce oppressive gender and sexual norms.
Certificate (a state document that legally recognizes a person’s self-defined gender) have been held in prisons with people of a
By segregating institutions along sex/gender lines, prisons work to
make invisible, isolate, and stigmatize those bodies and gender identity
expressions that defy imposed gender binaries.28 Second, gender segregation in
prisons plays a key role in “correctional” efforts to modify prisoner behavior in
accordance with gender norms. Historically, women’s prisons were designed to
transform “fallen” women into better wives, mothers, homemakers, and domestic
servants, whereas men’s prisons were designed to transform males into
disciplined individuals, productive workers, and masculine citizens.29 These
gendered goals persist today, particularly in the division of prison labor. For example,
different gender.27
when a new mixed-gender prison was built in Peterborough, England in 2005, all parts of the institution were duplicated to provide
separate male and female areas, except for the single kitchen, where women were expected to do all the cooking.30
The
current trend toward so-called “gender responsive” prisons is likewise framed as
a measure to address the specific needs of female prisoners, but usually works
to discipline, enforce, and regulate gender norms.31 Moreover, genderresponsive prison reforms are increasingly used to justify building new prisons
(without closing existing ones), thereby furthering prison expansion.32 Third,
sexual violence plays a key role in maintaining order and control within prisons, a
tactic that relies on oppressive sexual and gender norms.33 Sexual violence in
prison, including harassment, rape, and assault, is shockingly widespread and
often institutionally condoned. According to Stop Prisoner Rape, 1 in 5 males and 1 in 4 females face sexual
assault in US prisons.34 To call attention to the enforcement of gender/ sexual norms in
prison is not to suggest that prison culture is uniform across or within institutions,
or that prisoners are more sexist, homophobic, or transphobic than nonprisoners. Rather, prisons as institutions tend to reinforce, perpetuate, and
entrench gender/sex hierarchies and create environments in which sexual
violence flourishes.
Trans Generalizations
Speaking on behalf of trans people is bad – reinforces this
generic/simplistic narrative.
McBee ’12 (Thomas Page; 8/6/12; former masculinity expert for Vice; Salon, “Trans, but not like you think”
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/07/trans_but_not_like_you_think/)
Just last week I got a birth certificate from North Carolina Vital Records that put a state seal on a tale that began before I could talk.
“Thomas Page McBee,” it says, under “Certificate of Live Birth,” and then, there’s the word I spent thousands of dollars, a major
surgery, two trips to probate court, two physicals, a doctor’s letter, plus the 80 oily milligrams of testosterone self-shot into my thigh
every week to achieve: male. When I tore open the envelope it took my breath away, much like seeing my reflection every morning
— the growing pronouncement of my jaw, the square sideburns, the scruff on my cheek, the pecs and biceps ballooning steadily
with each workout — I tear up sometimes, I’m so floored by the rightness of it all. I held my birth certificate, my heart galloping, and I
felt born again at the age of 31. Maybe you think you’ve heard my story before: I knew I wasn’t a girl before I knew much of
anything. There were the years of private, simmering mirror-hate; the jealous glances at men, the coveting of facial hair and biceps.
As trans people become more visible, our stories have narrowed into a neat narrative
arc: born in the wrong body, pushed to the brink of suicide/sanity/society, the agonized
decision to begin hormone treatment/surgeries for the reward of ending up ourselves
and looking “normal,” which ends in a lesson about the tenacity of the human spirit, the
gorgeous triumph of believing in yourself. This is all true. But for me, and many others, it’s also
more complicated than that. I don’t think I was born in the wrong body. I am not “finally
myself.” I’ve never spent a day being anyone else. Mine is another story, a real and
complex story, and one, by definition, that’s not as easy to tell. - – - – - – - – - - I’ve been thinking
about Lana Wachowski since she released a video clip promoting her new film, “Cloud Atlas,” last week. In an age when Chaz Bono
yuks it up with David Letterman and the frontman for rock band Against Me! created a frenzy when she came out earlier this year as
Laura Jane Grace Gabel, Wachowski surely knew that the video clip would garner attention, requests to be interviewed, before-and-
Even for those lucky trans folks not facing a
daily threat of violence, this is a strange time: one where we find our portrayals hovering
between soft-focus empathy and tawdry headlines. Despite reportedly being several years into her
after photos, fans’ gushes of loyalty or turncoat transphobia.
transition, which has been discussed in print and gossiped about openly since the early-2000s, the famously tight-lipped Wachowski
has never addressed her gender identity publicly, even when “raising eyebrows” at red-carpet events in pearl earrings and dresses.
So here she is, in this promotional behind-the-scenes video, meant to address the making of her new film. “Hi, I’m Lana,” she says
simply, seated beside her directing partner and brother. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, a wide smile and that’s it. No baby
picture montage, no recounting suicide attempts, no bloody footage of surgery. Hers is not that kind ,.of story. She goes on to get
down to the business at hand. When she describes the new film, her pink dreads shake like flags in the wind. “I’m Lana,” she says. I
hope that’s the sound of a tide turning. - – - – - – - – - - Don’t
get me wrong. Some trans people feel that
they’ve suffered a birth defect, tantamount to a missing limb. For some folks, “trapped in
the wrong body” is a precise description. I don’t fault anyone their language or their
vision of themselves. I don’t tell anyone else’s story. But I do think that the typical trans
narrative — the one you see on talk shows or in long human-interest stories in popular magazines — is dumbed down
for your consumption because it’s presumed that people who aren’t trans don’t think
about their gender identity. Even more darkly, there’s an unspoken assumption: that
trans people are strange, untranslatable. There’s something so fundamentally confusing
about the trans experience, the logic goes, that we need to make our stories really, really
palatable for you to understand us. But I’ve found the opposite to be true. I write a column for the Rumpus
exploring themes related to my transition, and the people who email me or the friends who start conversation over drinks about their
own genders are almost always not trans. We talk about the ways expectations of masculinity and femininity inform and stifle us, or
how we’ve all grown from teenage bravado informed by those concepts into unique adults, unafraid to be who we are. Because of
that sense of dialogue (inevitable Internet trolls and ignorant menace aside), I’ve come to believe that non-trans folks are not only
capable of metabolizing more than the schlocky softball celebrity interviews and stark mirror-in-a-mirror documentary shots, but are
hungry for real conversation. Gender is part of everyone’s life, we’re all negotiating the line between what we’re expected to be and
who we are. In that spirit, then, I’ll tell you the whole story. - – - – - – - – - - I
believe I was born in the right body;
transgender, yes, but there’s nothing “wrong” with me. For 10 years I was a boyish, short-haired kid, as
equally interested in skateboards as poetry. As a teenager, I cultivated a guy-but-better gallantry that won me girlfriends and a few
manageable bullies. There were signs that the center wouldn’t hold: the way I felt caught off-guard if my reflection materialized in a
Like a lot of people, I
understood even at a young age that gender was a spectrum, with “hyper-masculine” and “hyperfeminine” on the extreme poles, and a million shades of potential expression between them. I knew I was masculine, but
window, my insistence on getting a hot shave at the barber, the ace bandage flattening my chest.
saw myself as artistic, rebellious, indifferent to alpha posturing. I loved the ruggedness of James Dean and the romanticism of the
Beats. For the most part, I felt OK about myself. Anyway, in my baseball hat and jeans, I looked like all the skinny boys I was friends
with. I
knew I wasn’t a woman, not like my girlfriends or sister or mother. Not like my friends, even the tomboy punk-rock
But I looked at most of the men in my midst and didn’t
see myself in their jockeying power dynamics or aversion to hugs. Even later, as I befriended guys
straight girls or the swaggering butch lesbians.
just as baffled by masculinity as I was, I didn’t connect my growing discomfort in my body to the reality of their physical differences. I
didn’t feel like a man exactly, and I figured, once I knew trans men in college, that hormones weren’t for me. It was easier to imagine
dressing like the fantasy guy I saw in countless mirrors than it was to imagine an actual life of men’s rooms and shoulder claps. It
was my breasts that troubled me the most: they were lost pilgrims, afloat on my frustrated body. My attempts to hide them grew
more elaborate by the day, and my frustration with their shape made getting dressed an angry hurricane of discarded, too-tight Tshirts. By the time I’d moved to Oakland in my early 20s, I’d decided I would have chest-reconstruction surgery as soon as I could
save up enough money to do so. Maybe, I figured, that would fix the growing reality that I no longer “passed” as a teenage boy, that
every “ma’am” thrown my way tarnished my sparkle. So, one foggy June morning in 2008, a surgeon sculpted pecs where there
once were breasts. I lost, in the process, five pounds of flesh; I awoke feeling a much heavier burden lifted. But something was
wrong. I thought maybe I could find peace by lifting weights, jumping rope to keep trim and hide my hips, wearing V-necks that
showed off my flat chest. I went swimming shirtless in the Caribbean, trying to occupy some unicorn space. I tried, with growing
desperation, to both love my body and be myself. I even wrote about it for Salon: I’m not a man or a woman, I said. But
pronouns made me bristle, and I didn’t understand yet that I could look like a man and be
whomever I wanted on that grand spectrum. I didn’t think that, just like you, I have a
gender identity that’s growing and evolving, that I’m tasked with finding my authentic
place in a jumble of stereotypes and expectations. What makes a man? I thought, looking at myself. It was
my body that showed me. They call it dysphoria, but it feels to me like watching yourself become a stranger. Maybe you’ve known
you’re making a mistake: a bad marriage, the wrong career path, something that becomes clearer and more potent daily. My
reflection seemed to be going in the wrong direction: rounding where it shouldn’t have been, thinning where it should have
thickened. Every
trans person has a breaking point, and mine came two years after top
surgery, when I expected to see myself and found a woman standing before me, instead.
As much as I didn’t connect with the cultural expectations of Being a Man, I knew that I’d grown up and become one. I was going to
have to figure out how to bridge the gap. I’d done so many sit-ups and spent so much time in quiet reflection, tailoring shirts to fit my
bird chest that I knew, in that last-puzzle-piece way of an epiphany, that loving myself meant allowing my body to change. I had a
primal sense of home, and I knew exactly what it looked like. My body needed me. A few months later, I began injecting
testosterone. - – - – - – - – - - Here we are, over a year later. I
love the way my face has blended into
something familiar, how I’ve met the guy I saw every time I squinted at the mirror. I am
indeed the male-bodied version of myself, the same romantic, tattooed guy. I wish I could
explain to the 23-year-old looking in the mirror that I needn’t have worried: my body
knew. My gender hasn’t changed since I was a teenager. I’m very much my own man. I don’t know how
Lana Wachowski feels, but I hope that the relative quiet of both her “introduction” and the reaction to it signal a growing awareness
that we’re entitled to our stories, however we want to tell them. Maybe we don’t need to hand out sugar pills anymore. “I’m Lana,”
she said, and smiled. It was an act of faith to leave it there, in two words and a shake of that hair. Consider the story told.
We must embrace the trans that exists within all of us
Browing ’14 (Frank; Winter 2014; author; California Magazine, “Trans Identity Meditation: Exploding the Notion that Anyone
Is Simply Male or Female” http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/winter-2014-gender-assumptions/trans-identity-meditationexploding-notion-anyone)
Trans in all these forms is at once a way of being and a performance. Increasingly,
however, trans aims to suggest that all of us, if we are able to acknowledge it, are to
some degree trans*. We all are traveling through lives that are less and less defined by
language, style, presentation, or physical and hormonal capacities. To be human is to be
at once male and female, expressed in various degrees and intensities by the roles
required of us by our friends, our colleagues, and our enemies. That of course makes
many people, particularly those who don’t share the same celebration of gender fluidity, terribly anxious—not least
some of the muscle queers of the Stonewall generation, whose pumped torsos and three-day beards are as uniformly unoriginal as
the “little houses made of ticky-tacky” from the Malvina Reynolds song, that “all look just the same.” Now safely certified by the
marriage courts and the marketplace, their challenge to bourgeois convention is about as subversive as the Shriners.
Visibility
Global Queer Politics of Visibility Are in-accessible to minority queer
identities
Calixte 05 (Shana L. "Things Which Aren't To Be Given Names: Afro-Caribbean and Diasporic Negotiations of Same Gender
Desire and Sexual Relations." In Canadian Woman Studies 24.2 (2005).)
One final theme within the literature of queer diasporic AfroCaribbean women is the discussion around naming and visibility.
A
politics of visibility is one that is central to western ideas of gay and
lesbian liberation. For diasporic queers, especially women, this has been a difficult
terrain, where politics of exclusion, such as racism, sexism, classism and
lesbophobia work to invalidate the experiences of Afro-Caribbean queer women, even as they are
located in the originating space of the "global gay," assuming, therefore, that they are located in a space of freedom to practice their
sexuality, as well as in a space that would inevitably recognize how they perform "queer." Yet because of the terrain of oppression,
a clear understanding of how they perform their sexual identities is not
often the result. Some Afro-Caribbean queer women articulate a need to "find our way towards an authentic naming of
ourselves" (Douglas xi). Although one can question and critique the problematic nature of what "authenticity" means to Douglas, this
use of language speaks to a community that has for centuries, been violently distanced from their own subject formation and also
naming. This history, therefore, has resulted in a reclamation of identities and namings that are often seen as negative: sodomite,
The reclamation of these words is not one
that is clear of dangers, but is specific for locating oneself in a space that
indexes the complex structures of colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality.
man royal, zami, bulldagger, buller, batty bwoy (Cohen).
As Wesley Crichlow states of Caribbean men (which I would argue also works for women named above), the act of identifying
oneself as buller man or batty bwoy places an individual, historically and geographically, in proximity to a specific set of narratives,
images andvalues. The naming ties identity to the history of the Caribbean people as well as to a historical, cultural, collective, and
personal sense of ancestral heritage, language, body gestures and memory that is specific to . . . same-sex relations. (32) As
Crichlow has illustrated, it is also essential, for diasporic queers, to make naming connections between indigenous sexualities and
diasporic sexualities, even though this reclamation seems dangerous when thinking of how these words are used within the
Caribbean. Makeda Silvera states these words are dread words. So dread that women dare not use these words to describe
themselves. They were names given to women by men to describe aspects of our/ their lives that men neither understood nor
approved. (172) And the politics of reclaiming words in the Caribbean diaspora that would be used as "dread words" in the
Caribbean has led to serious debate between local and diasporic Afro-Caribbean women. Astrid Roemer and Audre Lorde found
themselves facing off over the ways women are to name themselves, their lives and their sexualities. As Surinamese-born Roemer
states, "Simply doing things, without giving them a name, and preserving rituals and secrets between women are important to me"
(qtd. in Wekker 61). Audre Lorde, a diasporic Caribbean self-identified lesbian replied, "If YOU speak your name, you represent a
threat to the powers that be, the patriarchate.. . . I want to encourage more and more women to identify themselves and to speak
their name, where and when they can, and to survive" (qtd. in Wekker 60-6 1). This debate brings up the interesting dilemma of
visibility politics for those in the West, but whose experience is linked to a Caribbean consciousness-where the "open secret" around
sexuality predomiSome AfraCaribbean queer women articulate a need to "find our way towards an authentic naming of
aexrsel~es."~ This speaks to a community that has been distanced dram their own subject formagian and afso naming.. Lorde is
, in order to challenge racist and
heterosexist myths that Afro-Caribbean women cannot be included in
histories of same gender desires and relationships. For Roemer, the terrain ofsexual identity
arguing for a need to declare oneself, openly and visibly
and desire requires a preserving of that history, keeping it hidden from those who would seek to destroy or appropriate it. For
diasporic AfroCaribbean women, it has become essential to name and be visible, as they constantly battle a force that seeks to
The global gay, it seems, only has space for a
certain body, not one that challenges the normative and rigid ideologies of
class, race and gender. All these experiences prove to once again displace the diasporic queer. As T. J. Bryan
invisibilize how they perform their queer sexualities.
states about her own experiences in theToronto SIM community: . . . there's a leather ball advertised in a queer community rag. I
contemplate going but... when i'm wrapped in yard upon yard of colourful cloth, head-tied, accessorized not in chrome, leather and
chain, but in cowrie shells, beads and ragamuffin gyal gold hoops, will they see the kink in me? . . . even if i could afford the ticket,
would they allow me into their fete dressed as is, or stop me at the door with lectures "bout strict dress codes and the (white) queer
slim asthetic? Ain't my kwaminathe essentialist, wannabe, continental, african-queen wear-the sort of festish wear they had in mind?
(1 997b: 155)
The Construction of the Closet and Thus of Coming out form a Modern
Confessional in which Queerness can be appropriated and shame
replicated – Opacity is a resistance to this logic
De Villiers (Nicholas. An associate professor of Arts and English at the University of Florida Miami with areas of Expertise in Film Theory,
Gender Studies, Philosophy, Queer Theory. Opacity and The Closet, 4-6)
. The guilt
and shame associated with sexual secrets often seem to be supplied in
order to make the closet meaningful, which distracts us from the way it
“performs anyway” (as de Man puts it). Foucault famously voiced his doubts about the Repressive Hypothesis, asking,
“Suppose the obligation to conceal it was but another aspect of the duty to
admit to it (concealing it all the more and with greater care as the confession of it was more important, requiring a stricter
The closet as a modern form of confessional discourse strikes me as particularly “mechanical” in its operations
ritual and promising more decisive effects)? What if sex in out society, on a scale of several centuries, was something that was
placed within an unrelenting system of confession?”26 Both de Man and Foucault acknowledge the way in which this operation is
the question then becomes how to throw a spanner in the
machine of confessional discourse? What if we were to look at speech as
nonrevelatory, outside the parameters of confession and truth, the
humanist desire for reflection, and the ideal of transparency? What if we were to
attend to its opacity? What would such an opacity look or sound like, and what would be its function? This book
interrogates the viability of the metaphor of the closet and puts forth a concept of “opacity” as an alternative queer
strategy or tactic that is not linked to an interpretation of hidden depths,
concealed meanings, or a neat opposition between silence and speech.27 To
like an unrelenting machine. So
this end I examine queer appropriations of forms typically linked to truth telling, the revelation of secrets, authenticity, and
transparency, namely, the interview, the autobiography, the diary, and the documentary.28 I use the term “strategy” here to indicate
a certain relation to particular “games of truth” and to indicate the simultaneously ludic and regulated nature of language. Strategies
are specific to particular historical, cultural, and discursive situations and can have different intentions and effects. It may well be
that a strategy’s “motivation” is part and parcel of a homophobic logic of shame, self-loathing, and a petit-bourgeois concern for
privacy.29 But this does not prohibit its effects from being productively queer. This tension may, in fact, be the enabling condition for
any consideration of queer opacity whatsoever. It is my conviction that strategies should be considered less for their reactive or
protective abilities (that is, a reading in terms of the closet, in terms of what the strategy is intended to prevent or protect against),
what is remarkable about
opacity as a discursive strategy is its productivity (including the remarkable number of
but rather more for what they might enable, creatively and politically. Indeed,
attempts to make sense of it, which perhaps makes it an ironic productivity).30 The figure of Bartleby with which I began exemplifies
what I suggest
Alts
Conviviality
The alternative is to engage in a politics of conviviality
Puar 10. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Women & Performance: a journal of
feminist theory, Vol. 19, No. 2, July 2009, pg. 168
Out of the numerous possibilities that ‘‘assemblage theory’’ offers, much of it has already begun to transform queer theory, from
Elizabeth Grosz’s crucial re-reading of the relations between bodies and prosthetics (which complicates not only the contours of
bodies in relation to forms of bodily discharge, but also complicates the relationships to objects, such as cell phones, cars,
wheelchairs, and the distinctions between them as capacity-enabling devices) (1994), to Donna Haraway’s cyborgs (1991), to
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘BwO’’ (Bodies without Organs – organs, loosely defined, rearranged against the presumed natural ordering
of bodily capacity) (1987).
I want to close by foregrounding the analytic power of
conviviality that may further complicate how subjects are positioned ,
underscoring instead more fluid relations between capacity and debility .
Conviviality , unlike notions of resistance , oppositionality , subversion or
transgression (facets of queer exceptionalism that unwittingly dovetail
with modern narratives of progress in modernity), foregrounds categories
such as race , gender , and sexuality as events – as encounters – rather
than as entities or attributes of the subject . Surrendering certain notions
of revolution , identity politics , and social change – the ‘‘ big utopian
picture’’
that Massumi complicates in the opening epigraph of this essay –
conviviality instead always
entails an ‘‘experimental step .’’ Why the destabilization of the subject of
identity and a turn to affect matters is because affect – as a bodily
matter – makes identity politics both possible and yet impossible . In its
conventional usage,
conviviality means relating to , occupied with , or fond of
feasting , drinking , and good company – to be merry , festive , together
at a table , with companions and guests, and hence, to live with . As an attribute
and function of assembling, however,
conviviality does not lead to a politics of the
universal or inclusive common , nor an ethics of individuatedness , rather
the futurity enabled through the open materiality of bodies as a Place to
Meet . We could usefully invoke Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘‘encounter value’’ here, a
‘‘becoming with’’ companionate (and I would also add, incompanionate) species,
whereby actors are the products of relating, not pre-formed before the
encounter (2008, 16). Conviviality is an ethical orientation that rewrites a Levinasian taking up of
the ontology of the Other by
arguing that there is no absolute self or other ,15 rather bodies
that come together and dissipate through intensifications and
vulnerabilities , insistently rendering bare the instability of the divisions
between capacity-endowed and debility-laden bodies . These encounters
are rarely comfortable mergers but rather entail forms of eventness that
could potentially unravel oneself but just as quickly be recuperated
through a restabilized self, so that the political transformation is invited , as
Arun Saldhana writes,
through ‘‘ letting yourself be destabilized by the radical
alterity of the other , in seeing his or her difference not as a threat but as
a resource to question your own position in the world’’
(2007, 118).
Conviviality is thus open to its own dissolution and self-annihilation and
less interested in a mandate to reproduce its terms of creation or
sustenance, recognizing that political critique must be open to the
possibility that it might disrupt and alter the conditions of its own
emergence such that it is no longer needed – an openness to something
other than what we might have hoped for. This is my alternative approach
to Lee Edelman’s No Future, then, one that is not driven by rejecting the figure of the
child as the overdetermined outcome of ‘‘reproductive futurism’’ (2004),16 but rather complicates the
very terms of the regeneration of queer critique itself. Thus the challenge
before us is how to craft convivial political praxis that does not demand a
continual reinvestment in its form and content , its genesis or its
outcome , the literalism of its object nor the direction of its drive.
Failure
The alternative is to embrace failure as a radical means of rejecting
normative notions of success and productivity
Halberstam 11. J. J. Jack Halberstam, professor of English at the University of Southern California, The Queer Art of
Failure, pg. 2
In this book I range from children’s animation to avant-garde performance and queer art to think about ways of being and knowing
that stand outside of conventional understandings of success. I argue that
success in a heteronormative,
capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive
maturity combined with wealth accumulation. But these measures of success have come under
serious pressure recently, with the collapse of financial markets on the one hand and the epic rise in divorce rates on the other. If
the boom and bust years of the late twentieth century and the early twentyfirst have taught us anything, we should at least have a healthy critique of
static models of success and failure . Rather than just arguing for a reevaluation of these standards of
passing and failing,
The Queer Art of Failure dismantles the logics of success and
failure with which we currently live. Under certain circumstances failing , losing ,
forgetting , unmaking , undoing , unbecoming , not knowing may in fact
offer more creative , more cooperative , more surprising ways of being in
the world . Failing is something queers do and have always done
exceptionally well ; for queers failure can be a style , to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way
of life , to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of
success that depend upon “ trying and trying again. ” In fact if success
requires so much effort , then maybe failure is easier in the long run and
offers different rewards . What kinds of reward can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure
allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and
manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly
childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods . Failure preserves
some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly
clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And while
failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as
disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the
opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic
positivity of contemporary life . As Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us in Bright- sided, positive
thinking is a North American affliction , “a mass delusion ” that emerges
out of a combination of American exceptionalism and a desire to believe
that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence
of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions
(2009: 13). Positive thinking is offered up
believing
that success depends upon one’s attitude is far preferable to Americans
than recognizing that their success is the outcome of the tilted scales of
race, class, and gender. As Ehrenreich puts it, “If optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve
an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure.” But, she continues, “the flip
side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility ,”
meaning that while capitalism produces some people’s success through
other people’s failures, the ideology of positive thinking insists that
success depends only upon working hard and failure is always of your own
doing (8). We know better of course in an age when the banks that ripped off ordinary people have been deemed “too big to
fail” and the people who bought bad mortgages are simply too little to care about. In Bright-sided Ehrenreich uses the
example of American women’s application of positive thinking to breast
cancer to demonstrate how -dangerous the belief in optimism can be and
in the U.S. as a cure for cancer, a path to untold riches, and a surefire way to engineer your own success. Indeed
how deeply Americans want to believe that health is a matter of attitude
rather than environmental degradation and that wealth is a matter of
visualizing success rather than having the cards stacked in your favor .
For the nonbelievers outside the cult of positive thinking, however, the failures
and losers, the grouchy, irritable whiners who do not want to “have a nice
day” and who do not believe that getting cancer has made them better
people, politics offers a better explanatory framework than personal
disposition . For these negative thinkers, there are definite advantages to failing.
Relieved of the obligation to keep smiling through chemotherapy or
bankruptcy, the negative thinker can use the experience of failure to
confront the gross inequalities of everyday life in the United States . From
the perspective of feminism , failure has often been a better bet than
success . Where feminine success is always measured by male standards ,
and gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure
up to patriarchal ideals , not succeeding at womanhood can offer
unexpected pleasures . In many ways this has been the message of many renegade feminists in the past. Monique
Wittig (1992) argued in the 1970s that
if womanhood depends upon a heterosexual
framework , then lesbians are not “women ,” and if lesbians are not
“women ,” then they fall outside of patriarchal norms and can re-create
some of the meaning of their genders . Also in the 1970s Valerie Solanas suggested that if “woman”
takes on meaning only in relation to “man,” then we need to “cut up men” (2004: 72). Perhaps that is a little drastic, but at any rate
these kinds of feminisms, what I call shadow feminisms in chapter 5, have long haunted
the more acceptable forms of feminism that are oriented to positivity,
reform, and accommodation rather than negativity, rejection, and
transformation. Shadow feminisms take the form not of becoming, being,
and doing but of shady, murky modes of undoing, un- becoming, and
violating.
Failure is a viable political strategy
Halberstam 11. J. J. Jack Halberstam, professor of English at the University of Southern California, The Queer Art of
Failure, pg. 5
Illegibility , then, has been and remains, a reliable source for political
autonomy . —James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State Any book that begins with a quote from SpongeBob SquarePants and is
motored by wisdom gleaned from Fantastic Mr. Fox, Chicken Run, and Finding Nemo, among other animated guides to life, runs the
risk of not being taken seriously. Yet this is my goal.
Being taken seriously means missing out
on the chance to be frivolous , promiscuous , and irrelevant . The desire to
be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried
and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map
a few detours. Indeed terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words ,
in academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness ; they
signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already
known according to approved methods of knowing , but they do not allow
for visionary insights or flights of fancy . Training of any kind , in fact, is a
way of refusing a kind of Benjaminian relation to knowing, a stroll down
uncharted streets in the “wrong” direction
(Benjamin 1996);
it is precisely about
staying in well-lit territories and about knowing exactly which way to go
before you set out . Like many others before me, I propose that instead the goal is to lose
one’s way , and indeed to be prepared to lose more than one’s way.
Losing , we may agree with Elizabeth Bishop, is an art , and one “that is not too hard to
master / Though it may look like a disaster” (2008: 166–167). In the sciences, particularly
physics and mathematics, there are many examples of rogue intellectuals ,
not all of whom are reclusive Unabomber types (although more than a few are just that), who wander off into
uncharted territories and refuse the academy because the publish-orperish pressure of academic life keeps them tethered to conventional
knowledge production and its well-traveled byways. Popular mathematics
books, for example, revel in stories about unconventional loners who are selfschooled and who make their own way through the world of numbers. For
some kooky minds , disciplines actually get in the way of answers and
theorems precisely because they offer maps of thought where intuition
and blind [unscripted] fumbling might yield better results. In 2008, for example, The
New Yorker featured a story about an oddball physicist who, like many ambitious physicists and mathematicians, was in hot pursuit
of a grand theory, a “theory of everything.” This thinker, Garrett Lisi, had dropped out of academic physics because string theory
As an outsider to the discipline,
writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Lisi “built his theory as an outsider might, relying on a grab
bag of component parts: a hand-built mathematical structure, an
unconventional way of describing gravity, and a mysterious mathematical
entity known as E8.”1 In the end Lisi’s “theory of everything” fell short of expectations, but it nonetheless
yielded a whole terrain of new questions and methods. Similarly the computer
scientists who pioneered new programs to produce computer-generated
imagery (CGI), as many accounts of the rise of Pixar have chronicled, were
academic rejects or dropouts who created independent institutes in order
to explore their dreams of animated worlds.2 These alternative cultural
dominated the field at that time and he thought the answers lay elsewhere.
and academic realms , the areas beside academia rather than within it, the
intellectual worlds conjured by losers , failures , dropouts , and
refuseniks , often serve as the launching pad for alternatives precisely
when the university cannot . This is not a bad time to experiment with
disciplinary transformation on behalf of the project of generating new
forms of knowing , since the fields that were assembled over one hundred
years ago to respond to new market economies and the demand for
narrow expertise, as Foucault de- scribed them, are now losing relevance
and failing to respond either to real-world knowledge projects or student
interests . As the big disciplines begin to crumble like banks that have
invested in bad securities we might ask more broadly, Do we really want
to shore up the ragged boundaries of our shared interests and intellectual
commitments, or might we rather take this opportunity to rethink the
project of learning and thinking altogether ? Just as the standardized tests
that the U.S. favors as a guide to intellectual advancement in high schools
tend to identify people who are good at standardized exams ( as
opposed to , say, intellectual visionaries ), so in universities grades ,
exams , and knowledge of canons identify scholars with an aptitude for
maintaining and conforming to the dictates of the discipline . This book, a stroll out
of the confines of conventional knowledge and into the unregulated territories of failure, loss, and unbecoming, must make a long
universities (and by implication high schools)
squash rather than promote quirky and original thought . Disciplinarity , as
de- fined by Foucault (1995), is a technique of modern power: it depends upon and
deploys normalization , routines , convention , tradition , and regularity ,
detour around disciplines and ordinary ways of thinking. Let me explain how
and it produces experts and administrative forms of governance . The
university structure that houses the disciplines and jealously guards their
boundaries now stands at a crossroads , not of disciplinarity and
interdisciplinarity, past and future, national and transnational; the
crossroads at which the rapidly disintegrating bandwagon of disciplines ,
subfields , and interdisciplines has arrived offer a choice between the
university as corporation and investment opportunity and the university
as a new kind of public sphere with a different investment in knowledge ,
in ideas , and in thought and politics . A radical take on disciplinarity and the university that presumes
both the breakdown of the disciplines and the closing of gaps between fields conventionally presumed to be separated can be found
in a manifesto published by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in 2004 in Social Text titled “The University and the Undercommons:
Seven Theses.” Their essay is a searing critique directed at the intellectual and the critical intellectual, the professional scholar and
the “critical academic professionals.” For Moten and Harney,
the critical academic is not the answer
to encroaching professionalization but an extension of it , using the very
same tools and legitimating strategies to become “an ally of professional
education .” Moten and Harney prefer to pitch their tent with the
“subversive intellectuals ,” a maroon community of outcast thinkers who
refuse , resist , and renege on the demands of “rigor ,” “ excellence ,” and
“ productivity .” They tell us to “ steal from the university ,” to “ steal the
enlightenment for others ” (112), and to act against “what Foucault called the
Conquest , the unspoken war that founded , and with the force of law
refounds, society ” (113). And what does the undercommons of the university
want to be? It wants to constitute an unprofessional force of fugitive
knowers , with a set of intellectual practices not bound by examination
systems and test scores. The goal for this unprofessionalization is not to
abolish; in fact Moten and Harney set the fugitive intellectual against the
elimination or abolition of this, the founding or refounding of that: “Not so
much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could
have prisons , that could have slavery , that could have the wage , and
therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the
founding of a new society ” (113). Not the elimination of anything but the
founding of a new society . And why not? Why not think in terms of a different
kind of society than the one that first created and then abolished slavery ?
The social worlds we inhabit , after all, as so many thinkers have reminded us,
are not inevitable ; they were not always bound to turn out this way , and
what’s more, in the process of producing this reality , many other
realities , fields of knowledge , and ways of being have been discarded
and, to cite Fou- cault again, “ disqualified .” A few visionary books, produced alongside disciplinary knowledge, show us
the paths not taken. For example, in a book that itself began as a detour, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed (1999), James C. Scott details the ways
the modern state has run
roughshod over local , customary , and undisciplined forms of knowledge
in order to rationalize and simplify social, agricultural, and political
practices that have profit as their primary motivation . In the process, says Scott,
certain ways of seeing the world are established as normal or natural , as
obvious and necessary , even though they are often entirely
counterintuitive and socially engineered . Seeing Like a State began as a study of
“why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of ‘people who move around,’” but quickly became a study
of the demand by the state for legibility through the imposition of
methods of standardization and uniformity
(1). While Dean Spade (2008) and other queer
scholars use Scott’s book to think about how we came to insist upon the documentation of gender identity on all govern- mental
documentation,
I want to use his monumental study to pick up some of the
discarded local knowledges that are trampled underfoot in the rush to
bureaucratize and rationalize an economic order that privile ges profit
over all kinds of other motivations for being and doing .
Language/Opacity
The alternative is to engage in queering language—queer slangs offer an
opportunity to resist systems of power while still engaging within a safe
space
Tzini 14 (Tzini, Anna [Anna Tzini, also known as Anna T. studied Photography, Video and New Technologies in Athens and
obtained her MA in Queer Studies in Arts & culture from Birmingham City University in 2010. PhD in practice. Her work mainly deals
with the relation between private / public, identities and the ways the interactions between time and space form them.]. 12/2014 “The
Opacity of Queer Languages,” E-flux Journal #60, accessed: 7/15/2015. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-opacity-of-queerlanguage-2/)//ALepow
communication codes allowed for an easier exchange of information that to
some extent shielded group members from potential aggressors: at the same
time, these languages did not render group members completely invisible. It is
exactly this position between visibility and invisibility—which can perhaps be
described as opaqueness—that interests me in relation to the particular political
stance of passivity. David Van Leer, an American scholar who researched queer cultures in the US from the 1920s to
the 2000s, says that “often minorities speak most volubly between the lines, ironically
reshaping dialogues the oppressor thinks he controls or even finding new topics
and modes of speaking to which the oppressor himself lacks access.”5 Language—
These
being regulated by the state, taught in educational institutions, and used to discipline, inform, educate, or structurally violate, among
other uses—is frequently subverted by minorities in an attempt to bypass authority. In this case in particular the “new topics” and
“modes” Van Leer refers to are perhaps illegal pleasures, embodied performances, irony, and disguised (or not-so-well-disguised)
social critique. While trying to stay safe and communicate, individual subjects start forming a community based on a common
culture. In her essay “Qwir-English Code-Mixing in Germany: Constructing a Rainbow of Identities,” Heidi Minning argues that “the
resulting sociopsychological function is one of constructing group membership and a sense of the self as a participant in larger gay
6
These slangs with vocabularies ranging from
six hundred words (as is the case of Polari) to more than six thousand
documented words (as in Kaliarda) and different lifespans (four hundred years
and counting in the case of Lubunca, or thirty years in the case of IsiNgqumo),
constitute mini-universes where their users freely circulate and through which
they are able to connect. They do not only include terms to describe the
particular practices/interests of the groups which might be dangerous to publicly
describe in a noncoded way. They also include words or phrases to describe everyday household objects,
and lesbian local and transnational cultures.” Lexicon
professions, toponyms, and activities. They are patchworks of several other languages, including etymologically untraceable
7
8
neologisms. For instance, Polari consists of English, Italian, Yiddish, and Mediterranean Lingua Franca (a composite itself), while
9
Kaliarda is made up of Greek, English, Italian, French, Turkish, and Romani. Bajubá or Pajubá seems to have its roots in Africa
and is based on several Bantu and Yoruba African languages outfitted with Portuguese syntax.
Tagalog, English, Spanish, and Japanese.
11
10
Swardspeak is a mixture of
Lubunca consists of Turkish, Romani, French, Greek, English, Armenian, Arabic,
Italian, Bulgarian, Kurmanji, Russian, and Spanish.
12
The multicultural linguistic loans seem to indicate a certain degree of mobility
on the part of the speakers, who seem to have come in contact with foreigners beyond their immediate border neighbors, perhaps
through working the seas, or through unsuccessful attempts to find better employment options abroad, but also due to dealing with
sailors and seamen as sex-workers themselves. And as Paul Baker says, we shouldn’t throw out the possibility of the use of foreign
13
Much like the several
spatiotemporal paradoxes that surround the closet, the languages that could be
its product seem to predate it in certain cases. Furthermore, who speaks or
spoke these languages long before the emergence of any contemporary
understanding of homosexuality, the homosexual, and notions such as trans* or
queer becomes an even more sensitive topic in light of queer modes of
communication. Social Queetique As I can only fully access Kaliarda and to a certain extent Polari, one of the things I
have noticed is their lack of political correctness (or any sense of self-censorship for
that matter), and the pejorative terms used for both those who are socially looked
down on by society (including the speakers themselves) and their oppressors
alike.14 This seems to indicate a certain adoption of the mores of the general
population in addition to their own, no matter how contradictory the two may be.15
languages as a way of coming across as more sophisticated and well-traveled.
For instance, the words for an effeminate homosexual or the receptive partner in penetrative sex are always pejorative, and the
same cannot be said of the terms for the insertive partner. The word “Kaliarda” (καλιαρντά) itself has only negative meanings:
“mean, ugly, weird,” with the verb “kaliardevo” (καλιαρντεύω) meaning to speak ill of someone.
16
In addition, there are pejorative
terms for other groups that seem to already be looked down on by Greek society, and for whom there already exist several offensive
terms, like for the out-of-towners, the obese, the old, and the non-able-bodied. At the same time, there are plenty of derogatory
This points to the counter-cultural elements of the
subculture that to some extent could be the result of the constant friction with
said authorities. It seems that at least by allowing for a mocking of those seen as
oppressors, or by placing themselves somewhere other than the lowest position
in the social hierarchy, queers can afford a moment of pleasure that derives from
their deviance itself and their organizing around it. So beyond the importance of a
safer space, and the practicalities of communication between precariously living
subjects, another element of these languages is the proximity they produce
between the speakers, and most importantly the moments of humor and joy they
allow for. For instance, small moments of pleasure among fellow deviant subjects seem to be the case with much of Kaliarda
terms for legal, religious, and political authorities.
and the way it is used, which sadly remains untranslatable. I can only guess that this might well be the case for some of the other
, we might be able to glimpse in our archives
“historically specific forms of pleasure” that have not been institutionalized, and a
deeper look at queer language can definitely provide a confirmation of that.17
Sara Ahmed states: To be happily queer might mean being happy to be the
cause of unhappiness (at least in the sense that one agrees to be the cause of
unhappiness, even if one is not made happy by causing unhappiness), as well as
to be happy with where we get to if we go beyond the straight lines of happiness
scripts.”18 Kaliarda also manages to make a somewhat humorous social critique with terms like “the Vatican” (Βατικανό) to
languages as well. As Elizabeth Freeman suggests
mean a gay men’s brothel; a word referring to London that translates as “faggville”/“sisterville” (αδερφοχώρι); “Moutsemeni”
(Μουτσεμένη), a word referring to the Virgin Mary as having been naively tricked; and “smartasses’ gangbang”
(φαεινοπαρτούζα),referring to a political party; and the Acropolis being referred to as “tourist trap” (τουριστόφακα).
19
Such social
critique is not unique to queer slangs though; it is a phenomenon common among subcultural languages, as the same is true for
hobo slang, spiv cant, magkika and so on. Paul Baker writes that in “‘anti-languages’ the social values of words and phrases tend to
be more emphasized than in mainstream languages,” a phenomenon termed “sociolinguistic coding orientation,”
20
while Nicholas
the slang of marginal groups betrays an alternative sociolinguistic
market, in which the value of markers from the majority market is neither
intrinsically positive not negative, but reassessed based on an alternative habitus
which is particular to the field in which that group interacts.21 Both Baker and
Kontovas point to the specificities of the social universes these languages
produce, which much like the words themselves are borrowed, reappropriated,
and creatively adjusted to reflect the ever-changing needs and positions of the
speakers. The overlapping of marginalized groups that operate with those slangs offers an interesting insight into their
Kontovas points out that
intersectionality. Circus performers, sailors, prostitutes, and criminals, for instance, also used Polari. Polari also incorporates
elements of Thieves’ Cant from the seventeenth century and Hackney rhyming slang.
22
Similarly, Kaliarda—used primarily by
(trans*) sex workers and “effeminate homosexuals,” according to researcher Elias Petropoulos—is also spoken by actors. It has
borrowed and loaned lemmata from magkika and rebetika, two different slang varieties used by other Greek subcultures.
23
Pajubá,
24
Although all of the
above categories are in one way or another marginal, perhaps illegal, with
intense minoritarian traits, and although socialization between them could explain
this transcultural permeation of terms, it definitely evokes the issue of
intersectionality within single subjects as the reason that terms traveled so widely
within large communities of “deviants” and “outcasts.” Opacity—Some Passivity Subjects
do not become invisible when talking in these languages; they can actually
attract more interest from the public. But at the same time, the content of their
discussion remains somewhat sealed and opaque. It is through this practice,
which is not vocal (although it is verbal) and which does not actively disrupt the
status quo (and yet builds an alternative social space), that passivity is generated
as a political action. I am referring to passivity not as a synonym for inactivity, but
rather as a variety of tactics that manage to subvert norms in ways that are not
initially intended. While such cultural productions (language, music, dance,
performativities, etc.) are not created with the intent to take over or substitute
normative or mainstream culture, as other “active” modes of questioning would,
they are forms of resistance. They refuse to be assimilated and “normalized,”
choosing instead to produce an alternative that provides a safer space of
expression and which—by the way—also has the potential to mock and subvert
the norm. As Jonathan D. Katz says in reference to John Cage’s silences: “Closeted people seek to ape dominant discursive
apart from being used by the LGBTQ and queer community, is used by Candomblé practitioners.
forms, to participate as seamlessly as possible in hegemonic constructions. They do not, in my experience, draw attention to
25
finding opaque ways of resisting seems to be a somewhat efficient
option. The mannerisms and vocabulary of these slangs are flexible and made to
themselves.”
Thus,
be customizable so they can better serve the speaker. Creation and use of queer
slangs is not a forceful destabilization of the status quo and the
official/mainstream languages, but at the same time, using them is a refusal of
complete silence. Silence here refers both to not speaking and to not speaking
audibly against the regime. Queer slangs remain in a rather liminal space
between inactivity and straightforward revolutionary action. It is a form of creative
resistance, a way of producing a parallel social space of expression whose
existence might in some ways indirectly affect the mainstream as well, without
that being the primary concern or objective behind them. These languages, when
used in the vicinity of outsiders, are indeed audible but not transparent; they
remain opaque, allowing the nonspeakers to identify the speakers as
belonging to a certain group, but not being able to pinpoint what group that
is. This creates a rift in the homogenous social fabric. Katz addresses a similar paradox
when he speaks of the irony in the work of John Cage, a composer who made the loudness of silence his hallmark: Irony’s
distinction between what is said and what is meant opened up a space of otherness that was not understood as specifically
oppositional. As a “readerly” relation, irony is recognized, not written, understood not declared. And irony would prove to be a means
through which resistance could figure in a culture of coercion.
27
Cage used silence as a means to not be silent/silenced, and in a
very similar manner queer subjects opt out of mainstream modes of communication and produce a separate sonic space with with a
specific membership. While art is made in order to be public and communicated (at least in most cases)—and Cage’s art was very
much so—these languages are supposed to be communicated within certain limits, those of the social space they help to produce.
I
think the way they operate in producing rifts in wider society is by the casual,
perhaps accidental moments they engender. They don’t need to be translated,
and one does not need to be fully aware of the speakers’ subjectivities, but the
sheer fact that certain nonconforming individuals are speaking an unfamiliar
dialect might be all it takes to create the impression that there is a very much
present, active, and creative community producing its own subculture, and that
might already be enough. These queer languages do not produce new, politically
informed revolutionary terminology. But they are very much present, occupying a
terrain between explicit action-oriented politics and compliance. They operate
under cover of opacity and empower the marginalized, giving them space for
existence, expression, and safety. Queer languages are anti-authoritative and as
such, according to Katz says, “they reveal the power of the individual to construct
meaning unauthorized by dominant culture—and all the while, under its very
nose.”28 It’s not by accident that during the Greek military dictatorship of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, popular satirical theater
used Kaliarda as a way to avoid censorship. For “precarious” words, they substituted Kaliarda words, introducing these words to a
general audience and letting this audience figure them out for themselves. In the UK a few years earlier, between 1965 and 1968, a
BBC radio show that aired on Sunday afternoons and addressed the “entire family” featured two out-of-work camp actors who used
Polari at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. Kaliarda is nontransparent not only because of its neologisms and
semantically altered Greek words, but also because it is spoken very fast. The words acquire meaning and specificity thanks to the
contextualization offered by performative gestures and body language. Kaliarda is seen as the quintessence of camp performance,
which itself is often referred to as a method of resistance that, according to David Halperin, resists the power of the system from
within.
29
As Nicholas De Villiers writes: In an insistence of “Camp” as a queer strategy of political resistance Moe Meyer clarifies his
“What ‘queer’ signals is an ontological challenge that
displaces bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and continuous while
substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative, improvisational,
discontinuous and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized acts.”30 I
think queer languages could be one of the answers to De Villiers’s questions in
the preface of his book: “What if we were to look at speech as nonrevelatory,
outside the parameters of confession and truth, the humanist desire for reflection,
and the ideal of transparency? What if we were to attend to its opacity? What
would such an opacity look or sound like, and what would be its function?”31
use of the term in the following way:
Queering language solves
Koerner 11. Michelle Koerner, professor of women’s studies at Duke, “Lines of Escape: Gilles Deleuze’s Encounter with
George Jackson,” Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2 Summer 2011 pg. 164
Writing On the first page of the provocatively titled essay “On the Superiority
of Anglo- American Literature,” Jackson’s line is once again deployed, but
here it is in reference to the idea that the “ highest aim of literature ” is to
escape
(Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006: 26).
An interesting convergence occurs here
between political and aesthetic practices , suggesting an indiscernibility
between the two insofar as both effectuate becomings. Genet had already made a similar
point in describing Soledad Brother as a “poem of love and combat,” but deploying Jackson with respect to the
question of literature as such, this essay invites us to rethink a more profound relation between blackness and writing. At some
Deleuze and Parnet insist we reject any account of
literature as an “imaginary representation” of real conditions (literature as
ideology) in order to consider writing as a production at the level of real
conditions.10 Writing, which is to say the unleashing of the creative force of
distance from traditional Marxist theory,
becoming in language (a line of flight), is not finally reducible to already
existing historical conditions , because such an act involves the
production of new conditions . Literature, as they underscore, is driven by a desire
to liberate what existing conditions seek to govern, block, capture; as
such, it asserts a force in the world that existing conditions would
otherwise reduce to nonexistence. Such formulations enable a radical assertion: Soledad
Brother, insofar as Jackson’s letters defy the prison system and the
arrangement of a social order defined by the criminalization and capture of
blackness, escapes what would otherwise be thought of as the historical
conditions of its production . Jackson’s writing gains its real force by a total refusal to adjust to existing
conditions of capture, enslavement, and incarceration. And
it does so concretely by rejecting the
subjectivity produced by the structures of what Genet, in his introduction to the letters, called
the “enemy’s language”
(Jackson [1970] 1994: 336).
Jackson (ibid.: 190, 305) himself
underscores this dimension of the letters several times, remarking, “I work on words,”
and more precisely
describing an operation by which the intensities of black resistance come
to be expressed in writing: “We can connect the two, feeling and writing,
just drop the syntax” (ibid.: 331). The specific feeling invoked here is linked first to Jackson’s total rejection of the
terms of captive society—“the feeling of capture . . . this slave can never adjust to it” (ibid.: 40) — but it further affirms
a connection to the “uncounted generations” of enslaved black labor: “I
feel all they ever felt, but double” (ibid.: 233). In dropping the syntax, Jackson
describes a method for rearticulating the relationship between the
historical experience of capture (and the multiplicity of feeling carried
across the passage) and the feeling of that experience. In his introduction to Soledad
Brother, Genet focuses almost entirely on how Jackson’s use of language could be
understood as a “weapon” precisely because Jackson’s lines were shot
through with such violent hatred of the “words and syntax of his enemy”
that he “has only one recourse: to accept this language but to corrupt it so
skillfully the whites will be caught in his trap”
(ibid.: 336).11
In corrupting the
“words and syntax” of domination, one directly attacks the “conditions
that destroy life,” because language is here considered a mechanism by
which one’s thought, agency, relations, and subjectivity are “caught” by
Power. As can be seen, this idea is not one that Genet imports into Soledad
Brother. Rather, these are ideas that Jackson himself has already emphasized. Jackson’s “minor use” of
a standard, major language thus contributes to Deleuze and Guattari’s
understanding of literature. This is to say that, while commonly associated with
Franz Kafka, the very notion of “minor literature” is also linked to the
encounter between black radicalism and French philosophy in the early
1970s. The connection forged between writing and feeling in Jackson’s letters sug- gests that the production of
resistant subjectivities always involves a dismantling of the dominant order
of language. To “drop the syntax” names a strategy for forcibly
rearranging existing relations. But such a strategy also implies that one
releases something else, specifically the affective force of what resists
those relations. Writing here becomes the “active discharge of emotion ,
the counterattack ” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 400). Or put differently, writing becomes a
weapon .12 When Deleuze (1997: 143) states that “in the act of writing there’s an attempt to
make life something more than personal, of freeing life wherever it’s
imprisoned,” he seems to refer to something exceedingly abstract, but
Jackson’s letters concretely assert writing as a freeing of life—of
blackness—from the terms of racist imprisonment. As we will see, Jackson twists
and pulls on the joints of language itself , quite literally seizing on the
standard syntax until it breaks. In doing so, what Jackson describes as his
“completely informal” style makes language an open field shot-through
with fugitive uses
(Jackson [1970] 1994: 208).
Writing becomes an expression of
thought on the run , a way of mapping escape routes and counterattacks
that cannot be adequately understood in terms of structure or an
understanding of language as an invariable system. But escaping the
existing dominant social order on “lines of flight” — given the volatile intensities they assert in
the world — carries a real danger . In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987: 229) note the
risk of “the line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes,
but instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its
valence, turns to destruction , abolition pure and simple, the passion of
abolition .” Here, a restricted concept of abolition , understood simply as the
destruction of the existing social order , runs the risk of transforming the
“line of flight” into a line of death . For this reason the issue of escape must not
stop at negation “pure and simple” but become one of construction and
the affirmation of life . And it is for this reason that the effort to connect “lines of flight”
and to compose consistencies across these lines becomes a matter of
politics: an affirmation of a politics of reconstruction as the immanent
condition of abolition. Jackson ([1970] 1994: 328) wrote from prison: “ Don’t mistake this as a
message from George to Fay. It’s a message from the hunted running
blacks to those people of this society who profess to want to change the
conditions that destroy life .” A collective imperative determines the reading of these letters—namely, the
necessity to put them in connection with other lines. The circulation of these letters in France
during the 1970s offers a compelling example of how Jackson’s message
insinuated itself into what would seem an unlikely arrangement of French
philosophy in the 1970s. Yet it is precisely in understanding that moment in
French thought as an effort to “change conditions that destroy life” that
we gain a sense of how Jackson’s book arrives at its expressly stated
destination. In making the connection between Jackson’s line and the lines
of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and his coauthors can be said to
have gotten the message.
Queer Opacity as a method of resisting interpellation which makes
recognizable subjects for the regime of power.
De Villiers (Nicholas. An associate professor of Arts and English at the University of Florida Miami with areas of Expertise in Film Theory,
Gender Studies, Philosophy, Queer Theory. Opacity and The Closet, 3-4)
Why might someone refuse to tell the truth of his or her sexuality? According to the
dominant logic of the closet, such behavior can only betoken closetedness, a lack of truthfulness-to-oneself and a crippling
homophobia is always a will-to-ignorance and
silence, and whether it might in fact include a fear of not knowing everything about a
person’s sexuality. It is important to consider the ways that homophobia often insists on
knowing rather than refusing to know about the sexuality of gay people.
Indeed, as Sedgwick points out in Epistemology of the Closet, the subject can be faulted for not
disclosing enough rather than disclosing too much about her or his
sexuality. This disclosure is “at once compulsory and forbidden.”10 “Outing” has
been criticized for its controlling impulse, whereby, as Silvia Bovenschen has argued, “Someone who refuses to
render himself universally accessible and classifiable, even though
according to general opinion he belongs to a type that may become an
object of a discussion, is suspect. In outing he is categorically
categorized.”11 Roland Barthes, in his preface to Tricks, Renaud Camus’s novel of gay cruising, claims that there is
one thing that “society will not tolerate,” namely, that “I should be . . .
nothing, or, more precisely, that the something I am should be openly
expressed as provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessen - tial, in a word
irrelevant.”12 This emphasis on “insignificance” has been critiqued by those who see Barthes and others as complicit with a
homophobic logic of erasure and absence.13 But what if we were to take seriously these
“intolerable” and “suspect” behaviors and consider them distinctly queer
strategies, strategies of opacity, not necessarily of silence or invisibility?
complicity with homophobia. Therefore, it is worth asking, first of all, if
Barthes clarifies that the problem is not that I should be nothing, but rather that the something I am might be impertinent. Following
I see this as a struggle against subjection
(assujetissement) and against a form of power that “categorizes the individual,
marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity,
imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to
recognize in him.”14 This form of power makes individuals into
Foucault’s remarks in “The Subject and Power,”
recognizable subjects by imposing a categorizing and interpretive regime
of truth.
The imposition of Imperialism Rests on Naming – a refusal to do so is a
resistance to this
Calixte 05 (Shana L. "Things Which Aren't To Be Given Names: Afro-Caribbean and Diasporic Negotiations of Same Gender
Desire and Sexual Relations." In Canadian Woman Studies 24.2 (2005).)
The western imperialist practice of "naming" the other has been a large part of the colonial project. AsTrinhT. Minh-Ha states,
to
classify the colonized, this "naming" becomes essential for the self /other
dichotomy to work: Hegemony works at leveling out differences and at
standardizing contests and expectation in the smallest detail of our daily lives. Uncovering this leveling of
differences is, therefore, resisting that very notion of difference that is defined
in the master's terms and that often resorts to the simplicity of essences. (4 16) This paper argues that the
"global gay," a seemingly universal western influenced definition of sexual identity, is ineffectual for
understanding the experiences of local and diasporic Afro-Caribbean experiences
of same gender desire and identity. I also suggest that diasporically-located women in North America find
themselves caught between western "global" ideas of gay identity and local Caribbean theories of the same. As a result, th ey
create a hybrid diasporic "queer" identity that combines experiences of
both the local and the global relying heavily on diasporic experiences of
home, myth, and memory to create and inform their sexual identities. As I
will show in the coming sections, "global gay" discourses work similarly to
colonial naming that seeks to make the "other" understandable, and
influence how Afro Caribbean people in particular, name and experience
their same gender desires. The Pelau example Those who have a history of
colonialism begin to formulate their subjectivities in ways that hinder a
direct colonial "naming." AR "opaque" identity construction, therefore,
becomes effectively a tool of resistance. provides just a brief example of how the power to "name"
becomes the central organizing principle for validating sexual performativity and identity. Opaque Relations and the Unruly Woman
While working in Martinique in the late 1990s, David Murray forwarded Martinican playwright Edouard Glissant's concept of
opacity" to explain the social relations of gender, sexuality, race, and
identity he encountered in his research. Glissant suggests that the notion of "opacity is used by Afro
Caribbean people to counter strategies of positivist social science
discourses. These discourses, which are often interested in "order, category and
fixedness" is something that has often been a preoccupation of colonial
regimes and therefore ethnographic studies ofcolonized peoples (Murray 15). In his study, Murray attempts to de-center the
"
colonizing tendencies of ethnographic research by refiguring the way identity is read and understood by those in the Caribbean. He
it is ever
changing, ever paradoxical and ever contradictory, despite its best efforts
to the contrary. (9). This concept becomes important for a discussion on sexuality and alternative scripts to western
states: I am proposing that an identity project [for peoples with a history of colonization] is an opaque process, for
imperialist codifications. It also is essential for examining how both local and diasporic Afro-Caribbean people construct their own
sexualities, in light of the hegemonic discourses that attempt to provide an explanatory model for understanding same gender desire
those who have a history of colonialism begin to
formulate their subjectivities in ways that hinder a direct colonial "naming."
An "opaque" identity construction, therefore, becomes, effectively a tool of
resistance. A different (and altogether non- - western) script is being forwarded not only by those in the Caribbean, but also
by diasporic Afro-Caribbean peoples, which follows the idea of "opacity" that Murray has described. This opacity, this
"tangled nature of lived experience" that is able to be at one time "out of
focus" as well as "irreducibly dense" becomes an important space of
resistance (Glissant qtd.. in Murray 15, 16).
and sexual relations. In this way,
Normalized Race and Gender positioning excludes bodies that do not
conform to conceptualizations of identity – opacity acts as a response to
that
Calixte 05 (Shana L. "Things Which Aren't To Be Given Names: Afro-Caribbean and Diasporic Negotiations of Same Gender
Desire and Sexual Relations." In Canadian Woman Studies 24.2 (2005).)
This idea of the open secret lends itself very well to the theory of opacity that Glissant expresses about Afro-Caribbean subjectivities
or of (un)naming, which I am forwarding. As one woman in Clemencia's study states, "[tlhere were a lot of women who loved
normalized race, class and gender positionings. As Murray writes, this has resulted in
an "internationalization of a certain form of social and cultural identity based
homosexuality that is conceptualized in terms derived from recent
American consumerist and intellectual stylesn (130). It becomes dangerous, then, when these
western constructions This (un)naming, speaking one's desire in ways that do not necessitate a verbal appellation of that desire,
allows women the freedom to engage in sexual relations with other women without having to be stigmatized by a western label,
such as "lesbian. demandable how these names arise, as relationships between women may most often be structured within and
around their daily domestic duties, where their intimacy will not be seen as threatening to male power structures. The women
"opacity," of known yet unspoken experiences,
that are at one time understood, but for outsiders seem murky and
unreadable, shapes the existence of women's sexual relations with each
other. As Roemer states, In the communitywhere I come, there is not so much talk about the phenomenon ofwomen having
Clemencia quotes also found that the idea of
relations with other women.. . . But we do have ageold rituals originating from Africa by which women can make quite clear that
special relations exist between them. For instance, birthday rituals can be recognized by anyone and are quite obvious. Also, when
two women are at a party and one hands another a glass or a plate of food, from which she has first tasted herself, it is clear to
everybody and their mother what that means. Why then is it necessary to declare oneself a lesbian? It is women) in our society, out
in the open and hidden" (82). Yet these "open secrets" become a way of (un)naming, a known yet unknown space, a desire and
identity that can be imagined, but not necessarily spoken. A secret ritual develops between women, that can carry on, that needs
It becomes a space of resistance from
outsiders, who want to provide ways to understand the "other," by using
the powerful (colonizing) method of naming. This Caribbean - script indeed contests western ideas of gay
visibility politics, once again questioning the supposed naturalness of an "out" gay identity. These Caribbean scripts counter
western imperialist constructions of sexuality and new categories that are
developing, which locate an understanding of same-sex desire and identity
in a "global gay." As Dennis Altman states, "in effect, what McDonald's has done for food and Disney has done for
entertainment, the global emergence of ordinary gayness is doing for sexual cultures" (1996: n.p.). This global queering
has led to a worldwide dominance of western cultural, social and political
not be given a name (Roemer cited in Clemencia 82).
identity markers of homosexuality that are heavily reliant on become the
centering force for defining same gender sexual relations and desire in the
Caribbean. Yet this import as Eithne Lubheid states . . . raises questions about the complexities of mapping histories of . . .
transnational women while using sexual categories that substantially derive their meaning from metropolitan centres. (78) These
categories, which derive from a "global queering" and a globalization of gay identity, have indeed had an effect on Caribbean
society, even in light of the Caribbean theorizing explained above. Now turning to the Caribbean - diaspora, it seems important to
ask how those who straddle both the Caribbean and western constructions of same gender desire and identity construction,
How then do these competing discourses of Caribbean
scripts of opacity and "global queering" affect and mediate the same gender
desire of those who are located seemingly in the inlbetween?
negotiate this very fraught space.
The closet’s role in heteronormative society is to keep everyone either “in”
or “out”—this forces queer persons into different positions of being—
either they must be “out” and align their life with a specific identity
category, or they must be “in” and be presumed to be living a life of shame
and secrecy. Queer opacity rejects the binary of the closet—rejecting forms
of fixed identity and confession
Dimock ’12 (Chase; 8/19/12; Professor of English at Southeast Missouri State University; Lambday Literary, “‘Opacity and
the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol’ By Nicholas De Villiers”
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/08/19/opacity-and-the-closet-queer-tactics-in-foucault-barthes-and-warhol-by-nicholas-devilliers/#sthash.YWkx6iQ6.dpuf)
“The Closet” is an increasingly ill-fitting metaphor for queer men and women who wish
to explore their sexuality outside of the two opposite states of either being “out” and
having to confess their personal life aloud and align it with a specific identity category or
being “closeted” and thus presumed to be living in shame, secrecy, or self-denial. It is
this binary of being in or out of the closet that Nicholas De Villiers deconstructs in Opacity
and the Closet with the advancement of a practice he terms “queer opacity.” Laying out the thesis of
the text, De Villiers writes, “This book interrogates the viability of the metaphor of the closet and puts forth a concept of ‘opacity’
as an alternative queer strategy or tactic that is not linked to an interpretation of hidden depths,
concealed meanings, or neat opposition between silence and speech.” Queer opacity is
not the transparency of being “out” nor is it the concealment of being “in,” but it is
instead a practice of queer living that resists confession, fixed identity categories, and
public visibility as obligatory elements of LGBT identity. De Villiers’ three case studies on practitioners of
queer opacity, French philosophers Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, and American art icon Andy Warhol, have
all greatly influenced the study and expression of sexuality in contemporary culture. Yet, none of the
three ever fully came out of the closet in any conventional sense. All three engaged openly with gay themes in their work, and
Warhol never denied his sexuality, but
none of the three ever became openly gay self-identified
voices of the community. It would be convenient and easy, as many biographers and cultural critics
have done, to fault these men for not declaring their identity according to contemporary gay cultural
standards set long after their deaths or to perform some one-size-fits-all, pop psychoanalysis to locate the source of shame or guilt
But instead, De Villiers’ concept of queer
opacity allows us to see the sexualities of these men as they truly were expressed by
widening our narrow narrative of sexuality to encompass the peripheries where the
genius of these men flourished. Instead of seeing them as closeted, De Villiers praises
their queer opacity for inventing new methods of queer expression and transgression.
that we have been taught to believe is the source of our sexual discretion.
For an object to be opaque, it is visibly present, but difficult to make out or obscure, like
a figure standing behind a marble glass shower door. De Villiers’ does not claim that he has figured out a
way to remove the shower door and expose the naked Foucault or Warhol behind it, but instead that the opaque forms
and gestures are the subject himself. Opaque tactics do not hide the truth; they are the
truth—the truth that there is no essential, locatable truth to one’s sexuality. This theory of queer
opacity is most accessible when De Villiers applies it to the life and works of Andy Warhol. As a pop artist, Andy Warhol’s
work was a celebration of the surface—the flat, but bright and shiny logos, icons, and
images that populated consumer culture. While they imply the depth of social critique, it
would be a mistake to assert a specific, intentional statement in Warhol’s soup cans and
Marilyn Monroe prints, just as it would be a mistake to think that Warhol’s legendary
shyness, awkwardness, and contradictory behaviors concealed a hidden, refined
sexuality accessible through analysis. Instead De Villiers argues we should believe
Warhol when he said he wanted “to be a machine” and take him at his word when he
said, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings
and my films.” Warhol’s queer opacity was not a way to evade the truth of his self, but
that his true self was defined by his constant toying with identity. Beyond the fresh and highly
original studies of these three iconic queer intellectuals, the book’s most vital contribution to queer studies will be the theory of queer
opacity. Queer
opacity is a more accurate way of describing how sexual identity is never
fully in nor out of the closet, but in a constant state of management and engagement with
varying degrees of obscurity and clarity. Thinking of queer identity as tactical
deployments instead of a struggle to realize an optimal self reverses the history of
interrogations, confessions, and diagnoses that queers have faced and instead
empowers the individual to revel in illegible acts of queerness from the revolutionary to
the absurd.
Rage
The alternative is to burn this world to the ground—we must rage against
systems of normativity
Mary Nardini Gang 09 (Mary Nardini Gang [The Mary Nardini Gang are criminal queers
from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.]. “Toward the Queerest Insurrection.” Queer Jihad, 2009.
http://zinelibrary.info/files/QueerestImposed.pdf)//ALepow
Some will read “queer” as synonymous with “gay and lesbian” or “LGBT”. This reading falls short. While those who would fit within
the con- structions of “L”, “G”, “B” or “T” could fall with- in the discursive limits of queer, queer is not a stable area to inhabit.
Queer is not merely another identity that can be tacked onto a list of neat social
categories, nor the quantitative sum of our identities. Rather, it is the qualitative
position of opposition to presentations of stability - an identity that problematizes
the manageable limits of identity. Queer is a territory of tension, defined against
the dominant narrative of white-hetero-monogamous-patriarchy, but also by an
affinity with all who are marginalized, otherized and oppressed. Queer is the
abnormal, the strange, the dangerous. Queer involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. It is
our desire and fantasies and more still. Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the
heterosexual capitalist world. Queer is a total rejection of the regime of the
Normal. As queers we understand Normalcy. Normal, is the tyranny of our
condition; reproduced in all of our relationships. Normalcy is violently reiterated in
every minute of every day. We understand this Normalcy as the Totality. The
Totality being the interconnection and overlap- ping of all oppression and misery.
The Totality is the state. It is capitalism. It is civilization and empire. The totality is
fence-post crucifixion. It is rape and murder at the hands of police. It is “Str8
Acting” and “No Fatties or Femmes”. It is Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It is the
brutal lessons taught to those who can’t achieve Normal. It is every way we’ve
limited ourselves or learned to hate our bodies. We understand Normalcy all too
well. When we speak of social war, we do so because purist class analysis is not
enough for us. What does a marxist economic worldview mean to a survivor of bashing? To a sex work- er? To a
homeless, teenage runaway? How can class analysis, alone as paradigm for a revolution, promise liberation to those of us
journeying beyond our assigned genders and sexualities? The Proletariat as revolutionary subject marginalizes all whose lives don’t
We must create space wherein it is possible for desire to
flourish. This space, of course, requires conflict with this social order. To de- sire,
in a world structured to confine desire, is a tension we live daily. We must
understand this tension so that we can become powerful through it - we must
understand it so that it can tear our confinement apart. This terrain, born in
rupture, must challenge oppression in its entirety. This of course, means total
negation of this world. We must become bodies in revolt. We need to delve into
and indulge in power. We can learn the strength of our bodies in struggle for
space for our desires. In desire we’ll find the power to destroy not only what
destroys us, but also those who aspire to turn us into a gay mimicry of that which
destroys us. We must be in conflict with regimes of the normal. This means to be
fit in the model of heterosexual-worker.
at war with everything. If we desire a world without restraint, we must tear this
one to the ground. We must live be- yond measure and love and desire in ways
most devastating. We must come to understand the feeling of social war. We can
learn to be a threat, we can become the queerest of insurrections.
Queerness can never exist within civil society—it is always forced to
assimilate into normativity
Mary Nardini Gang 09 (Mary Nardini Gang [The Mary Nardini Gang are criminal queers
from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.]. “Toward the Queerest Insurrection.” Queer Jihad, 2009.
http://zinelibrary.info/files/QueerestImposed.pdf)//ALepow
In the discourse of queer, we are talking about a space of struggle against
this totality - against normalcy. By “queer”, we mean “social war”. And
when we speak of queer as a conflict with all domination , we mean it. See,
we’ve always been the other, the alien, the criminal. The story of queers in this civilization has
always been the narrative of the sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic
inferior, the traitor, the freak, the moral imbecile. We’ve been excluded at
the border, from labor, from familial ties. We’ve been forced into
concentration camps, into sex slavery, into prisons. The normal, the
straight, the american family has always constructed itself in opposition to
the queer . Straight is not queer. White is not of color. Healthy does not have HIV. Man is
not woman. The discourses of heterosexuality, whiteness and capitalism
reproduce themselves into a model of power. For the rest of us, there is
death . In his work, Jean Genet1 asserts that the life of a queer, is one of exile - that all of
the totality of this world is constructed to marginalize and exploit us . He posits
the queer as the criminal. He glorifies homosexuality2 and criminality as the most beautiful and
lovely forms of conflict with the bourgeois world. He writes of the secret worlds of rebellion and joy inhabited by criminals and
queers. Quoth Genet, “Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world
Now they don’t critique marriage, military or the
state. Rather we have campaigns for queer assimilation into each. Their politics is
was irrelevant: the stars on a general’s sleeve,
advocacy for such grievous institutions, rather than the annihilation of them all. “Gays can kill poor people around the world as well
as straight people!” “Gays can hold the reigns of the state and capital as well straight people!” “We are just like you”.
Assimilationists want nothing less than to construct the homosexual as
normal - white, monogamous, wealthy, 2.5 children, SUVs with a white
picket fence. This construction, of course, reproduces the stability of
heterosexuality, whiteness, patriarchy, the gender binary, and capitalism
itself. If we genuinely want to make ruins of this totality, we need to make a
break. We don’t need inclusion into marriage, the military and the state.
We need to end them . No more gay politicians, CEOs and cops. We need
to swiftly and immediately articulate a wide gulf between the politics of
assimilation and the struggle for liberation. simultaneously struggled
against capitalism, racism and patriarchy and empire. This is our history .
Overkill is more than death—it is an attempt to rid the world of all
queerness
Stanley 11 (Stanley, Eric [Eric Stanley is the President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the departments of Communication and
Critical Gender Studies at the University of California.]. 2011. “Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture,” Social
Text 29.2 107)//ALepow
“He was my son—my daughter. It didn’t matter which. He was a sweet kid,” Lauryn Paige’s mother, trying to reconcile at once her
child’s murder and her child’s gender, stated outside an Austin, Texas, courthouse. 24 Lauryn was an eighteen-year-old
transwoman who was brutally stabbed to death. According to Dixie, Lauryn’s best friend, it was a “regular night.” The two women
had spent the beginning of the evening “working it” as sex workers. After Dixie and Lauryn had made about $200 each they decided
to call it quits and return to Dixie’s house, where both lived. On the walk home, Gamaliel Mireles Coria and Frank Santos picked
them up in their white conversion van. “Before we got into the van the very first thing I told them was that we were transsexuals,”
said Dixie in 9 an interview. 25 After a night of driving around, partying in the van, Dixie got dropped off at her house. She pleaded
for Lauryn to come in with her, but Lauryn said, “Girl, let me finish him,” so the van took off with Lauryn still inside. 26 Santos was
then dropped off, leaving Lauryn and Coria alone in the van. According to the autopsy report, Travis County medical examiner Dr.
Roberto Bayardo cataloged at least fourteen blows to Lauryn’s head and more than sixty knife wounds to her body. The knife
Overkill is a term used to
indicate such excessive violence that it pushes a body beyond death. Overkill is
often determined by the postmortem removal of body parts, as with the partial
decapitation in the case of Lauryn Paige and the dissection of Rashawn Brazell.
The temporality of violence, the biological time when the heart stops pushing and
pulling blood, yet the killing is not finished, suggests the aim is not simply the end
of a specific life, but the ending of all queer life. This is the time of queer death,
when the utility of violence gives way to the pleasure in the other’s mortality. If
queers, along with others, approximate nothing, then the task of ending, of killing,
that which is nothing must go beyond normative times of life and death. In other
words, if Lauryn was dead after the first few stab wounds to the throat, then what
do the remaining fifty wounds signify? The legal theory that is offered to nullify the practice of overkill often
wounds were so deep that they almost decapitated her—a clear sign of overkill.
functions under the name of the trans- or gay-panic defense. Both of these defense strategies argue that the murderer became so
enraged after the “discovery” of either genitalia or someone’s sexuality they were forced to protect themselves from the threat of
queerness. Estanislao Martinez of Fresno, California, used the trans-panic defense and received a four-year prison sentence after
admittedly stabbing J. Robles, a Latina transwoman, at least twenty times with a pair of scissors. Importantly, this defense is often
The logic of
the trans-panic defense as an explanation for overkill, in its gory semiotics, offers
us a way of understanding queers as the nothing of Mbembe’s query. Overkill
names the technologies necessary to do away with that which is already gone.
Queers then are the specters of life whose threat is so unimaginable that one is
“forced,” not simply to murder, but to push them backward out of time, out of
History, and into that which comes before. 27 In thinking the overkill of Paige and
Brazell, I return to Mbembe’s query, “But what does it mean to do violence to
what is nothing?”28 This question in its elegant brutality repeats with each case I offer. By resituating this question in
used, as in the cases of Robles and Paige, after the murderer has engaged in some kind of sex with the victim.
the positive, the “something” that is more often than not translated as the human is made to appear. Of interest here, the category of
the human assumes generality, yet can only be activated through the 10 specificity of historical and politically located intersection.
To this end, the human, the “something” of this query, within the context of the
liberal democracy, names rights-bearing subjects, or those who can stand as
subjects before the law. The human, then, makes the nothing not only possible
but necessary. Following this logic, the work of death, of the death that is already
nothing, not quite human, binds the categorical (mis)recognition of humanity. The
human, then, resides in the space of life and under the domain of rights, whereas
the queer inhabits the place of compromised personhood and the zone of death.
As perpetual and axiomatic threat to the human, the queer is the negated double
of the subject of liberal democracy. Understanding the nothing as the
unavoidable shadow of the human serves to counter the arguments that suggest
overkill and antiqueer violence at large are a pathological break and that the
severe nature of these killings signals something extreme. In contrast, overkill is
precisely not outside of, but is that which constitutes liberal democracy as such.
Overkill then is the proper expression to the riddle of the queer nothingness. Put
another way, the spectacular material-semiotics of overkill should not be read as
(only) individual pathology; these vicious acts must indict the very social worlds
of which they are ambassadors. Overkill is what it means, what it must mean, to
do violence to what is nothing.
TO be queer means to live in opposition to civil society and to live an
everyday death-in-waiting
Stanley 11 (Stanley, Eric [Eric Stanley is the President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the departments of Communication and
Critical Gender Studies at the University of California.]. 2011. “Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture,” Social
Text 29.2 107)//ALepow
“Dirty faggot!” Or simply, “Look, a Gay!” These words launch a bottle from a passing car window, the target my awaiting body. In
other moments they articulate the sterilizing glares and violent fantasies that desire, and threaten to enact, my corporal undoing.
Besieged, I feel in the fleshiness of the everyday like a kind of near life or a
death-in-waiting. Catastrophically, this imminent threat constitutes for the queer
that which is the sign of vitality itself. What then becomes of the possibility of
queer life, if queerness is produced always and only through the negativity of
forced death and at the threshold of obliteration? Or as Achille Mbembe has provocatively asked, in
the making of a kind of corporality that is constituted in the social as empty of
meaning beyond the anonymity of bone, “But what does it mean to do violence to
what is nothing?”1 In another time and place, “ ‘Dirty nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’ ” (“Sale nègre! ou simplement:
Tiens, un nègre!”) opened Frantz Fanon’s chapter 5 of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Lived Experience of the Black” (“L’expérience
vécue du Noir”), infamously mistranslated as “The Fact of Blackness.”2 I start with “Dirty faggot!” against a logic of Near Life, Queer
Death Overkill and Ontological Capture Eric Stanley 2 flattened substitution and toward a political commitment to non-mimetic
friction. After all, the racialized phenomenology of blackness under colonization that Fanon illustrates may be productive to read
against and with a continuum of antiqueer violence in the United States. The scopic and the work of the visual must figure with such
It is argued, and rightfully so, that the instability of
queerness obscures it from the epidermalization that anchors (most) bodies of
color in the fields of the visual. When thinking about the difference between anti-Semitism and racism, which
a reading of race, gender, and sexuality.
for Fanon was a question of the visuality of oppression, he similarly suggests, “the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness.”3 Here it
may be useful to reread Fanon through an understanding of passing and the visual that reminds us that Jews can sometimes not be
Similarly I ask why antiqueer violence, more often than not, is
correctly levied against queers. In other words, the productive discourse that
wishes to suggest that queer bodies are no different might miss moments of
signification where queer bodies do in fact signify differently. This is not to
suggest that there is an always locatable, transhistorical queer body, but the
fiercely flexible semiotics of queerness might help us build a way of knowing
antiqueer violence that can provisionally withstand the weight of generality. 4
Indeed, not all who might identify under the name queer experience the same
relationship to violence. For sure, the overwhelming numbers of trans/queer people who are murdered in the United
unknown in their Jewishness.
States are of color. 5 Similarly, trans/gender nonconforming people, people living with HIV/ AIDS and/or other ability issues,
undocumented and imprisoned trans/ queer people, sex workers, and working-class queers, among others, experience a
disproportionate amount of structural violence. In turn, this structural violence more often than not predisposes them to a greater
amount of interpersonal violence. Yet many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) folks in the United States who have
access to normative power may in their daily lives know very little about either structural or personal violence. The long history and
magnified present of gay assimilation illustrates these varying degrees of possibility and power available to some at the expense of
In contrast, I am marking queer as the horizon where identity crumbles and
vitality is worked otherwise. To this end, queer might be a productive placeholder
to name a nonidentity where force is made to live. This is not to suggest that the
negativity of queer and methodologies of violence define the end of queer
worlding or that the parameters of opposition are sedimented as such. 6 On the
contrary, the very fact that queers do endure is evidence, as Fred Moten has
beautifully argued about the history of blackness in relation to slavery, that
“objects can and do resist.”7 I start here, in reference to Fanon’s text, because he continues to offer us among the
others.
most compelling analyses of structural abjection, (non)rec- 3 ognition, and psychic/corporal violence. “Look, a Negro!” violently
freezes Fanon in a timeless place as a black object, overdetermined from without, as a signifier with no meaning of its own making.
In a similar way, the “dirty faggot” of my opening places queerness in the
anonymity of history and shocks it into the embodied practice of feeling queer in
a particular place, body, and time. This meditation will attempt to understand how
the queer approximates the cutting violence that marks the edges of subjectivity
itself. Race and gender figure the contours of my thinking on the work of violence
in the gathering up of queer remains. Here the force of violence that interests me
is not introduced after the formation of something that might be called queer. I
am using the term queer to precisely index the collision of difference and
violence. In other words, queer is being summoned to labor as the moment when
bodies, non-normative sexuality/genders, and force materialize the im/possibility
of subjectivity. Against an identity that assumes a prior unity, queer disrupts this
coherence and also might function as a collective of negativity, void of a subject
but named as object, retroactively visible through the hope of a radical politics to
come.
Stanley 11 (Stanley, Eric [Eric Stanley is the President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the departments of Communication and
Critical Gender Studies at the University of California.]. 2011. “Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture,” Social
Text 29.2 107)//ALepow
The queer, here Rashawn Brazell, Lauryn Paige, or Scotty Joe Weaver, is forced
to embody to the point of obliteration the movement between abject nothingness
at one end—a generality that enables queers to be 12 killed so easily and
frequently—and at the other end, the approximation of a terrorizing threat as a
symbol of shattering difference, monstrosity, and irreconcilable contradiction.
This fetishistic structure allows one to believe that queers are an inescapable
threat and at the same time know that they are nothing. According to Lum Weaver, Scotty Joe’s
older brother, Gaines had always had “issues” with Scotty Joe’s homosexuality. As in the majority of interpersonal antiqueer
violence, the attackers knew, and in this case even lived with, their target. The murder of Weaver must be read as a form of intimate
violence not only because of the relationship the murderers had to Weaver, but also, and maybe more important, because of the
technologies of vivisection that were deployed. As Kelsay, Gaines, and Porter had, according to testimony, at least a week to plan
the murder, it seems logical that, during that time in rural Alabama, they could have produced a gun that would have made the
murder much less gruesome. However, the three decided to cut and rip Weaver to pieces using raw force. The psychic distance that
may be produced through the scope of a hunting rifle, and the possible dissociation it might provide, is the opposite of blood
squirting from your former roommate’s chest and the bodily strength it takes to lunge a knife into the flesh and bone of a human
. The penetrative violence, the moments when Gaines was thrusting his knife
into Weaver’s body, stages a kind of terrorizing sexualized intimacy. If Weaver
was at once so easy to kill, and at the same time so monstrous that he had to be
killed, this intimate overkill might also help us to understand why antiqueer
violence tends to take this form. Weaver was, after all, the roommate and “best
friend” of one of his killers. However, at the same time, robbing him would not be
enough, killing him would not be enough, the horror of Weaver’s queerness
forced his killers to mutilate, decapitate, and burn his body. This tender hostility
of ravaging love and tactile brutality may be an opening for the task of facing the
question scribed on the bathroom wall, “What if it feels good to kill or mutilate
homos?” The disavowal of the queer threat through a murderous pleasure
signals a much more complicated structure of desire and destruction. This
complex structure of phobia and fetishism, not unlike the pleasure and pain
Kelsay might have experienced as she helped slaughter her “best friend,” asks
us to consider antiqueer violence outside the explanatory apparatus that situates
all antiqueer violence on the side of pure hate, intolerance, or prejudice. Affective
Remains Weaver’s body, bound in gasoline-soaked fibers, partially decapitated,
charred, and pummeled beyond death, as remainder of a queer life, rep- resents
what kind of sociality is (not)lived before such a death. There has been in the recent past an
body
important and understandable drive in critical and artistic production to articulate the various forms of vitality that congeal below the
This desire is at least in part a wish
for a way of understanding what Audre Lorde has called, in her exacting ability to
place us at the scene, “the deaths we are forced to live.”31 Among the most productive and
surface or outside the orbit of the fully realized promise of personhood.
fraught expressions of this compromised vitality is Giorgio Agamben’s offering of “bare life.” For Agamben, bare life signals a kind of
stripped-down sociality, skillfully articulated via his reading of the Nuremburg Laws enabled through a legal state of exception. The
state of exception that placed absolute power in the hands of Hitler, as the necessary temporal precondition for bare life, seems for
some not an exception at all. The liberation of the camps that brought with it the dismantling of or at least radical change in
Germany’s juridical system, including the Nuremburg Laws (but surely did not end anti-Semitism), left untouched the “Nazi version”
of Paragraph 175, the clause criminalizing homosexuality. To this end, as hundreds of thousands of those who survived the camps
Death through
freedom, as it were, requires a different formulation, or at least a different way to
think about proximity and vitality. 32 If for Agamben bare life expresses a kind of
stripped-down sociality or a liminal space at the cusp of death, then near life
names the figuration and feeling of nonexistence, as Fanon suggests, which
comes before the question of life might be posed. Near life is a kind of
ontocorporal (non) sociality that necessarily throws into crisis the category of life
by orientation and iteration. This might better comprehend not only the
incomprehensible murders of Brazell, Paige, and Weaver, but also the terror of
the dark cell inhabited by the queer survivor of the Holocaust who perished under
“liberation.”33 Struggling with the phenomenology of black life under colonization, Fanon opens up critical ground for
understanding a kind of near life that is made through violence to exist as
nonexistence. For Fanon, violence is bound to the question of recognition (which
is also the im/possibility of subjectivity) that apprehends the relationship between
relentless structural violence and instances of personal attacks evidenced by the
traumatic afterlives left in their wake. For Fanon, the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, as theoretical
were swept to freedom, “homosexual” survivors were forced to serve their remaining sentences in prison.
instrument for thinking about recognition, must be reconsidered through the experience of blackness in the French colonies. For
Fanon, Hegel positions the terms of the dialectic (master/slave) outside history and thus does not account for the work of the psyche
and the historicity of domination like racialized colonization and the epidermal- ization of that power. In other words, for Fanon, when
the encounter is staged and the drama of negation unfolds, Hegel assumes a pure battle. Moreover, by understanding the dialectic
singularly through the question of self-consciousness, Hegel, for Fanon, misrecognizes the battle as always and only for recognition.
Informed by Alexandre Kojève and Jean-Paul Sartre, Fanon makes visible the absent figure of Enlightenment assumed by the
, colonization is not a system of recognition but a state of raw
force and total war. The dialect cannot in the instance of colonization swing
forward and offer the self-consciousness of its promise. According to Fanon, “For Hegel there is
Hegelian dialectic. For Fanon
reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.”34
Hegel’s dialectic that, through labor, offers the possibility of self-consciousness, for the colonized is frozen in a state of domination
which is also why this articulation is helpful for
thinking near life, is not only the bodily terror of force; ontological sovereignty
also falls into peril under foundational violence. This state of total war, not unlike
the attacks that left Brazell, Paige, and Weaver dead, is at once from without—
the everyday cultural, legal, economic practices— and at the same time from
within, by a consciousness that itself has been occupied by domination. For Fanon, the
white imago holds captive the ontology of the colonized. The self/Other apparatus is dismantled, thus
leaving the colonized as an “object in the midst of other objects,” embodied as a
“feeling of nonexistence.”36 While thinking alongside Fanon on the question of
racialized difference, violence, and ontology, how might we comprehend a
phenomenology of antiqueer violence expressed as “nonexistence”? It is not that we can
and nonreciprocity. 35 What is at stake for Fanon,
take the specific structuring of blackness in the French colonies and assume it would function the same today, under U.S. regimes
if both desire and antiqueer violence are embrocated by the
histories of colonization, then such a reading might help to make more capacious
our understanding of antiqueer violence today as well as afford a rereading of sexuality in Fanon’s
of antiqueer violence. However,
, Fanon’s intervention offers a space of nonexistence, neither master nor
slave, written through the vicious work of epistemic force imprisoned in the cold
cell of ontological capture. This space of nonexistence, or near life, forged in the
territory of inescapable violence, allows us to understand the murders of queers
against the logics of aberration. This structure of antiqueer violence as irreducible
antagonism crystallizes the ontocorporal, discursive, and material inscriptions
that render specific bodies in specific times as the place of the nothing. The
figuration 15 of near life should be understood not as the antihuman but as that
which emerges in the place of the question of humanity. In other words, this is
not simply an oppositional category equally embodied by anyone or anything.
This line of limitless inhabitation, phantasmatically understood outside the
intersections of power, often articulated as “equality,” leads us back toward rights
discourse that seeks to further extend (momentarily) the badge of personhood.
The nothing, or those made to live the death of a near life, is a break whose
structure is produced by, and not remedied through, legal intervention or state
mobilizations. For those who are overkilled yet not quite alive, what form might
redress take, if any at all?
texts. Indeed
The Undercommons
L: Recognition
The AFF’s politics of recognition ties reinscribes oppression by tying
subjecthood to suffering
Tuck and Yang 14 [Eve, & K.W., 2014, “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In n D. Paris & M.
T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and
communities (pp. 223-248). Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications. Pp. 228]
The costs of a politics of recognition that is rooted in naming pain have been¶ critiqued
by recent decolonizing and feminist scholars (Hartman, 1997, 2007;¶ Tuck, 2009). In
Scenes of Subjection, Sadiya Hartman (1997) discusses how recognizing¶ the personhood of
slaves enhanced the power of the Southern slaveowning¶ class. Supplicating narratives of
former slaves were deployed effectively¶ by abolitionists, mainly White, well-to-do, Northern
women, to generate portraits¶ of abuse that ergo recognize slaves as human (Hartman, 2007).
In response, new¶ laws afforded minimal standards of existence, “making personhood
coterminous¶ with injury” (Hartman, 1997, p. 93), while simultaneously authorizing
necessary¶ violence to suppress slave agency. The slave emerges as a legal
person only when¶ seen as criminal or “a violated body in need of limited forms
of protection”¶ (p. 55). Recognition “humanizes” the slave, but is predicated upon her
or his¶ abjection. You are in pain, therefore you are. “[T]he recognition of humanity¶
require[s] the event of excessive violence, cruelty beyond the limits of the¶ socially
tolerable, in order to acknowledge and protect the slave’s person” (p. 55).¶ Furthermore,
Hartman describes how slave-as-victim as human accordingly¶ establishes slave-as-agent
as criminal. Applying Hartman’s analysis, we note how¶ the agency of Margaret Garner or
Nat Turner can only be viewed as outsider¶ violence that humane society must reject
while simultaneously upholding the¶ legitimated violence of the state to punish such
outsider violence. Hartman asks,¶ “Is it possible that such recognition effectively
forecloses agency as the object of¶ punishment . . . Or is this limited conferral of
humanity merely a reinscription of¶ subjugation and pained existence?” (p. 55).
The affirmative attempts to historicize the action of the subaltern by
rendering it into a recognizable people. This project of academic
integration obliterates the subaltern.
Spivak 5 [Gayatri, Prof. Comparative Literature and Society @ Columbia, 2005, “Scattered
speculations on the subaltern and the popular,” Postcolonial Studies Vol 8 No 4, p. 476]
Subaltern is to popular as gender is to sex, class to poverty, state to nation.¶ One word inclines to
reasonableness, the other to cathexis / occupation¶ through desire. ‘Popular’ divides between
descriptive (as in presidential or TV¶ ratings), evaluative (not ‘high’, both a positive and a negative value,¶ dependent on your
‘politics’), and contains ‘people’, a word with immense¶ range, from ‘just anyone’, to the ‘masses’ (both a positive and a
negative¶ political value, depending on your politics). The reasonable and rarefied¶ definition of the word subaltern that
interests me is: to be removed from all¶ lines of social mobility. The disciplinary interest of literary criticism is
in the singular and the¶ unverifiable. In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ it was the peculiar and singular¶ subalternity of the young
Bhubaneswari Bhaduri that seemed of interest.1¶ Her story was my mother Sivani Chakravorty’s testimony. The question
of¶ veridicality / of the evidentiary status of testimony, sometimes taken for¶ granted in
unexamined oral history / has to be thought of here.¶ Gilles Deleuze’s notion of singularity is both complex
and simple. In its¶ simplest form, the singular is not the particular because it is an unrepeatable ¶ difference that is, on the other
hand, repeated / not as an example of a¶ universal but as an instance of a collection of repetitions. Singularity is life as¶ pure
immanence, what will be, of this life, as life. As the name Bhubaneswari ¶ Bhaduri became a teaching text, it took on this imperative
/ repeat as¶ singular /, as does literature.2 If the thinking of subalternity is taken in the general sense,
its lack of access¶ to mobility may be a version of singularity. Subalternity cannot be
generalised¶ according to hegemonic logic. That is what makes it subaltern. Yet it is a¶
category and therefore repeatable. Since the general sense is always mired in¶ narrow senses,
any differentiations between subalternity and the popular¶ must thus concern itself with singular
cases and thus contravene the¶ philosophical purity of Deleuze’s thought.3 The starting point of a singular itinerary of the word
‘subaltern’ can be¶ Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Southern Question’ rather than his more general¶ discussions of the subaltern. I believe that
was the basic starting point of¶ the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective / Gramsci, a Communist,¶ thinking beyond capital logic
in terms of unequal development. Subsequently, Partha Chatterjee developed a nuanced reading of both Gramsci and¶ Foucault.4
It is from ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’, then, that we can move¶ into Ranajit Guha’s ‘On Some Aspects of the
Historiography of Colonial¶ India’.5 ‘Subaltern’ in the early Guha was the name of a space of difference. ¶ And the word was
indistinguishable from ‘people’. Although Guha seems to¶ be saying that the words ‘people’ and ‘subaltern’ are interchangeable, I
think¶ this is not a substantive point for him. At least in
their early work, the¶ members of the Subaltern
Studies collective would not quarrel with the¶ notion that the word ‘subaltern’ and the
idea of the ‘popular’ do not inhabit a¶ continuous space. Yet their failure to make this
distinction has led to a certain¶ relaxing of the word ‘subaltern’ that has undermined its
usefulness. The slide¶ into the ‘popular’ may be part of this. Subalternity is a position
without identity. It is somewhat like the strict¶ understanding of class. Class is not a cultural origin, it is a sense of
economic¶ collectivity, of social relations of formation as the basis of action. Gender is¶ not lived sexual difference. It is a sense of
the collective social negotiation of¶ sexual differences as the basis of action. ‘Race’ is not originary; it assumes ¶ racism.
Subalternity is where social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not¶ permit the formation of
a recognisable basis of action. The early subalternists¶ looked at examples where subalternity was brought to crisis,
as a basis for¶ militancy was formed. Even then colonial and nationalist historiography did¶ not
recognise it as such. Could the subaltern speak, then? Could it have its¶ insurgency recognised by
the official historians? Even when, strictly speaking,¶ they had burst the outlines of subalternity? This last is important.
Neither the¶ groups celebrated by the early subalternists nor Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, in so¶ far as they had
burst their bonds into resistance, were in the position of¶ subalternity. No one can say ‘I
am a subaltern’ in whatever language.
And¶
subaltern studies will not reduce itself to the
historical recounting of the¶ details of the practice of disenfranchised groups and
remain a study of the¶ subaltern.
L: Suffering
Research is used to commodify pain narratives and damage
representations to reproduce oppression with the justification of the
academy
Tuck and Yang 14 [Eve, & K.W., 2014, “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In n D. Paris & M.
T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and
communities https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-RWords_Refusing-Research.pdf]
Urban communities, and other disenfranchised communities.
Damage-centered researchers may operate,
even benevolently, within a theory of change in which harm must be recorded or proven
in order to convince an outside adjudicator that reparations are deserved. These reparations
presumably take the form of additional resources, settlements, affirmative actions, and other material, political, and sovereign
adjustments. Eve has described this
theory of change as both colonial and flawed, because it relies
upon Western notions of power as scarce and concentrated, and because it requires
disenfranchised communities to posi-tion themselves as both singularly defective and
powerless to make change (2010). Finally, Eve has observed that “won” reparations rarely become
reality, and that in many cases, communities are left with a narrative that tells them that
they are broken.Similarly, at the center of the analysis in this chapter is a concern with the fixation social science research
has exhibited in eliciting pain stories from com-munities that are not White, not wealthy, and not straight. Academe’s
demon-strated fascination with telling and retelling narratives of pain is troubling, both
for its voyeurism and for its consumptive implacability. Imagining “itself to be a voice,
and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised” (Simpson, 2007, p. 67, emphasis in
the original) is not just a rare historical occurrence in anthropology and related fields. We observe that much of the
work of the academy is to reproduce stories of oppression in its own voice. At first, this may
read as an intolerant condemnation of the academy, one that refuses to forgive past blunders and see how things have changed in
recent decades. However, it is our view that while many individual scholars have cho-sen to pursue other lines of inquiry than the
pain narratives typical of their disciplines, novice researchers emerge from doctoral programs eager to launch pain-based inquiry
projects because they believe that such approaches embody what it means to do social science. The collection of pain narratives
and the theories of change that champion the value of such narratives are so prevalent in the social sciences that one might surmise
that they are indeed what the academy is about. In her examination of the symbolic violence of the academy, bell hooks
(1990) portrays the core message from the academy to those on the margins as thus: No
need to hear your voice
when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your
voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back
to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own.
Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the
speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk. (p. 343) Hooks’s words resonate with our
observation of how much of social science research is concerned with providing recognition to the presumed voiceless, a
recognition that is enamored with knowing through pain. Further, this passage describes the ways in which the researcher’s voice is
constituted by, legitimated by, animated by the voices on the margins. The researcher-self is made anew by telling back the story of
the marginalized/subaltern subject. Hooks works to untangle the almost imperceptible differences between forces that silence and
forces that seemingly liberate by inviting those on the margins to speak, to tell their stories. Yet the forces that invite those on the
margins to speak also say, “Do not speak in a voice of resistance. Only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of
deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain” (hooks, 1990, p. 343).
Research is used to commodify pain narratives- a refusal to enagage in
research is necessary
Tuck and Yang 14 [Eve, & K.W., 2014, “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In n D. Paris & M.
T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and
communities https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-RWords_Refusing-Research.pdf]
Research is a dirty word among many Native communities (Tuhiwai Smith,1999), and arguably, also among
ghettoized (Kelley, 1997), Orientalized(Said, 1978), and other communities of overstudied Others. The
ethicalstandards of the academic industrial complex are a recent development, and likeso many post–civil rights reforms, do not
always do enough to ensure that socialscience research is deeply ethical, meaningful, or useful for the individual or com-munity
being researched. Social
science often works to collect stories of pain andhumiliation in the
lives of those being researched for commodification. However,these same stories of pain and
humiliation are part of the collective wisdom thatoften informs the writings of
researchers who attempt to position their intellectualwork as decolonization. Indeed, to refute
the crime, we may need to name it. Howdo we learn from and respect the wisdom and desires in the
stories that we (over)hear, while refusing to portray/betray them to the spectacle of the
settler colonialgaze? How do we develop an ethics for research that differentiates
between power—which deserves a denuding, indeed petrifying scrutiny—and people?
Atthe same time, as fraught as research is in its complicity with power, it is one ofthe last places for legitimated inquiry. It is at least
still a space that proclaims tocare about curiosity. In this essay, we theorize refusal not just as a “no,” but as atype of investigation
into “what you need to know and what I refuse to write in”(Simpson, 2007, p. 72). Therefore, we
present a refusal to do
research, or a refusalwithin research, as a way of thinking about humanizing researchers. We have organized this chapter into
four portions. In the first three sections,we lay out three axioms of social science research. Following the work of EveKosofsky
Sedgwick (1990), we use the exposition of these axioms to articulateotherwise implicit, methodological, definitional, self-evident
groundings (p. 12)of our arguments and observations of refusal. The axioms are: (I) The subalterncan speak, but is only invited to
speak her/our pain; (II) there are some forms of knowledge that the academy doesn’t deserve; and (III) research may not be
theintervention that is needed. We realize that these axioms may not appear self-evident to everyone, yet asserting them as
apparent allows us to proceed towardthe often unquestioned limits of research. Indeed, “in dealing with an open-secret structure, it’s
only by being shameless about risking the obvious that wehappen into the vicinity of the transformative” (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 22). In
thefourth section of the chapter, we theorize refusal in earnest, exploring ideas thatare still forming.Our thinking and writing in this
essay is informed by our readings of postco-lonial literatures and critical literatures on settler colonialism. We locate much ofour
analysis inside/in relation to the discourse of settler colonialism, the particu-lar shape of colonial domination in the United States and
elsewhere, includingCanada, New Zealand, and Australia. Settler colonialism can be differentiatedfrom what one might call
exogenous colonialism in that the colonizers arrive at a place (“discovering” it) and make it a permanent home (claiming it). The
perma-nence of settler colonialism makes it a structure, not just an event (Wolfe, 1999).The settler colonial nation-state is
dependent on destroying and erasingIndigenous inhabitants in order to clear them from valuable land. The settlercolonial structure
also requires the enslavement and labor of bodies that have been stolen from their homelands and transported in order to labor the
land stolenfrom Indigenous people. Settler colonialism refers to a triad relationship, betweenthe White settler (who is valued for his
leadership and innovative mind), the dis-appeared Indigenous peoples (whose land is valued, so they and their claims to itmust be
extinguished), and the chattel slaves (whose bodies are valuable butownable, abusable, and murderable). We believe that this triad
is the basis of theformation of Whiteness in settler colonial nation-states, and that the interplay oferasure, bodies, land, and violence
is characteristic of the permanence of settlercolonial structures.Under coloniality, Descartes’ formulation, cognito ergo sum (“I think,
thereforeI am”) transforms into ego conquiro (“I conquer, therefore I am”; Dussel, 1985;Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Ndlvou-Gatsheni,
2011). Nelson Maldonado-Torres(2009) expounds on this relationship of the conqueror’s sense-of-self to hisknowledge-of-others (“I
know her, therefore I am me”). Knowledge
of self/Others became the philosophical justification for
the acquisition of bodies and territo-ries, and the rule over them. Thus the right to
conquer is intimately connected tothe right to know (“I know, therefore I conquer,
therefore I am”). Maldonado-Torres (2009) explains that for Levi Strauss, the self/Other knowledge paradigmis the
methodological rule for the birth of ethnology as a science (pp. 3–4). Settler colonial knowledge is premised on frontiers; conquest,
then, is an exerciseof the felt entitlement to transgress these limits. Refusal, and stances of refusal inresearch, are attempts to place
limits on conquest and the colonization of knowl-edge by marking what is off limits, what is not up for grabs or discussion, what
issacred, and what can’t be known. To speak of limits in such a way makes some liberal thinkers uncomfortable, andmay, to them,
seem dangerous. When
access to information, to knowledge, to theintellectual commons is
controlled by the people who generate that information[participants in a research study],
it can be seen as a violation of shared standards of justice and truth. (Simpson, 2007, p.
74) By forwarding a framework of refusal within (and to) research in this chapter, weare
not simply prescribing limits to social science research. We are making
visibleinvisibilized limits, containments, and seizures that research already stakes out.
L: Overcoming
The attempt to overcome the conditions of modernity, the founding original
violences which constitutes our current epistemologies is the logic of
settler colonialism. It operates on a fetishization of woundedness.
Tuck and Yang 14 [Eve, & K.W., 2014, “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In n D. Paris & M.
T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and
communities (pp. 223-248). Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications. Pp. 228-9]
As numerous scholars have denoted, many social science disciplines emerged¶ from the need to provide justifications for social
hierarchies undergirded by¶ White supremacy and manifest destiny (see also Gould, 1981; Selden, 1999; ¶ Tuck & Guishard,
forthcoming). Wolfe (1999) has explored how the contoured¶ logic of settler colonialism (p. 5) can be mapped onto the
microactivities of¶ anthropology; Guthrie (1976) traces the roots of psychology to the need to “scientifically”¶ prove the supremacy
of the White mind. The
origins of many social¶ science disciplines in maintaining logics of
domination, while sometimes¶ addressed in graduate schools, are regularly thought to be just errant or
inauspicious¶ beginnings—much like the ways in which the genocide of Indigenous¶ peoples that
afforded the founding of the Unites States has been reduced to an¶ unfortunate byproduct of
the birthing of a new and great nation. Such amnesia¶ is required in settler colonial
societies, argues Lorenzo Veracini, because settler colonialism is “characterized by a persistent
drive to supersede the conditions of¶ its operation,” (2011, p. 3); that is, to make itself
invisible, natural, without origin¶ (and without end), and inevitable. Social science disciplines have
inherited¶ the persistent drive to supersede the conditions of their operations from
settler¶ colonial logic, and it is this drive, a kind of unquestioning push forward, and not¶ the origins of the disciplines that
we attend to now. We are struck by the pervasive silence on questions regarding the contemporary¶
rationale(s) for social science research. Though a variety of ethical and¶ procedural protocols require researchers to
compose statements regarding the¶ objectives or purposes of a particular project, such protocols do not prompt¶
reflection upon the underlying beliefs about knowledge and change that too often¶ go unexplored or
unacknowledged. The rationale for conducting social science¶ research that collects pain narratives seems to be self-evident for
many scholars,¶ but when looked at more closely, the rationales may be unconsidered, and somewhat¶ flimsy. Like a maritime
archaeological site, such rationales might be best¶ examined in situ, for fear of deterioration if extracted. Why do researchers
collect¶ pain narratives? Why does the academy want them? An initial and partial answer is
because settler colonial ideology believes that,¶ in fiction author Sherril Jaffe’s words, “scars make
your body more interesting,”¶ (1996, p. 58). Jaffe’s work of short, short of fiction bearing that sentiment as title¶
captures the exquisite crossing of wounds and curiosity and pleasure. Settler¶ colonial ideology, constituted by
its conscription of others, holds the wounded¶ body as more engrossing than the body
that is not wounded (though the person¶ with a wounded body does not politically or
materially benefit for being more¶ engrossing). In settler colonial logic, pain is more
compelling than privilege,¶ scars more enthralling than the body unmarked by
experience. In settler colonial¶ ideology, pain is evidence of authenticity, of the
verifiability of a lived life.¶ Academe, formed and informed by settler colonial ideology,
has developed the¶ same palate for pain. Emerging and established social science researchers set out¶
to document the problems faced by communities, and often in doing so, recirculate¶ common
tropes of dysfunction, abuse, and neglect.
L: Inclusion/Multiculturalism
Your politics of inclusion gets coopted
Brown 1996 [Wendy Brown, Prof. Political Science, Prof. Rhetoric, Prof. Critical Theory @
UC-Berkeley, 96, “In the ‘folds of our own discourse’: The Pleasures and Freedoms of Silence,”
3 U. Chi. L. Sch. Roundtable, 189-91]
In her lecture at the Swedish Academy on the occasion of receiving the¶ Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison also displaces the
conventional¶ antinomy between silence and language, arguing that certain
kinds of language¶ are themselves
silencing, capable of violence and killing, as well as "susceptible¶ to death, erasure." 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 to maintain 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 smitheried to sanction¶ ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor, polished to shocking¶
glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. 4 While Morrison is concerned in this passage primarily
with state languages,¶ with bureaucratic and 'official' languages, any language of regulation, including¶
those originally designed on behalf of our emancipation, has the potential to¶ become
"official" in the sense she describes. If silence can function as speech in discourse, can be a
function of discourse,¶ and can also function as a resistance to regulatory discourse, such¶ practices
of silence are hardly unfettered. The complexities of silence and¶ speech in relation to freedom brings us to the second passage of
Foucault's¶ that I want to consider. It is from his "Two Lectures" on power,"5 and¶ occurs in the context of his discussion of
discovering or "disinterring" subjugated¶ knowledges: .. . is it not perhaps the case that these fragments of
genealogies are no¶ sooner brought to light, that the particular elements of the knowledge¶ that one seeks to
disinter are no sooner accredited and put into circulation,¶ than they run the risk of re-codification,
recolonisation? In fact,¶ those unitary discourses, which first disqualified and then ignored
them¶ when they made their appearance, are, it seems, quite ready now to¶ annex them,
to take them back within the fold of their own discourse and to invest them with everything this implies in
terms of their effects¶ of knowledge and power." Here, Foucault's concern is less with disrupting the
conventional modernist¶ equation of power with speech on one side, and oppression
with silence on the¶ other, than with the ways in which insurrectionary discourse borne
of exclusion¶ and marginalization can be colonized by that which produced it much as¶
counter-cultural fashion is routinely commodified by the corporate textile¶ industry. While
"disqualified" discourses are an effect of domination, they¶ nevertheless potentially function as oppositional when they are deployed
by¶ those who inhabit them. However, when "annexed" by those "unitary"¶ discourses which they ostensibly oppose, they
become a particularly potent¶ source of regulation, carrying as they do intimate and
detailed knowledge of¶ their subjects. Thus, Foucault's worry would appear to adhere not simply to¶ the study of
but to the overt political mobilization, of oppositional discourses. ¶ Consider the way in which the discourse of
multiculturalism has been annexed¶ by mainstream institutions to generate new
modalities of essentialized racial¶ discourse; how "pre-menstrual syndrome" has been rendered a debilitating¶
disease in medical and legal discourses;'7 how "battered women's syndrome" ¶ has been deployed in the courtroom to defend
women who strike back at their¶ assailants by casting them as sub-rational, egoless victims of male violence; 8¶ or how some
women's response to some pornography was generalized by the¶ Meese Commission on pornography as the violence done to all
women by all¶ pornography. 9
L: Resistance
Focusing on resistance and difference forecloses politics
Dean 05 [Jodi Dean, Prof. Poli Sci @ Hobart & William Smith, 2005, “Communicative
Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics,” Cultural Politics Vol 1 Issue 1, p. 53]
The post-political world, then, is marked by emphases on multiple sources of value, on
the plurality of beliefs and the importance of tolerating these beliefs through the
cultivation of an attunement to the contingencies already pervading one's own values.
Divisions between friends and enemies are replaced by emphases on all of us. Likewise, politics
is understood as not confined to specific institutional fields but as a characteristic of all of life.
There is an attunement, in other words, to a micropolitics of the everyday. But this very
attunement forecloses the conflict and opposition necessary for politics. Finally, Hardt and
Negri's description of the current techno-globalcapitalist formation coincides with Agamben's
account of communication without communicability and with Zizek's portrayal of a global
formation characterized by contingency, multiplicity and singularity. For example, they agree
that "communication is the form of capitalist production in which capital has succeeded
in submitting society entirely and globally to its regime, suppressing all alternative
paths" (Hardt and Negri 2000: 347; cf. Dean 2002b: 272-5). Emphasizing that there is no
outside to the new order of empire, Hardt and Negri see the whole of empire as an "open site
of conflict" wherein the incommunicability of struggles, rather than a problem, is an asset
insofar as it releases opposition from the pressure of organization and prevents co-optation. As I
argue elsewhere, this position, while inspiring, not only embraces the elision between the
political and the economic but also in so doing cedes primacy to the economic, taking
hope from the intensity and immediacy of the crises within empire. The view I advocate is
less optimistic insofar as it rejects the notion that anything is immediately political, and
instead prioritizes politicization as the difficult challenge of representing specific claims
or acts as universal (cf. Laclau 1996: 56-64). Specific or singular acts of resistance,
statements of opinion or instances of transgression are not political in and of
themselves ; rather, they have to be politicized, that is articulated together with other
struggles, resistances and ideals in the course or context of opposition to a shared enemy or
opponent (cf. Laclau and Mouffe 1986:188). Crucial to this task, then, is understanding how
confimunicative capitalism, especially insofar as it relies on networked communications,
prevents politicization. To this end, I turn now to the fantasies animating communicative
capitalism.
I: University->Social Death
University creates social death
Occupied UC Berkeley 09 [“The Necrosocial: Civic Life, Social Death, and the UC.
http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-necrosocial/]
In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a
movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our
force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us. Here we
are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists,
police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/
chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be. That is, we are students, or students of color, or
queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are
We form teams, clubs, fraternities,
majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and
thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot. Who doesn’t participate in this graveyard? In
the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality translates
to a value of domination. We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves
we’re brighter than everyone else. Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than
shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning.
everyone else. We have measured ourselves and we have measured others. It should never feel terrible ordering others around,
right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat, test them as a professor, extract
It is our private wet dream for
the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of domination. After all, we are
intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this. We are convinced,
owned, broken. We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. This triumvirate
value from their capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying, completing.
of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own
When those values are violated by
the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it
injustice, we get indignant. We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values. What many have learned
again and again is that these institutions don’t care for those values, not at all, not for all. And we
are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own. The values create popular images
students—we have used their words on their stages: Save public education!
and ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while
they mean
in practice the selling of commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on
violence, the expansion of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based
on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation in general. They sell the practice through
the image. We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept the practice. In this crisis the Chancellors and Presidents, the
Regents and the British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all intend to be true to their values and capitalize on the
Their most
recent attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more
willing to accept their new terms as well as what was always dead in the university, to
see just how dead we are willing to play, how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous.
university economically and socially—which is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an escalation, a provocation.
A: Refusal
We must not attempt to redeem this world but refuse the demand for
redemption, of ourselves or this world. Instead we need to tear shit down.
Do not ask what will come next. The world beyond cannot be access
except through a refusal to be held hostage to this one.
Halberstam 13 [Jack Halberstam, Prof. English @ USC, 2013, “The Wild Beyond: With and
For the Undercommons” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, p. 5-6]
It ends with love, exchange, fellowship. It ends as it begins, in motion,¶ in between
various modes of being and belonging, and on the way to¶ new economies of giving,
taking, being with and for and it ends with¶ a ride in a Buick Skylark on the way to another place altogether.
Surprising,¶ perhaps, after we have engaged dispossession, debt, dislocation¶ and violence. But not surprising when you have
understood that¶ the projects of “fugitive planning and black study” are mostly about¶ reaching out to
find connection; they are about making common¶ cause with the brokenness of being, a
brokenness, I would venture to¶ say, that is also blackness, that remains blackness, and will,
despite all,¶ remain broken because this book is not a prescription for repair. If we do not
seek to fix what has been broken, then what? How do we resolve¶ to live with brokenness, with
being broke, which is also what Moten¶ and Harney call “debt.” Well, given that debt is sometimes a history of¶
giving, at other times a history of taking, at all times a history of capitalism ¶ and given that debt also signifies a promise of
ownership but never delivers¶ on that promise, we have to understand that debt is something that¶ cannot be paid off.
Debt, as Harney puts it, presumes a kind of individualized¶ relation to a naturalized economy
that is predicated upon exploitation.¶ Can we have, he asks, another sense of what is owed
that does not¶ presume a nexus of activities like recognition and acknowledgement,¶
payment and gratitude. Can debt “become a principle¶ of elaboration”? Moten links economic
debt to the brokenness of being in the interview¶ with Stevphen Shukaitis; he acknowledges that some debts¶ should be
paid, and that much is owed especially to black people by¶ white people, and yet, he says: “I also
know that what it is that is¶ supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only¶
thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something¶ new.” The
undercommons do not come to pay their debts, to¶ repair what has been broken, to fix
what has come undone.¶ If you want to know what the undercommons wants, what Moten¶ and
Harney want, what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and¶ poor people want, what we
(the “we” who cohabit in the space of the¶ undercommons) want, it is this – we cannot be
satisfied with the recognition¶ and acknowledgement generated by the very system that¶
denies
a) that
anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to¶ be the broken part; so we refuse
to ask for recognition and instead we¶ want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the
structure that, right now,¶ limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the¶
places that we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new¶ structures will replace the ones we
live with yet, because once we have¶ torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see
differently and¶ feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want¶ after
“the break” will be different from what we think we want before¶ the break and both are
necessarily different from the desire that issues ¶ from being in the break.
Refusal is the first step to the undercommons
Halberstam 13 [Jack Halberstam, Prof. English @ USC, 2013, “The Wild Beyond: With and
For the Undercommons” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, p. 8]
The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In The Undercommons¶ if we begin anywhere,
we begin with the right to refuse what has¶ been refused to you. Citing Gayatri Spivak, Moten and
Harney call¶ this refusal the “first right” and it is a game-changing kind of refusal¶ in that it
signals the refusal of the choices as offered. We can understand¶ this refusal in terms that Chandan Reddy lays
out in Freedom¶ With Violence (2011) – for Reddy, gay marriage is the option that cannot¶ be opposed in
the ballot box. While we can circulate multiple critiques¶ of gay marriage in terms of its institutionalization
of intimacy,¶ when you arrive at the ballot box, pen in hand, you only get to check¶ “yes” or “no”
and the no, in this case, could be more damning than the¶ yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as offered.
A: Silence
Instead of fetishizing breaking silence we should embrace silence as a
means of resisting regulation and depoliticization
Brown 1996 [Wendy Brown, Prof. Political Science, Prof. Rhetoric, Prof. Critical Theory @
UC-Berkeley, 96, “In the ‘folds of our own discourse’: The Pleasures and Freedoms of Silence,”
3 U. Chi. L. Sch. Roundtable, 186]
But if
the silences in discourses of domination are a site for insurrectionary¶ noise, if they are
the corridors we must fill with explosive counter-tales, it is¶ also possible to make a fetish of breaking
silence. Even more than a fetish, it¶ is possible that this ostensible tool of emancipation carries its
own techniques¶ of subjugation-that it converges with non-emancipatory tendencies in
contemporary¶ culture (for example, the ubiquity of confessional discourse and¶ rampant personalization of political life),
that it establishes regulatory norms,¶ coincides with the disciplinary power of
confession, in short, feeds the powers¶ we meant to starve. While attempting to avoid a simple reversal
of feminist¶ valorizations of breaking silence, it is this dimension of silence and its putative¶ opposite with which this Article is
concerned. In the course of this work, I want to make the case for silence not simply¶ as an aesthetic but a
political value, a means of preserving certain practices¶ and dimensions of existence from regulatory
power, from normative violence,¶ as well as from the scorching rays of public exposure. I also want to suggest¶ a
link between, on the one hand, a certain contemporary tendency concerning¶ the lives of public figures-the confession or extraction
of every detail of¶ private and personal life (sexual, familial, therapeutic, financial) and, on the¶ other, a certain practice in feminist
culture: the compulsive putting into public¶ discourse of heretofore hidden or private experiences-from catalogues of¶ sexual
pleasures to litanies of sexual abuses, from chronicles of eating disorders ¶ to diaries of homebirths, lesbian mothering, and Gloria
Steinam's inner¶ revolution. In linking these two phenomena-the privatization of public life via¶ the
mechanism of public exposure of private life on the one hand, and the¶ compulsive/compulsory
cataloguing of the details of women's lives on the¶ other-I want to highlight a modality of
regulation and depoliticization specific¶ to our age that is not simply confessional but
empties private life into the¶ public domain, and thereby also usurps public space with
the relatively trivial,¶ rendering the political personal in a fashion that leaves injurious
social,¶ political and economic powers unremarked and untouched. In short, while¶ intended
as a practice of freedom (premised on the modernist conceit that the¶ truth shall make us free), these
productions of truth not only bear the capacity¶ to chain us to our injurious histories as well
as the stations of our small lives¶ but also to instigate the further regulation of those lives, all the
while depoliticizing¶ their conditions. My concern with what might be called compulsory feminist discursivity¶ and
the presumed evil of silences has yet another source. Notwithstanding¶ American academic feminism's romance with Foucault,
there is an oddly non or¶ pre-Foucauldian quality to much feminist concern with censorship and¶ silencing. In
these formulations, expression is cast either as that which makes¶ us free, tells our truth, puts
our truth into circulation,' or as that which¶ oppresses us by putting "their" truth into circulation in
the form of pornography,¶ hate speech, harassment or simply the representation of the world
from¶ "the male point of view."4 If one side in the debate argues for more expression¶ on our partfor example, by making our own pornography or telling our¶ own stories-and the other argues for less on "their" part, both
sides nonetheless¶ subscribe to an expressive and repressive notion of speech, its
capacity¶ to express the truth of an individual's desire or condition, or to repress that¶
truth. Both equate freedom with voice and visibility.' Both assume recognition¶ to be
unproblematic when we tell our own story, and assume that such¶ recognition is the
material of power and pleasure. Neither, in short, confronts¶ the regulatory potential of
speaking ourselves. I think the whole contemporary¶ debate over censorship-whether focused on porn or rap music-is
necessarily¶ bound to an expressive-repressive model of power and freedom, which may¶ explain why those who feel passionately
about both freedom and dignity have¶ trouble finding their way in this debate. If the choice is cast either as the free¶ circulation of
music and pictures venerating rape, racism, and misogyny, or¶ state repression of the same, how does one choose? To inaugurate
a different kind of analysis of the relationship between¶ silence, speech, and freedom, I want to turn to two passages in Foucault's¶
work, the first from The History of Sexuality: Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up¶ against it, any
more than silences are . . .Discourse transmits and produces¶ power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders¶ it
fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. In like manner, silence and¶ secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but
they also¶ loosen its hold and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance. Foucault here marks the ambiguity of silence in
relationship to power, insisting¶ that silence
functions not only as a "shelter for power"7 but also as a
shelter¶ from it. (Foucault's example is the putative freedom of homosexual practice in a historical age when there is no
discourse for or about it).8 This paradoxical¶ capacity of silence to engage opposites with regard to power is rarely associated ¶
with Foucault's thinking due to his emphasis on discourse as power. Yet I ¶ do not think he is here reneging on this emphasis nor, in
speaking of silence¶ as a shelter from power, suggesting a pre-discursive existence to things. Critical¶ here is the difference
between what Foucault calls unitary discourses, which¶ regulate and colonize, and those which do not perform these functions
with¶ same social pervasiveness, even as they do not escape the tendency of all discourse ¶ to establish norms by which it
regulates and excludes. It is through this¶ distinction that one can make sense of Foucault's otherwise inexplicable ¶ reference to
sex in the eighteenth century as being "driven out of hiding and¶ constrained to lead a discursive existence,"9 or his troubling
example of the¶ village simpleton whose "inconsequential" habit of molesting young girls in¶ exchange for pennies was suddenly
subjected to medical, judicial, and popular¶ scrutiny and condemnation. ° Neither in these cases nor in others where ¶ Foucault
seems to imply a "freer" because pre-discursive existence to certain¶ practices would he appear to mean that they really occurred
"outside" discourse,¶ but rather that they had not yet been brought into the pervasive¶ regulatory discourses of the age-science,
psychiatry, medicine, law, pedagogy,¶ and so forth." Silence, as Foucault affirms it, then, is identical neither with¶
secrecy nor with not speaking. Rather, it signifies a relation to regulatory¶ discourses, as
well as a possible niche for the practice of freedom within those¶ discourses. If, as Foucault
insists, freedom is a practice (as opposed to an¶ achievement, condition, or institution), then the possibility of practicing¶ freedom
inside a regulatory discourse occurs in the empty spaces of that ¶ discourse as well as in resistance to the discourse. Moreover,
silence can¶ function as speech in both ways at once, as in the following autobiographical ¶ example offered by Foucault: Maybe
another feature of this appreciation of silence is related to the¶ obligation of speaking. I lived as a child in a petit bourgeois,
provincial milieu in France and the obligation of speaking, of making conversation¶ with visitors, was for me something both very
strange and very boring.¶ I often wondered why people had to speak. 2
Networks K
Notes
Maybe include a cap impact in the 1NC
1NC
Thesis: The network has permeated all swaths of life. Though networks,
like the internet, pride themselves in their anonymity and supposed
freedom, in truth the internet is a site of distributed control.
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Galloway is an assistant professor of
communications and media at NYU, Thacker is a professor of philosophy at the New School,
“Protocol, Control, and Networks”, 2004, Grey Room, 17 (10),
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381042464572
For the last decade or more network discourse has proliferated with a kind of epidemic
intensity: peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, wireless community net- works, terrorist networks, contagion networks of
biowarfare agents, political swarming and mass demonstration, economic and finance networks, massively multiplayer online role-
Often the discourse
surrounding networks tends to be posed both morally and architecturally against what
its participants see as retrograde structures like hierarchy and verticality, which have their
concomi- tant techniques for keeping things under control: bureaucracy, the chain of com- mand, and so on. “We’re tired of
trees,” wrote Deleuze and Guattari. But even beyond the fields of technology and philosophy, the concept of the
network has infected broad swaths of contemporary life. Even the U.S. military, a bastion of vertical,
playing games, Personal Area Networks, grid computing, “generation txt,” and on and on.
pyramidal hierarchy, is redefining its internal structure around network architectures, as RAND researchers John Arquilla and David
Ronfeldt have indi- cated. Their concept of “netwar” is defined in topological terms: “Hierarchies have a difficult time fighting
networks. [...] It takes networks to fight networks. [...] Whoever masters the network form first and best will gain major advantages.”
1 In short, the
current global crisis is an asymmetrical crisis between centralized,
hierarchical powers and distributed, horizontal networks. 2 Today’s conventional wisdom
cajoles us into thinking that everything can be subsumed under the warm security
blanket of interconnectivity. But it hasn’t yet told us quite what that means, or how one
might be able to draft a critique of networks. This “net- work fever” 3 has a delirious
tendency, for we identify in the current literature a general willingness to ignore politics
by masking it inside the so-called black box of technology. What is needed, then, is an analysis of
networks not at the broad level of political theory but at the microtechnical level of nonhuman, machinic practices. To this end, the
principle of political control we suggest is most helpful for thinking about technological networks is protocol, a
word derived from computer science but which resonates in the life sciences as well. Action within a network can be
deliberately guided by human actors or accidentally affected by nonhuman actors (a
computer virus or emerging infectious disease, for example). Often a misuse or an exploit of a protocol, be it
intended or unintended, can iden- tify the political fissures in a network. We suggest that such
moments, while often politically ambiguous when taken out of context, can also serve as instances for a more
critical, more politically engaged “counter-protocol” practice. As we shall see, protocological
control brings into existence a certain contradiction, at once distributing agencies in a
complex manner, while at the same time concentrating rigid forms of management and
control. The Politics of Algorithmic Culture The question we aim to explore here is What is the principle of political organi- zation
or control that stitches a network together? Writers like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have helped answer this question in the
sociopolitical sphere. They describe the
global principle of political organization as one of “Empire.”
Like a network, Empire is not reducible to any single state power, nor does it follow an
architecture of pyramidal hierarchy. Empire is fluid, flexible, dynamic, and far-reaching. In
that sense the concept of Empire helps us greatly to begin thinking about political organization in networks. But while inspired by
Hardt and Negri’s contribution to political philosophy, we are concerned that no one has yet adequately answered this question for
the technological sphere of bits and atoms. What, then, is “protocol”? Protocol abounds in technoculture. It is
a totalizing
control apparatus that guides both the technical and political formation of com- puter
networks, biological systems, and other media. Put simply, protocols are all the conventional
rules and standards that govern relationships within networks. Quite often these relationships come in
the form of communication between two or more computers, but “relationships within networks” can also refer to purely biological
processes, as in the systemic phenomenon of gene expression. Thus, by “networks” we want to refer
to any system
of interrelationality, whether biologi- cal or informatic, organic or inorganic, technical or natural—with the ultimate
goal of undoing the polar restrictiveness of these pairings. In computer networks science professionals
have, over the years, drafted hun- dreds of protocols to govern e-mail, Web pages, and so on, plus many other stan- dards for
technologies rarely seen by human eyes. The first protocol for computer networks was written in 1969 by Steve Crocker and is titled
“Host Software.” 4 If networks are the structures that connect people, then protocols are the rules that make sure the connections
actually work. Internet users commonly use protocols such as HTTP, FTP, and TCP/IP, even if they know little about how such
technical standards function. Likewise, molecular biotechnology research frequently makes use of protocol to configure biological
life as a network phenomenon, be it in gene expression networks, metabolic networks, or the circuitry of cell signaling pathways. In
such instances the biological and the informatic become increasingly enmeshed in hybrid systems that are more than biological:
proprietary genome databases, DNA chips for medical diagnostics, and real-time detection systems for biowar- fare agents. Protocol
is twofold; it is both an apparatus that facilitates networks and a logic that governs how things are done within that apparatus. While
its primary model is the informatic network (e.g., the Internet), we will show here how protocol also helps organize biological
networks (e.g., biopathways). A recent computer science manual describes the implementation of protocol in the Internet: The
network is made up of intelligent end-point systems that are self-deter- ministic, allowing each end-point system to communicate
with any host it chooses. Rather than being a network where communications are controlled by a central authority (as found in many
private networks), the
Internet is specifically meant to be a collection of autonomous hosts that
can commu- nicate with each other freely. . . . IP [Internet Protocol] uses an anarchic and
highly distributed model, with every device being an equal peer to every other device on
the global Internet. 5 That this passage sounds more like philosophy and less like science is particu- larly telling. Today
network science often conjures up the themes of anarchy, rhizomatics, distribution, and anti-authority to explain interconnected
systems of all kinds. From these sometimes radical prognostications and the larger tech- nological discourse of thousands of white
papers, memos, and manuals surround- ing them, we can derive some of the basic qualities of the apparatus of organization which
we here call protocol: •protocol
facilitates relationships between interconnected, but
autonomous, entities; •protocol’s virtues include robustness, contingency,
interoperability, flex- ibility, and heterogeneity; •a goal of protocol is to accommodate
everything, no matter what source or destination, no matter what originary definition or
identity; •while protocol is universal, it is always achieved through negotiation (meaning that
in the future protocol can and will be different); •protocol is a system for maintaining organization and
control in networks. Each of these characteristics alone is enough to distinguish protocol from many previous modes of
social and technical organization (such as hierarchy or bureau- cracy). Together they compose a new, sophisticated system of
protocol is implemented broadly and is thus not reducible
simply to the domain of institutional, governmental, or corporate power. In the broadest sense
distributed control. As a technology,
protocol is a technology that regulates flow, directs netspace, codes rela- tionships, and connects life forms. Networks always have
several protocols operating in the same place at the same time. In this sense networks are always slightly schizophrenic, doing one
thing in one place and the opposite in another. The
concept of protocol does not, therefore, describe one
all-encompassing network of power—there is not one Internet but many internets, all of
which bear a specific relation to the infra- structural history of the military,
telecommunication, and science industries. Thus protocol has less to do with individually
empowered human subjects (the pop-cultural myth of the hacker) who might be the engines of a teleological vision for
protocol, than with manifold modes of individuation that arrange and remix both human and nonhuman elements. But the
inclusion of opposition within the very fabric of protocol is not simply for the sake of
pluralism. Protocological control challenges us to rethink critical and political action
around a newer framework, that of multi-agent, individuated nodes in a metastable
network. This means that protocol is less about power (confinement, discipline, normativity) and more
about control (modulation, distribution, flexibility).
[Link]
The network is a mean of affective control. Networks have the power to
expand and catalyze its subjects to accept the violence of capitalism.
Brian Massumi, professor of critical empiricism at the University of Montreal and the
European Graduate School, 1997, “The Political Economy of Belonging”, Chapter 3,
http://www.brianmassumi.com/textes/Political%20Economy%20of%20Belonging.pdf
Technologically assisted channeling of event-transitivity constitutes a qualitatively
different mode of power than either the regulating codifications of the Static or the regularizing codings of the “social” or
“cultural,” at whose self-referential thresholds it is continually knocking. The transitive (a less fraught term than
“communicational”) must be seen as the dominant mode of power in what some are apt to call the
“postmodern” condition. Its network is what connects coding to coding, codification to
codification, coding to codification, and each to its own repetitions, in an ebb and flow of
potentialization-and-containment. The network distributes. Interlinks. Relates. The
network is the relationality of that which it distributes. It is the being of collective
becoming. Communicational technologies give body to relationality as such, and as set in motion –
as the passing-on of the event. The passing of the event is distinct both from the technology of transmission that is its corporeal
double, and from its delivery on the other side of the threshold. The
passing, event-transitivity in itself, in its
becoming, is the interval that encompasses – occupying every threshold. Every “enclosure” is
encompassed by a pure immanence of transition. The medium of “communication” is not the technology. It is the interval itself: the
moveability of the event, the displacement of change, relationality outside its terms, “communication” without content,
communicability. v Encompassed
by transitivity (understood in this way as a special kind of transduction), the Static
As “communications” ever more
insistently pipes itself in through a many-dimensioned delivery line, it increasingly
thresholds spaces of potentialization-and-containment with indeterminate eventtransitivity. Both the singular and the general-particular come to hinge on the indeterminate. Or swim in it, since the
encompassing threshold is not a door but an inundative medium of flow. “Communications” is the traffic in
modulation. It is a special mode of power that lubricates event-spaces in a bath of
indeterminacy, smoothing the thresholds of containment. If local or individual style is
resistance (understood more in the frictional sense than the oppositional one: a rub against the rules, rather than a breaking of
them), then resistance and containment are contained – in flow. They are wafted. Their wafting indexes
and the regularized transpire in a rarefied atmosphere of modulation.
them to the notself-referentiality of their threshold, the interval: something that is not exactly outside, but is still exorbital to the eventspace of arrival. A pseudo exo-referentiality – to the indeterminate. Not the “simply” indeterminate. Not the simply logically
indeterminate: the complexly, technologically, ontologically, indeterminate. From the perspective of containment and regularized
modes of opposition to it (countercontainment), this situation can only be experienced as a “crisis.” Everything from architecture to
“the family” to religion to “the Left and Right” to government itself fell into a self-declared state of perpetual crisis, all around the
same moment – when the thresholding approached saturation point. Yet they are all still very much with us. The change is not a
disappearance but an encompassing. What has changed is that none of them, no apparatus of coding or of codification, can claim to
encompass, because they are all encompassed. They waft and bathe, and by virtue of that shared condition, connect. Not negated:
The
networkability of event-transmission must be seen as pertaining not only to mass media
images but to information in general, to commodities, and to money: to any sign whose
basic operation is to flow, and whose inductive/transductive effect must be “realized”
(whose catalytic role must be catalyzed; whose expression must be expressed). All of these eventtransmitters
carry a high charge of indeterminacy, of unrealized (or in the present vocabulary, “unactualized”)
potential. What they are, what their event will be, what will be expressed with or through them, is highly variable, since they are
networked. Delivered one and all to transitivity, to the indeterminate event (for which “crisis” is as good a name as any).
complexly co-catalyzed by the heterogeneous elements populating the proliferating spaces they enter. Event-transmitters are
inductive/transductive signs roving for catalysis, across many a proliferation.vi Their readiness to catalyze – their aptitude for partsubjecthood – is also highly variable. The
ready-most is money, a sign whose simple appearance in
any context is sure to incorporeally transform it in one way or another. The least catalytic
is information. Each event-transmitter is sustained and delivered by a dedicated
collective apparatus deploying at least one technology of channeling that gives it body in
the interval, where it disappears into its own immanence (even low-tech transmitters return to
immanence: letters are mailed sealed in an envelope, their meaning re-latent). The intervallic bodies are of many types,
ranging from mail boxes and post offices to telephone lines to computers to the many and varied institutions and instruments of
finance. These knot
together into an expanding capillary network traversing every eventspace, with ever-increasing complexity (most recently converging on the World-Wide Web). It is in the complexity
of their technological interlinkage that they form an encompassing threshold-space of transitivity that can no longer be ignored as a
global power formation in its own right. This new power formation has an old name: capitalism. For
money, as means of payment or of investment, is the only event-transmitter that traverses every event-space and piggy-backs every
intervallic body, without exception. Present-day capital is the capillary network of the capillary, the
circulator of the circulation, the motor of transitivity – the immanence of immanence-embodied. The inside limit of the relational.
The current capitalist mode of power could be called control: neither coding nor codification, neither
regularization nor regulation, but the immanently encompassing modulation of both. vii The power of control is
predicated on decoding (the rendering immanent of signs, become vectors of indeterminate potential) and
deterritoritorialization (the drawing off of the event from its general-particular spaces of expression and, in this case, its
consignment to a distributed, intervallic space of its own). The power of control is decoding and deterritorialization, delivered
(ready for catalysis, into a potentialization-and-containment in a new space; ready for
recoding/recodification and reterritorialization). Control is modulation made a power
factor (its flow factor). It is the powering-up – or powering-away – of potential. The ultimate capture, not of the elements
of expression, not even of expression, but of the movement of the event itself. It is in no way underestimating
capitalist control to call its worldwide trafficking in modulation the stylization of power. It was argued earlier that the model of power
was usurpation. What is being usurped here? The very expression of potential. The movement of relationality. Becoming-together.
Belonging. Capitalism
is the global usurpation of belonging. This is not merely a lament: power, it
must be recognized, is now massively potentializing, in a new planetary mode. But neither is it
necessarily cause for celebration: the potentialization is just as massively delivered to proliferating
spaces of containment. It is the inescapable observation that belonging per se has emerged as a problem of global
proportions. Perhaps the planetary problem. Neither celebration nor lament: a challenge to rethink, and reexperience, the individual
and the collective. Which goes last?
Existence has become a measureable science. Thus, the alternative is to
become immeasurable, devoid of any representable identity.
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Galloway is an assistant professor of
communications and media at NYU, Thacker is a professor of philosophy at the New School,
2007, “The Exploit: A Theory of Networks”, pg. 135, http://dss-edit.com/plu/GallowayThacker_The_Exploit_2007.pdf
A
simple laser pointer can blind a surveillance camera when the beam is aimed directly at
the camera’s lens. With this type of cloaking, one is not hiding, simply nonexistent to that node. The subject has
full pres- ence but is simply not there on the screen. It is an exploit. Elsewhere, one might go
online but trick the server into recording a routine event. That’s nonexistence. One’s data is
there, but it keeps moving, of its own accord, in its own temporary autonomous ecology.
This is “disingenuous” data, or data in camouflage as not - yet - data. Tactics of abandonment are
positive technologies; they are tactics of fullness. There is still struggle in abandonment,
but it is not the struggle of con frontation, or the bureaucratic logic of war. It is a mode of non - existence: the full
assertion of the abandonment of representation. Absence, lack, invisibility, and nonbeing
have nothing to do with nonexistence. Nonexistence is nonexistence not because it is an absence,
The question of nonexistence is this: how does one develop tech- niques and technologies to make oneself unaccounted for?
or because it is not visible, but precisely because
it is full. Or rather, because it permeates. That which
permeates is not arbitrary, and not totalizing, but tactical. Of course, nonexistence has been the concern of antiphilosophy
philosophers for some time. Nonexistence is also a mode of escape, an “otherwise than being.” Levinas
remarks that “escape is the need to get out of oneself.” 34 One must always choose either being or nonbeing (or worse,
becoming...). The choice tends to moralize pres- ence, that one must be accounted for, that one must, more impor- tantly, account
for oneself, that accounting is tantamount to self - identification, to being a subject, to individuation. “It
is this category of
getting out, assimilable neither to renovation nor to creation, that we must grasp....It is
an inimitable theme that invites us to get out of being.” 35 And again Levinas: “The experience that
reveals to us the presence of being as such, the pure existence of being, is an expe- rience of its powerlessness, the source of all
need.” 36 Future
avant - garde practices will be those of nonexistence. But still you ask: how is it
existence becomes a measurable science of control, then
nonexistence must become a tactic for any thing wishing to avoid control. “A being
radically devoid of any representable identity,” Agamben wrote, “would be absolutely irrelevant
to the State.” 37 Thus we should become devoid of any repre- sentable identity. Anything
measurable might be fatal. These strategies could consist of nonexistent action (nondoing);
unmeasurable or not - yet - measurable human traits; or the promotion of measurable
data of negligible importance. Allowing to be measured now and again for false behaviors, thereby attracting
possible not to exist? When
incongruent and ineffective control responses, can’t hurt. A driven exodus or a pointless desertion are equally virtuous in the quest
for nonexistence. The bland, the negligible, the featureless are its only evident traits. The nonexistent is that which cannot be cast
into any available data types. The nonexistent is that which cannot be parsed by any available algorithms.
nihilism; it is the purest form of love.
This is not
L: Internet Democracy
Attempts to democratize the internet extends communicative capitalism
and control
Dean 03 [Jodi Dean, Prof. Poli Sci @ Hobart & William Smith, 2003, “Why the Net is Not a
Public Sphere,” Constellations Volume 10, Number 1, p. 101-3]
These two contradictory accounts of the Net as a public sphere suggest that it might be more productive to treat the public sphere
as an ideological construct and subject it to ideology critique. As theorized by Slavoj Zizek, ideology refers to the “generative matrix
that regulates the relationship between the visible and the non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable, as well as changes
a notion of public in the sense of visible, accessible, and
known operates together with a notion of secrecy in the sense of hidden, inaccessible,
and unknown in a matrix that configures how democracy is imagined in contemporary
technoculture.20 If the public aspires to inclusivity, transparency, and reconciliation, then
the secret holds open these aspirations via the promise that a democratic public is within
reach – once all that is hidden has been revealed. Along with networked communications
and practices of education and informatization, technologies of surveillance and
practices of dissemination are installed to fulfill these promises, to bring everything
before the gaze of the public. Publicity works through demands to disclose or reveal the
secret and realize the public as the ideal self-identical subject/object of democracy.
Publicity, in other words, is the ideology of technoculture. In contrast with other Marxist theorizations,
in this relationship.”19 My claim is that
the Zizekian account of ideology does not involve false consciousness and ideology critique does not involve unmasking this falsity
Precisely
because cynicism incorporates an ironic distance from everyday social reality,
unmasking is clearly pointless. People know very well that they are playing into the
hands of advertisers, say, but they do it nevertheless, despite their knowledge of what is
going on. For Zˇ izˇek, then, ideology refers to the beliefs involved when we go ahead and do something nevertheless. Ideology
to reveal an underlying truth. Instead, Zizek upgrades the concept of ideology in order to apply it to a cynical age.
affects what we do, not what we know. Furthermore, insofar as ideology refers to practices of belief, it has a profoundly material
dimension. Belief
is exteriorized in cultural practices, institutions, and technologies. When
we “go through the motions” despite what we know, we uphold, reinforce these
institutions. Thus, rather than designating the interior disposition of an individual, belief, again persists at the level of actions
and in those practical, technological, conditions that produce them. I contend that today these conditions are best understood as the
materialization of norms of publicity. Technoculture, as I mentioned, is often heralded for the ways it enhances democracy by
From virtual town halls to the chat and opining of apparently
already politicized netizens, computer mediated interaction has been proffered as
democracy’s salvation. New technologies seem to solve the old republican worry about
whether deliberative democracy can work in societies too big for face-to-face discussion.
realizing the conditions for an ideal public.
In technoculture we can have the privilege and convenience of democracy without the unsightly mess as millions and millions of
people participate in a great big public sphere. Or at least that’s the fantasy. New media present themselves for and as a democratic
public. They present themselves for a democratic public in their eager offering of information, access, and opportunity. They present
themselves as a democratic public when the very fact of networked communications comes to mean democratization, when
But, as is becoming
increasingly clear, the expansion and intensification of communication and
entertainment networks yields not democracy but something else entirely:
communicative capitalism. In communicative capitalism, what has been heralded as central to
Enlightenment ideals of democracy takes material form in new technologies. Access, information, and
communication, as well as open networks of discussion and opinionformation, are
conditions for rule by the public that seem to have been realized through global
telecommunications. But instead of leading to more equitable distributions of wealth and
influence, instead of enabling the emergence of a richer variety in modes of living and
expansions in the infrastructure of the information society are assumed to be enactments of a demos.
practices of freedom, the deluge of screens and spectacles undermines political
opportunity and efficacy for most of the world’s people. As Saskia Sassen’s research on the impact of
economic globalization on sovereignty and territoriality makes clear, the speed, simultaneity, and
interconnectivity of electronic telecommunications networks produce massive
distortions and concentrations of wealth. Not only does the possibility of superprofits in
the finance and services complex lead to hypermobility in capital and the devalorization
of manufacturing, but financial markets themselves acquire the capacity to discipline
national governments.21 Similarly, within nations like the US, the proliferation of media has been accompanied by a shift
in political participation. Rather than actively organized in parties and unions, politics has
become a domain of financially mediated and professionalized practices centered on
advertising, public relations, and the means of mass communication. Indeed, with the
commodification of communication, more and more domains of life seem to have been
reformatted in terms of market and spectacle as if the valuation itself had been rewritten
in binary code. Bluntly put, the standards of a finance and consumption-driven entertainment culture set the very terms of
democratic governance today. In effect, changing the system, organizing against and challenging
communicative capitalism, seems to require strengthening the system: how else to get
out the message than to raise the money, buy the television time, register the domain
names, build the websites, and craft the accessible, user-friendly, spectacular message?
Democracy demands publicity. So, we are at an impasse: the ideal of the public works simultaneously to encode
democratic practice and market global technoculture. Precisely those technologies that materialize a promise
of full political access and inclusion drive an economic formation whose brutalities
render democracy worthless for the majority of people. The meme: publicity is to technoculture what
liberalism is to capitalism. It is the ideology that constitutes the truth conditions of global, information- age capital. Publicity is what
makes today’s communicative capitalism seem perfectly natural. The
ideal of publicity configures the Net as a
consensual space. Not only does this pathologize all sorts of interactions long part of computer mediated
communication – sex, porn, games, banal chatter – but it completely occludes the way that the Net is the
key infrastructural element of the global economy. We see this in ICANN statements that emphasize the
importance of competition on the Net. Competition is associated with the public good, with what is best for all people.
This reappears in “Third Way” rhetoric: the market is public; the market registers and serves the public interest. Market competition
as public good displaces attention from the actual antagonisms, the actual conflict going
on in the world in various forms and spaces. The Net is one of the spaces where this
conflict rages in full-force. When we talk about the Net as a public sphere, we displace
attention from this conflict.
The AFF’s fantasy of secure internet participation is technology fetishism
that depoliticizes political struggle
Dean 05 [Jodi Dean, Prof. Poli Sci @ Hobart & William Smith, 2005, “Communicative
Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics,” Cultural Politics Vol 1 Issue 1, p. 60-2]
In their online communications, people are apt to express intense emotions, intimate feelings, some of the more secret or
significant aspects of their sense of who they are. Years ago, while surfing through Yahoo's home pages, I found the page of a guy
who featured pictures of his dog, his parents, and himself fully erect in an SMstyle harness. At the bottom of his site was the typical,
"Thanks for stopping by! Don't forget to write and tell me what you think!" I mention this quaint image to point to how easy many find
it to reveal themselves on the Internet. Not only are people accustomed to putting their thoughts online but also in
so doing they believe their thoughts and ideas are registering - write and tell me what you think] Contributing to the infostream, we
might say, has a subjective registration effect. One believes that it matters, that it contributes, that it means something. Precisely
because of this registration effect, people
believe that their contribution to circulating content is a kind
action. They believe that they are active, maybe even that they are making a difference
simply by clicking on a button, adding their name to a petition or commenting on a blog.
of communicative
Zizek describes this kind of false activity with the term "interpassivity." When we are interpassive,
something else, a fetish object, is active in our stead. Zizek explains, "you think you are active, while your true
position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive..." (1997:21). The frantic activity of the fetish works to
prevent actual action, to prevent something from really happening. This suggests to me the way activity on the Net,
frantic contributing and content circulation, may well involve a profound passivity, one that
is interconnected, linked, but passive nonetheless. Put back in terms of the circulation of contributions that fail to coalesce into
actual debates, that fail as messages in need of response, we might think of this odd interpassivity as content that is linked to other
content, but never fully connected. Weirdly, then, the
circulation of communication is depoliticizing, not
because people don't care or don't want to be involved, but because we do! Or, put more precisely, it is
depoliticizing because the form of our involvement ultimately empowers those it is supposed
to resist. Struggles on the Net reiterate struggles in real life, but insofar as they reiterate these struggles, they
displace them. And this displacement, in turn, secures and protects the space of "official" politics. This suggests
another reason communication functions fetishistically today: as a disavowal of a more fundamental
political disempowerment or castration. Approaching this fetishistic disavowal from a different direction, we can
ask, if Freud is correct in saying that a fetish not only covers over a trauma but that in so doing it also helps
one through a trauma, what might serve as an analogous socio-political trauma today? In my view, in the US a likely
answer can be found in the loss of opportunities for political impact and efficacy. In the face of the constraining of states to the
demands and conditions of global markets, the dramatic decrease in union membership and increase in corporate salaries and
benefits at the highest levels, and the shift in political parties from person-intensive to finance-intensive organization strategies.the
political opportunities open to most Americans are either voting, which increasing numbers choose not to do, or giving money. Thus,
it is not surprising that many might want to be more active and might feel that action
online is a way of getting their voice heard, a way of making a contribution. Indeed,
interactive communications technology corporations rose to popularity in part on the
message that they were tools for political empowerment. One might think of Ted Nelson, Stewart Brand,
the People's Computer Company and their emancipatory images of computing technology. In the context of the San Francisco Bay
Area's anti-war activism of the early seventies, they held up computers as the means to the renewal of participatory democracy One
might also think ofthe image projected by Apple Computers. Apple presented itself as changing the world, as saving democracy by
bringing technology to the people. In 1984, Apple ran an ad for the Macintosh that placed an image of the computer next to one of
Karl Marx. The slogan was, "It was about time a capitalist started a revolution." Finally, one might also recall the guarantees of
citizens' access and the lure ^ of town meetings for millions, the promises of democratization and P education that drove Al Gore
and Newt Gingrich's political rhetoric O in the nineties as Congress worked through the Information and J Infrastructure Technology
Act, the National Information Infrastructure g Act (both passing in 1993) and the 1996 Telecommunications Act. g These bills made
explicit a convergence of democracy and capitalism, a rhetorical convergence that the bills brought into material form. As the 1996
bill affirmed, "the market will drive both the Internet and the information highway" (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 34-5). In all these cases,
what is driving the Net is the promise of political efficacy, of the enhancement of democracy through citizens' access and use of new
the promise of participation is not simply propaganda. No, it is a deeper,
underlying fantasy wherein technology functions as a fetish covering over our impotence
and helping us understand ourselves as active. The working of such a fantasy is clear in discussions of
the political Impact of a new device, system, code or platform. A particular technological
innovation becomes a screen upon which all sorts of fantasies of political action are
projected.
communications technologies. But,
2NC Overview
Normalization
Protocols act as technologies of normalization within decentralized
networks like the internet. This acts to normalize liberal, capitalist values of
expansion and as a tool for totalitarian expansion.
Alexander Galloway, assistant professor of communications and media at NYU, 2004,
“Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization”, pg. 244, MIT Press
But protocol is more than simply a synonym for “the rules.” Instead, pro- tocol is like the trace of footprints
left in snow, or a mountain trail whose route becomes fixed only after years of constant wear. One is always free to pick a different
route. But protocol
makes one instantly aware of the best route—and why wouldn’t one want to follow it?
Thus, a better synonym for protocol might be “the practical,” or even “the sensible.” It is a physical
logic that delivers two things in parallel: the so- lution to a problem, plus the background rationale for why that solution has been
selected as the best. Like
liberalism, or democracy, or capitalism, protocol is a successful
technology precisely because its participants are evangelists, not servants. Like
liberalism, democracy, or capitalism, protocol creates a community of actors who
perpetuate the system of organization. And they perpetuate it even when they are in direct conflict with it.
Protocol then becomes more and more coextensive with humanity’s pro- ductive forces,
and ultimately becomes the blueprint for humanity’s inner- most desires about the world and how it ought to be lived. This
makes protocol dangerous—but in the Foucauldian sense of danger that is twofold. First it is dangerous because it
acts to make concrete our fun- damentally contingent and immaterial desires (a process called
reification), and in this sense protocol takes on authoritarian undertones. As a colleague Patrick Feng said
recently: “Creating core protocols is something akin to constitutional law,” meaning that
protocols create the core set of rules from which all other decisions descend. And like
Supreme Court justices having control over the interpretation of the American Constitution, whoever has power over
the creation of such protocols wields power over a very broad area indeed. In this sense
protocol is dangerous. But protocol is also dangerous in the way that a weapon is
dangerous. It is potentially an effective tool that can be used to roll over one’s political
op- ponents. And protocol has already proven this in the sphere of technology. What poses a real threat to Microsoft’s
monopoly? Not Macintosh (the mar- ket). Not the Justice Department (the state). Instead it is the widespread use of protocols that
struggle against Redmond’s proprietary standards with varying degrees of success. What poses a real threat to global dominance of
American culture? Not the French Ministry of Culture. Not Bollywood. In- stead it is the transitory networks and temporary
autonomous zones—each protocological spaces—that bring out vulnerabilities where before none were thought to exist.
Distributed networks with protocols are sites of control
Alexander Galloway, assistant professor of communications and media at NYU, 2004,
“Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization”, pg. 11,MIT Press
Protocol’s native landscape is the distributed network. Following Del- euze, I consider the distributed
network to be an important diagram for our current social formation. Deleuze defines the diagram as “a map, a
cartog- raphy that is coextensive with the whole social field.” 14 The distributed net- work
is such a map, for it extends deeply into the social field of the new millennium. (I explore this
point in greater detail in chapter 1.) A distributed network differs from other networks such as centralized and decentralized networks
A centralized network consists of a single central power
point (a host), from which are attached radial nodes. The central point is connected to all of the satellite
in the arrangement of its internal structure.
nodes, which are themselves connected only to the central host. A decentralized network, on the other hand, has multiple central
hosts, each with its own set of satellite nodes. A satellite node may have connectivity with one or more hosts, but not with other
nodes. Communication generally travels unidirectionally within both centralized and decentralized networks: from the central trunks
to the radial leaves. The
distributed network is an entirely different matter. Distributed networks are native to Deleuze’s control societies. Each point in a distributed network is neither a central hub nor
The network contains nothing but “intelligent endpoint systems that are self-deterministic, allowing each end-point system to communicate with any host it chooses.” 15 Like the rhizome, each node in a dis- tributed
network may establish direct communication with another node, without having to
appeal to a hierarchical intermediary. Yet in order to ini- tiate communication, the two
nodes must speak the same language.This is why protocol is important. Shared
protocols are what defines the landscape of the network—who is connected to whom. As
a satellite node—there are neither trunks nor leaves.
architect Branden Hookway writes: “[d]istributed systems require for their operation a homogenous standard of interconnectivity.” 16
Compatible protocols lead to network articulation, while incompatible protocols lead to network disarticulation. For example, two
computers running the DNS ad- dressing protocol will be able to communicate effectively with each other about network addresses.
Sharing the DNS protocol allows them to be net- worked. However, the same computers will not be able to communicate with
foreign devices running, for example, the NIS addressing protocol or the WINS protocol. 17 Without a shared protocol, there is no
network. I turn now to Michel Foucault to derive one final quality of protocol,
the special existence of protocol in
the “privileged” physical media of bodies.Pro- tocol is not merely confined to the digital world. As Deleuze
shows in the “Postscript on Control Societies,” protocological control also affects the func- tioning of
bodies within social space and the creation of these bodies into forms of “artificial life”
that are dividuated, 18 sampled, and coded. “Artificial life” is a term I use in chapter 3 to describe protocol within
the sociopolitical the- ater.Artificial life simply means the active production of vital forms by other
vital forms—what Foucault calls the “work of the self on the self.”
2NC Internet Bad
The internet intensifies communicative capitalism and forecloses
democratic politics
Dean 05 [Jodi Dean, Prof. Poli Sci @ Hobart & William Smith, 2005, “Communicative
Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics,” Cultural Politics Vol 1 Issue 1, p. 52-3]
Although mainstream US media outlets provided the Bush administration with supportive, non-critical and even encouraging
platforms for making his case for invading Iraq, critical perspectives were nonetheless well represented in the communications flow
of mediated global capitalist technoculture. Alternative media, independent media and non-US media provided thoughtful reports,
insightful commentary and critical evaluations ofthe "evidence" of "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. Amy Goodman's
syndicated radio program, "Democracy Now," regularly broadcast shows intensely opposed to the militarism and unilateralism of the
Bush administration's national security policy. The Nation magazine offered detailed and nuanced critiques of various reasons
introduced for attacking Iraq. Circulating on the Internet were lists with congressional phone and fax numbers, petitions and
As the march to war proceeded,
thousands of bloggers commented on each step, referencing other media supporting
their positions. When mainstream US news outlets failed to cover demonstrations such as the September protest of 400.000
announcements for marches, protests and direct-action training sessions.
people in London or the October march on Washington when 250,000 people surrounded the White House, myriad progressive,
alternative and critical left news outlets supplied frequent and reliable information about the action on the ground. All in all. a strong
Even when the
White House acknowledged the massive worldwide demonstrations of February 15, 2003, Bush
simply reiterated the fact that a message was out there, circulating - the protestors had
the right to express their opinions. He didn't actually respond to their message. He didn't treat
anti-war message was out there. But, the message was not received. It circulated, reduced to the medium.
the words and actions of the protestors as sending a message to him to which he was in some sense obligated to respond. Rather,
he acknowledged that there existed views different from his own. There were his views and there 2 were other views; all had the
right to exist, to be expressed - but that in no way meant, or so Bush made it seem, that these views were involved with each other.
So, despite the terabytes of commentary and information, there wasn't exactly a debate
over the war. On the contrary, in the days and weeks prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the
anti-war messages morphed into so much circulating content, just like all the other cultural effluvia
wafting through cyberia. We might express this disconnect between engaged criticism and national strategy in terms of
a distinction between politics as the circulation of content and politics as official policy. On the one hand there is media chatter of
various kinds - from television talking heads, radio shock jocks, and the gamut of print media to websites with RSS (Real Simple
Syndication) feeds, blogs, e-mail lists and the proliferating versions of instant text messaging. In this dimension, politicians,
governments and activists struggle for visibility, currency and, in the now quaint term from the dot.com years, mindshare. On the
other hand are institutional politics, the day-to-day activities of bureaucracies, lawmakers, judges and the apparatuses of the police
and national security states. These components of the political system seem to run independently of the politics that circulates as
content. At first glance, this distinction between politics as the circulation of content and politics as the activity of officials makes no
governance by the people
has generally been thought in terms of communicative freedoms of speech, assembly and the
press, norms of publicity that emphasize transparency and accountability, and the
deliberative practices of the public sphere. Ideally, the communicative interactions of the public sphere, what
I've been referring to as the circulation of content and media chatter, are supposed to impact
official politics. In the United States today, however, they don't, or, less bluntly put. there is a significant disconnect
between politics circulating as content and official politics. Today, the circulation of content in the dense,
intensive networks of global communications relieves top level actors (corporate, institutional and
governmental) from the obligation to respond. Rather than responding to messages sent by activists and critics,
they counter with their own contributions to the circulating flow of communications, hoping
sense. After all, the very premise of liberal democracy is the sovereignty of the people. And,
that sufficient volume (whether in terms of number of contributions or the spectacular nature of a contribution) will give their
contributions dominance or stickiness. Instead
of engaged debates, instead of contestations employing common terms,
points of reference or demarcated frontiers, we confront a multiplication of resistances and assertions
so extensive that it hinders the formation of strong counterhegemonies. The
proliferation, distribution, acceleration and intensification of communicative access and
opportunity, far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in
precisely the opposite - the post-political formation of communicative capitalism.
Communicative capitalism forecloses democratic politics and exacerbates
structural violence
Dean 05 [Jodi Dean, Prof. Poli Sci @ Hobart & William Smith, 2005, “Communicative
Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics,” Cultural Politics Vol 1 Issue 1, p. 52-3]
Communicative capitalism designates that form of late capitalism in which values
heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications
technologies (cf. Dean 2002a; 2002b). Ideals of access, inclusion, discussion and participation
come to be realized in and through expansions, intensifications and interconnections of
global telecommunications. But instead of leading to more equitable distributions of
wealth and influence, instead of enabling the emergence of a richer variety in modes of
living and practices of freedom, the deluge of screens and spectacles undermines
political opportunity and efficacy for most of the world's peoples. Research on the impact of
economic globalization makes clear how the speed, simultaneity and interconnectivity of electronic
communications produce massive concentrations of wealth (Sassen 1996). Not only does the
possibility of superprofits in the finance and services complex lead to hypermobility of capital and the devalorization of
manufacturing but financial
markets themselves acquire the capacity to discipline national
governments. In the US, moreover, the proliferation of media has been accompanied by a shift in political participation.
Rather than actively organized in parties and unions, politics has become a domain of financially mediated
and professionalized practices centered on advertising, public relations and the means of mass
communication. Indeed, with the commodification of communication, more and more domains of
life seem to have been reformatted in terms of market and spectacle. Bluntly put, the standards of a
finance- and consumption-driven entertainment culture set the very terms of democratic governance today. Changing the system organizing against and challenging communicative capitalism - seems to require strengthening the system; how else can one
organize and get the message across? Doesn't it require raising the money, buying the television time, registering the domain
name, building the website and making the links? My account of communicative capitalism is affiliated with Georglo Agamben's
discussion of the alienation of language in the society of the spectacle and with Slavoj Zizek's emphasis on post-politics. And, even
as it shares the description of communication as capitalist production with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, it differs from their
assessment of the possibilities for political change. More specifically, Agamben notes that "in the old regime ... the estrangement of
the communicative essence of human beings was substantiated as a presupposition that had the function of a common ground
(nation, language, religion, etc.)" (Agamben 2000:115). Under current conditions, however, "it is precisely this same
communicativity, this same generic essence (language), that is constituted as an autonomous sphere to the extent to which it
becomes the essential factor of the production cycle. What hinders communication, therefore, is communicability itself: human
the nation state was
thought in terms of linguistic and religious groups. We can extend his point by recognizing that the ideal of
beings are being separated by what unites them." Agamben is pointing out how the commonality of
constitutional states, in theories such as Jurgen Habermas's, say, has also been conceptualized in terms of the essential
communicativity of human beings: those who can discuss, who can come to an agreement with one another at least in principle, can
be in political relation to one another. As Agamben makes clear, however,
communication has detached itself
from political ideals of belonging and connection to function today as a primarily economic form.
Differently put. communicative exchanges, rather than being fundamental to democratic
politics, are the basic elements of capitalist production. Zlzek approaches this same problem of the
contemporary foreclosure of the political via the concept of "post-politics." Zizek explains that post-politics "emphasizes the need to
leave old ideological divisions behind and confront new issues, armed with the necessary expert knowledge and free deliberation
that takes people's concrete needs and demands into account" (1999: 198). Post-politics thus begins from the premise of consensus
and cooperation. Real antagonism or dissent is foreclosed. Matters
previously thought to require debate and
struggle are now addressed as personal issues or technical concerns. We might think of the ways
that the expert discourses of psychology and sociology provide explanations for anger and resentment, in effect treating them as
syndromes to be managed rather than as issues to be politicized. Or we might think of the probabilities, measures and assessments
tolerance and attunement to
difference and emphasis on hearing another's pain prevents politicization. Matters aren't
characteristic of contemporary risk management. The problem is that all this
represented-they don't stand for something beyond themselves. They are
simply treated in all their particularity,
as specific issues to be addressed therapeutically, juridically, spectacularly or
disciplinarily rather than being treated as elements of larger signifying chains or political
formations. Indeed, this is how third-way societies support global capital: they prevent
politicization. They focus on administration, again, foreclosing the very possibility that
things might be otherwise.
2NC Alt
Refusal/Neodemocracy Alt
Our refusal of transparency is neodemocratic and challenges
communicative capitalism
Dean 03 [Jodi Dean, Prof. Poli Sci @ Hobart & William Smith, 2003, “Why the Net is Not a
Public Sphere,” Constellations Volume 10, Number 1, p. 109-10]
Neodemocratic politics is not rooted in figuring out the best sorts of procedures and
decision rules for political deliberation. Instead, it acknowledges in advance the endless, morphing variety of
political tools and tactics. What is crucial to these tactics, however, is whether they open up opportunities for contestation. Not all
tactics are equal; those that are part of a neodemocratic arsenal are those that challenge
rather than reinforce communicative capitalism. The norms articulated together by the
notion of the public were important to utopian imaginings of democracy. Unfortunately, they have been coopted
by a communicative capitalism that has turned them into their opposite. For this reason,
it may well be necessary to abandon them – if only to realize them. Hence, instead of
prioritizing inclusivity, equality, transparency, and rationality, neodemocratic politics
emphasizes duration, hegemony, decisiveness, and credibility. Any transformative
politics today will have to grapple with the speed of global telecommunications and the
concomitant problems of data glut and information dumping. Instead of giving into the drive for spectacle and immediacy that
plagues an audience-oriented news cycle, the issue networks of neodemocracy work to maintain links among those specifically
engaged with a matter of concern. Indeed, linking itself is tactical, a tool of alliance and inclusion, as well as conflict and exclusion.
Although the outcomes of these practices may be deeply embedded within already existing power relations, linking does not
presuppose the technocratic rule of the experts. Rather, it builds from the extensions of access, information, and know-how enabled
by networked communications and uses them to value various strengths, perspectives, and knowledges developed by people with
varying degrees of interest and expertise. Put somewhat differently, the valuation of duration as opposed to inclusion prioritizes the
interest and engagement brought to bear on an issue rather than inclusion for its own sake. Not everyone knows. Not every opinion
matters. What does matter is commitment and engagement by people and organizations networked around contested issues. If
contestation and antagonism are at the core of democratic politics, then not every view or way of living is equal. What I mean is that
the very notion of a fundamental antagonism involves a political claim on behalf of some modes of living and against others. These
other views, then, are in no way equal – calling them that makes no sense; it basically misses the point of contestation, namely,
winning. Usually, in a contested matter, one does not want the other view to coexist happily somewhere, one wants to defeat it.
(Examples from US politics might be guns or prayer in public schools. Each side wants to prevent the other side from practicing
what it believes or values.) Accordingly, neodemocratic politics are struggles for hegemony.33 They are partisan, fought for the sake
of people’s most fundamental beliefs, identities, and practices. Admittedly, at one level my emphasis on hegemony may seem
simply to describe politics in technoculture – yes, that’s what’s going on, a struggle for hegemony. I emphasize it, however, out of a
conviction that the
democratic left has so emphasized plurality, inclusivity, and equality that it
has lost the partisan will to name and fight against an enemy. The replacing of
transparency by decisiveness follows from the critique of publicity as ideology. The
politics of the public sphere has been based on the idea that power is always hidden and
secret. But clearly this is not the case today. We know full well that corporations are destroying the environment, employing
slave labor, holding populations hostage to their threats to move their operations to locales with cheaper labor. All sorts of
horrible political processes are perfectly transparent today. The problem is that people
don’t seem to mind, that they are so enthralled by transparency that they have lost the will to fight
(Look! The chemical corporation really is trying. . . Look! The government explained where the money went. . .). With this in mind,
there is always more information
available and that this availability is ultimately depoliticizing, neodemocratic politics prioritizes
neodemocracy emphasizes the importance of affecting outcomes. Fully aware that
decisiveness. Of course, the outcomes of decisions cannot be predicted in advance. Of course, they can be rearticulated in all sorts
of perverse and unexpected ways. But the
only way out of communicative capitalism’s endless
reflexive circuits of discussion is through decisive action. For many, the ever increasing protests
against the World Bank and the G8 have been remarkable precisely as these instances of
decisive action that momentarily disrupt the flow of things and hint at the possibility of
alternatives to communicative capitalism.
Immeasurability Alt
Existence has become a measureable science. Thus, the alternative is to
become immeasurable, devoid of any representable identity.
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Galloway is an assistant professor of
communications and media at NYU, Thacker is a professor of philosophy at the New School,
2007, “The Exploit: A Theory of Networks”, pg. 135, http://dss-edit.com/plu/GallowayThacker_The_Exploit_2007.pdf
A
simple laser pointer can blind a surveillance camera when the beam is aimed directly at
the camera’s lens. With this type of cloaking, one is not hiding, simply nonexistent to that node. The subject has
full pres- ence but is simply not there on the screen. It is an exploit. Elsewhere, one might go
online but trick the server into recording a routine event. That’s nonexistence. One’s data is
there, but it keeps moving, of its own accord, in its own temporary autonomous ecology.
This is “disingenuous” data, or data in camouflage as not - yet - data. Tactics of abandonment are
positive technologies; they are tactics of fullness. There is still struggle in abandonment,
but it is not the struggle of con frontation, or the bureaucratic logic of war. It is a mode of non - existence: the full
assertion of the abandonment of representation. Absence, lack, invisibility, and nonbeing
have nothing to do with nonexistence. Nonexistence is nonexistence not because it is an absence,
or because it is not visible, but precisely because it is full. Or rather, because it permeates. That which
permeates is not arbitrary, and not totalizing, but tactical. Of course, nonexistence has been the concern of antiphilosophy
philosophers for some time. Nonexistence is also a mode of escape, an “otherwise than being.” Levinas
The question of nonexistence is this: how does one develop tech- niques and technologies to make oneself unaccounted for?
remarks that “escape is the need to get out of oneself.” 34 One must always choose either being or nonbeing (or worse,
becoming...). The choice tends to moralize pres- ence, that one must be accounted for, that one must, more impor- tantly, account
for oneself, that accounting is tantamount to self - identification, to being a subject, to individuation. “It
is this category of
getting out, assimilable neither to renovation nor to creation, that we must grasp....It is
an inimitable theme that invites us to get out of being.” 35 And again Levinas: “The experience that
reveals to us the presence of being as such, the pure existence of being, is an expe- rience of its powerlessness, the source of all
need.” 36 Future
avant - garde practices will be those of nonexistence. But still you ask: how is it
existence becomes a measurable science of control, then
nonexistence must become a tactic for any thing wishing to avoid control. “A being
radically devoid of any representable identity,” Agamben wrote, “would be absolutely irrelevant
to the State.” 37 Thus we should become devoid of any repre- sentable identity. Anything
measurable might be fatal. These strategies could consist of nonexistent action (nondoing);
unmeasurable or not - yet - measurable human traits; or the promotion of measurable
data of negligible importance. Allowing to be measured now and again for false behaviors, thereby attracting
possible not to exist? When
incongruent and ineffective control responses, can’t hurt. A driven exodus or a pointless desertion are equally virtuous in the quest
for nonexistence. The bland, the negligible, the featureless are its only evident traits. The nonexistent is that which cannot be cast
into any available data types. The nonexistent is that which cannot be parsed by any available algorithms.
nihilism; it is the purest form of love.
This is not
Resistance-to-Life Alt
The alternative is to engage in the counterprotocol of resistance-to-life.
When power takes life as an object, life itself becomes a resistance to
homogenization and subjectification.
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Galloway is an assistant professor of
communications and media at NYU, Thacker is a professor of philosophy at the New School,
“Protocol, Control, and Networks”, 2004, Grey Room, 17 (10),
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381042464572
Contemplating this in the context of network-network conflict, we can ask a fur- ther question: How do networks transform the
concept of political resistance? As we’ve stated, the distributed character of networks in no way implies the absence of control or the
absence of political dynamics. The
protocological nature of networks is as much about the
maintenance of the status quo as it is about the disturbance of the network. We can begin to
address this question by reconsidering resistance within the context of networked technology. If networks are not just
technical systems but are also real-time, dynamic, experiential “living networks,” then it
would make sense to consider resistance as also living, as life-resistance. This is what
Hardt and Negri call “being-against”; that is, the vast potential of human life to counter
forces of exploitation. 22 There are (at least) two meanings of the phrase life- resistance: (1) life is what resists
power; and (2) to the extent that it is co-opted by power, “life itself” must be resisted by
living systems. Deleuze states, “Life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its
object.” 23 On the one hand, life is a sort of counterpower, a return flow of forces aimed
backward toward the source of exploitation, selectively resisting forms of
homogenization, canalization, and subjectification. (But then this is really not a resistance at all but instead
an intensification, a lubrication of life.) When power becomes bio-power, resistance becomes power of
life, a vital- power that cannot be confined within species, places, or the paths of this or
that diagram. . . . Is not life this capacity to resist force? . . . [T]here is no telling what man might achieve “as a living being,” as
the set of “forces that resist.” 24 On the other hand, life is also that which is resisted (resistance-to-life), that against
which resistance is propelled. Today “life itself” is boxed in by compet- ing biological and computational
definitions. In the biological definition the icon of DNA is thought to explain everything from Alzheimer’s to ADD. In the computational definition information surveillance and the extensive databasing of the social
promote a notion of social activity that can be tracked through records of transactions,
registrations, and communications. Resistance-to-life is thus a challenge posed to any
situation in which a normative definition of “life itself” dovetails with an instrumental use
of that definition. Might this consideration of life-resistance make possible a
“counterprotocol”? If so, how might counterprotocological practices keep from falling into the famil- iar aporias of opposition
and recuperation? We can close with a few suggestions. First, oppositional practices will have to focus not
on a static map of one-to- one relationships but on a dynamic diagram of many-to-many
relationships. This means that the counterprotocols of current networks will be pliant and
vigorous where existing protocols are flexible and robust. 25 Counterprotocological
practice will not avoid downtime. It will restart often. A second point about tactics. In reality,
counterprotocological practice is not “counter” anything. Thus the concept of resistance in
politics should be superceded by the concept of hypertrophy. The goal is not to destroy
technology in some neo-Luddite delusion but to push technology into a hypertrophic state, further than
it is meant to go. We must scale up, not unplug. Third, because networks are (technically)
predicated on creating possible com- munications between nodes, oppositional
practices will have to focus less on the characteristics of the nodes and more on the
quality of edges-without-nodes. In this sense the node-edge distinction will break down. In communications media,
conveyances are key. Nodes may be composed of clustering edges, while edges may be extended nodes. Using various protocols
as their operational standards, networks tend to com- bine large masses of different elements under a single umbrella.
Counterprotocol practices can capitalize on the homogeneity found in networks to
resonate far and wide with little effort. Protocological control works through inherent tensions, and, as such, counterprotocol practices can be understood as particular types of
implementations and intensifications of protocological control. Protocological control fosters the
creation and regulation of life itself. In other words, the set of procedures for monitoring, regulating, and modulating networks as
living networks is geared, at the most fundamental level, toward the produc- tion of life, in its biological, social, and political
capacities. So the
target is not simply protocol; rather, to be more precise, the target of resistance is
the way in which protocol inflects and sculpts life itself.
Reanalyze Alt
The alternative is to understand networks not as large totalities but as bits
and atoms. The focus on the micro instead of the macro helps reveal the
topology of the network.
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Galloway is an assistant professor of
communications and media at NYU, Thacker is a professor of philosophy at the New School,
2007, “The Exploit: A Theory of Networks”, pg. 155, http://dss-edit.com/plu/GallowayThacker_The_Exploit_2007.pdf
For this reason, we
propose something that is, at first, counterintuitive: to bring our understanding of
networks to the level of bits and atoms, to the level of aggregate forms of organization
that are material and unhuman, to a level that shows us the unhuman in the human. What
exactly would such an unhuman view of networks entail? 14 We close—or rather, we hope, open—with a thought
concerning networks as “elemental” forms. By describing networks as elemental, we do not mean that our
understanding of networks can wholly be reduced to physics, or a totally quantitative analysis of bits and atoms. Nevertheless we
the bits and atoms something interesting, a level of interaction that is both “macro”
and “micro” at once. The level of bits and atoms suggests to us not modern physics or postmodern
computing but something totally ancient—an ancient, even pre - Socratic understanding of networks. The pre Socratic ques- tion is a question about the fabric of the world. Of what is it made? What is it that stitches the
world together, that links part to part in a larger whole? The answers given, from Thales to Anaxagoras,
find in
involve the elemental. Water, fire, air, “mind,” or some more abstract sub- stance...Heraclitus, for instance, gives us a world in which
everything flows—empires rise and fall, a person remains a person throughout youth and old age, and one can never step into the
same river twice. For Heraclitus, it is fire that constitutes the world. But he does not mean “fire” as a denotated thing, for the flame or
the sun itself point to another “fire,” that of dynamic morphology, a propensity of ener- gentic flux. This kind of fire is more elemental
than natural. The same can be said for Parmenides, who is now more commonly regarded as the complement, rather than the
opposite, of Heraclitus. The em- phasis on the “One”—the sphere without circumference—leads Par- menides to the fullness of
space, a plenum that emphasizes the inter- stitial aspects of the world. If everything flows (the statement of Heraclitus), then all is
A movement between a world that is always changing and a
world that is immobile, between a world that is always becoming and a world that is full—
the movement and the secret identity between these positions seem to describe to us
something fundamental about networks. Networks operate through ceaseless
connections and dis- connections, but at the same time, they continually posit a
topology. They are forever incomplete but always take on a shape. The shape also always
has a scale. In the case of certain network topologies such as the decentralized network, the scale is
fractal in nature, meaning that it is locally similar at all resolutions, both macro- scopic
and microscopic. Networks are a matter of scaling, but a scal- ing for which both the “nothing” of the network and the
“universe” of the network are impossible to depict. One is never simply inside or outside a network; one is
never simply “at the level of” a network. But something is amiss, for with fields such as network science and new
“One” (the proposition of Parmenides).
forms of data visualization, attempts are made to image and man- age networks in an exhaustive sense. The impossibility of
Accidents, failures, and exploits, both
imaginative and material, are part and parcel of any network. These are strange and often
bewildering kinds of acci- dents and failures—the accidents that are prescribed by the
design, the failures that indicate perfect operation. Networks are elemental, in the sense
that their dynamics operate at levels “above” and “below” that of the human subject. The
depiction is ignored, and the network is imagined nonetheless.
elemen- tal is this ambient aspect of networks, this environmental aspect— all the things that we as individuated human subjects or
groups do not directly control or manipulate. The elemental is not “the natu- ral,” however (a concept that we do not understand).
The elemental
concerns the variables and variability of scaling, from the micro level to the
macro, the ways in which a network phenomenon can sud- denly contract, with the most local action becoming a global pattern,
and vice versa. The
elemental requires us to elaborate an entire clima- tology of thought. The
unhuman aspects of networks challenge us to think in an elemental fashion. The
elemental is, in this sense, the most basic and the most com- plex expression of a network. As
we’ve suggested in this book, networks involve a shift in scale, one in which the central concern is no longer the
action of individu- ated agents or nodes in the network. Instead what matters more and more is the very
distribution and dispersal of action throughout the net- work, a dispersal that would ask
us to define networks less in terms of the nodes and more in terms of the edges—or
even in terms other than the entire, overly spatialized dichotomy of nodes and edges
altogether. In a sense, therefore, our understanding of networks is all - too - human...
2NC AT Perm
Asymmetry Key
A new asymmetrical revolutionary threat is needed to break the lock
between the distributed network of the multitude and that of the empire
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Galloway is an assistant professor of
communications and media at NYU, Thacker is a professor of philosophy at the New School,
2007,“The Exploit: A Theory of Networks”, pg. 152, http://dss-edit.com/plu/GallowayThacker_The_Exploit_2007.pdf
The network form is not tied to
any necessary political position, either progressive or reactionary. 11 In fact, this is the primary reason
why there can exist network - to - network struggle. Both the forces of the multitude and
the counterforces of empire organize themselves around the topology of the distributed
network; there is no bonus given to either side simply for historically adopting the distributed form. 12 So at the finish of Empire
and Multitude, we end up in a symmetrical relationship of struggle. Empire is a distrib- uted network, and so is
the multitude. In fact, the very notion that networks might be in a relationship of political opposition at all means that networks
must be politically ambiguous. But what we suggest is missing from both books is any vision of a
new future of asymmetry. Slow, deliberate reform comes about through the head - to - head struggle of like forces. But
revolutionary change comes about through the insinuation of an asymmetrical threat. 13
Hardt and Negri’s argument is never that distributed networks are inherently resistive.
So the point is that if today one agrees that a new plateau of global sym- metry of struggle exists in the world—networks fighting
networks, empire struggling against the multitude—then what will be the shape of the new revolutionary threat? What will be the
undoing of the dis-tributed network form, just as it was the undoing of a previous one? From where will appear the anti - Web? And
what will it look like? Resistance
is asymmetry—and this is where we part ways with Hardt and Negri—formal sameness
may bring about reform, but formal in- commensurability breeds revolution. Because both empire and the
multitude employ the distributed network form, it is not sufficient to remain politically ambiguous on the question of distributed
networks. A decision has to be made: we’re
tired of rhizomes. One must not only analyze how
distributed networks afford certain advantages to certain movements; one must critique
the logics of distributed networks themselves. Many political thinkers today seem to think that “networked
power” means simply the aggre- gation of powerful concerns into a networked shape, that networked power is nothing more than a
network of powerful individuals. Our claim is entirely the opposite, that the
materiality of networks—and above
all the “open” or “free” networks—exhibits power relations re- gardless of powerful
individuals.
State DA
State fails – surveillance has become individualized. The micro fascism of
everyday surveillance occurs on a daily basis.
Beverly Geesin, 3-30-2012, "Resistance to Surveillance in Everyday Life," page 105-7,
Thesis submission in Sociology at University of York, http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2697/
One difficulty in confronting and challenging these surveillance technologies and the
accompanying military rhetoric is the extent to which they are already so deeply embedded within
society. As they become normalised they become enmeshed within the everyday and, as such,
become integrated within the broader ideology. On the one hand, military ideologies and rhetoric become
commonplace in the common discourse. On the other hand, these technologies lose much of their attachment to
connotations of war and combat as they become commonplace and take on the functions which, at least superficially, seem
benign. As Galloway and Thacker state, “the everydayness - this banality of the digital - is precisely
what produces the effect of ubiquity, and of universality” (2007: 10). This banality of the
surveillance technologies hinders the development of a counter-discourse to challenge
the surveillance practices. In order to highlight and challenge this notion of banality there first needs to be an
exploration of how these technologies become ubiquitous and the implications of this ubiquity both on a broad societal level but
As these technologies
become entwined with the everyday, the everydayness of these practices have
implications upon the rhythms of the environment and of the individual The ubiquity of
surveillance technologies is the result of two concurrent technological developments
outlined in William J. Mitchell’s Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (2003). First, wireless networks have
enabled the move away from fixed computers/computing devices and the possibility for
various devices to communicate amongst each other exchanging information without
necessarily relying upon explicit human involvement. However, individuals become
increasingly reliant upon networks and the ability to connect with the emerging
imperative to be ‘always on’. Networks become “faster, more pervasive and more
essential” and “the more we depend upon networks, the more tightly and dynamically
interwoven our destinies become” (Mitchell, 2003:9). What Thrift and French refer to as ‘local
intelligence’ emerges where spaces become increasingly “computationally active
environments” able to communicate with each other (2002: 315). Second, technologies have
become dramatically smaller and this miniturisation has three significant implications.
First, devices, along with the development of wireless networks, become increasingly portable. This allows for
“squeezing more functions into smaller packages” and “freeing [devices] from fixed locations” (Mitchell, 2003: 69). Second, as
they shrink they become more discreet and less noticeable. Third, along with this portability and
decreased size technologies grow closer to the individual. Mitchell describes these devices as “electronic
parasites” because as they shrink this allows them to be carried at all times as cyborg-esque
appendages (like mobile phones), to be built into clothing as with ‘smart threads’, or, at the most
extreme, to be literally inserted under the skin as with RFID (2003). Devices that are carried,
embedded into clothing, or inserted into the body empower the body with technical
capabilities and enable individuals to communicate automatically, electronically and
wirelessly with the environment. As a result of all of this, notions of individuals disappearing into their homes
chained to the desktop computer interacting in cyberspace fade as, instead, the computer is unchained and has
become easily portable. There is the emergence of ‘electronic nomadicity’ (Mitchell, 2003)
where these devices enable individuals to remain connected and involved in the
electronic networks regardless of location. Spaces will consist of the physical environment as
well as “sophisticated, well-integrated wireless infrastructure, combined with other networks, and deployed on
also, importantly, a look at how these technologies become tied up amongst the individual.
a global scale” (2003: 57). Instead of fixed notions of uses of space there is a need to consider the implications of the new
‘walking architecture’ which Mitchell describes as the combination of flexible, mobile clothing and fixed infrastructure (2003: 82). This
development outlined by Mitchell above leads to a dramatic shift in understanding the individual’s relationship to physical space and,
following on, impacts upon a conception of everyday rhythms. Everyday
life takes place in a complicated
merging of physical and virtual space, not an oscillation between two distinct realms for
distinct and separate activities but a merging of the two. While on the one hand, this allows for
the development of increasingly sophisticated and spatially aware surveillance practices
this also complicates the function of observation as there still remains a struggle to
harness into a coherent picture the multi-tasking of everyday life. Surveillance
technologies often capture one perspective and putting the pieces together, while increasingly
accurate is still often clumsy. However, similarly, an observation of everyday rhythms which highlights the restrictive impact of
surveillance devices is also complicated.
Network DA
Networks are a bad way to resist because of the contradictory tension
between total singular knowledge and decentralized anonymous
distribution
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Galloway is an assistant professor of
communications and media at NYU, Thacker is a professor of philosophy at the New School,
2007, “The Exploit: A Theory of Networks”, pg. 154, http://dss-edit.com/plu/GallowayThacker_The_Exploit_2007.pdf
Difficult, even frustrating, questions appear at this point. If no single human entity controls the network in any total way, then can we
If humans are only a part of a network,
then how can we assume that the ultimate aim of the network is a set of human centered goals? Consider the examples of computer viruses or Internet worms, of emerging infectious diseases, of
assume that a network is not controlled by humans in any total way?
marketing strategies employing viral marketing or adware, of the unforeseen interpersonal connections in any social network, of the
connections between patterns of immigra- tion and labor in the United States, of the
scaling up of surveillance in
U.S. Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, of the geopolitics of the Kyoto Treaty and climate change. At the
macro and micro lev- els, it is not difficult to note at least some element in every network that frustrates total
control—or even total knowledge. In fact, it is the very idea of “the total” that is both promised and
yet continually deferred in the “unhumanity” of networks, netwars, and even the
multitude. The point here is not that networks are inherently revolutionary but that networks are constituted by
this tension between unitary aggre gation and anonymous distribution, between the
intentionality and agency of individuals and groups on the one hand, and the uncanny,
unhuman intentionality of the network as an “abstract” whole.
Baudrillard Visibility K
1NC Shell
The visibility of the affirmative recreates virulence through the hypersignification of the 1ac. The medium has become the message. The 1ac’s
politics of transparency internalizes control through the panendoptikon,
where individuals become transparent to themselves. Reality only exists
through hyper-expression and over-representation; the modern “subject”
no longer exists, rather an empty screen projecting a fake sociality.
Baudrillard 2 ~ “The violence of the image”, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/the-violence-of-the-image/
This is the typical violence of information, of media, of images, of the spectacular.
Connected to a total visibility , a total elimination of secrecy. Be it of a psychological or mental, or of a neurological,
biolo-gical or genetic order - soon we shall discover the gene of revolt, the center of violence in the brain, perhaps even the gene of resistance against genetic manipulation -
we should
not speak of violence anymore, but rather of virulence. Inasmuch that it does not work frontally, mechanically, but by
biological brainwashing, brainstorming, brainlifting, with nothing left but recycled, whitewashed lobotomized people as in Clockwork Orange. At this point
contiguity, by contamination, along chain reactions, breaking our secret immunities. And operating not just by a negative effect like the classical violence, but on the contrary by
an excess of the positive, just as a cancerous cell proliferates by metastasis, by restless reproduction and an excess of vitality.
That is the point in the controversy about the violence on the screens and the impact of
images on people's mind. The fact is that the medium itself has a neutralizing power ,
counterbalancing the direct effect of the violence on the imagination. I would say : the violence of the third
type annihilates the violence of the first and second type - but at the price of a more virulent intrusion in the deep cells of our mental world. The same as for anti-biotics : they
eradicate the agents of disease by reducing the general level of vitality.
When the medium becomes the message (MACLUHAN), then violence as a medium becomes
its own message , a messenger of itself. So the violence of the message cannot be
compared with the violence of the medium as such, with the violence-emanating from the
confusion between medium and message . It is the same with viruses the virus also is information, but of a very special kind - it is
medium, and message, agent and action at the same time. That the very origine of its "virulence", of its uncontrollable
proliferation. In fact, in all actual biological, social or mental processes, virulence has substituated
violence . The traditional violence of alienation , power and oppression has been
superated by something more violent than violence itself : the virality , the virulence. And while it was an
there is no subject , no personal agent of virulence (of contamination, of chain
reaction), and then no possibility to confront it efficiently. The classical violence was still
haunted by the specter of the Evil, it was still visible. Virulence only transappears, it is of the order of
historical or individual subject of violence,
transparency
and its logic is that of the transparency of the Evil.
The image (and more generally the s re of information) is violent because what happens there is the murder
of the Real , the vanishing point of Reality. Everything must be seen, must be visible , and the image is the
site par excellence of this visibility . But at the same time it is the site of its disappearance. And that something
in it has disappeared, has returned to nowhere, makes the very fascination of the image.
Particularly in the case of all professional of press-images which testify of the real
events . In making reality , even the most violent, emerge to the visible , it makes the real substance
disappear. I t is like the Myth of Eurydice : when Orpheus turns around to look at her, she vanishes and returns to hell. That is why, the more
exponential the marketing of images is growing the more fantastically grows the
indifference towards the real world . Finally, the real world becomes a useless function , a
collection of phantom shapes and ghost events . We are not far from the silhouettes on the walls of the cave of Plato.
A wonderful model of this forced visibility is Big Brother and all similar programs, reality shows, docusoaps etc.
Just there; where everything is given to be seen there is nothing left to be seen . It is the
mirror of platitude, of banality, of the zero degree of everyday life. There is the place of a fake
sociality , a virtual sociality where the Other is desperately out of reach - this very fact illuminating perhaps the fundamental truth
that the human being is not a social being. Move over in all these scenarii the televisual public is mobilized as spectator and judged as
become itself Big Brother. The power of control and transvisuality has shifted to the silent
majorities themselves.
We are far beyond the panoptikon, where there was still a source of power and visibility it was so
to say a panexoptikon - things were made visible to an external eye, whereas here they are made
transparent to themselves - a panendoptikon - thus erasing the traces of control and
making the operator himself transparent. The power of control is internalized , and people
no more Lt victims of the image :
are
they transform themselves into images - they only exist as screens, ;or in a
superficial dimension.
All that is visualized there, in the operation Big Brother, is pure virtual reality, a synthetic image of the banality, producted : as in a
computer. The equivalent of a ready-made - a given transcrition of everyday life - which is itself already
recycled by all current patterns.
people dont want that, what they secretly want to
see is the spectacle of the banality ,which is from now our real pornography, own true obscenity - that of the nullity,of
insignificance and platitude (i.e. the extreme reverse of the "There of the Cruelty"). But maybe in that scene lies a certain form of cruelty, at least of a
Is there any sexual voyeurism ? Not at all. Almost no sexual scenery. But
virtual one. At the time when media and television are more and more unable to give an image of the events of the world, then they discover the everyday life, the existential
people are
fascinated, terrified and fascinated by this indifference of the Nothing-to-see, of the
Nothing-to-say, by the indifference of their own life, as of the zero degree of living. The banality
banality as the most criminal event, as the most violent (in)actua-lity, as the very place of the Perfect Crime. And that it is, really. And
and the consumption of banality have now become an olympic discipline of our time - the last form of the experiences of the limits.
In fact, this deals with the naive impulsion to be nothing, and to comfort oneself in this nothingness - sanctioned by the right to be nothing and to be considered and respected
as such. Something like a struggle for Nothing and for Virtual death - the perfect opposite to the basic anthropological postulat of the struggle for life. At least it seems that we
are all about to change our basic humanistic goals.
There are two ways of disappearing, of being nothing, (in the Integral Reality, everything must logically want to disappear automatic abreaction to the overdose of reality). Either to be hidden,and to insist on the right not-to-be-seen (the
actual defense of private life).Or one shifts to a delirious exhibitionism of his own platitude and insignificance - ultimate protection against the servitude of being,and of being
Hence the absolute obligation to be seen,to make oneself visible at any price. Everyone deals on both
levels at the same time. Then we are in the double bind - no t to be seen,and to be
himself.
continously visible . No ethics,no legislation can solve this dilemma,and the whole
current polemic about the right to information,all this polemic is useless. Maximal
information, maximal visibility are now part of the human rights (and of human duties all the same) and the destiny of the
image is trapped between the unconditional right to see and that, unconditional as well,
not to be seen.
people are deciferable at every moment . Overexposed to the light of information , and
addicted to their own image. Driven to express themselves at any time - self-expression as the ultimate form of confession, as Faucauld
said. To become an image, one has to give a visual object of his whole everyday life, of his possibilities, of his feelings and desires. He-has to keep no
secrets and to interact permanently. Just here is the deepest violence, a violence done to the deepest
core, to the hard core of the individual. And at the same-time to the language , because it also loses its
This means that
symbolic originality - being nothing more than the operator of visibility .. It loses its
ironic dimersion, its conceptual distance, its autonomous dimension - where language is more important
than what it signifies. The image too is more important than what it sneaks of . That we forget usually, again and again
and that is a source of the violence done to the image.
Today everything takes the look of the image - then all pretend that the real has
disappeared under the pression and the profusion of images.. What is totally neglected is that the image
also disappears under the blow and the impact of reality . The image is usually spoiled of
its own existence as image, deyoted to a shameful complicity with the real . The violence exercised by
the image is largely balanced by the violence done to the image - its exploitation as a pure vector of documen-tation, of
testimony, of message (including the message of misery and violence), its allegeance to morale, to pedagogy, to politics, to
publicity . Then the magic of the image, both as fatal and as vital illusion, is fading away.
The Byzantine Iconoclasts wanted to destroy images in order to abolish meaning and the representation of God. Today we are still iconoclasts, but in an opposite way :
we
kill the images by an overdose of meaning .
Borgès'fable on " The People of the Mirror :he gives the hypothesis that
behind each figure of resemblance and
representation there is a vanquished enemy , a defeated singularity, a dead object. And the Iconoclasts clearly understood how
icons were the best way of letting God disappear. (but perhaps God himself had chosen to disappear behind the images ? Nobody knows). Anyway,today is no more the matter
of God :
We disappear behind our images . No chance anymore that our images are stolen from us, that we must give up our secrets - because
we no longer have any. That is at the same time the sign of our ultimate morality and of our total obscenity.
There is a deep misunderstanding of the process of meaning. Most images
and photographs today
reflect the misery and the violence of human condition . But all this affects us less and
less, just because it is over signified . In order for the meaning, for the message to affect
us, the image has to exist on its own , to impose its original language . In order for the real to be transferred
to our imagination, or our imagination transferred to the real, it must be a counter-transference upon
the image, and this countertransference has to be resoluted, worked through (in terms of psychoanalysis). Today we see misery and
violence becoming a leitmotiv of publicity just by the way of images. Toscani for example is reintegrating sex
and Aids, war and death into fashion. And why not ? Jubilating ad-images are no less obscene than the pessimistic ones) But at one condition to
show the violence of publicity itself, the violence of fashion, the violence of the medium.
What actually publishers are not able even to try to do. However, fashion and high society are themselves a kind of
spectacle of death . The world's misery is quite so visible , quite so transparent in the line and the face of any topmodel as on the skeletal body of an african boy. The same cruelty is to be perceived everywhere, if one only knows how to look at it.
The 1AC is nothing more than the production and assimilation of
otherness. This creates a violent form of identification whereby the other
becomes an object of manipulation, another commodity in the economy of
symbolic exchange.
Baudrillard 02
/Jean, Screened Out, 51 – 56/
With modernity, we enter the age of the production of the Other. The aim is no longer to
kill the Other, devour it, seduce it, vie with it, love it or hate it, but, in the first instance,
to produce it . The Other is no longer an object of passion, but an object of production.
Perhaps, in its radical otherness or its irreducible singularity, the Other has become dangerous or
unbearable, and its seductive power has to be exorcized? Or perhaps, quite simply, otherness and the
dual relation progressively disappear with the rise of individual values and the destruction of
symbolic ones? The fact remains that otherness does come to be in short supply and, ifwe are not to live otherness as destiny, the other has to be
produced imperatively as difference. This goes for the world as much as for the body, sex and social relations. It is to escape the world as destiny, the body as
destiny, sex (and the opposite sex) as destiny, that the production of the other as difference will be invented. For example, sexual differ- ence: each sex with its anatomical and psychological characteristics, with
its own desire and all the irresolvable consequences that ensue, including the ideology ofsex and the Utopia of a difference based both in right and in nature. None of this has any meaning in seduction, where it is
a question not of desire but of a game with desire, and where it is a question not of the equality of the sexes or the alienation ofthe one by the other, since game-playing involves a perfect reciprocity ofpart- ners
(not difference and alienation, but otherness and complicity). Seduction is as far from hysteria as can be. Neither of the sexes projects its sexuality on to the other; the distances are given; otherness is intact - it is
the very condition of that higher illusion that is play with desire.
However, with the coming of the nineteenth century and Romanticism, a mas- culine hysteria comes into play and with it a change in the sexual
paradigm, which we must once again situate within the more general, universal framework of the change in the paradigm of otherness.
In this hysterical phase, it was, so to speak, the femininity of man which pro- jected itself on to
woman and shaped her as an ideal figure in his image. In Romantic love, the aim was not
now to conquer the woman, to seduce her, but to create her from the inside, to invent her, in some cases as
achieved Utopian vision, as idealized woman, in others as jemme jatale, as star - another hysterical, supernat- ural metaphor. The Romantic Eros
can be credited with having invented this ideal of harmony, of loving fusion, this ideal of an almost incestuous form of twin beings — the woman as projective
resurrection ofthe same, who assumes her super- natural form only as ideal of the same, an artefact doomed henceforth to Vamour ox, in other words, to a pathos ofthe ideal resemblance ofbeings and sexes - a
The whole mechanics ofthe erotic changes meaning, for the
erotic attraction which previously arose out of otherness, out of the strangeness of the Other, now finds its stimulus in sameness - in
pathetic confusion which substitutes for the dual otherness of seduction.
similarity and resemblance. Auto-eroticism, incest? No. Rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same eyeing up the other, investing itself in the other, alienating itselfin the other - but the other is only ever the
sexuality becomes connected with
death: it is because it becomes connected with incest and its destiny - even in banalized form (for we are no longer
ephemeral form ofa difference which brings me closer to me. This indeed is why, with Romantic love and all its current spin-offs,
speaking ofmythic, tragic incest here; with modern eroticism we are dealing with a secondary incestuous form - of the protection of the same in the image of the other - which amounts to a confusion and
corruption of all images).
We have here then, in the end, the invention of a femininity which renders woman superfluous.
The invention of a difference which is merely a
roundabout copulation with its double. And which, at bottom, renders any encounter
with otherness impossible
(it would be interesting to know whether there was not any hysterical quid pro quo from the feminine in the construction of a virile, phallic
mythology; feminism being one such example of the hystericization of the mas- culine in woman, of the hysterical projection of her masculinity in the exact image ofthe hysterical projection by man ofhis femininity
into a mythical image of woman).
However, there still remains a dissymmetry in this enforced assignment to dif- ference.
This is why I have contended, paradoxically, that man is more different from woman than woman is from man. I mean that, within
the framework ofsexual dif- ference, man is merely different, whereas in woman there remains something ofthe radical otherness
which precedes the debased status ofdifference.
in this process of extrapolation of the Same into the production of the Other, of
hysterical invention of the sexual other as twin sister or brother (if the twin theme is so prominent today, that is because it
reflects this mode oflibidinal cloning), the sexes become progressively assimilated to each other. This develops
from difference to lesser difference through to the point of role-reversal and the vir- tual nonIn short,
differentiation of the sexes. And it ends up making sexuality a useless function. In cloning, for example, pointlessly sexed beings are going to be repro- duced, since sexuality
is no longer needed for their reproduction.
If the real woman seems to disappear in this hysterical invention ofthe feminine (though she has other
means ofresisting this), in this invention ofsexual difference, in which the masculine occupies the privileged pole from the outset, and in which all the
feminist struggles will merely reassert that insoluble privilege or difference, we must recognize too that
masculine desire also becomes entirely problematical since it is able only to project itselfinto another in its image and, in this way, render itselfpurely speculative. So all the nonsense about the phallus and male
There is a kind of transcendent justice which means that, in this process ofsexual
the two sexes each lose as much of their singularity and their
otherness. This is the era ofthe Transsexual, in which all the conflicts connected with
this sexual difference carry on long after any real sexuality, any real alterity of the sexes, has disappeared.
sexual priv- ilege, etc. needs revising.
differentiation which culminates inexorably in non- differentiation,
The body is identified and
appropriated as a self-projection, and no longer as otherness and destiny. In the facial features, in sex, in
sickness and death, identity is constantly being altered. You can do nothing about that. It is destiny. But this is precisely what has to be warded off at all costs in the
identification of the body, the individual appropriation of the body, of your desire, your appearance, your
image: plastic surgery on all fronts. For if the body is no longer a site of otherness, of a dual relation, if it
Each individual repeats on his or her own body this (successful?) takeover ofthe feminine by masculine projection hysteria.
is a site of identification, then you have urgently to reconcile yourselfwith it, to repair it,
perfect it, turn it into an ideal object . Everyone treats his/her body as man treats woman in the projective identification we have described: he
invests it as a fetish in a desperate attempt at self-identification . The body becomes an
object of autistic worship, of an almost incestuous manipulation . And it is the body's resemblance to its model which
becomes a source oferoticism and unconsummated self-seduction, insofar as it vir- tually excludes the Other and is the best means of excluding any seduction from elsewhere.
Many other things relate also to this production of the Other - a hysterical, spec- ulative production. Racism is one example, in its development throughout the modern era and its current recrudescence. Logically,
But the more we learn how unfounded the genetic theory
of race is, the more racism intensifies. This is because we are dealing with an artificial
construction of the Other, on the basis of an erosion of the singularity of cultures (of their otherness
one to another) and entry into the fetish- istic system of difference. So long as there is otherness, alienness and a (possibly violent) dual
relation, there is no racism properly so called. That is to say, roughly, up to the eighteenth century, as anthropological accounts attest. Once this 'natural' relation is
lost, we enter upon an exponential relation with an artificial Other. And there is nothing in
our culture with which we can stamp out racism, since the entire movement of that
culture is towards a fanatical differential construction of the Other, and a perpetual
extrapolation ofthe Same through the Other. Autistic cul- ture posing as altruism.
it ought to have declined with progress and the spread ofEnlightenment.
We talk of alienation. But the worst alienation is not being dispossessed by the other, but
being dispossessed of the other: it is having to produce the other in the absence of the
other, and so continually to be thrown back on oneself and one's own image . If, today, we are
condemned to our image (to cultivate our bodies, our 'looks', our identities, our desires), this is not because ofalienation, but because ofthe end ofalienation and the virtual disappearance ofthe other, which is a
much worse fate. In fact, the definition ofalienation is to take oneselfas one's focus, as one's object of care, desire, suffering and communication.
This definitive short-
circuiting of the
other ushers in the era of transparency. Plastic surgery becomes universal. And the
surgery performed on the face and the body is merely the symptom ofa more rad- ical
surgery: that performed on otherness and destiny.
What is the solution? There is no solution to this erotic trend within an entire culture; to this fascination, this whirl of denial of otherness, of all that is alien and negative; to this foreclosing of evil and this
All we can do is remind ourselves that seduction
lies in non-reconciliation with the other, in preserving the alien status of the Other. One
reconciliation around the Same and its multiple figures: incest, autism, twinship, cloning.
must not be reconciled with oneself or with one's body. One must not be reconciled with
the other, one must not be reconciled with nature, one must not be reconciled with the
feminine
(that goes for women
We present no alternative. The system demands that we maximize
production of meaning – in response, we refuse communication, we refuse
signification, and we refuse meaning.
Baudrillard 2K ~http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-andsimulations-viii-the-implosion-of-meaning-in-the-media/
What is essential today is to evaluate this double challenge – the challenge of the
masses to meaning and their silence ( which is not at all a passive resistance ) - the
challenge to meaning that comes from the media and its fascination. All the marginal,
alternative efforts to revive meaning are secondary in relation to that challenge.
Evidently, there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media: do
the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed [informe] or informed [informée] masses,
or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages
that the media produce without responding to them? Sometime ago, in "Requiem for the Media,"
I analyzed and condemned the media as the institution of an irreversible model of
communication without a response. But today? This absence of a response can no longer be
understood at all as a strategy of power, but as a counterstrategy of the masses themselves
when they encounter power. What then? Are the mass media on the side of power in the
manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of
meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that
induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle?
Mogadishu-Stammheim: the media make themselves into the vehicle of the moral
condemnation of terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but simultaneously, in
the most complete ambiguity, they propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are
themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction (cf. Umberto
Eco on this eternal moral dilemma: how can one not speak of terrorism, how can one find a
good use of the media - there is none). The media carry meaning and countermeaning, they
manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this process , they are the
vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation that destroys the
system, according to an absolutely Mobian and circular logic - and it is exactly like this. There
is no alternative to this, no logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a
catastrophic resolution.
With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble
double bind - exactly like children faced with the demands of the adult world. Children are
simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible,
free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient,
conforming objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he
responds with a double strategy . To the demand of being an object, he opposes all the
practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total claim to
subjecthood . To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as obstinately and
efficaciously, an object's resistance , that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness,
hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither strategy has more
objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and
viewed as positive - just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom,
emancipation, expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable
and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior, impact of all
the object practices , of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning precisely the practices of the masses - that we bury under the derisory terms of
alienation and passivity . The liberating practices respond to one of the aspects of the
system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects,
but they do not respond at all to the other demand, that of constituting ourselves as
subjects , of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting,
producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game - a form of blackmail and
ultimatum just as serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument
is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But
this strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still
confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system is
to maximize speech , the maximum production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance
is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word - or of the hyperconformist
simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of nonreception. It is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to returning to the system its own
logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning , like a mirror, without absorbing it . This
strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it was ushered in by that
phase of the system which prevails.
To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on
liberation , emancipation , on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the
word based on "consciousness raising," indeed a " raising of the unconscious " of
subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system,
whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning
and of speech.
Links
Generic
The aff’s move to authentic engagement ignores that reality is dead – their
negative criticism of <insert impact> helps it survive by pretending that it
matters. This is bound up with a larger strategy of striving for perfection,
which ignores that humanity itself is an imperfection.
Baudrillard ’97 (Jean; “Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact” chapter 2; trompe-l'oeil = visual illusion in art, especially as
used to trick the eye into perceiving a painted detail as a three-dimensional object)
There is always a camera hidden somewhere. It may be a real one - we may be filmed
without knowing it. We may also be invited to replay our own life on a television network. Anyway, the virtual
camera is in our head, and our whole life has taken on a video dimension. We might
believe that we exist in the original, but today this original has become an exception for the happy few. Our
own reality doesn't exist any more. We are exposed to the instantaneous retransmission
of all our facts and gestures on a channel. We would have experienced this before as
police control. Today it is just like an advertising promotion. Thus it is irrelevant to get upset with talk
shows or reality shows, and to criticize them as such. For they are only a spectacular version, and so an innocent one, of the
transformation of life itself, of everyday life, into virtual reality. We don't need the media to reflect our problems in real time - each
TV and the media have left their mediatized space in order to invest
'real' life from the inside, infiltrating it exactly like a virus in a normal cell. We don't need digital
gloves or a digital suit. As we are, we are moving around in the world as in a synthetic image. We
have swal-lowed our microphones and headsets, producing intense interference effects,
due to the short-circuit of life and its technical diffusion. We have interiorized our own
prosthetic image and become the professional showmen of our own lives. Compared with this,
the reality shows are only side-effects, and moreover mystifying, because in indicting them as
manipulation, the critics assume that there is somewhere an original form of life, and that
reality shows would be no more than its parody and simulation (Disneyland). This criticism is over, as
existence is telepresent to itself.
is every Situationist criticism of the 'spectacle' and the concept of 'spectacle', as also in substance all criticism of 'alienation'.
Unfortunately, I would add. Because the human abstraction of the spectacle was never hopeless; it always offered the chance of
disalienation. Whereas the operation of the world in real time, its unconditional realization, is really without alternative.
Radicality has changed, and all negative criticism, surviving itself, actually helps its
object to survive. For instance, the critic of religion and of its official manifestation misses the
fact that religion is in practice far more realized in many other forms - irreligious,
profane, political or cultural - where it is less easily recognizable as such. It is the same thing
with the virtual. Current criticism engaging with new techniques, new images, masks the fact
that its concept has been distilled throughout real life, in homoeopathic doses, beyond
detection. And if the level of reality decreases from day to day, it's because the medium itself has passed into life, and become
a common ritual of transparency. It is the same for the virtual: all this digital, numerical and electronic equipment is only the
epiphenomenon of the virtualization of human beings in their core. If
this can overwhelm people's fantasy to
such a degree, it is because we are already, not in some other world, but in this very life,
in a state of photosynthesis. If we can today produce a virtual clone to replace Richard Bohringer, it is because he has
already replicated himself, he has already become his own done. But anyway the reality show can be used as a micromodel for the
analysis of all virtual reality. Whether it's the immediacy of information on all screens, the telepresence, or presence on TV, in all
actings and happenings, it is always a question of 'real time' — of the collapse of the real and its double. Live your life in real time
(live and die directly on the screen). Think in real time (your thinking is immediately transferred on the printer). Make your revolution
in real time (not in the street, but in the broadcasting studio). Live your love and passion in real time (by videotaping each other).
This conversion of the mediatized into the immediatized, that is, into an immediate catalytic operation of the real by the screen, this
itrunedi-atic revolution is already implied in McLuhan's formula 'The Medium is the Message', which has never been analysed in all
its consequences. McLuhan remains the prophetic theoretician of this collapse of the medium and the message, and thus in some
way the prophet of the vanishing process of information and communication (whose signifi-cance he emphasized at the same time!).
'The Medium is the Message' remains as the Mene Tekel Epharsim of the communication era, its password and the sign of its end.
But there is another predecessor for all technologies of the virtual: it is the ready-made. Again, for example, the reality show: all
those human beings, literally extracted from their real life to play out their AIDS or conjugal psychodrama on the TV screen have
their prototype in the bottle rack of Duchamp. The artist extracted the bottle rack from the real world in the same way, displaced it on
another level to confer on it an undefinable hyperreality. A paradoxical acting-out, putting an end to the bottle rack as a real object,
to art as the invention of another scene and to the artist as the protagonist of another world. To all aesthetic idealization Duchamp
opposes a violent desublimation of art and of the real by their instantaneous short-circuit. Extrematization of the two forms: the bottle
rack, ex-inscribed from its context, from its idea, from its function, becomes more real than the real (hyperreal), and more art than art
(it enters into the transaesthetics of banality, of insignificance, of nullity, where today the pure and indifferent form of art is to be
seen). Any object, any individual, any situation today could be a virtual ready-made. For all of them might be described in much the
same way as Duchamp implicitly categorizes his ready-made object 'It exists, I met it!' This is the only label for existence. Graffiti —
another form of ready-made — says nothing other than: 'I exist, here I am, my name is so and so'. The pure and minimal form of
identity: 'I exist, I met myself'. The ready-made always seems like these stuffed animals, vitrified as if they were alive, hypnotized in
the pure form of appearance — 'naturalized'. But I would say that today art in general also looks like a naturalized species, vitrified
in its pure formal essence. Duchamp's coup has since been repeated indefinitely, not only in the field of art, but in all individual and
social functions, especially in the mediasphere. The last phase being precisely the reality show, where everybody is invited to
present themselves as they are, key in hand, and to play their live show on the screen (with all its obscene connotations), just as the
ready-made object plays its hyperrealistic role on the screen of the museum. All these mediatic events relate to this crucial phase in
the world of information and communication - a phase that art, politics and produc-tion have known before. The drama of the
mediatic class is that it is starving on the other side of the screen, in front of an indifferent consuming mass, in front of the teleabsence of the masses. Any form of tele-presence will be good enough to exorcize this tele-absence. Just as it was a vital necessity
for capital to have workers and producers trans-formed into active consumers, and even into direct stockholders in the capitalist
economy (this doesn't change anything in business, the strategy being as always to remove the tablecloth without changing the
organization of the table), the telespectator has to be transferred not in front of the screen where he is staying anyway, passively
escaping his responsibility as citizen, but on the screen, on the other side of the screen. In short, he must undergo the same
conversion as Duchamp's bottle rack, when it was transferred to the other side of art, thus creating a definitive ambiguity between
art and the real world. Today art is nothing more than this paradoxical confusion of the two. And information too is
nothing more than the paradoxical confusion of the event and the medium, including all forms of
intoxication and mystification connected to it. So we have all become ready-mades. Objects transposed
to the other side of the screen, mediumized (we don't even enjoy the good old status of passive spectator any
more), hypostasized as if transfigured in situ, on the spot, by aesthetic or mediatic decision, transfigured in their specific habits and
ways of life, as living museum exhibits. Thus we become cloned to our own image by high definition, and dedicated by involu-tion
into our own image to mediatic stupefaction, just as the ready-made is dedicated to aesthetic stupefaction. And just as Duchamp's
acting-out opens on an overall aestheticization, where any piece of junk will be promoted to a piece of art, and any piece of art
demoted to a piece of junk - so this immediatic conversion opens on to a universal virtuality, that is to say the radical actualization of
All cultural spaces are involved. For example, some new
museums, following a sort of Disneyland processing, try to put people not so much in front of the
painting - which is not interactive enough and even suspect as pure spectacular
consumption - but into the painting. Insinuated audiovisually into the virtual reality of the Dejeuner sur l'herbe,
people will enjoy it in real time, feeling and tasting the whole Impressionist context, and
eventually interacting with the picture. The masses usually prefer passive roles, and
avoid representation. This must change, and they must be made interactive partners. It is
not a question of free speaking or free acting - just break their resistance and destroy
their immunities. It is a question of life and death. When the indifference of the masses
becomes dangerous for the political or cultural class, then interactive strategies must be
invented to exhort a response at any price. In fact, the interactive mass is still a mass, with
all the characteristics of a mass, simply reflecting itself on both sides of the screen. But
the screen is not a mirror, and, while there was some magic in passing beyond the
mirror, there is no magic at all in passing beyond the screen. It's impossible anyway there is no other side of the screen. No depth - just a surface. No hidden face - just an
interface. Besides, the masses were not without an answer. Their answer was silence,
the silence of the silent majorities. This challenge of silence is now cancelled when
people are forced to ask their own questions, when they are assigned to speech. If they had
some questions, these would never be autonomous but would surely be programmed in a schedule. But even this
implication en trompe l'oeil doesn't save media and information from inertia, from
reality through its acting-out in real time.
proliferating fatal inertia. Mass media or micromedia, directive or interactive, the chain reaction of the
images is the same. It is simply materialized in real time and in every-body's head. Now what exactly is at stake
in this hegemonic trend towards virtuality? What is the idea of the virtual? It would seem
to be the radical actualization, the unconditional realization, of the world, the
transformation of all our acts, of all historical events, of all material substance and
energy into pure information. The ideal would be the resolution of the world by the
actualization of all facts and data. This is the theme of Arthur C. Clarke's fable about the names of God. In this fable,
the monks of Tibet devote themselves to the fastidious work of transcribing the 99 billion names of God, after which the world will be
accomplished, and it will end. Exhausted by this everlasting spelling of the names of God, they call IBM computer experts who
complete the work in a few months. This offers a perfect allegory of the
completion of the world in real time by
the operation of the virtual. Unfortunately this is also the end of the world in real time. For with this
virtual countdown of the names of God, the great promise of the end was realized; and the technicians of IBM, who left the site after
work (and didn't believe of course in the prophecy), saw the stars in the sky fading and vanishing one by one. Maybe it is an allegory
of our
technical transfiguration of the world: its accelerated end, its anticipated resolution
- the final score of modem millenarianism, but without hope of salvation, revelation, or
even apocalypse. Simply accelerating the process of declining (in the double sense of the word)
towards a pure and simple disappearance. The human species would be invested,
without knowing it, with the task of programming, by exhausting all its possibilities, the
code for the auto-matic disappearance of the world. Rather than the ideal transformation
of the world, the ultimate end of this transfiguration would be that of building a perfectly
autonomous world from which we can retire and remove ourselves. In order for us to
step out of it, the world must be brought to completion. As long as we stay here as alien
beings, the world cannot be perfect. And to be perfect it must be constructed and
artificial, because there is no perfection in the natural state. The human being itself is a
dangerous imperfection. If we want to achieve this sort of immortality, we must also treat
ourselves as artefacts and get out of ourselves in order to move on an artificial orbit,
where we can revolve eternally. We all dream of an ex-nihilo creation, of a world
emerging and moving without our intervention. We dream of perfect autonomous beings
who, far from acting against our will as in the fable, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, would meet our desire
to escape our own will, and realize the world as a self-fulfilling prophecy. So we dream of
perfect com-puters, of auto-programming artificial intelligence. But if we allow artificial
beings to become intelligent, and even more intelligent than we are, we don't allow them
to have their own will. We don't allow them what God finally allowed us - the intelligence
of evil. We cannot bear real challenge from another species; and if we concede
intelligence to other beings, then this intelligence must still be the manifestation of our
desire. While God permitted us to raise such questions about our own liberty, we don't
allow artificial beings to raise such questions about themselves. No liberty, no will, no
desire, no sexuality. We want them complex, creative, interactive, but without spirit. By
the way, it seems that these 'intelligent' machines have found, if not the way to transgression and freedom, at least the byways to accident and catastrophe. It seems that
they have an evil genius for dysfunctions, electronic viruses and other perverse effects,
which save them - and us, in the same way -from perfection and from reaching the limit
of their possibilities. The perfect crime would be to build a world-machine without defect,
and to leave it without traces. But it never succeeds. We leave traces everywhere viruses, lapses, germs, catastrophes - signs of defect, or imperfection, which are like our
species' signature in the heart of an artificial world. All forms of high technology illustrate the fact that
behind its doubles and its prostheses, its biological clones and its virtual images, the human species is secretly
fomenting its disappearance. For example, the video cassette recorder connected to the TV: it sees the film in your
place. Were it not for this technical possibility of devolution, of a vicarious accomplishment, we would have felt obliged to see it for
ourselves. For
we always feel a little responsible for films we haven't seen, for desires we
haven't realized, for people we haven't answered, for crimes we haven't committed, for
money we haven't spent. All this generates a mass of deferred possibilities, and the idea
that a machine is there that can deal with these possibilities, can stock them, filter them (an answermachine, a memory bank), and progressively absorb and reabsorb them, is very comforting. All
these machines can be called virtual, since they are the medium of virtual pleasure, the
abstract pleasure of the image, which is often good enough for our happiness. Most of these machines are used for delusion, for the
elusion of communication ('Leave a message . . .'), for absolving face-to-face relations and social responsi-bilities. They
don't
really lead to action, they substitute for it most of the time. So with the film on the video
cassette recorder: maybe I'll see this film later, but maybe I won't do it at all. Am I sure I
really want to see it anyway? But the machine must work. Thus the consumption of the
machine converges with the consumption of the desire. All these machines are
wonderful. They give us a sort of freedom. They help us to get free from the machine
itself, since they interconnect one with another and function in a loop. They help us to
get free from our own will and from our own production. What a relief all at once to see twenty pages
erased by a caprice of the word processor (or by an error of the user, which amounts to the same thing). They would never have
What the computer gives to you, too easily
perhaps, it takes away just as easily. Everything is in order. The technological equation
amounts to zero. We always hear about negative perverse effects. But here the technique assumes a positive
had such a value if they hadn't been given the chance to disappear!
(homoeopathic) perverse effect. The inte-grated circuit reverses itself, performing in some way the automatic writing of the world.
Now let us consider some different aspects of this virtual achieve-ment, of this automatic writing of the world. High definition. High
fidelity. Real time. Genetic codes. Artificial intelligence. In high definition, the (electronic, numerical or synthesized) image is nothing
more than the emanation of the digital code that generated it. It has nothing more to do with representation, and even less with
aesthetic illusion. All
illusion is abolished by technical perfection. It is the same with the three
dimensional image: it is a pure disillusion, since the magic of the image lies simply in the
subtraction of one dimension from the real world. In the hologram's perfection of the
virtual image, all parts are microscopically identical to the whole, generating a fractal
deconstruction of the image, which is supplanted by its own pure luminous definition. High
fidelity. Disappearance of the music by excess of fidelity, by the promiscuity of the music and its absolute technical model.
Holographic music, holophonic, stereophonic, as if it had swallowed its own genetic code before expelling it as an artificial synthesis
- clinical music, sterile, purged of all noise. Real time. The equivalent of high definition for the image. Simul-taneity of the event and
its diffusion in information. Instant proximity of oneself and one's actions at a distance. Telepresence: you can manage your
Like the space of the image in
high definition, each moment in real time is microscopically coded, microscopically isolated, in a
dosed and integrated circuit. As in the hologram, each parcel of time concentrates the total
information relative to the event, as if we could control the event from all sides at once. No
business in situ at the other end of the world, by the medium of your electronic clone.
distance, no memory, no continuity, no death: the extreme 'reality of time' is in fact extreme virtuality. All the suspense, all the
unforeseeability, of time is over. Genetic coding. What is at stake here is the simulation of a perfect human being, of a body of high
The construction of a virtual body
outperforming the original - plastic genetic surgery. The genetic code itself, the DNA, which concentrates
definition, through the controlled engineering and dispatching of the genome.
the whole definition of any living being in a minimal space and a minimal formula, is the ideal type of virtuality. Last, but not least:
artificial intelligence. Something like an artificial brain-recording, adapted to an artificial environment. Thinking almost
instantaneously inscribed on the screen, in direct interaction with data, software and memories - intelligence in real time. Thinking
becomes a high definition operation, suppressing all distance, all ambiguity, all enigmatic eventualities, suppressing the very illusion
of thought. Just
as the illusion of the image disappears into its virtual reality, just as the
illusion of the body disappears into its genetic inscription, just as the illusion of the
world disappears into its technical artefacts, so the natural intelligence of the world
disappears into its artificial intelligence. There is no trace in all of this of the world as a
game, as a fake, as a machination, as a crime, and not as a logical mechanism, or a reflex
cybernetic machine, with the human brain as mirror and model. Artificial intelligence is
everything except artificial. It is definitive 'realthinking' (as we speak of realpolitik), fully
materialized by the interaction of all virtualities of analysis and computing. We could
even say that artificial intelligence goes beyond itself through too high a definition of the
real, through a delirious sophistication of data and operations - but this is only the
consequence of the fact that artificial intelligence is a matter of the hyperrealization of
thinking, of the objective processing of thinking. There is not the slightest sense here of illusion, artifice,
seduction, or a more subtle game of thought. For thought is neither a mechanism of higher functions nor a range of operational
reflexes. It is a rhetoric of forms, of moving illusions and appearances. It reacts positively to the illusion of the world, and negatively
to its reality. It plays off appear-ances against reality, turning the illusion of the world against the world itself. The thinking machine
masters only the computing process. It doesn't rule over appearances, and its function, like that of all other cybernetic and virtual
all the above traits rely
upon paradoxes. 'Real time' is in fact a purely virtual time. 'Artificial intelligence' is
nothing like artificial. 'Virtual reality' is at the antipodes of the real world. As for 'high
definition, it is synonymous with the highest dilution of reality. The highest definition of the medium
machines, is to destroy this essential illusion by counterfeiting the world in real time. Curiously,
corresponds to the lowest definition of the message. The highest definition of information corresponds to the lowest definition of the
event. The highest definition of sex (in porno-graphy) corresponds to the lowest definition of desire. The highest definition of
language (as computer coding) corresponds to the lowest definition of sense. The highest definition of the other (as computer
coding), corresponds to the lowest definition of exchange and alterity. Everywhere high definition corresponds to a world where
Such are the stakes involved in the virtual
realization of the world. And we must take it as irreversible. This logic leads to the end, to
the final solution, or resolution. Once performed, it would be the equivalent of a perfect
crime. While the other crime, the 'original' crime, is never perfect, and always leaves
traces - we as living and mortal beings are a living trace of this criminal imperfection future extermination, which would result from the absolute determination of the world
and of its elements, would leave no traces at all. We would not even have the choice or
chance to die, to really die. We would have been kidnapped and disintegrated in real time
and virtual reality long before the stars go out. Artificial intelligence, tele-sensoriality, virtual reality and
so on - all this is the end of illusion. The illusion of the world - not its analytical countdown the wild illusion of passion, of thinking, the aesthetic illusion of the scene, the psychic
and moral illusion of the other, of good and evil (of evil especially, perhaps), of true and
false, the wild illusion of death, or of living at any price - all this is volatilized in psychosensorial telereality, in all these sophisticated technologies which transfer us to the
virtual, to the contrary of illusion: to radical disillusion.
referential substance is scarcely to be found any more.
Art
Their appropriation of banality and commodification of art participates in
“insider-trading,” a recirculation of the same images of the status quo.
Baudrillard 02
/Jean, “Screened Out,” 182-185/
(Modern) art was able to be part of the part maudite, the 'accursed share', by being a sort of
dramatic alternative to reality, by expressing the irruption of unreality into reality. But what
can art mean now in a world that is hyperrealist from the outset, a world that is cool,
transparent, image-conscious ? What can porn mean in a world that is pornographied from the outset? What can they do but tip
us a last paradoxical wink - that of reality mocking itself in its most hyperrealistic form, that of sex mocking itself in its most exhibitionistic form, that of
The dictatorship of images is, in any event,
an ironic dictatorship. But that irony itself is no longer part of the accursed share; it is,
rather, party to insider-trading, to that hidden, shameful complicity which binds the artist,
playing on his/her aura of derision, to the stupefied, incredulous masses. Irony, too, is a part of the
art mocking itself and its own disappearance in its most artificial form: irony.
art conspiracy.
Art playing on its own disappearance and the disappearance of its object was still an art of great works. But art
itself indefinitely by helping itself to reality? Most
playing at re-cycling
contemporary art is engaged in just this:
appropriating banality, the throwaway, mediocrity as value and as ideology . In these innumerable
installations and performances, what is going on is merely a compromise with the state of things – and
simultaneously with all the past forms of the history of art. An admission of unorig-inality, banality and worthlessness, elevated into a perverse aesthetic
value, if not indeed a perverse aesthetic pleasure. Admittedly, it is claimed that all this mediocrity is sublimated in the transition to the level of art, which
Transition to the aesthetic level
rescues nothing. In fact the opposite is true: it is mediocrity raised to the second power.
It claims to be worthless: 'I'm worthless, I'm worthless!' and it really is worthless!
is distanced and ironic. But it is just as worthless and insignificant at that level as before.
We have here the whole duplicity of contemporary art: laying claim to worthlessness [la
nullite], insignificance and non-meaning; aiming for worthlessness, when it is already
worthless; aiming for non-meaning, when it already signifies nothing; claiming to
achieve superficiality in superficial terms. Now, nullity is a secret quality which not everyone can aspire to. Insignificance true insignificance, the victorious defiance of meaning, the stripping away of meaning, the art of the disappearance of meaning — is an exceptional
quality possessed by a few rare works — works which never claim that quality.
There is an initiatory form of nullity, just as there is an initiatory form of the nothing, or an initiatory form of evil. And then there is
insider-trading, the fakers of nullity, the snobbery of nullity, of all those who prostitute the Nothing for value, who prostitute Evil for
useful ends. We must not let these fakers get away with it. When the Nothing shows up in signs, when Nothingness emerges at the
very heart of the system of signs, that is the fundamental event of art. It is the proper task of poetry to raise the Nothing to the power
of the sign — not the banality or indifference of the real, but the radical illusion. In this way, Warhol truly is a 'zero',in the sense that
he reintroduces nothingness into the heart of the image. He turns nullity and insignificance into an event which he transforms into a
fatal strategy of the image.
The others merely have a commercial strategy of nullity, to which they give a
promotional form, the sentimental form of the commodity , as Baudelaire put it. They hide behind
their own nullity and the metastases of the discourse on art, whichworks generously to
promote this nullity as a value (among other things, a value on the art market, of course). In a sense, this is worse than nothing,
because it means nothing and yet it exists all the same, giving itself every reason to exist. With this paranoia colluding with art, there is no
room for critical judgement any more, but merely for an amicable, and inescapably
convivial, participation in nullity. This is theart conspiracy and its primal scene, carried forward by all the private shows,
It is a conspiracy which cannot be
'unhatched' in any known universe, since, behind the mystification of images, it has put
itself beyond the reach of thought.
hang ings, exhibitions, restorations, collections, donations and speculations.
The other side of this trickery is the way people are bluffed into according importance and credence to all this, on the grounds that it
is not possible that itshould be so worthless and empty and there must be something to it. Contemporary art plays on this
uncertainty, on the impossibility of a reasoned aesthetic value- judgement, relying on the guilt of those who simply cannot
understand, or have notunderstood that there is nothing to understand. Here again, this is insider-trading
But we may also take the view that these people, whom art keeps at bay, have indeed
fully understood, since, by their very stupefaction, they show an intuitive understanding
that they are victims of an abuse of power; that they are not being let in on the rules of
the game; that the wool is being pulled over their eyes. In other words, art has made its entry
into the general process of insider-trading (and not merely from the financial point of view of the art market, but in the
very management of aesthetic values). In this it is not alone: the same kind of collusion is to be found in politics,
the economy and information, with the same ironic resignation on the part of the
'consumers'. 'Our admiration for painting is the consequence of a long process of adaptation which has gone on over centuries, and exists for
reasons which very often have nothing to do either with art or the mind. Painting created its receptor. It is, at bottom, a relationship of convention'
(Gombrowicz to Dubuffet). The only question is how such a machine can continue to function in a situation of critical disillusionment and commercial
frenzy. And if it can, how long will this illusionism, this occultism last? A hundred years? Two hundred? Will art have a second, inminable existence, like
the secret services, which, though we know they have long had no secrets to steal or exchange, still thrive amid a superstitious belief in their
usefulness, and continue to generate a mythology?
Authenticity
The aff’s move to authenticity is an attempt at perfection – that fruitless
pursuit kills illusion and replaces it with a hyperreality.
Baudrillard ’97 (Jean; “Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact” pg 7-15)
Aesthetic disillusionment. It seems that the most contemporary art culminates in an
effort of self-deterrence, in a process of mourning the death of the image and the
imaginary, in an aesthetic mourning, that cannot succeed anyway, resulting in a general
melancholy in the artistic sphere, which seems to survive by recycling its history. (But art
and aesthetics are not the only domains devoted to this melancholic and paradoxical destiny — of living beyond their own finalities.)
It seems that we have been assigned to conduct infinite retrospective analyses of what happened before. This is true for politics,
history and ethics, and for art as well, which in this matter has no special privilege. All the movement in painting has been displaced
towards the past. Employing quotation, simulation, reappropriation, it seems that contem-porary art is about to reappropriate all
forms or works of the past, near or far — or even contemporary forms — in a more or less ludic or kitsch fashion. What Russell
Connor calls 'the abduction of modem art'. Of course, all of this remaking and recycling claim to be ironic; but this form of irony is
like a threadbare piece of cloth — a by-product of disillusion — a fossilized irony. The trick that consists in juxtaposing the nude in
Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe with Cezanne's card players is only a publicity stunt, part of the irony, or the trompe-l'oeil criticism
which characterizes publicity today, and which is about to submerge the artistic world. It's the irony of repentance and resentment
against our own culture. But perhaps repentance and resentment constitute the ultimate phase of art history, just as, according to
Nietzsche, they constitute the ultimate phase in the genealogy of morals. It's a parody, and at the same time a palinody of art and
art history, a self-parody of culture in the form of revenge, characteristic of radical disillusion. It's as if art, like history, was recycling
Consider, for example, the way certain films (Barton
leave no place for criticism because, in some
way, they destroy themselves from within. Quotation crazy, prolix, high-tech, they carry
with them the cancer of cinema, the internal excroissance, proliferation of their own
technique, of their own scenography or of their own cinematographic culture. We feel as
if these directors were repelled by their own films, that they couldn't stand them (whether
through excess of ambition or lack of imagination). Nothing else justifies the orgy of means and the
efforts to cancel films through an excess of virtuosity, special effects, megalomaniac
angles -the technical harassment of the images - by exhausting their effects to the point
of making a sarcastic parody out of it, a veritable pornography of the image. Everything
seems to be programmed for the disillusion-ment of the spectator, for whom no other
choice is left than that of enduring this excess of cinema, this end to all cinematic
illusion. What can one say about the cinema, if not that now - almost at the end of its evolution, of its
technical progress, from silent movies to talkies, colour, high technology and special
effects - its capacity for illusion, in the radical sense of the word, has vanished. Current
cinema is no longer related to allusion or illusion; it connects everything in a super-tech,
super-efficient, super-visual style. No void, no ellipsis, no silence - nothing more than
what you get on television, which film resembles more and more as it loses the
specificity of its images. We're going more and more in the direction of high definition,
that is to say, towards the useless perfection of the image - which is no longer an image.
The more it becomes real, the more it is produced in real time, the more we approach
absolute definition, or the realistic perfection of the image, the more the image's power of
illusion is lost. Just remember the Peking Opera, and how with only the movement of two
bodies on a vessel, it brings alive the whole space of a river. How two bodies struggling
in a duel, avoiding each other, moving near each other without touching, in an invisible
copulation, can mime the physical presence of darkness on the stage where this fight
takes place. Here the illusion is total and intense, more than aesthetic, a physical
its own garbage and looking for its redemption in its own detritus.
Fink, Basic Instinct, Greenaway's works, Sailor and Lula, etc.)
ecstasy, because it eludes all realistic presence of the night and the river, and only the
bodies assume the natural illusion. Today we would bring tons of real water on to the
stage, the duel would be filmed in infra-red and so forth. We confront the misery of the over-technical
image, like the Gulf War on CNN. Pornography of the image in three or four dimensions, or of music
with three or four or twenty-four tracks. It's always by adding to the real, by adding the
real to the real with the objective of obtaining a perfect illusion (that of the perfect
realistic stereotype), that we kill profound illusion. An image is an abstraction of the
world in two dimensions. It takes away a dimension from the real world, and by this very
fact the image inaugurates the power of illusion. On the other hand, virtuality, by making
us enter into the image, by recreating a realistic image in three dimensions (and even in
adding a sort of fourth dimension to the real, so as to make it in some way hyperreal),
destroys this illusion (the equivalent of this operation in time is 'real time', which makes the loop of time close up on itself
instantaneously, and thus abolishes all illusion of the past as well as of the future). Virtuality tends toward the
perfect illusion. But it isn't the same creative illusion as that of the image. It is a
'recreating' illusion (as well as a recreational one), revivalistic, realistic, mimetic,
hologrammatic. It abolishes the game of illusion by the per-fection of the reproduction, in
the virtual rendition of the real. And so we witness the extermination of the real by its
double.
Individuality
The affirmative operates under the myth of individuality --- their claims to
an “authentic” self obscures that their conception of subjectivity is the
foundation of all the structures of modernity.
Baudrillard 5 (Jean, “The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact: “Do You Want to be Anyone Else?”, 55-59)
Individuality is a recent phenomenon. It is only over the last two centuries that the
populations of the civilized countries have demanded the democratic privilege of being
individuals. Before that, they were what they were: slaves, peasants, artisans, men or
women, fathers or children - not ‘individuals’ or ‘fully fledged subjects’. Only with our
modern civilization did we find ourselves forcibly inducted into this individual existence .
Of course, we fight to retain this ‘inalienable’ right, and we are naturally driven to win it and defend it at all costs. We demand this freedom, this
autonomy, as a fundamental human right and, at the same time, we are crippled by the
responsibility that ends up making us detest ourselves as such. This is what resounds in the complaint of Job.
God asks too much: ‘What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him? And that thou shouldest set thy heart upon him? And that thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try
This leaves us subject to a
contradictory twofold requirement: to seek an identity by all possible means - by
hounding the identities of others or by exploring the networks - and to slough off identity
in every possible way, as though it were a burden or a disguise. It is as though liberty
and individuality, from having been a ‘natural’ state in which one may act freely, had
become artificial states, a kind of moral imperative, whose implacable decree makes us
hostages to our identities and our own wills. This is a very particular case of Stockholm Syndrome, since we are here both the
terrorist and the hostage. Now, the hostage is by definition the unexchangeable, accursed object you
cannot be rid of because you don’t know what to do with it. The situation is the same for
him every moment? How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle?’ 10
the subject: as hostage to himself, he doesn’t know how to exchange himself or be rid
of himself. Being unable to conceive that identity has never existed and that it is merely
something we play-act, we fuel this subjective illusion to the point of exhaustion . We
wear ourselves out feeding this ghost of a representation of ourselves. We are overwhelmed by this
pretension, this obstinate determination to carry around an identity which it is impossible to exchange (it can be exchanged only for the parallel illusion of an objective reality, in
). All the grand narratives of our individual consciousness - of
freedom, will, identity and responsibility - merely add a useless, even contradictory, overdetermination to our actions as they ‘occur’. To the effect that we are the cause of them, that they are the doing of our will, that our
decisions are the product of our free will, etc. But our actions do not need this: we can decide and act without
there being any need to involve the will and the idea of the will. There is no need to involve the idea of free will to
make choices in one’s life. Above all, there is no need to involve the idea of subject and its identity in order
the same metaphysical cycle into which we are locked
to exist (it is better, in any case, to involve that of alterity). These are all useless, like the belief that is superadded
to the existence of God (if he exists, he doesn’t need it). And so we believe in a free, willed determination
of our actions and it gives them meaning, at the same time as it gives meaning to us - the
sense of being authors of those actions. But this is all a reconstruction, like the reconstruction of the dream narrative. ‘A person’s actions
... are commonly continuations of his own inner constitution ... the way the magnet bestows form and order on iron filings’ (Lichtenberg).11 This is the problem Luke Rhinehart
sets himself in his novel The Dice Man: how are we to slough off this freedom, this ego which is captive to its free will? The solution he finds is that of chance. Among all the
possibilities for shattering the mirror of identity, for freeing beings from the terrorism of the ego, there is the option of surrendering oneself to chance, to the dice, for all one’s
At bottom, the
ego is itself a form of superego: it is the ego we must rid ourselves of, above all. We
must live without reference to a model of identity or a general equivalent. But the trap
with these plural identities, these multiple existences, this devolution on to ‘intelligent
actions and decisions. No free will any longer, no responsible subject, but merely the play of a random dispersal, an artificial diaspora of the ego.
machines’ - dice machines as well as the machines of the networks - is that once the
general equivalent has disappeared, all the new possibilities are equivalent to one
another and hence cancel each other out in a general indifference. Equivalence is still there, but it is no longer
the equivalence of an agency at the top (the ego); it is the equivalence of all the little egos ‘liberated’ by its disappearance. The erosion of destinies
occurs by the very excess of possibilities - as the erosion of knowledge occurs by the
very excess of information or sexual erosion by the removal of prohibitions, etc. When,
under the banner of identity, existence is so individualized, so atomized (‘atomon’ is the literal equivalent
of individual) that its exchange is impossible, the multiplication of existences leads only to a
simulacrum of alterity. To be able to exchange itself for anything or anyone is merely an extreme, desperate form of impossible exchange.
Multiplying identities never produces anything more than all the illusory strategies for
decentralizing power: it is pure illusion, pure strategem.
Racism
Their celebration of difference is the precondition for the extermination of
the Other. Only that which remains radically Other is safe from racism.
Grace 2000—Senior Lecturer in Feminist Studies @ University of Canterbury at Christchurch
(Victoria, 2000, Routledge, “Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading,”
http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100724/20100724151252877.pdf, rmf)
Baudrillard develops his most sustained discussion of the erasure of ‘Otherness’ and the
proliferation of ‘difference’ in The Transparency of Evil (TE). His critique distinguishes
‘difference’ from a form of otherness that is radical, in which there is no scale of values
upon which otherness can be registered. Baudrillard is emphatic that not only is otherness
not the same as difference, but difference is what destroys otherness . Differences are
indeed differentiated along a single scale of values. In an interview with Le Journal des
Psychologues he says that difference is diversification, ‘it is the spectre of modality’,
making it distinct from alterity in a way he describes there as ‘absolute’ (Gane 1993: 173).
The ‘hell of the same’ (the void in the second quotation cited at the beginning of this section) is
deflected by the hyperreal ‘melodrama of difference’ (both being chapter titles in TE).
Simulation of a spectacular, everproliferating display of ‘difference’ is entirely consistent
with the logic of sign value. Baudrillard claims that otherness can now be considered to
be subject to the law of the market, and in fact, as a rare item, is highly valued . The
‘Other’ is no longer to be conquered, exterminated, hated, excluded, or seduced but
rather now to be understood, liberated, recognised, valued, ‘coddled’, resurrected as
‘different ’ This distinction between a form of ‘otherness’ that is indeed structurally irreducible,
neither comparable nor opposable, and a form of ‘difference’ that is precisely predicated on
establishing criteria against which difference is ascertained,3 is central to the critique offered
here of feminist insistence on ‘irreducible difference’. For this feminist proclamation to be
meaningful we need some kind of structural critique of the social, political, economic, and
semiotic structuring of difference and otherness. Baudrillard’s analysis shifts the ground
considerably. It makes additional questions pertinent; for example, what is at stake
contemporarily in insisting on the importance of ‘irreducible difference’? His work suggests that
this kind of question has to be addressed through a critique of the political economy of the sign.
At least. With reference to Baudrillard’s ‘melodrama of difference’, the word ‘melodrama’ has the
sense of ‘decidedly overdone’. A dictionary definition is: ‘sensational dramatic piece with crude
appeals to emotions and usually happy ending’. The ‘usually happy ending’ is rather ironic given
its humanist appeal, and the ‘happy ending’ of cultural hybridity would see the end of the
apparent anachronism of racism, a form of discrimination Baudrillard analyses as precisely
prescribed by ‘difference’ (I will elaborate on this below). Baudrillard uses the term ‘melodrama’
in conjunction with ‘psychodrama’ and ‘sociodrama’ to critique contemporary discourses and
practices of ‘otherness’, both of which conjure the centrality of simulation to the scene of
‘cultural difference’, and metaphorically depict the simulated and dramatised absence of
the other, with its ‘melodramatic’ undertones of crude emotionality. Baudrillard’s argument
that racism is an artefact of the institution of difference is integrally related to the structure
of differentiation and the axiological and semiological form of its logic. To differentiate in the
hyperreal mode of simulation is to discriminate: to establish differences that, generated
from the model, are nothing more than more of the same. Racism , Baudrillard argues,
does not exist ‘so long as the other remains Other ’ (TE: 129). When the Other is foreign,
strange, ‘other’, for example, within the order of the symbolic in Baudrillard’s critical terms,
there is no scale of equivalence or difference against which discrimination can be
performed. Encounter and transformation are fully open and reversible, in all forms
(including the agonistic encounter of violence and death). Racism becomes possible when
‘the other becomes merely different’ as then the other becomes ‘dangerously similar’.
This is the moment, according to Baudrillard, when ‘the inclination to keep the other at a
distance comes into being’ (TE: 129). The intolerable introjection of difference in the case
of the construction of ‘the subject’ as ‘different’, or traversed by a multiplicity of
‘differences’, means the other must be exorcised: the differences of the other must be
made materially manifest. The inevitability of a fluctuation, oscillation, vacillation of
differences in a differential system means the ‘happy ending’ will always be illusory.
‘Difference’ (of others) is fetishised as the icon that keeps ‘the subject’ different.
Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is the formation of the viral Other, the final amassing of
difference into one huge melting pot. This inevitably recreates racism in a
more viral form.
*could also be answer to permutation (see proper use of otherness section)
Grace 2000—Senior Lecturer in Feminist Studies @ University of Canterbury at Christchurch
(Victoria, 2000, Routledge, “Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading,”
http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100724/20100724151252877.pdf, rmf)
As the biological bases of racism are exposed as pure fallacy in theoretical and genetic
terms, and as the principles of democracy have advanced since the Enlightenment,
racism should have declined. Logically, as Baudrillard claims in his book The Perfect Crime
(PC), this should have been the case, yet he observes that as cultures become
increasingly hybrid, racism actually grows stronger (PC: 131– 2). He analyses this contraindication in terms of the increasing fetishisation of difference and the loss of the
encounter with the Other , and in the erosion of the singularity of cultures qua increasing
simulation of differentiation. The ‘relation’ within the order of ‘cultural difference’ is
phobic, according to Baudrillard: a kind of reflex that is fundamentally irrational in terms
of the logic of the system. The ‘other’ is idealised, and: because it is an ideal other, this
relationship is an exponential one: nothing can stop it, since the whole trend of our
culture is towards a fanatically pursued differential construction, a perpetual
extrapolation of the same from the other. (PC: 132) ‘Autistic culture by dint of fake altruism’,
he adds, recapturing the cultural imperative of the western hyperreal ‘culture’ to
recognise, value, liberate, and understand difference. On the other hand, racism can equally
result from the opposite sentiment; that of a desperate attempt to manifest the other as an evil
to be overwhelmed. Either way, both the benevolence of the humanitarian and the hatred
of the racist seek out the ‘other’ for reasons symptomatic of the fetishisation of
difference. As the increasingly cult-like dedication to differences escalates with its
concurrent impulse to increasing homogeneity,4 another ‘other’ emerges. Baudrillard
comments on the figure of the alien as a ‘monstrous metaphor’ for the ‘viral Other’, which
is, in his words, ‘ the compound form of all the varieties of otherness done to death by our
system ’ (TE: 130). I remember thinking recently how there must be some significance to the
outpouring of ‘alien’ movies (on television especially) and wondered if this was the final frontier
of ‘otherness’ to be ‘done to death’ (what else is left?). I recall also being disturbed, as I watched
one such movie, to reflect on my accepting without question the imperative of exterminating the
aliens who (that?) were going to invade and transform human society in evil ways. Baudrillard
emphasises that this metaphor of alien ‘Other’ seizes on what he describes as a ‘viral
and automatic’ form of racism that perpetuates itself in a way that cannot be countered
by a humanism of difference . Viral in the sense of self-generating and invisibly infecting,
reconstructing: a ‘virus of difference’, played out through minute variations in the order
of signs. Such a form of monstrous otherness is also the product of what Baudrillard
calls an ‘obsessional differentiation’ (TE: 130), emanating from the compulsion of the
‘self’ (same) to manifest signs of ‘difference’ in the form of the ‘other’ . The problematic
structure of this self( same )–other( different) dynamic , Baudrillard argues, demonstrates
the weakness of those ‘dialectical’ theories of otherness which ‘aspire to promote the
proper use of otherness’ (TE: 130). Racism, especially in its current viral and immanent
form, makes it clear that there is no such thing as the ‘proper use of difference’. This
point links again with my concerns about the emptiness of feminist claims for the
importance of ‘irreducible differences’ in the absence of a structural critique.
Liberation
We now live in an era of constant simulation of past political conflicts.
Nostalgic for a time when power was opposable, the affirmative engages in
this banal form of reliving the past through their project of liberation. This
reproduces their impacts in a simulated form.
Grace 2000—Senior Lecturer in Feminist Studies @ University of Canterbury at Christchurch
(Victoria, 2000, Routledge, “Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading,”
http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100724/20100724151252877.pdf, rmf)
The Transparency of Evil opens with Baudrillard’s observation that our current predicament
could be described as ‘after the orgy’. This depiction evokes a sense of extravagant and
committed energy expended with earnest ebullience and intensity, in all directions at once,
from which one emerges having ‘done it’, and wondering what to do next now that it is in
fact ‘over’. This allegory refers to the explosive moment of modernity when ‘ liberation’ in
every sphere was the passionate and energising motivation for political action:
‘[p]olitical liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of the forces of production , liberation
of the forces of destruction, women’s liberation, children’s liberation, liberation of
unconscious drives, liberation of art’ (TE: 3). ‘ After the orgy’ does not necessarily mean
that the ‘goals’ of liberation have been achieved in their own liberal or radical,
transformative terms . It can rather be understood to refer to the entry into a world
structured in accordance with the logic of sign value, where all values, all signifiers, are
indeed ‘liberated’ to produce more of the same, ad infinitum , in a boundless, hyperrealised
consumerist world. All signifiers are ‘liberated’ in the sense of no longer being caught up
in the oppressive dialectics of ‘race, gender, class’, but the fact that this means we are
now wandering around in the ‘depressing ruins of late capitalism’ (to use Walters’
phrase), rather than blissfully enjoying some other fantasised form of ‘freedom’, testifies
to the poverty of the understandings on which such politics of liberation were premised,
and to their illusory character . If ‘liberation’ was the political goal, and if everything has been
‘liberated’ (albeit in a manner not recognised as ‘liberation’ by advocates and protagonists of the
multitude of causes – as Baudrillard himself writes, ‘not in the way we expected’), the preferred
action now appears to be to simulate a continuing orgy through simulated liberatory
agendas . Baudrillard refers to this simulated liberatory movement as one which is in
fact ‘accelerating in a void’ (TE: 3): its goals are behind it, having already been achieved,
so it is on a fast track to nowhere in a sort of meaningless orbital circuit, nostalgic for
the times when there were ‘real’ opponents and ‘real’ power relations . Having overshot
the finalities of modernity (remember Foucault and the finalities of ‘man’), through what
Baudrillard elsewhere has referred to as a ‘hypertelic process’ (Gane 1993: 163), we have
moved into a state he characterises through the repetitive use of the prefix ‘trans’:
transpolitical, transsexual, transeconomic, transaesthetic. What to do after the orgy? ‘[ W]e
can only “hyper-realize” them [utopias] through interminable simulation. We live amid
the interminable reproduction of ideals, phantasies, images and dreams which are now
behind us, yet which we must continue to reproduce in a sort of inescapable
indifference’ (TE: 4). This indifference results from the radical indeterminacy that
accompanies the ‘liberated’ state ; ‘[e]verywhere what has been liberated has been
liberated so that it can enter a state of pure circulation, so that it can go into orbit’ (TE:
4). The tensions and contradictions which were understood to traverse and constitute relative
social positions meant subjects-in-process were always somewhere, relative to something or
someone else/others. Positions could be challenged and overwhelmed. ‘Politics’ meant
something. But in a social (that is probably, therefore, no longer a social) where all such
positions lose their dialectical relationality and float with a kind of weightlessness ‘free’
from any bearings, these tensions and contradictions have vaporised, leaving an
indifference to the very simulations of conflict and tension endlessly fabricated .
Culture
The appeal to cultural authenticity is an illusion, a form of cultural
impoverishment intended to be consumed by the West that is ultimately
lost in a proliferation of cultural difference.
Grace 2000—Senior Lecturer in Feminist Studies @ University of Canterbury at Christchurch
(Victoria, 2000, Routledge, “Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading,”
http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100724/20100724151252877.pdf, rmf)
Cultural artefacts and performances are sold for tourist consumption, which, we learn
from the media, can’t be tacky replicas; tourists are discerning and want the real thing –
authentic Thai, Maori, Indian, etc. culture. This packaging of cultural experiences and
things , referred to in one newspaper article as ‘indigenous tourism’,8 can be interpreted
both as a form of cultural impoverishment captured and regurgitated in simulated,
hyperreal form, and at the same time as a parodic pandering to the superficiality of the
west’s construction of ‘difference ’: a smart entrepreneurial response to the panicked
desire for signs of the real and of difference. This is one example of an important point of
tension in Baudrillard’s analysis. It is here that we see the vulnerability of the western edifice of
representation, ‘political power’, and economic value predicated on the barring of a symbolic it
can never erase, while simultaneously we are aware of the relentless and totalitarian nature of
its structure. The totalising quality of the structure of simulation ensures that all attempts
to realise ‘cultural authenticity’ will be recaptured through a strategy of deterrence : the
system is your friend, cultural difference is valued. As Spivak noted in an interview with
Ellen Rooney (1989), the concern that ‘Little India’ in a US city is more Indian than India
can be analysed in terms of Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality: more real than real. The
logic of sign value can be considered to be fundamentally ‘anti-culture’ by virtue of its
structural eradication, or barring of the symbolic, although, of course, this barring is a
mythical construct, albeit with deadly consequences. In this sense, the west is a deculturing
force that has swept the globe, a process that has been referred to by Latouche (1989) as
‘the westernisation of the world’.
Sexual Difference
Positing sexual difference in terms of binaries utilizes a logic of
equivalence that reproduces the exact form of oppression the affirmative
wishes to eliminate.
Grace 2000—Senior Lecturer in Feminist Studies @ University of Canterbury at Christchurch
(Victoria, 2000, Routledge, “Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading,”
http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100724/20100724151252877.pdf, rmf)
In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard cites a brief dialogue from ‘a modern novel’ (not
referenced) where one character says ‘so ultimately, why are there two sexes?’ And the
second character replies, ‘what are you complaining about? Do you want twelve of them or
just one?’ (SE&D: 118). He uses this dialogue to point to the absurdity of the concept of
numbers of sexes. Whether we are referring to Laqueur’s one-sex model or two-sex model, the
question of difference is predicated on the assumption of the one, against which more
like it can be added, or those not like it can be differentiated. To use Baudrillard’s example,
we can logically ask ‘why not six fingers on each hand?’ Such a question assumes a unit
which can be multiplied; which can be added to hypothetically, relying on a standard
against which relations of equivalence can be ascertained. Sex , he claims (understood
radically), simply does not have a calculable status. The two sexes – again, understood
radically – cannot be added together, nor can they become part of a series; nor again are they
terms of a dualism. To articulate sexual difference in terms of ‘numbers’ (two sexes as
versions of one sex; the one-sex model) or in terms of a binary opposition (two sexes as the
one that is incommensurably different from the other; the two-sex model), either way the
construct is reliant on a standard against which relations of equivalence and difference
can be asserted in accordance with a binary logic . This , according to Baudrillard, is
precisely how sexual difference is constructed within the modern western cultural
tradition . Thus Baudrillard’s concept of sexual ambivalence traversing every subject
cannot be understood in terms of a ‘bisexuality’; not in terms of a calculus of two in one.
Feminist theorists, particularly recently and in many different ways, have pointed to the
problem of binary logic , of logocentrism (to use Derrida’s term), or of phallocentrism
implicit in a semiological structure that posits the dichotomous terms of the one and the
different from (identity/ difference) as the male and the female; the masculine and the
feminine. What Baudrillard’s analysis forces us to consider is that this structure cannot be
understood only in semiological and psychoanalytic terms, nor can it be confronted
only in terms of deconstruction, reinventing language, and reconfiguring the
unconscious , by whatever means. These latter strategies are blind to the role of the
code , to the role of the economic structuration of that codification in sustaining and
reproducing this binary logic. Baudrillard’s argument leads us to problematise not only the
format of the coding of language and value, but the role of the codification itself.
University
The university is dead. The affirmative’s attempt to use educational spaces
as a means of politics reproduces power and regenerates the fiction of
knowledge. Only by allowing the university to rot can we inject death into
the system.
Baudrillard 81 ~Jean, “Simulacra and Simulation” 1981, p. 143 - 146
The university is in ruins: nonfunctional in the social arenas of the market and
employment, lacking cultural substance or an end purpose of knowledge .¶ 143¶ Strictly
speaking, there is no longer even any power: it is also in ruins. Whence the impossibility of the return of the
fires of 1968: of the return of putting in question knowledge versus power itself - the explosive contradiction of
knowledge and power (or the revelation of their collusion, which comes to the same
thing) in the university, and, at the same time, through symbolic (rather than political)
contagion in the whole institutional and social order. Why sociologists? marked this shift: the impasse of
knowledge, the vertigo of nonknowledge (that is to say at once the absurdity and the impossibility of accumulating value in the order
of knowledge) turns like an absolute weapon against power itself, in order to dismantle it according to the same vertiginous scenario
Today it cannot be achieved since power itself, after
knowledge, has taken off, has become ungraspable - has dispossessed itself. In a now
uncertain institution, without knowledge content, without a power structure (except for
an archaic feudalism that turns a simulacrum of a machine whose destiny escapes it and
whose survival is as artificial as that of barracks and theaters), offensive irruption is
of dispossession. This is the May 1968 effect.
impossible . Only what precipitates rotting, by accentuating the parodic, simulacral side
of dying games of knowledge and power, has meaning.¶ A strike has exactly the
opposite effect. It regenerates the ideal of a possible university: the fiction of an
ascension on everyone's part to a culture that is unlocatable, and that no longer has
meaning . This ideal is substituted for the operation of the university as its critical
alternative, as its therapy. This fiction still dreams of a permanency and democracy of
knowledge. Besides, everywhere today the Left plays this role: it is the justice of the Left
that reinjects an idea of justice, the necessity of logic and social morals into a rotten
apparatus that is coming undone, which is losing all conscience of its legitimacy and
renounces functioning almost of its own volition. It is the Left that secrets and
desperately reproduces power, because it wants power, and therefore the Left believes in
it and revives it precisely where the system puts an end to it. The system puts an end one by one to all
its axioms, to all its institutions, and realizes one by one all the objectives of the historical and revolutionary Left that sees itself
constrained to revive the wheels of capital¶ 144¶ in order to lay seige to them one day: from private property to the small business,
from the army to national grandeur, from puritan morality to petit bourgeois culture, justice at the university - everything
that
is disappearing, that the system itself, in its atrocity, certainly, but also in its irreversible
impulse, has liquidated, must be conserved.¶ Whence the paradoxical but necessary
inversion of all the terms of political analysis .¶ Power (or what takes its place) no longer
believes in the university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone for the shelter and surveillance of a whole class
of a certain age, it therefore has only to select - it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other means. Diplomas are worthless:
why would it refuse to award them, in any case it is ready to award them to everybody;
why this provocative politics, if not in order to crystallize energies on a fictive stake
(selection, work, diplomas, etc.), on
an already dead and rotting referential?¶ By rotting, the
university can still do a lot of damage (rotting is a symbolic mechanism - not political but symbolic, therefore
subversive for us). But for this to be the case it is necessary to start with this very rotting, and
not to dream of resurrection . It is necessary to transform this rotting into a violent
process, into violent death, through mockery and defiance, through a multiplied
simulation that would offer the ritual of the death of the university as a model of
decomposition to the whole of society, a contagious model of the disaffection of a whole
social structure, where death would finally make its ravages, which the strike tries
desperately to avert, in complicity with the system, but succeeds, on top of it all, only in
transforming the university into a slow death, a delay that is not even the possible site of
a subversion, of an offensive reversion.¶ That is what the events of May 1968 produced. At a less advanced
point in the process of the liquefaction of the university and of culture, the students, far from wishing to save the
furniture (revive the lost object, in an ideal mode), retorted by confronting power with the
challenge of the total, immediate death of the institution, the challenge of a¶ 145¶ deterritorialization
even more intense than the one that came from the system, and by summoning power to respond to this total derailment of the
institution of knowledge, to this total lack of a need to gather in a given place, this death desired in the end - not the crisis of the
university, that is not a challenge, on the contrary, it is the game of the system, but the death of the university - to that challenge,
power has not been able to respond, except by its own dissolution in return (only for a moment maybe, but we saw it).
Deleuze
The affirmative’s notion of desire follows the flow of modern capital—it
turns desire into an exchangeable commodity whereby death becomes the
object of our desire.
Grace 2000—Senior Lecturer in Feminist Studies @ University of Canterbury at Christchurch
(Victoria, 2000, Routledge, “Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading,”
http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100724/20100724151252877.pdf, rmf)
Baudrillard claims that the similarities between Foucault’s ‘new’ version of power and
Deleuze’s desire are not accidental. They can be readily understood within the social,
historical milieu in which they took, or are taking, shape. According to Baudrillard, desire , in
Deleuze’s terms, is not to be understood through lack or interdiction, but through the
positive deployment of flows and intensities; a positive dissemination, ‘purged of all
negativity’. Desire is ‘a network, a rhizome, a contiguity diffracted ad infinitum’ (FF: 17–18).
Desire is productive, as power is productive, and in Baudrillard’s analysis, the same concerns
must be raised. Earlier, in the discussion of Braidotti’s engagement with Deleuze’s concept of
desire, I raised a question about the nomadic desiring subject embraced by Braidotti as
potentially emancipatory, asking whether this might rather be a concept of desire and
subjectivity that is in fact complicit with the contemporary construct of value and
consumerism. Baudrillard is very clear about it: This compulsion towards liquidity, flow,
and an accelerated circulation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is
the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity
and any fixed point must disappear ; the chain of investments and reinvestments must
never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction . (FF: 25) Rather than
discovering the truth of the body through this productive, positive liberation of libidinal
energy expressed and advocated in Deleuze’s writing, it is , in Baudrillard’s analysis,
simply unearthing the ‘psychic metaphor of capital’. Deleuze, through his critique of
psychoanalysis, instantiates the axiomatic of desire in a parallel form to Foucault’s instantiation
of the inevitability of power in his critical distance from Marx. In Forget Foucault, Baudrillard’s
attention is understandably drawn to what he calls the convergence of ‘the purified axioms of
Marxism and psychoanalysis’ in the catchword of the ‘productivity of desire’. Desire annexed to
production neatly eradicates seduction, meaning, again in a parallel form to power, that
sexuality is everywhere at precisely the moment it is nowhere. Desire in its positive, productive
formulation functions differently from desire manifested through loss, or lack. It becomes
‘negotiable’ in terms of signs which are exchanged in terms of phallic values, ‘indexed on a
general phallic equivalent where each party operates in accordance with a contract and
converts its own enjoyment into cash in terms of a phallic accumulation: a perfect situation
for a political economy of desire’ (SE&D: 103).
The implications of Baudrillard’s arguments regarding the positioning of ‘the feminine’ in relation
to contemporary discourses on ‘sexuality’ and ‘desire’, as these are explored in Symbolic
Exchange and Death, will be discussed in Chapter 5 in conjunction with his book Seduction. My
main purpose here is to foreground the critique of the productivity of desire in Deleuze, with its
implications for feminist engagement with this theoretical notion. Further to this purpose, it is
useful at this point to outline Baudrillard’s related thoughts on psychoanalysis, and ‘the subject’
of psychoanalytic theory. Baudrillard refers to the place of psychoanalysis in contemporary
theory in three interviews in Mike Gane’s collection (1993), conducted around 1983–5. Another
mention in a 1991 interview shows how his view shows no signs of weakening, and given the
analysis of desire discussed above, this is not surprising. ‘Psychoanalysis has become
useless, a burden’ was Baudrillard’s claim in 1984, and he goes on to say that in its more
recent, Lacanian-inspired renditions, psychoanalysis has spun itself into a ‘delirium of
conceptual production’ satisfying ‘a sort of dizziness for explanations’ (Gane 1993: 45);
and later he refers to an escalating technical sophistication of the unconscious resulting
in ‘a kind of ecstasy of psychoanalysis’ (Gane 1993: 83). His observations lead him to
express the view that for all this, psychoanalysis in France has lost its glamour and fascination:
‘the word “psychoanalysis” has very rapidly and strikingly lost its impact. It no longer has at all
that authority and omnipotence that it once had’ (1993: 59); indeed, ‘there has been an
extraordinary winding-down’, it has ‘fallen flat’, it ‘doesn’t interest us anymore . . . [t]hat’s for
sure’ (p. 83). Baudrillard acknowledges that the theoretical schools continue to produce their
analyses and that the practitioners continue to practise, but his view is that, although the
subtlety increases, the dubiousness of the point of it all increases at a parallel rate. As Sylvere
Lotringer observed (Gane 1993: 101), Baudrillard could have written a parallel to his Mirror of
Production, as a Mirror of Desire. He didn’t develop his critique of Freudian psychoanalysis in a
text devoted to such a project, because he felt it would be useless to engage in such a ‘frontal
attack’. The ideology of desire has to fall into its own trap ; its demise has to run its own
course. The view expressed in these interviews needs to be understood through his critical
analysis of the discourse on the unconscious and ‘the lost object’ as this critique appears in a
number of references in Symbolic Exchange and Death, and to a lesser extent in Forget
Foucault. I have referred a number of times to ‘the strategy of the real’, a phrase that
Baudrillard himself uses, postulating an historical social process whereby ‘reality’ is
produced through a dichotomous separation of subject and object, and of the
subject/object (referent) and its representation. An identity of the subject and of the object is
made meaningful through a series of exclusions. Thus ‘reality’ cannot be divorced from its
excluded imaginary, which is attached to it like a shadow; hence the conscious subject is ‘real’
with its inevitable unconscious, its fascination with the imaginary. Baudrillard argues that the
‘strategy of the real’ produces the positivity of the object and the conscious subject, but it
equally produces the phantasm of the irreversible unconscious cast in terms of repression, and
the forever missing ‘lost object’. This is the dual structure of this strategy, of ‘reality’, a strategy
which is itself the phantasm of psychoanalysis. Although a social order of economic exchange
structurally excludes or bars symbolic exchange as an organising principle, the assumption of
an irreversible logic of the economic, as pure positivity, is ceaselessly haunted by symbolic
reversion. Psychoanalysis, in complete contrast to empiricist forms of psychology, gravitates
towards this haunting. But although psychoanalysis, in its nascent form, was attracted to the
shadow side of a metaphysics of presence, or substance, Baudrillard argues that it has ended
up by repelling the symbolic. It ‘fends it off’. It is not, however, just a matter of excluding the
symbolic. At the same time as the symbolic is repelled, psychoanalysis seeks to contain it by
circumscribing it within an individual unconscious, and by doing so reduces it to the obsessional
fear of castration, under the Law of the Father (SE&D: 1). Baudrillard portrays a view of the
entire movement of western history being compulsively drawn to a realism, a fascination with
the real, that is predicated on this rather pitiful figure of castration.17 A preoccupation with
castration in psychoanalytic theory ostensibly concerns itself with restoring the ‘reality’ of
castration (and with it the ‘grounds of the real’) through a ‘conscious’ recognition of the
imaginary, of unconscious processes. But in Baudrillard’s analysis this ‘eyeing up the void’ does
not actually result in a recognition of castration, does not lead to a de-essentialising of a
determined resolve to fetishise the real or to gain insight into our role in believing we can say it
all, believing we can represent the real in its phantasised totality. On the contrary, this
preoccupation with castration in psychoanalysis leads to establishing a plethora of phallic alibis
which are then dismissed one by one in elaborate deconstructive lourishes, again ostensibly to
uncover the ‘truth’ of castration, but which in fact lead over and over again to a denial of
castration (see SE&D: 110). Earlier in this chapter I referred to the way meanings circulate
within societies of symbolic exchange, how signs already reversed and sacrificed cannot be
understood within a logic of representation and/or accumulation. Such signs, or symbols, have
no ‘unconscious’, no underside. Exchange takes place with no ‘hallucination of reality’ and
therefore with no phantasmatic imaginary. Baudrillard refers to an excerpt from a 1969 text by
Ortigues (Oedipe Africain) to demonstrate the absurdity of attempting to understand ‘individual
subjectivity’ in a tribal social world in terms of the oedipal complex. In a society of people where
life and death are reciprocally exchanged, to ‘kill one’s father’ is simply not possible. It is worth
quoting at least a part of the citation: In a society under the sway of ancestral law, it is
impossible for the individual to kill the father, since, according to the customs of the Ancients,
the father is always already dead and always still living . . . To take the father’s death upon
oneself or to individualise the moral consciousness by reducing paternal authority to that of a
mortal, a substitutable person separable from the ancestral altar and from ‘custom’, would be to
leave the group, to remove oneself from the basis of tribal society. (cited in SE&D: 135)
Baudrillard’s point is that in such a society the collective movement of exchanges cannot
be understood to be articulated through the Law of the Father, or in terms of the individual
psychical reality principle. The very postulation of a modern, private, individualised
unconscious fails to become meaningful where no bar splits life from death, subject from
object, subject/object from sign. With this western, and modern, exclusion of death in the
assertion of the presence of life, of the subject, of consciousness, the unconscious
becomes a kind of accumulation of death not exchanged. Furthermore, Baudrillard adds
the observation that desire ‘invests’ the very separation of life and death . Death
becomes the object of a ‘perverse desire’ of a ‘subject’ subjected to the imperatives of a
conscious ego. We can now make more sense of Baudrillard’s rendition of the unconscious as
‘the psychic metaphor of capital’; as capital is the surplus not symbolically exchanged but
rendered positive in its cumulative productive logic, so the unconscious is the psychic
‘site’ for the piling up of that which is not reversed , w hich enables the production of the
present but finite subject haunted by its own death . As the strategy of the real flips into the
hyperreal, as capital floats free from its anchoring points of reference in use value and
some kind of standard of exchange value, as the dialectic implodes and value is coded into
the sign in its continually shifting differential relations, Baudrillard ironically notes that Foucault
had a point in not wanting to talk of ‘repression’: an anachronistic simulation model, no doubt.
Baudrillard concludes that Foucault’s ‘microphysics of power’ is best ‘forgotten’, dropped
because it leads nowhere and is a mere reflection on, or echo of, an ending or a disappearing.
Baudrillard then goes on to speculate on the finality of sexuality – what if it too were
disappearing? While psychoanalysis seemingly inaugurates the millenium [sic] of sex and
desire, it is perhaps what orchestrates it in full view before it disappears altogether. In a certain
way psychoanalysis puts an end to the unconscious and desire, just as Marxism put an end to
the class struggle, because it hypostatizes them and buries them in their theoretical project.
Alt
U/Q
The collapse of reality is either inevitable or has already happened – it’s
just a question of whether we try foolishly clinging on to it.
Baudrillard ’97 (Jean; “Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact” pg 15-18)
Andy Warhol
worked with any image available, in order to eliminate the imaginary and to
make a pure visual product of it. Unconditional simulacrum. Steve Miller (and all those who are
reprogramming the video-image, the scientific cliché and the synthesized image 'aestheti-cally') does exactly the opposite. They
make art with anti-art material. They use the machine to remake art. He (Warhol) is a machine. The
true technical metabolism is Warhol; Steve Miller only simulates the machine and he uses technique in order to make illusion.
Warhol gives us the very illusion of technique — technique as radical illusion — far superior today to that of painting. In this sense,
even a machine can become famous, and Warhol never aspired to anything but this mechanical celebrity, without consequence and
without trace. A photogenic celebrity simply related to the demand of everything, of every individual to be seen, and to be selected
and acknowledged. That is what Warhol does; he is only the agent for the ironic disappearance of things. He
is only the
medium for this huge publicity which the world makes for itself through technique,
through images, forcing our imagination to surrender, breaking the mirror that we are
holding up to it, hypocritically, in order to capture it for our profit. Through images,
through technical artefacts of all sorts, of which those of Warhol are the modern idealtype, it is the world that imposes its discontinuity on us, its fragmentation, its
stereophony, its artificial instantaneousness. Evidence of the Warhol machine, this extraordinary machine
filtering the material evidence of the world. Warhol's images are not banal because they reflect a banal
world, but because they result from the absence of any claim by the subject to be able to
interpret the world. They result from the elevation of the image to pure figuration, without
the least transfiguration. No transcendence any more, but a potentialization of the sign,
which, losing all natural signification, shines in the void with all its artificial splendour .
Warhol is the first to intro-duce modem fetishism, transaesthetic illusion, that of an image as such, without quality, a presence
without desire. But what are modem artists doing, anyway? The artists of the Renaissance believed that they were making religious
Are our modern artists, who believe they are producing
artworks, not doing something completely different? Could it be that the objects they
produce are something completely different from art? Fetish-objects for example, but
disenchanted ones, purely decorative objects (Roger Caillois would say: hyperbolic orna-ments). Objects that
pictures while in fact they were creating artworks.
are literally superstitious in the sense that they no longer assume the sublime nature of art nor a belief in art, but which nevertheless
keep the idea and superstition of art alive. The same process as sexual fetishism, which is itself sexually disinvolved. The fetishist
denies both the reality of sex and sexual pleasure. He doesn't believe in sex, only in the idea of sex (which itself of course is
asexual). In the same way we
no longer believe in art, but only in the idea of art (which for itself of
course is not aesthetic, but ideological). This is why art, being nothing more than an idea, is now working on
ideas. The bottle rack of Duchamp is an idea; the Campbell's box by Warhol is an idea; Yves Klein selling air for a blank cheque in a
gallery, this is an idea. All these are ideas, signs, allusions, concepts. This no longer means anything at all; but it signifies anyway.
What we call art today seems to witness an unavoidable void. Art is tranvested by ideas, and ideas are tranvested by art. It's our
form of transexuality, of trans-vestism enlarged to the whole field of art and culture. Equally tran-sexual are those kinds of art
crossed by an idea, crossed by the empty signs of art, and by the signs of their own disappearance. All
modern art is
abstract in the sense that it is crossed by the idea far more than it is crossed by the
imagination of forms and substances. All modern art is conceptual in the sense that it
fetishizes the concept, the stereotype of a cerebral model of art, exactly as that which is
fetishized in merchandise is not the real value, but an abstract stereotype of value.
Dedicated to this fetishist and decorative ideology, art no longer has an existence of its own. In this sense we might say that we
are on the way to the disappearance of art as a specific activity. This may lead us either
to a reversion of art into technique and pure artisanal quality, possibly transferred into
the sphere of electronics, as we can see every-where today. Or towards a primary ritualism, where
everything will be used as an aesthetic gadget, and art will end up as universal kitsch,
Art as such may only have been
a parenthesis, a sort of ephemeral luxury of the species. The distressing thing is that this
crisis of art will probably last for ever. And the difference between Warhol and all those
who comfort themselves in this perpetual crisis is that with Warhol the crisis of art is
over and virtually obsolete. Is there still any aesthetic illusion? And if not, is the way open to a transaesthetic illusion?
exactly as religious art in its time ended up as Saint-Sulpicien kitsch. Who knows?
To a radical one, that of the secret, of seduction, of magic? Is there still, within our hypervisibility, transparence, virtu-ality, a place
for an image? A place for an enigma? A place for the real events of perception, a place for an effective power of illusion, a true
strategy of forms and appearances? Despite
the modern mythology of a liberation of forms, we must
say that forms and figures cannot be liberated, cannot be free. Our task is not to free
them, but to capture them, to make them relate to each other and to generate each other.
Objects whose secret is not in the 'centrifugal' expression of their representative form (or deformation), but on the contrary, in their
There are two ways of
achieving, of going beyond representation: either that of its endless deconstruction
where painting looks at itself dying, in a sort of umbilical nostalgia, always reflecting its
lost history. Or, simply to give up representation, forgetting all the trouble of
interpretation, forgetting the critical violence of sense and counter-sense, in order to join
the matrix of the appearance of things and the matrix of the distribution of forms. This is
the very form of illusion, the very concept of playing (illudere). Going beyond a form is to
pass from one form to another, whereas going beyond an idea is to negate the idea. This
second strategy defines the intellectual position of illusion and is often that of modern
painting's challenge to the world, whereas the former strategy exemplifies the very
principle of illusion for which there is no other destiny of form than the form itself. In this
attraction towards the centre and in their subsequent dispersion into the cycle of metamorphosis.
sense we must have illusionists who know that art and painting are illusion, and are as far from intellectual criticism as from
Illusionists who
know that all art is first a form of trompe-l'oeil, a 'life trick', just as all theory is a 'sense trick' — trompe-lesens, and that all painting, far from being an expressive version of the world, and thus
pretending to veracity, consists in setting up snares in which the supposed reality of the
world may be naive enough to become trapped. Just as theories do not consist of having
ideas (and thus of flirting with the truth), but consist of setting up traps into which meaning naively
falls. Of finding, in short, a form of fundamental seduction. A dimension beyond aesthetic illusion, which I
would call anthropological, in order to designate the generic function of designing the
world just as it appears to us long before it makes sense, long before it is interpreted or
represented, and long before it becomes real. Not the negative and superstitious illusion
of another world. But the positive illusion of this world, of the operatic scene of the
world, of the symbolic operation of the world, of the vital illusion of appearances about which Nietzsche spoke
— illusion as a primitive scene, acting and happening long before and much more
fundamentally than the aesthetic scene. The sphere of artefacts goes largely beyond art.
The realm of art and aesthetics is that of the conventional management of illusion, of a
con-vention that neutralizes the delirious effects of illusion, which neutral-izes illusion as
an extreme phenomenon. Aesthetics constitutes a sort of sublimation, a mastery of the
radical illusion of the world. Other cul-tures accepted the evidence of this original illusion by trying to deal with it in a
symbolic balance. We, the modern cultures, no longer believe in this illusion of the world, but in
its reality (which of course is the last and the worst of illusions). We have chosen to
exorcize this illusion through this civilized form of simulacrum, which we call the
aesthetic form. Illusion has no history. Aesthetic form has one. But because it has a
history it also has an end, and it may be now that we can see the fall, the failure, the
fading of this conditional font, of this aesthetic form of the simulacrum — in favour of the
unconditional simulacrum, that is, of the primitive scene of illusion, where we may join
aesthetics properly speaking (which already supposes a discrimination between the beautiful and the ugly).
again with the rituals and phantasmagories of symbolic cultures, and with the fatality of
the object.
Alt – trompe-l’oeil
Our method of art is trompe-l’oeil – reproducing illusion within supposedly
‘real’ objects like the 1AC ruptures their simulative politics.
Baudrillard ’97 (Jean; “Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact” pg 7-15; trompe-l'oeil = visual illusion in art, especially as used
to trick the eye into perceiving a painted detail as a three-dimensional object)
By contrast, trompe-l'oeil,
by taking away a dimension from real objects, highlights their
presence and their magic through the simple unreality of their minimal exactness.
Trompe-l'oeil is the ecstasy of the real object in its immanent form. It adds to the formal
charm of painting the spiritual charm of the lure, the mystification of the senses. For the
sublime is not enough, we must have the subtle too, the spirit which consists in
reversing the real in its very place. This is what we have unlearned from modernity —
subtraction is what gives strength; power emerges from the absence. We produce, we
accumulate. And because we can no more assume the symbolic mastery of absence we
are plunged today into the inverse illusion, the disenchanted proliferation of screens and
the profusion of images. It is very difficult to speak of painting today because it is very
difficult to see it. Because generally it no longer wants exactly to be looked at, but to be
absorbed visually without leaving any traces. In some way modem painting could be characterized as the
simplified aesthetic form of the impossible exchange. So that the best discourse about painting would be a
discourse where there is nothing to say, which would be the equivalent of a painting
where there is nothing to see. The equivalent of an object, the object of art, that isn't an object
any more. However, an object which isn't an object is not nothing. One becomes obsessed
by its immanence, its void and its immaterial presence. The problem is to materialize this
nothingness, at the very limit of the void, to trace the mark of this void, and within the
limits of indifference to play the game according to the mysterious rules of indifference.
Art is never the mechanical reflection of the positive or negative conditions of the world;
it is its exacerbated illusion or hyperbolic mirror. In a world ruled by indifference, art can
only add to this indifference, by focusing the void of the image or the object that isn't an
object any more. Thus the cinema of Wenders, Jarmusch, Antonioni, Altman, Godard or Warhol explores the
insignificance of the world through the image, and by its images contributes to the
insignificance of the world — they add to its real or hyperreal illusion. Whereas recent cinema like
that of the latest Scorsese, Greenaway, etc. with its high-tech machinery, and its frantic and eclectic agitation, only fills the void of
the image, and thus adds to our imaginary disillusion. Exactly like the Simulationists of New York who, by hypostasizing the
In many cases (Bad
Painting, New New Painting, installations and performances) painting denies itself, parodies itself, rejects
itself. Plasticized, vitrified, frozen excrement, or garbage. It does not even justify a
glance. It doesn't look at you, and so in turn you don't need to look at it; it is no longer
your concern. This painting has become completely indifferent to itself as painting, as
art, as illusion more powerful than the real. It doesn't believe any longer in its own
illusion, and so it falls into the simulation of itself and into derision. Abstraction was the great
simulacrum, are only hypostasizing painting itself as a simulacrum, as a machine defeating itself.
adventure of modern art. In its 'irruptive', primitive and original phase, whether expressionist or geometric, it was still part of an
heroic history of painting, of the deconstruction of rep-resentation and of the object. By volatilizing its object, the subject of painting
itself advanced towards the limits of its own disappearance. By contrast, the forms of contemporary abstraction (and this is true also
of the New Figuration) have passed beyond this revolutionary acting out, beyond this act of disappearance - they simply reflect the
undiffer-entiated field of our daily life, the banality of the images which have informed our social practices. The New Abstraction and
the New Figuration oppose each other only formally - in fact they both equally retrace the total disincarnation of our world, no longer
in its dramatic phase, but in its banal phase. The
abstraction of our world is a matter of fact now, when
all the art forms in an indifferent world are assigned to the same indifference. This is
neither denigration nor depreciation; it's simply the state of things. Authentic contemporary painting
has to be as indifferent to itself as the world is once the essential issues have vanished. Art is generally nothing more than the
metalanguage of banality. Can
this anti-dramatic simulation evolve or revolve, or last for ever?
Whatever forms it takes, we are already on the way towards the psychodrama of
disappearance and trans-parency. We must not be lured and trapped by a false continuity in art and the history of
art. To rephrase Benjamin, there is an aura of simulacrum - just as for him there was an aura of the original. There is an
authentic form of simulation as well as an inauthentic form of simulation. This may seem
paradoxical but it's true. When Warhol painted his Campbell Soups in the 1960s, this was a breakthrough for simulation, and for all
modern art. All at once the merchandise-object and the merchandise-sign were raised up to an ironical consecration, which is
indeed the only ritual left to us, the ritual of transparency. But when he painted the Soup Boxes in '86, he only reproduced the
stereotype of simulation. In '65 he attacked the concept of originality in an original way. In '86 he reproduced the unoriginal in an
unoriginal way. The year 1965 witnessed the aesthetic traumatism of the entry of merchandise into art - in short the geniality of
merchandise. The evil genie of merchandise raised a new geniality in art - the genie of simulation. Nothing of this in '86, when the
genie of advertising merely illustrated a new phase of merchandise. Once again official art fell back into the cynical and sentimental
aestheticization that Baudelaire stigmatized. Would it be any superior form of irony to do the same thing twenty years later? I don't
believe so. I believe in the evil genius of simulation, but I don't believe in its ghost. Or in its cadaver, even in stereo. I know that in
a few centuries there will be no difference between a real Pompeiian villa and the Paul
Getty museum in Malibu, nor any difference between the French Revolution and its
Olympic commemora-tion in Los Angeles in 1989, but we are still referring to this difference. Here is the
dilemma - either simulation is irreversible and there is nothing beyond simulation, in that
simulation isn't even an event any more, but is our absolute banality, our everyday
obscenity, so that we are now in definitive nihilism, awaiting the future rewriting of all
pre-existing forms and also waiting for another unforeseeable event - but from where will
it come? Or, on the other hand, there is an art of simulation, an ironic quality that evokes the
appearances of the world in order to let them vanish again. If not, art won't be anything other than
aesthetic harassment, as so often happens today. We must not add the same to the same, and then to the same again: that is poor
simulation. We
must expel the same from the same. Each image must take something away
from the reality of the world; in each image something must disappear. But this
disappearance must be a challenge, and that's the secret of art and seduction: it must
never totally succeed. In art - in contemporary art as well as in classical art - there is a double postulation and thus a
double strategy. A compulsion to nothingness and to erase all the traces of the world and reality, along with an inverse resistance to
this impulse. According to Michaux, the artist is 'he who resists with all his strength the fundamental impulse to leave no traces'.
A/T: Permtuation
Fem
DA to feminist theory perm—theories fundamentally incompatible
Grace 2000—Senior Lecturer in Feminist Studies @ University of Canterbury at Christchurch
(Victoria, 2000, Routledge, “Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading,”
http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100724/20100724151252877.pdf, rmf)
Suzanne Moore’s (1988) insistence that the ‘pimps of postmodernism’ (Baudrillard, Lacan,
Barthes, Lyotard) can’t see that women have ‘identities’ and ‘desires’, and their refusal to
see the obvious – that the notion of women’s lacking the possibility of identity and desire is
problematic to say the least – is a perfect entry point into a consideration of the limitations
of feminist theory when it comes to analysis of the symbolic , in Baudrillard’s terms. My
argument is not that feminism is inherently limited in this regard, but that the theoretical
standpoints adopted by many feminist theorists and commentators systematically sever
the possibility of thinking through Baudrillard’s very particular contribution . To follow
Moore’s concern, she exposes and opposes the presumed motives of those (especially
French and philosophical) blokes who seem to think there is something in the association
of the feminine with the realm of appearance, of lack, absence, seduction, the
masquerade (possibly even chaos and death), that is worth hanging on to. She calls them
‘pimps’ to point to an essentially exploitative relationship whereby their apparent
valorisation of the feminine, of ‘women’, thinly conceals what is better understood to be a desire
and resolve not only to ensure that the ‘other’ of the man, the masculine, stays firmly in its place
(thus ensuring his continued existence), but also that ‘he’ can make his postmodern excursions
into the world of the feminine, getting his ‘bit of the Other’. To use Gallop’s words in response to
Baudrillard: ‘a line if ever I heard one’ (Gallop 1987: 114) While I fully support the need to be
cautious and discerning when it comes to gendered investments, in particular theoretical
configurations, alternative ‘explanations’ need to be explored to avoid repeating exactly
the same pattern. In the case of Baudrillard, his intent is fairly unambiguous: to engage the
symbolic to critique the order of (a phallic) identity. Considering such a project, it quickly
becomes evident that the contemplation of that which is barred from the realm of a
codified identity – the symbolic – might potentially hold as much anxiety for women as
for men
Trans
DA to Perm (trans)
Grace 2000—Senior Lecturer in Feminist Studies @ University of Canterbury at Christchurch
(Victoria, 2000, Routledge, “Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading,”
http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100724/20100724151252877.pdf, rmf)
Transgender authors such as Whittle (guest editor of the ‘Transgendering’ issue of the Journal
of Gender Studies 1998) assert or observe that in their assessment, transgenderism is at
the cutting edge of radical politics. ‘Trans’ is ‘high on the new agenda of identity politics’
(Whittle 1998: 269). Nataf (1996) cites Baudrillard at the opening of a chapter on ‘the
postmodern lesbian body and transgender trouble’, clearly assuming that his words provide
support for Nataf’s contribution, missing the critique they so obviously represent. In accordance
with Baudrillard’s view, movements such as transgender and queer cannot be considered
to have the radical potential they purport. Said (1989) refers to Lyotard’s thesis that the two
great narratives of emancipation and enlightenment have lost their legitimising power.
According to Lyotard, they have been replaced by smaller, local narratives ‘based for their
legitimacy on performativity’, which Said describes as ‘the user’s ability to manipulate the
codes in order to get things done’ (p. 222). Said goes on to take issue with Lyotard’s
understanding of why this might be the case, but my point here is to draw attention to the link
made between the shift to the performative and the ‘smaller, local narratives’. Baudrillard
refers a number of times, particularly in Shadow of the Silent Majorities, to what he views as
the misguided understandings of those who consider the political stakes as revolving
around exalting ‘microdesires’ (p. 40), or ‘free[ing] libidinal energies, plural energies,
fragmentary intensities’ (p. 140 Hyperreal Genders 60); the stakes today, in his view, are
certainly not in any ‘molecular hodge-podge of desire-breaching minorities’ (p. 47). The critical
viewpoint presented in this chapter, based on an analysis of the work of Baudrillard, could not
be further apart from the stance taken by the transgendered authors considered here, a stance
they themselves also consider to be ‘critical’. Those advocating transgenderism as a radical
transgression of oppressive social processes of normative gendering do not ask how it
is that, contemporarily, their discourses of fluidity and multiplicity intersect with the
generalised proliferation of ‘trans’ traversing all spheres, and how their ‘politics’ might
be complicit with hegemonic trends . Butler’s concept of ‘performativity’ has contributed to
motivating critiques of gender that are assumed to be deconstructive and denaturalising of
gender. Baudrillard’s analysis, however, suggests that the question of the structural logic of
gender cannot be addressed by focusing solely on the sphere of semiotics. His critical
theoretical engagement with the principle of the ‘performative’ reveals that this principle is
indeed integral to simulation and sign value. ‘Gender trouble’ is exactly what one would
expect at this point in time according to the very logic of western hyperreality, and at
best little more than a smokescreen. Gabb (1998) hopes that we are moving towards a
‘Utopian space where transformation and “difference” is celebrated, without the
penalising loss of identity’ (p. 304). To Baudrillard, this is precisely symptomatic of this
era of simulation and relentless positivity, predicated on the radical exclusion of the
symbolic . The fate of such an era is encapsulated in the theorem of the accursed share:
‘anything that purges the accursed share in itself signs its own death warrant’ (TE: 106).
Chapter 5 will continue this discussion, focusing on seduction, reversion, and the significance of
the ‘accursed share’.
Spirit of Terrorism K
1NC Shell
The affirmative’s reconciliation terrorism is a move to incorporate it into
the growing orgy of Otherness. This suspends the defining characteristic
of the Other—terror. It reduces the Other to a knowable entity and strips
terrorism of its symbolic power.
Baudrillard 06 (Jean, 2006, “The Melodrama of Difference (Or, The Revenge of the
Colonized),” translated by James Benedict, rmf) *edited for gendered language
We are engaged in an orgy of discovery, exploration and “invention” of the Other. An
orgy of differences. We are procurers of encounter, pimps of interfacing and interactivity. Once
we get beyond the mirror of alienation (beyond the mirror stage that was the joy of our
childhood), structural differences multiply ad infinitum – in fashion, in mores, in culture. Crude
otherness, hard otherness – the otherness of race, of madness, of poverty – are done
with. Otherness, like everything else, has fallen under the law of the market , the law of
supply and demand. It has become a rare item – hence its immensely high value on the
psychological stock exchange, on the structural stock exchange. Hence too the intensity of
the ubiquitous simulation of the Other. This is particularly striking in science fiction, where
the chief question is always “What is the Other? Where is the Other?” Of course science fiction
is merely a reflection of our everyday universe , which is in thrall to a wild speculation on
– almost a black market in – otherness and difference. A veritable obsession with ecology
extends from Indian reservations to house-hold pets (otherness degree zero!) – not to mention
the other of “the other scene”, or the other of the unconscious (our last symbolic capital, and
one we had better look after, because reserves are not limitless). Our sources of otherness
are indeed running out; we have exhausted the Other as raw material . (According to
Claude Gilbert, we are so desperate that we go digging through the rubble of earthquakes and
catastrophes.) Consequently the other is all of a sudden no longer there to be
extermi-nated, hated, rejected or seduced, but instead to be understood, liberated,
coddled, recognized. In addition to the Rights of [Hum]an, we now also need the Rights of
the Other. In a way we already have these, in the shape of a universal Right to be Different.
For the orgy is also an orgy of political and psychological comprehension of the other –
even to the point of resurrecting the other in places where the other is no longer to be
found. Where the Other was, there has the Same come to be. And where there is no longer
anything, there the Other must come to be. We are no longer living the drama of otherness.
We are living the psychodrama of otherness, just as we are living the psychodrama of
“sociality”, the psycho­drama of sexuality, the psychodrama of the body – and the melodrama of
all the above, courtesy of analytic metadiscourses. Otherness has become socio--dramatic,
semio-dramatic, melodramatic. All we do in psychodrama – the psychodrama of contacts,
of psychological tests, of interfacing – is acrobatically simulate and dramatize the
absence of the other . Not only is otherness absent everywhere in this artificial
drama-turgy, but the subject has also quietly become indifferent to his [or her] own
subjecti-vity, to his [or her] own alienation, just as the modern political animal has become
indifferent to his [or her] own political opinions. This subject becomes transparent, spectral
(to borrow Marc Guillaume's word) – and hence interactive. For in interactivity the subject is
the other to no one. Inasmuch as he is indifferent to himself, it is as though he had been reified
alive – but without his double, without his shadow, without his other. Having paid this price, the
subject becomes a candidate for all possible combinations, all possible connections. The
interactive being is therefore born not through a new form of exchange but through
the disappearance of the social, the disappearance of otherness . This being is the other
after the death of the Other – not the same other at all: the other that results from the
denial of the Other. The only interaction involved, in reality, belongs to the medium
alone: to the machine become invisible. Mechanical automata still played on the differ-ence
between [hu]man and machine, and on the charm of this difference – something with which
today's interactive and simulating automata are no longer concerned. [Hum]an and machine
have become isomorphic and indifferent to each other: neither is other to the other. The
computer has no other. That is why the computer is not intelligent. Intelligence comes to us
from the other – always. That is why computers perform so well. Champions of mental
arithmetic and idiots savants are autistic – minds for which the other does not exist and which,
for that very reason, are endowed with strange powers. This is the strength, too, of the
integrated circuit (the power of thought-transference might also be considered in this
connection). Such is the power of abstraction. Machines work more quickly because they
are unlinked to any otherness. Networks connect them up to one another like an immense
umbilical cord joining one intelligence and its twin. Homeostasis between one and the same: all
otherness has been confiscated by the machine.
We control the direction of case solvency. The fundamental tenets of
universality have been overtaken and undone by globalization. The
violence of the global persists in its place, reduces the role of the
intellectual to nothing, and promotes exclusion. It has emptied rights,
democracy, and freedom of meaning. This will continue absent the
singularity of resistance that is terrorism.
Baudrillard 03 (Jean, 5/20/03, “The Violence of the Global,” translated by François Debrix,
rmf)
Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or
fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization. To identify its main
features, it is necessary to perform a brief genealogy of globalization, particularly of its
relationship to the singular and the universal. The analogy between the terms "global" [2] and
"universal" is misleading. Universalization has to do with human rights, liberty, culture, and
democracy. By contrast, globalization is about technology, the market, tourism, and
information. Globalization appears to be irreversible whereas universalization is likely to
be on its way out. At least, it appears to be retreating as a value system which developed in
the context of Western modernity and was unmatched by any other culture. Any culture that
becomes universal loses its singularity and dies. That's what happened to all those cultures
we destroyed by forcefully assimilating them. But it is also true of our own culture, despite its
claim of being universally valid. The only difference is that other cultures died because of
their singularity, which is a beautiful death. We are dying because we are losing our own
singularity and exterminating all our values. And this is a much more ugly death. We
believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really
assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is
instead a downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment,
universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast,
universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to
reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights,
democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression.
Universalization is vanishing because of globalization . The globalization of exchanges
puts an end to the universalization of values. This marks the triumph of a uniform thought
[3] over a universal one. What is globalized is first and foremost the market, the profusion
of exchanges and of all sorts of products, the perpetual flow of money. Culturally,
globalization gives way to a promiscuity of signs and values, to a form of pornography in
fact. Indeed, the global spread of everything and nothing through networks is
pornographic. No need for sexual obscenity anymore. All you have is a global interactive
copulation. And, as a result of all this, there is no longer any difference between the global
and the universal. The universal has become globalized, and human rights circulate
exactly like any other global product (oil or capital for example). The passage from the
universal to the global has given rise to a constant homogenization, but also to an endless
fragmentation. Dislocation, not localization, has replaced centralization. Excentricism, not
decentralization, has taken over where concentration once stood. Similarly, discrimination
and exclusion are not just accidental consequences of globalization, but rather
globalization's own logical outcomes. In fact, the presence of globalization makes us
wonder whether universalization has not already been destroyed by its own critical
mass. It also makes us wonder whether universality and modernity ever existed outside of
some official discourses or some popular moral sentiments. For us today, the mirror of our
modern universalization has been broken. But this may actually be an opportunity. In
the fragments of this broken mirror, all sorts of singularities reappear . Those
singularities we thought were endangered are surviving, and those we thought were lost
are revived. As universal values lose their authority and legitimacy, things become more
radical. When universal beliefs were introduced as the only possible culturally mediating
values, it was fairly easy for such beliefs to incorporate singularities as modes of differentiation
in a universal culture that claimed to champion difference. But they cannot do it anymore
because the triumphant spread of globalization has eradicated all forms of differentiation
and all the universal values that used to advocate difference. In so doing, globalization
has given rise to a perfectly indifferent culture . From the moment when the universal
disappeared, an omnipotent global techno-structure has been left alone to dominate. But
this techno-structure now has to confront new singularities that, without the presence of
universalization to cradle them, are able to freely and savagely expand. History gave
universalization its chance. Today though, faced with a global order without any alternative on
the one hand and with drifting insurrectionary singularities on the other, the concepts of
liberty, democracy, and human rights look awful. They remain as the ghosts of
universalization past. Universalization used to promote a culture characterized by the
concepts of transcendence, subjectivity, conceptualization, reality, and representation. By
contrast, today's virtual global culture has replaced universal concepts with screens,
networks, immanence, numbers, and a space-time continuum without any depth. [4] In
the universal, there was still room for a natural reference to the world, the body, or the
past. There was a sort of dialectical tension or critical movement that found its materiality in
historical and revolutionary violence. But the expulsion of this critical negativity opened the
door to another form of violence, the violence of the global. This new violence is
characterized by the supremacy of technical efficiency and positivity, total organization,
integral circulation, and the equivalence of all exchanges. Additionally, the violence of the
global puts an end to the social role of the intellectual (an idea tied to the Enlightenment
and universalization), but also to the role of the activist whose fate used to be tied to the
ideas of critical opposition and historical violence.
The affirmative’s attempt to “embrace terrorism” reinscribes the epistemic
logic that the terrorist can be domesticated which nullifies the radical
alterity of the terrorist and upholds the same logic of domination they
criticize. Vote negative to affirm the spirit of terrorism.
Baudrillard 1
/Jean, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/the-spirit-ofterrorism/
No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction, not even for perverse effects . It is
very logically, and inexorably, that the (literally: "rise to power of power") exacerbates a will to destroy it. And power is
complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of
the kamikazes by their own suicide. It has been said: "God cannot declare war on Itself". Well, It can. The West, in its God-like
position (of divine power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war on itself.
Numerous disaster movies are witness to this phantasm, which they obviously exorcise through images and submerge under
special effects. But the universal attraction these movies exert, as pornography does, shows how (this phantasm's) realization is
always close at hand -- the impulse to deny any system being all the stronger if such system is close to perfection or absolute
supremacy.
It is even probable that the terrorists (like the experts!) did not anticipate the collapse of the Twin Towers, which was, far more than
(the attack of) the Pentagon, the deepest symbolic shock. The symbolic collapse of a whole system is due to an unforeseen
complicity, as if, by collapsing (themselves), by suiciding, the towers had entered the game to complete the event.
In a way, it is the entire system that, by its internal fragility, helps the initial action. The
more the system is globally concentrated to constitute ultimately only one network, the
more it becomes vulnerable at a single point (already one little Filipino hacker has succeeded, with his laptop,
to launch the I love you virus that wrecked entire networks). Here, eighteen (dix-huit in the text) kamikazes, through the absolute
arm that is death multiplied by technological efficiency, start a global catastrophic process.
When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one deals with this
formidable condensation of all functions through technocratic machinery and absolute
ideological hegemony (pensee unique), what other way is there, than a terrorist reversal
of the situation (literally 'transfer of situation': am I too influenced by early translation as 'reversal'?)? It is the system itself
that has created the objective conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards to itself, it forces the
Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious. To a
system whose excess of power creates an unsolvable challenge, terrorists respond by a
definitive act that is also unanswerable (in the text: which cannot be part of the exchange circuit). Terrorism
is an act that reintroduces an irreducible singularity in a generalized exchange system .
Any singularity (whether species, individual or culture), which has paid with its death for
the setting up of a global circuit dominated by a single power, is avenged today by this
terrorist situational transfer.
No ideology, no
cause, not even an Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror. It
Terror against terror -- there is no more ideology behind all that. We are now far from ideology and politics.
(energy) does not aim anymore to change the world, it aims (as any heresy in its time) to
radicalize it through sacrifice, while the system aims to realize (the world) through force .
Terrorism, like virus, is everywhere. Immersed globally, terrorism, like the shadow of any
system of domination, is ready everywhere to emerge as a double agent. There is no
boundary to define it; it is in the very core of this culture that fights it - and the visible schism (and
hatred) that opposes, on a global level, the exploited and the underdeveloped against the Western world, is secretly linked to the
internal fracture of the
dominant system. The latter can face any visible antagonism. But with
terrorism -- and its viral structure --, as if every domination apparatus were creating its
own antibody, the chemistry of its own disappearance; against this almost automatic
reversal of its own puissance, the system is powerless . And terrorism is the shockwave of this silent
reversal.
Thus, it is no shock of civilizations, of religions, and it goes much beyond Islam and America, on which one attempts to focus the
conflict to give the illusion of a visible conflict and of an attainable solution (through force). It
certainly is a fundamental
antagonism, but one which shows, through the spectrum of America (which maybe by itself the
epicentre but not the embodiment of globalization) and through the spectrum of Islam (which is conversely not the
embodiment of terrorism), triumphant globalization fighting with itself. In this way it is indeed a World War, not
the third one, but the fourth and only truly World War, as it has as stakes globalization itself. The first two World Wars were classic
wars. The first ended European supremacy and the colonial era. The second ended Nazism. The third, which did happen, as a
dissuasive Cold War, ended communism. From one war to the other, one went further each time toward a unique world order.
Today the latter, virtually accomplished, is confronted by antagonistic forces, diffused in the very heart of the global, in all its actual
convulsions. Fractal war in which all cells, all singularities revolt as antibodies do. It is a conflict so unfathomable that, from time to
time, one must preserve the idea of war through spectacular productions such as the Gulf (production) and today Afghanistan's. But
the fourth World War is elsewhere. It is that which haunts every global order, every hegemonic domination; -if
Islam
dominated the world, terrorism would fight against it. For it is the world itself which
resists domination.
Terrorism is immoral. The event of the World Trade Center, this symbolic challenge is immoral, and it answers a globalization that is
immoral. Then let us be immoral ourselves and, if we want to understand something, let
us go somewhat beyond
Good and Evil. As we have, for once, an event that challenges not only morals, but every
interpretation, let us try to have the intelligence of Evil. The crucial point is precisely there: in this
total counter-meaning to Good and Evil in Western philosophy, the philosophy of
Enlightenment. We naively believe that the progress of the Good, its rise in all domains
correspond to a defeat of Evil. Nobody seems to
understand that Good and Evil rise simultaneously, and in the same movement. The
triumph of the One does not produce the erasure of the Other. Metaphysically, one considers Evil as
(sciences, techniques, democracy, human rights)
an accident, but this axiom, embedded in all manichean fights of Good against Evil, is illusory. Good does not reduce Evil, nor viceversa: there are both irreducible, and inextricable from each other. In
fact, Good could defeat Evil only by
renouncing itself, as by appropriating a global power monopoly, it creates a response of
proportional violence.
In the traditional universe, there was still a balance of Good and Evil, according to a dialectical relation that more or less insured
tension and equilibrium in the moral universe; - a little as in the Cold War, the face-to-face of the two powers insured an equilibrium
of terror. Thus, there was no supremacy of one on the other. This symmetry is broken as soon as there is a total extrapolation of the
Good (an hegemony of the positive over any form of negativity, an exclusion of death, of any potential adversarial force: the
absolute triumph of the Good). From there, the equilibrium is broken, and it is as if Evil regained an invisible autonomy, developing
then in exponential fashion.
Keeping everything in proportion, it is more or less what happened in the political order
with the erasure of communism and the global triumph of liberal power: a fantastical
enemy appeared, diffused over the whole planet, infiltrating everywhere as a virus,
surging from every interstice of power. Islam. But Islam is only the moving front of the crystallization of this
antagonism. This antagonism is everywhere and it is in each of us. Thus, terror against
terror... But asymmetrical terror... And this asymmetry leaves the global superpower
totally disarmed. Fighting itself, it can only founder in its own logic of power relations,
without being able to play in the field of symbolic challenge and death, as it has
eliminated the latter from its own culture .
Until now this integrating power had mostly succeeded to absorb every crisis, every negativity, creating therefore a deeply hopeless
situation (not only for the damned of the earth, but for the rich and the privileged too, in their radical comfort). The fundamental event
is that terrorists have finished with empty suicides; they now organize their own death in offensive and efficient ways, according to a
strategic intuition, that is the intuition of the immense fragility of their adversary, this system reaching its quasi perfection and thus
vulnerable to the least spark. They
succeeded in making their own death the absolute arm against
a system that feeds off the exclusion of death, whose ideal is that of zero death. Any
system of zero death is a zero sum system . And all the means of dissuasion and
destruction are powerless against an enemy who has already made his death a counteroffensive.
"What of American bombings! Our men want to die as much as Americans want to live!" This explains the
asymmetry of 7, 000 deaths in one blow against a system of zero death.
Therefore, here, death
is the key (to the game) not only the brutal irruption of death in direct,
in real time, but also the irruption of a more-than-real death: symbolic and sacrificial
death - the absolute, no appeal event.
This is the spirit of terrorism.
Never is it to attack the system through power relations. This belongs to the
revolutionary imaginary imposed by the system itself, which survives by ceaselessly bringing those who
oppose it to fight in the domain of the real, which is always its own. But (it) moves the fight into the symbolic
domain, where the rule is the rule of challenge, of reversal, of escalation. Thus, death can be
answered only though an equal or superior death. (Terrorism) challenges the system by a gift that the
latter can reciprocate only through its own death and its own collapse.
The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself suicides in response to the multiple
challenges of death and suicide. Neither the system, nor power, themselves escape
symbolic obligation -and in this trap resides the only chance of their demise (catastrophe). In
this vertiginous cycle of the impossible exchange of death, the terrorist death is an
infinitesimal point that provokes a gigantic aspiration, void and convection. Around this minute
point, the whole system of the real and power gains in density, freezes, compresses, and
sinks in its own super-efficacy. The tactics of terrorism are to provoke an excess of reality
and to make the system collapse under the weight of this excess. The very derision of the situation,
as well as all the piled up violence of power, flips against it, for terrorist actions are both the magnifying
mirror of the system's violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it cannot
access, the only violence it cannot exert: that of its own death.
This is why all this visible power cannot react against the minute, but symbolic death of a
few individuals.
2NC/1NR Material
2NC Link
Terror exists in the absence of globalization. The affirmative’s absorption
of radical Otherness banishes it to symbolic limbo where it’s potential is
annihilated.
Baudrillard 06 (Jean, 2006, “The Melodrama of Difference (Or, The Revenge of the
Colonized),” translated by James Benedict, rmf)
Differences mean regulated exchange. But what is it that introduces disorder into exchange?
What is it that cannot be negotiated over? What is it that has no place in the contract, or in the
structural interaction of differences? What is founded on the impossibility of exchange?
Wherever exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror . Any radical otherness at
all is thus the epicenter of a terror: the terror that such otherness holds, by virtue of its
very existence, for the normal world. And the terror that this world exercises upon that
otherness in order to annihilate it . Over recent centuries all forms of violent otherness
have been incorporated , willingly or under threat of force, into a discourse of difference
which simulta-neously implies inclusion and exclusion, recognition and discrimination.
Childhood, lunacy, death, primitive societies – all have been categorized, integrated and
absorbed as parts of a universal harmony. Madness, once its exclusionary status had been
revoked, was caught up in the far subtler toils of psychology. The dead, as soon as they were
recognized in their identity as such, were banished to outlying cemeteries – kept at such
a distance that the face of death itself was lost. As for Indians, their right to exist was no
sooner accorded them than they were confined to reservations. These are the vicissi-tudes of
a logic of difference.
2NC Impact
In the ashes of universalization we find terrorism, a heterogeneous force, a
singularity with no match that actively resists the West’s mission of
colonial erasure and cultural reductionism.
Baudrillard 03 (Jean, 5/20/03, “The Violence of the Global,” translated by François Debrix,
rmf)
But the game is not over yet. Globalization has not completely won. Against such a
dissolving and homogenizing power, heterogeneous forces -- not just different but clearly
antagonistic ones -- are rising everywhere. Behind the increasingly strong reactions to
globalization, and the social and political forms of resistance to the global, we find more than
simply nostalgic expressions of negation. We find instead a crushing revisionism vis-àvis modernity and progress, a rejection not only of the global techno-structure, but also
of the mental system of globalization, which assumes a principle of equivalence between all
cultures. This kind of reaction can take some violent, abnormal, and irrational aspects, at
least they can be perceived as violent, abnormal, and irrational from the perspective of
our traditional enlightened ways of thinking. This reaction can take collective ethnic,
religious, and linguistic forms. But it can also take the form of individual emotional outbursts or
neuroses even. In any case, it would be a mistake to berate those reactions as simply
populist, archaic, or even terrorist. Everything that has the quality of event these days is
engaged against the abstract universality of the global, [5] and this also includes Islam's own
opposition to Western values (it is because Islam is the most forceful contestation of those
values that it is today considered to be the West's number one enemy). Who can defeat the
global system? Certainly not the anti-globalization movement whose sole objective is to
slow down global deregulation. This movement's political impact may well be important. But
its symbolic impact is worthless. This movement's opposition is nothing more than an
internal matter that the dominant system can easily keep under control. Positive
alternatives cannot defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither positive
nor negative can. Singularities are not alternatives. They represent a different symbolic
order. They do not abide by value judgments or political realities. They can be the best or the
worst. They cannot be "regularized" by means of a collective historical action. [6] They defeat
any uniquely dominant thought. Yet they do not present themselves as a unique counterthought. Simply, they create their own game and impose their own rules. Not all
singularities are violent. Some linguistic, artistic, corporeal, or cultural singularities are quite
subtle. But others, like terrorism, can be violent. The singularity of terrorism avenges the
singularities of those cultures that paid the price of the imposition of a unique global
power with their own extinction. We are really not talking about a "clash of civilizations"
here, but instead about an almost anthropological confrontation between an
undifferentiated universal culture and everything else that, in whatever domain, retains a
quality of irreducible alterity . From the perspective of global power (as fundamentalist in
its beliefs as any religious orthodoxy), any mode of difference and singularity is heresy.
Singular forces only have the choice of joining the global system (by will or by force) or
perishing. The mission of the West (or rather the former West, since it lost its own values a
long time ago) is to use all available means to subjugate every culture to the brutal
principle of cultural equivalence. Once a culture has lost its values, it can only seek revenge
by attacking those of others. Beyond their political or economic objectives, wars such as
the one in Afghanistan [7] aim at normalizing savagery and aligning all the territories.
The goal is to get rid of any reactive zone, and to colonize and domesticate any wild and
resisting territory both geographically and mentally.
2NC Alt
Terrorism is our sentence, our punishment for globalization. Its symbolic
power will win the War on Globalization, but it cannot be reduced if it is to
complete its mission.
Baudrillard 03 (Jean, 5/20/03, “The Violence of the Global,” translated by François Debrix,
rmf)
The worst that can happen to global power is not to be attacked or destroyed, but to suffer
a humiliation. Global power was humiliated on September 11 because the terrorists
inflicted something the global system cannot give back . Military reprisals were only means
of physical response. But, on September 11, global power was symbolically defeated . War
is a response to an aggression, but not to a symbolic challenge. A symbolic challenge is
accepted and removed when the other is humiliated in return (but this cannot work when
the other is crushed by bombs or locked behind bars in Guantanamo). The fundamental
rule of symbolic obligation stipulates that the basis of any form of domination is the total
absence of any counterpart, of any return. [8] The unilateral gift is an act of power . And
the Empire of the Good, the violence of the Good, is precisely to be able to give without
any possible return. This is what it means to be in God's position. Or to be in the position of
the Master who allows the slave to live in exchange for work (but work is not a symbolic
counterpart, and the slave's only response is eventually to either rebel or die). God used to
allow some space for sacrifice. In the traditional order, it was always possible to give back to
God, or to nature, or to any superior entity by means of sacrifice. That's what ensured a
symbolic equilibrium between beings and things. But today we no longer have anybody to
give back to, to return the symbolic debt to. This is the curse of our culture. It is not that
the gift is impossible, but rather that the counter-gift is. All sacrificial forms have been
neutralized and removed (what's left instead is a parody of sacrifice, which is visible in all the
contemporary instances of victimization). We are thus in the irremediable situation of having
to receive, always to receive, no longer from God or nature, but by means of a technological
mechanism of generalized exchange and common gratification. Everything is virtually given
to us, and, like it or not, we have gained a right to everything. We are similar to the slave whose
life has been spared but who nonetheless is bound by a non-repayable debt. This situation
can last for a while because it is the very basis of exchange in this economic order. Still,
there always comes a time when the fundamental rule resurfaces and a negative return
inevitably responds to the positive transfer, when a violent abreaction to such a captive
life, such a protected existence, and such a saturation of being takes place. This
reversion can take the shape of an open act of violence (such as terrorism), but also of an
impotent surrender (that is more characteristic of our modernity), of a self-hatred, and of
remorse, in other words, of all those negative passions that are degraded forms of the
impossible counter-gift. What we hate in ourselves -- the obscure object of our resentment
-- is our excess of reality, power, and comfort, our universal availability, our definite
accomplishment, this kind of destiny that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor had in store for the
domesticated masses. And this is exactly the part of our culture that the terrorists find
repulsive (which also explains the support they receive and the fascination they are able to
exert). Terrorism's support is not only based on the despair of those who have been
humiliated and offended. It is also based on the invisible despair of those whom
globalization has privileged, on our own submission to an omnipotent technology, to a
crushing virtual reality, to an empire of networks and programs that are probably in the
process of redrawing the regressive contours of the entire human species, of a humanity
that has gone "global." (After all, isn't the supremacy of the human species over the rest of life
on earth the mirror image of the domination of the West over the rest of the world?). This
invisible despair, our invisible despair, is hopeless since it is the result of the realization of all
our desires. Thus, if terrorism is derived from this excess of reality and from this reality's
impossible exchange, if it is the product of a profusion without any possible counterpart
or return, and if it emerges from a forced resolution of conflicts, the illusion of getting
rid of it as if it were an objective evil is complete . [9] For, in its absurdity and nonsense, terrorism is our society's own judgment and penalty.
Victimization Link
Placing individuals in the position of the “victim” of the oppressor plays
into the politics of wounded attachments. This destroys the ability of the
individual to create pragmatic change, as their very identity and agency is
based off of the suffering the oppressed places on them
Abbas 2010 [Asma, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political Science,
Philosophy at the Liebowitz Center for International Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock,
Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics,
London: Palgrave Macmillan, pg. Pg. 133- 136]
There is a fundamental reciprocity between how sufferers represent themselves, or are
represented, and the way in which their subjectivities and those of the injurers are theorized in
various political programs. Together, they determine the form of agency that is granted to the
victim within any paradigm. In many theoretical attempts at redeeming victims, the work of
the wounded remains attached to an imputed aspiration for agency modeled on the
“health” of the agent qua perpetrator, bystander, and rescuer. Seeing the wounded as
agency-impaired affirms the definition of victim as inadequate subject. There can be no
justice done to the experience of suffering in its particularity if the only choice is to
define it in relation to—even when only as the antithesis of—normalized healthy
sovereign action. Critiques of liberalism that build on responses to orientalism and other
colonial discourses are suspicious of the mechanics of the identification of victims. For
them, the victim status precludes any status beyond that of the object of an action,
necessitates powerlessness, and imposes slave morality.20 An inevitable result is the
object’s own resignation to its “assigned” lack of subjectivity.21 In these criticisms, the
question of naming becomes inextricable from representation. It follows that the need and
validity of representing the victims, the oppressed, the third world, is doubted and, finally,
rejected. However, these challenges still remain attached to a relation to health as agency and
to agency as health. An example is the call that victims and agents are not mutually exclusive—
something to the effect that victims can be agents, too. Mohanty, for one, tells us of cottageindustry working women in Narsapur who “are not mere victims of the production process,
because they resist, challenge, and subvert the process at various junctures.”22 What is
implicit in the “not mere victim” reaction? It brings to mind Martha Nussbaum’s claim that
victimization does not preclude “agency.”23 Clearly at work in Mohanty’s account is a
defensiveness that ends up condoning and affirming the dominant notion of agency it opposes.
Occupying very different locations on the philosophical spectrum, Mohanty and Nussbaum
seem closer in their gut reaction than their avowals would suggest. Why is a victim merely a
victim? What does it tell us regarding how we understand victimization? These reactions betray
an inability to factor in the mode of practice that is suffering, which may spurn the redemption of
the victim on the terms of health and agency, liberal style. These thinkers highlight how
voice and representation are so frequently framed in terms of agency, where agency
itself becomes linked to representation: the victims or nonagents need representation,
and they are redeemed by obviating representation and granting a voice all in one fell
swoop. In my view, this link between agency and the authenticity of voice is a dubious
one. It is on this suspect convergence that Spivak makes an important intervention. In “Can the
Subaltern Speak?” she concludes that the subaltern cannot speak, an answer that, in
dismissing Western intellectuals who “make space” for the subaltern to speak, reinstates a
project of rethinking representation and the victim’s experience. Spivak’s analysis is more
nuanced than Mohanty’s, which rejects the very need and validity of this representation.
Spivak takes issue with Foucault’s wish to let the subaltern speak “in their own voice,” which
does not take seriously the notion that they have no voice as yet, and that this speechlessness
is what defines the subaltern. She saves the notion of representation by arguing that, in the
absence of a language of their own, there is no alternative but to represent the subaltern in
a way that is sensitive to their silence.24 As I argued in Chapters 2 and 3, the fetish of
voice itself must be subject to a suspicion, since it serves those who thrive on its
consolations more than those who are bid speak and must do so in order to write
themselves in. This is not to say that that the “victim”—its discursive and material reality—
does not need redressal in a liberatory politics. Far from that, one can see it as a
representation—a Darstellung and a Vorstellung— that has to itself be a subject of any social
theoretical endeavor that is materialist in its imperative to make conditions (for the possibility of
change) out of necessities. Liberal fictions and power structures need victims; unwittingly
or not, they sustain them as they are themselves nourished by the latter’s surplus
suffering. Interestingly, the same Nietzsche who inspires a suspicion of the agent is also
someone who forces a consideration of the material history, weight, and imperatives of
agency, and of the terms and labor of its overcoming. It is more than a coincidence that
Nietzsche’s transition from the slave revolt in the first essay of On the Genealogy or Morals to
the story of guilt, ressentiment, and punishment in the second essay, involves the myth of the
doer behind the deed.25 This transition is about suffering. Nietzsche’s views on subjects and
subjection suggest not merely that there is no doer but that the core of human existence is the
suffering of that doing—that the subject is, in any case, subject to itself and its deeds. (As
far as the fictive nature of the subject is concerned, Nietzsche drives home the very brutally
material nature of fictions— are fictions ever merely fictions?) The centrality of the agent in
liberalism’s focus on suffering is manifest in the necessity of an agent as the cause or remedy
of suffering. This raises the question of which fiction is more enduring in the liberal framework:
the agent who causes the injury or the victim who is injured with that agency? In both cases,
liberalism’s attention is clear. In its keenness to see as good for liberal justice only the
suffering that can be traced to a sanctioned agent, it makes victims into objects of the
action. While neither of these options exhausts the possibilities in reality, they do necessitate
each other. This is why the agent looms so large, even in the imaginations of critics of
liberalism, that it holds the promise, in its potential idealist-linguistic overcoming, of the undoing
of the stigmatizing victim identity it spawns. However, the sufferer subjected to the fictions of
agency and of the production of injury suffers these fictions through her labors of sustaining
and unwriting them.
Globe DA
1NC Shell
The 1AC is an act of world ordering – images of disempowering structures
produce a vision of the world that negates activism at the level of the self.
The I-In-Relationship is a necessary starting point for changing larger
structures
Jayan Nayar, Law—University of Warwick, 1999 “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING
INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity ,” 9 Transnat'l L. &
Contemp. Probs. 599
Despite the fixation of the beneficiaries of ordered worlds, even the ordered "critic," with the
prescribed languages, visions and possibilities of human socialities, other realities of humanity
nevertheless persist. Notwithstanding the globalization of social concern and the
transnationalization of professionalized critique and reformatory action, struggles against
violence remain energized, persistent and located. They are waged through the bodies of lives
lived in experiential locations against real instruments of terror, functioning within embodied
sites of violence. Non-information and non-representation of the existence of such struggles,
and non-learning of the wisdoms thus generated do not negate their truths or the vibrancy of
their socialities. 51 "We" are participants in ordered worlds, not merely observers. The
choice is whether we wish to recognize our own locations of ordered violence and
participate in the struggle to resist their orderings, or whether we wish merely to observe
violence in far-off worlds in order that our interventionary participation "out there" never
destabilizes the ground upon which we stand. I suggest that we betray the spirit of
transformatory struggle, despite all our expressions of support and even actions of
professionalized expertise, if our own locations, within which are ordered and from
which we ourselves order, remain unscrutinized. And so, what might I contribute to the
present collective exercise toward a futuristic imaging of human possibilities? I am
unsure. It is only from my view of the "world," after all, that I can project my visions.
These visions do not go so far as to visualize any "world" in its totality; they are
uncertain even with regard to worlds closer to home, worlds requiring transformatory
actions all the same. Instead of fulfilling this task of imagining future therefore I simply
submit the following two "poems." [*629] Changing the "I" of the World: The Essential
Message of Mahatmas?" We are today bombarded by images of our "one world." We
speak of the world as "shrinking" into a "global village." We are not all fooled by the
implicit benign-ness of this image of "time-space" contracted--so we also speak of
"global pillage." This astuteness of our perceptions, however, does not prevent us from
our delusion of the "global;" the image of the "global" world persists even for many
activists amongst us who struggle to "change" the world. This is recent delusion. It is a
delusion which anesthetizes us from the only world which we can ever locate ourselves
in and know--the worlds of "I"-in relationships. The "I" is seldom present in
"emancipatory" projects to change the world. This is because the "relational I"-world and
the "global"-world are negations of one another; the former negates the concept of the
latter whilst the latter negates the life of the former. And concepts are more amenable to
scrutiny than life. The advance in technologies of image-ing enables a distanciation of
scrutiny, from the "I"-world of relationships to the "global"-world of abstractions. As we
become fixated with the distant, as we consume the images of "world" as other than here
and now, as we project ourselves through technological time-space into worlds apart
from our here and now, as we become "global," we are relieved of the gravity of our
present. We, thus, cease the activism of self (being) and take on the mantle of the
"activist" (doing). This is a significant displacement. ¶ 1NC¶ That there is suffering all
over the world has indeed been made more visible by the technologies of image-ing. Yet
for all its consequent fostering of "networks," images of "global" suffering have also
served to disempower. By this, we mean not merely that we are filled with the sense that
the forces against which the struggle for emancipations from injustice and exploitation
are waged are pervasive and, therefore, often impenetrable, but, more importantly, that it
diverts our gaze away from the only true power that is in our disposal--the power of selfchange in relationships of solidarities. ¶ The "world," as we perceive it today, did not
exist in times past. It does not exist today. There is no such thing as the global "one
world." The world can only exist in the locations and experiences revealed through and
in human relationships. It is often that we think that to change the world it is necessary
to change the way power is exercised in the world; so we go about the business of
exposing and denouncing the many power configurations that dominate. Power indeed
does lie at the core of human misery, yet we blind ourselves if we regard this power as
the power out there. Power, when all the complex networks of its reach are untangled, is
personal; power does not exist out there, [*630] it only exists in relationship. To say the
word, power, is to describe relationship, to acknowledge power, is to acknowledge our
subservience in that relationship. There can exist no power if the subservient relationship is
refused--then power can only achieve its ambitions through its naked form, as violence.
Changing the world therefore is a misnomer for in truth it is relationships that are to be
changed. And the only relationships that we can change for sure are our own. And the
constant in our relationships is ourselves--the "I" of all of us. And so, to change our
relationships, we must change the "I" that is each of us. Transformations of "structures"
will soon follow. This is, perhaps, the beginning of all emancipations. This is, perhaps,
the essential message of Mahatmas.
World-ordering is the ordering of worlds – a civilizing mission that subdues
assimilates and eradicates the other
Jayan Nayar, Law—University of Warwick, 1999 “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING
INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity ,” 9 Transnat'l L. &
Contemp. Probs. 599
[*606] Distinguishing these two meanings of "order" provides us with radically opposed
directions of analysis and orientations for future imagings of social relations. Although the
rhetoric of world-order would focus on visions of some projected "world" that provides
the aspiration for collective endeavors, "order" does not come to be without necessary
"ordering;" the "world" of "world-order" has not come to be without the necessary
ordering of many worlds. The ordering and the ordered, the world of order and the ordered
world, all are inextricable parts of the past and the present of "civilization." Despite the
vision of world-order founded on a notion of a universal society of humankind aspiring
toward a universal common good, (first given meaning within a conceptual political-legal
framework through the birth of the so-called "Westphalian" state system n14 ), the materialities
of "ordering" were of a different complexion altogether. Contrary to the disembodied
rhetoric of world-order as bloodless evolution, the new images of the world and
languages of "globality" did not evolve out of a sense of "hospitality" n15 to the "other,"
the "stranger." Rather, the history of the creation of the post-Westphalian "world" as one
world, can be seen to be most intimately connected with the rise of an expansionist and
colonizing world-view and practice. Voyages of "discovery" provided the necessary
reconnaissance to image this "new world." Bit by bit, piece by piece, the jigsaw of the globe
was completed. With the advance of the "discoverer," the "colonizer," the "invader," the
"new" territories were given meaning within the hermeneutic construct that was the new
"world." [*607] The significance of this evolution of the world does not, however, lie merely in
its acquiring meaning. It is not simply the "idea" of the world that was brought to prominence
through acts of colonization. The construction of the "stage" of the world has also occurred,
albeit amid the performance of a violent drama upon it. The idea of a single world in need of
order was followed by a succession of chained and brutalized bodies of the "other." The
embodied world that has been in creation from the "colonial" times to the present could
not, and does not, accommodate plurality. The very idea of "one world" contains the
necessary impetus for the absorption, assimilation, if not destruction, of existing worlds
and the genocide of existing socialities. This violence of "order-ing" within the historical
epoch of colonialism is now plainly visible. Through "colonialism" was reshaped the material
basis of exchange that determined human relationships. Put differently, the very idea of what
is "human" was recast by the imposed value-systems of the "civilizing" process that was
colonialism. To be human, to live, and to relate to others, thus, both lost and gained meaning.
Lost were many pre-colonial and indigenous conceptions of human dignity, of
subsistence, production, consumption, wealth and poverty. Gained was the advent of the
human "self" as an objective "economic" agent and, with it, the universals of
commodification as the basis for human relations. Following this transformation of the
material political-economy of the colonized, or "ordered," colonialism entrenched the
"state" as the symbolic "political" institution of "public" social relations. The effect of
this "colonization of the mind" was that the "political-economic" form of social
organization--the state--was universalized as common, if not "natural," resulting in a
homogenization of "political" imagination and language. Thus, diversity was unified,
while at the same time, unity was diversified. The particularities and inconveniences of
human diversity--culture and tradition--were subordinated to the "civilized" discourse of
secular myths (to which the "rule of law" is central), n16 while concurrently, humanity was
formally segregated into artificial "states," enclosures of mythic solidarities and common
destinies. This brief remembering of colonialism as an historic process, provides us with the
most explicit lessons on the violence of the "ordering" of "worlds." From its history we see that
an important feature of ordering prevails. The world of those who "order" is the destruction
of the "worlds" of those ordered. So many ideologies of negation and (re)creation served
to justify this "beginning"--terra nullius, the "savage" native, the "civilizing mission." n17
The [*608] "world," after all, had to be created out of all this "unworldly" miasma, all for the
common good of the universal society of humankind. Although historical colonialism as a
formal structure of politico-legal ordering of humanity has come and gone, the violence
of colonization is very much a persistent reality. A striking feature of historical worldorderings was the confidence with which the "new world" was projected upon human
imagination. Colonialism was not a tentative process. The "right" of colonization, both as a right
of the colonizer and as a right thing to do by the colonizer, was passionately believed and
confidently asserted. Thus, for the most part, this "right" was uncontested, this confidence
unchallenged. "World-order" today is similarly asserted with confidence and rectitude.
Contemporary world-orderings, consistent with those of the past, are implemented using
a range of civilizational legitimization. With the advent of an ideology of "humanity," a "postcolonial" concession to human dignity demanded by the previously colonized, new languages of
the civilizational project had to be conceived of and projected. "Freed" from the brutalities of
the order of historical colonialism, the "ordered" now are subjected to the colonizing
force of the "post-colonial," and increasingly, globalization-inspired ideologies of
development and security. Visible, still, is the legitimization of "order" as coercive command
through the rhetoric of "order" as evolutionary structure.
Reject the 1AC in order to politicize our own relationships with structures –
this is the first step towards liberation
Nayar, Law—University of Warwick, 1999 “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL
LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity ,” 9 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs.
599
So, back to the question: to what extent, for this, "our world," do we contemplate change when
"we" imagine transformed "world-orders?" In addition to the familiar culprits of violent
orderings, such as government, financial institutions, transnational corporations, the World
Bank, the IMF, and the WTO (as significant culprits they indeed are), do we, in our
contemplations of violent orders, vision our locations within corporate "educational"
institutions as "professional academics" and "researchers," our locations within corporate
NGOs as "professional activists," our locations within "think-tanks" and "research organizations"
as "professional policy-formulators," and whatever other locations of elite "expertise" we
have been "trained" to possess, as ordered sites, complicit and parasitic, within a violent
"world-order"? Do we see in our critiques of world-orderings, out there, the orderings we
find, right here, in our bodies, minds, relationships, expectations, fears and hopes?
Would we be willing to see "our (ordered) world" dismantled in order that other worlds, wherein
our "privileges" become extinguished, may flourish? These concerns are, then, I believe, the
real complexities of judgment and action. Consideration should be given, not only to
those of the political-structural, so often honed in on, but also to the [*628] issue of the
political-personal, which ultimately is the "unit" of "worlds" and of "orders." If
"globalization," as a recent obsession of intellectual minds, has contributed anything to an
understanding of the ways of the "world," I suggest, it is that we cannot escape "our" implication
within the violence of "world (mis)orders." IV. A WORLD FOR TRANSFORMATION: TWO
POEMS Despite the fixation of the beneficiaries of ordered worlds, even the ordered "critic,"
with the prescribed languages, visions and possibilities of human socialities, other realities of
humanity nevertheless persist. Notwithstanding the globalization of social concern and the
transnationalization of professionalized critique and reformatory action, struggles against
violence remain energized, persistent and located. They are waged through the bodies of lives
lived in experiential locations against real instruments of terror, functioning within embodied
sites of violence. Non-information and non-representation of the existence of such struggles,
and non-learning of the wisdoms thus generated do not negate their truths or the vibrancy of
their socialities. n51 "We" are participants in ordered worlds, not merely observers. The
choice is whether we wish to recognize our own locations of ordered violence and
participate in the struggle to resist their orderings, or whether we wish merely to observe
violence in far-off worlds in order that our interventionary participation "out there" never
destabilizes the ground upon which we stand. I suggest that we betray the spirit of
transformatory struggle, despite all our expressions of support and even actions of
professionalized expertise, if our own locations, within which are ordered and from which we
ourselves order, remain unscrutinized.
L: Structural Focus
Focusing on larger structuers of power obscures our own resonsibility
Kappeler, 95 – [Susanne, The Will to Violence, p. 10-11]
We are the war' does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society - which would be equivalent to
exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of `collective irresponsibility', where people are no
longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal.' On the
contrary, the object is precisely to analyse the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war
are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them and to command such collective action. We need to hold them
our habit of
focusing on the stage where the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in
relation to our own sphere of competence, our own power and our own responsibility - leading
to the well-known illusion of our apparent `powerlessness’ and its accompanying phenomenon, our socalled political disillusionment. Single citizens - even more so those of other nations - have come to feel secure
in their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and
Bosnia-Hercegovina or Somalia - since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our insight
clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective `assumption' of responsibility. Yet
that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us into thinking that therefore we
have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgement, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of
action. In particular, it
seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own
actions and those events, or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and
our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls `organized irresponsibility', upholding the apparent
lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually organized separate competences. It also proves the
For we tend to think that
we cannot `do' anything, say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we
are not where the major decisions are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely
disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of `What
would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defence?' Since we
seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and
since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself
tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as `virtually
no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a
phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major powermongers:
general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN - finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like `I want to stop this war', `I
'We are this war', however, even if we do not
command the troops or participate in so-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our `noncomprehension’: our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own
understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or
want military intervention', `I want to stop this backlash', or `I want a moral revolution."
less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we `are' the war in our `unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the
`fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don't' - our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees,
We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the
way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape `our feelings, our relationships, our
values' according to the structures and the values of war and violence.
one of our own and one for the `others'.
L: Neutrality
Sanitization DA: assuming that debate is a neutral space where we can
separate ourselves from identity is what kills politics in the first place
because we can never separate ourselves from the personal experiences
that discipline us.
Alcoff 5, Linda, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center,
Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Studies in Feminist Philosophy) [Paperback])//AG
Yet the public discussion about ‘‘identity politics,’’ which has spread well beyond college
campuses to a larger discursive community, has worked effectively to discredit much
antiracist and feminist work being done today and sowed confusion about the
relationship between class, race, and gender. The ‘‘progressive’’ academic community
has thus contributed once again, perhaps not surprisingly, to the divisions that keep us
from moving forward.
L: Borders
Borders are not only a reflection of the changing nature of sovereignty –
they discipline us on a personal level determining our daily life practices.
Newman 6, David, Department of Politics and Government, Ben Gurion University,¶ Beer Sheba,
Israel, The lines that continue to separate us:¶ borders in our ‘borderless’world, Progress in Human
Geography 30, 2 (2006) pp. 143–161)//AG
For political scientists, borders reflect the¶ nature of power relations and the ability of¶
one group to determine, superimpose and¶ perpetuate lines of separation, or to remove¶ them,
contingent upon the political environment¶ at any given time (Ganster and Lorey,¶ 2005). For sociologists and
anthropologists,¶ borders are indicative of the binary distinctions¶ (us/them; here/there;
inside/outside)¶ between groups at a variety of scales, from¶ the national down to the
personal spaces and¶ territories of the individual. For international¶ lawyers, borders
reflect the changing nature¶ of sovereignty and the rights of States to¶ intervene in the
affairs of neighbouring¶ politico-legal entities (Ratner, 1996; Lalonde,¶ 2002; Castellino and Allen, 2003).
For all¶ disciplines, borders determine the nature of¶ group (in some cases defined territorially)¶
belonging, affiliation and membership, and¶ the way in which the processes of inclusion¶
and exclusion are institutionalized . It is at the border crossing point between¶ disciplines that abstract and nonspatial¶ notions of border are introduced to the discourse. ¶ The idea that cyberspace, itself used¶ as the ultimate proof (sic) of
the borderless¶ and deterritorialized world, is full of communities¶ and affiliations for whom access is¶
determined by strict border demarcation¶ characteristics (such as access to a computer,¶ knowledge of basic
computer skills) is, for¶ some geographers, hard to comprehend. But¶ borders they are and, as in the case of interstate¶ boundaries,
they assist in the reordering¶ of global society into neat compartments¶ and categories,
distinguishing between those who belong and those who do not. In all¶ these cases,
borders reflect existing difference,¶ while in some cases their construction¶ serves to
create a new set of ‘others’ which¶ had not previously existed, thus perpetuating,¶ rather
than removing, the sense of ‘otherness’¶ (van Houtum and van Naerssen, 2002).¶ Another major focus of border studies¶
during the past decade is the relationship¶ between borders and identity formation¶ (Leimgruber, 1991; Falah and Newman, 1995;¶
Paasi, 1995; 1996; 1999a; Berdahl, 1997;¶ Ackleson, 1999; Wilson and Donnan, 1998;¶ Donnan and Wilson, 1999; Knippenberg¶
and Markusse, 1999; Klemencic, 2000; Albert¶ et al., 2001; Brown, 2001; Agnew, 2002;¶ Kaplan and Hakli, 2002; Meinhof,¶ 2002;
Migdal, 2002). The opening of borders¶ does not, automatically, result in the¶ hybridization of ethnic and national identity.¶
Separate identities are dependent on the existence of group categorization, be they¶
religious, cultural, economic, social or ethnic .¶ Ethnicity remains a key determinant of¶ group affiliation,
inclusion and exclusion,¶ while the removal, or opening, of the borders¶ does not necessarily or automatically transform ¶ a member
of a national State into a¶ European, or global, citizen. Even if we¶ have become more mobile and find it easier¶ to cross the
boundaries that previously¶ hindered our movement, most of us retain¶ strong ethnic or national affiliations and¶ loyalties, be they
The global¶ access to cyberspace and the unhindered¶
spatial dissemination of information and¶ knowledge has, paradoxically, engendered a¶ national
identity among diaspora populations¶ which have previously been remote and -¶
dislocated from their places (or parents’¶ places) of origin, but who are now possessed¶
with more information, and greater ease of¶ access, to the ancestral (sic) homelands, and
territorial-focused or group¶ affiliations (Sigurdson, 2000).
identify with the causes and struggles of the¶ ethnic or national groups in faraway places.¶ Language remains the one great
boundary¶ which, for so many of us, remains difficult to cross, in the absence of a single, global, ¶ borderless form of
communication.¶ Scale has also figured prominently in much¶ of the recent border literature. There has¶ been a geographical
refocusing of the border¶ away from the level of the State, down to¶ internal regions, municipalities and neighbourhoods¶ (Lunden
and Zalamans, 2001). We¶
live in a world of scale hierarchies, where¶ different borders affects
our daily life practices¶ at one and the same time (Blatter, 2001).¶ Many towns and cities,
which are normally¶ perceived as constituting single functional¶ entities, are divided
along the national and¶ State borders, the degree of transboundary¶ coordination and
integration contingent¶ upon the nature of political and power¶ relations between the two
sides (Bucken-¶ Knapp, 2001; Buursink, 2001; Matthiesen and Burkner, 2001). At the most micro of¶ scales,
anthropologists remind us of the¶ personal, often invisible to the eye, borders,¶ which
determine our daily life practices to¶ a much greater extent than do national¶ boundaries
– across which the majority of¶ the global population do not even cross once¶ in their
lifetime (Alvarez, 1995).
A: Identity
Identity – in a debate where we shun how our identities impact our politics
– true change becomes impossible.
Alcoff 5, Linda, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center,
Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Studies in Feminist Philosophy) [Paperback])//AG
Identity is today a growth industry in the academy. Generic ‘‘Man’’ has been¶ overthrown by
scholars and researchers who have realized the importance of¶ taking identity into account—
whether by taking gender into account in studies of¶ cancer and heart disease or by taking race
into account in studies of history and¶ literature. The constitutive power of gender, race,
class, ethnicity, sexuality, and¶ other forms of social identity has, finally, suddenly, been
recognized as a relevant¶ aspect of almost all projects of inquiry. Yet at the same time,
the concern with¶ identity has come under major attack from many oddly aligned fronts—
academic¶ postmodernists, political liberals and leftists, conservative politicians, and
others—¶ in the academy as well as in the mainstream media. It may be widely conceded
that¶ generic ‘‘Man’’ was a rhetorical cover for the agency of a single subgroup, but many¶ still
pine for the lost discourse of generic universality, for the days when differences¶ could be
disregarded.¶ Against the critics of identity politics and those who see the attachment to¶
identity as a political problem, psychological crutch, or metaphysical mistake, this¶ book
offers a sustained defense of identity as an epistemically salient and ontologically¶ real
entity. The reality of identities often comes from the fact that they are¶ visibly marked on
the body itself, guiding if not determining the way we perceive and¶ judge others and are
perceived and judged by them. The road to freedom from the¶ capriciousness of arbitrary
identity designations lies not, as some class reductionists¶ and postmodernists argue, in the
attempt at a speedy dissolution of identity—a¶ proposal that all too often conceals a
willful ignorance about the real-world effects of¶ identity—but through a careful
exploration of identity, which can reveal its influence¶ on what we can see and know, as
well as its context dependence and its¶ complex and fluid nature. ¶ Differences, it is widely
believed, pose an a priori danger to alliance, unity,¶ communication, and true understanding. As
such, they are seen as a political threat¶ for any political agenda that seeks majority support,
given our increasingly diverse¶ society. Differences can also be exaggerated, manipulated, and
used opportunistically to coerce conformism and excuse corruption. Because differences are
perniciously¶ used in these ways some of the time, some jump to the conclusion that identitybased¶ political movements will devolve into these tendencies all of the time. Some suggest¶ that
our differences—such as the differences between those who were brought to the¶ United States
as slaves, as indentured servants, as cheap labor, or who came as free¶ immigrants—are
relevant only to our past history, and that we have the power to¶ choose the extent of their
present and future relevance. Maintaining a focus on¶ difference, according to some, will only
get in the way of positive, cooperative,¶ mutually beneficial action. Those persons who are seen
to be ‘‘harping’’ on their¶ difference and insisting on their identity are viewed as irrationally
preoccupied with¶ the past, or opportunistically focused on grievances with a goal of personal
gain rather¶ than justice.¶ In this book, my goal is to cast serious doubt on this suspicion of
difference by¶ explicating some of the important features of specific identities: race/ethnicity,
sex/¶ gender, and the new pan-Latino identity. In this project I join with the new¶ movement of
scholars (often working in ethnic studies and women’s studies) who¶ argue that the
acknowledgment of the important differences in social identity does¶ not lead inexorably to
political relativism or fragmentation, but that, quite the¶ reverse, it is the refusal to
acknowledge the importance of the differences in our¶ identities that has led to distrust,
miscommunication, and thus disunity. In a¶ climate in which one cannot invoke history,
culture, race, or gender for fear of¶ being accused of playing, for example, ‘‘the race card,’’
or identity politics, or¶ ‘‘victim feminism,’’ our real commonalities and shared interests
cannot even begin¶ to be correctly identified. When I refuse to listen to how you are
different from me,¶ I am refusing to know who you are. But without understanding fully
who you are,¶ I will never be able to appreciate precisely how we are more alike than I
might¶ have originally supposed. Race and gender are forms of social identity that share at
least two features:¶ they are fundamental rather than peripheral to the self—unlike, for example,
one’s¶ identity as a Celtics fan or a Democrat—and they operate through visual markers¶ on the
body. In our excessively materialist society, only what is visible can generally¶ achieve the status
of accepted truth. What I can see for myself is what is real; all¶ else that vies for the status of the
real must be inferred from that which can be seen,¶ whether it is love that must be made
manifest in holiday presents or anger that¶ demands an outlet of violent spectacle. Secular,
commodity-driven society is thus¶ dominated by the realm of the visible, which dominates not
only knowledge but¶ also the expression and mobilization of desire and all sorts of social
practices as¶ well. The German film director Wim Wenders says, ‘‘People increasingly believe¶ in
what they see and they buy what they believe in’’ (quoted in Crystal 1997, 91).
AT: ID Ptix Bad
We are not identity-based politics – we simply recognize that our lived
experience has a significant effect upon our political acts.
Alcoff 5, Linda, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center,
Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Studies in Feminist Philosophy) [Paperback])//AG
Social identities can and sometimes do operate as interest groups, but that is¶ not what
identities essentially are. On the basis of analyzing a wide sample of¶ identity-based
movements, sociologist Manuel Castells describes identity as a¶ generative source of
meaning, necessarily collective rather than wholly individual,¶ and useful as a source of
agency as well as a meaningful narrative (1997, 7). This¶ account accords with the research by
Cruz, Encarnacion, and Rosaldo. In analyzing¶ identity-based political movements, Castells
offers a typology of identity¶ constructions corresponding to a variety of political
agendas and historical contexts.¶ His work provides a model for the kind of contextual analysis I
called for¶ earlier that would analyze the operation of concepts within contexts rather than¶
assuming that concepts operate uniformly across contexts. I will turn to Castells¶ later on for
more help in developing an empirically adequate description of¶ identity, but here it is
enough to note that Castells’s work also strongly counters the¶ view that identity politics
always tends toward the same political forms or that the¶ political relevance of identity
always is cashed out in similar fashion. In a more philosophical account based in his readings of
contemporary literature,¶ Satya Mohanty argues that identity constructions provide
narratives that¶ explain the links between group historical memory and individual
contemporary¶ experience, that they create unifying frames for rendering experience
intelligible,¶ and that they thus help to map the social world (Mohanty 1997). To the extent
that¶ identities involve meaning-making, there will always be alternative interpretations¶ of the
meanings associated with identity, Mohanty explains, but he insists that¶ identities refer to real
experiences.¶ Of course, identities can be imposed on people from the outside. But that is¶ more
of a brand than a true identity, or more of an ascription than a meaningful¶ characterization of
self. Identities must resonate with and unify lived experience,¶ and they must provide a
meaning that has some purchase, however partial, on the¶ subject’s own daily reality .
Supporting Mohanty’s realism about identity, Anuradha¶ Dingwaney and Lawrence Needham
explain identity’s lived experience as that¶ which ‘‘signifies affective, even intuitive, ways of being
in, or inhabiting, specific¶ cultures. . . . [I]t is perceived as experience that proceeds from identity
that is given¶ or inherited . . . but it is also, and more significantly, mediated by what Satya¶
Mohanty calls ‘social narratives, paradigms, even ideologies’ ’’ (Dingwaney and¶ Needham
1996, 21). In other words, although experience is sometimes grouprelated¶ (and thus identityrelated), its meaning is not unambiguous. Dingwaney¶ and Needham go on to say, following
Stuart Hall: What we have are events, interactions, political and other identifications, made¶
available at certain historical conjunctures, that are then worked through in the¶ process of
constructing, and/or affiliating with, an identity. However, to say that¶ identity is constructed is
not to say that it is available to any and every person or¶ group who wishes to inhabit it.
The voluntarism that inheres in certain elaborations¶ of the constructedness of identity ignores,
as Hall also notes . . . ‘‘certain¶ conditions of existence, real histories in the contemporary world,
which are not¶ exclusively psychical, not simply journeys of the mind’’; thus it is incumbent
upon¶ us to recognize that ‘‘every identity is placed, positioned, in a culture, a language,¶
a history.’’ It is for this reason that claims about ‘‘lived experience’’ resonate with¶ such force in
conflicts over what does or does not constitute an appropriate interpretation¶ of culturally
different phenomena. (20–21, quoting from Hall 1987,¶ 44–45)¶ This is an account of identity that
holds both that identity makes an epistemic¶ difference and that identity is the product of a
complex mediation involving individual¶ agency in which its meaning is produced rather
than merely perceived or¶ experienced. In other words, identity is not merely that which is
given to an¶ individual or group, but is also a way of inhabiting, interpreting, and working ¶
through, both collectively and individually, an objective social location and group¶ history. We
might, then, more insightfully define identities as positioned or located¶ lived experiences
in which both individuals and groups work to construct meaning¶ in relation to historical
experience and historical narratives. Given this view, one¶ might hold that when I am identified,
it is my horizon of agency that is identified Thus, identities are not lived as a discrete and stable
set of interests, but as a site¶ from which one must engage in the process of meaning-making
and thus from¶ which one is open to the world. The hermeneutic insight is that the self operates
in¶ a situated plane, always culturally located with great specificity even as it is open¶ onto an
indeterminate future and a reinterpretable past not of its own creation.¶ The self carries with it
always this horizon as a specific location, with substantive¶ content—as, for example, a
specifiable relation to the Holocaust, to slavery, to the¶ encuentro, and so on—but whose
content only exists in interpretation and in¶ constant motion. The Holocaust is one dramatic
example that exists as an aspect¶ not only of every contemporary Jewish person’s horizon but of
every Christian¶ European’s. But there will be a difference in the way that these two groups are¶
situated vis-a`-vis this narrative: the one as knowing that he or she could have been¶ the target
of the Final Solution, and the other as knowing that this event occurred¶ within the broad
category of their culture. Each must react to or deal with this¶ event in some way, but to say
this does not presuppose any pre-given interpretation¶ of the event or of its significance
in forming a contemporary identity. There is even¶ a vibrant debate over the degree of
significance the Holocaust holds for Jewish¶ identity today. But obviously, for some time to
come, it will remain a central¶ feature of the map of our collective Jewish and Gentile horizons.
Answers
A speech is not capable of divorcing you from a liberal society that has
over-determined your identity.
Alcoff 5, Linda, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center,
Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Studies in Feminist Philosophy) [Paperback])//AG
This moment crystallizes for me the effect of social identity, precisely because it is so
obvious that global capital and neocolonial political formations had over- determined
that encounter between the U.S. soldiers and my father. My argument in this book begins
from the premise that structural power relations such as those created by global capital
are determinate over the meanings of our identities, the possibilities of social interaction,
and the formations of difference. Nonetheless, the focal point of power most often today
operates precisely through the very personal sphere of our visible social identities. This
should be no surprise, given that capitalism was a racial and gender system from its inception,
distributing roles and resources according to identity markers of status and social position and
thus reenforcing their stability. Social identities such as race, ethnicity, and gender remain the
most telling predictors of social power and success, predicting whether one works in the
service sector, the trades, or the managerial class, whether and how much profit can be had by
selling one’s home, how likely one is to be incarcerated, how likely one is to suffer sexual or
domestic violence, and even how high one is likely to score on the SAT. Such facts do not
displace the importance of class; rather, they reveal that class works through, rather
than alongside, the ca- tegories of visible identity.
Antiblackness K
1NC Shell
The only ethical demand available to modern politics is that of the Slave
and the Savage, the demand for the end of America itself. This demdand
exposes the grammar of the Affirmative for larger institutional access as a
fortification of antiblack civil society
Wilderson 07- [Frank B. Wilderson, Assistant professor of African American Studies and
Drama at UC Irvine, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, 5-7]
When I was a young student at Columbia University in New York there was a Black woman
who used to stand outside the gate and yell at Whites, Latinos, and East- and South Asian
students, staff, and faculty as they entered the university. She accused them of having
stolen her sofa and of selling her into slavery. She always winked at the Blacks, though we
didn’t wink back. Some of us thought her outbursts too bigoted and out of step with the
burgeoning ethos of multiculturalism and “rainbow coalitions” to endorse. But others did not
wink back because we were too fearful of the possibility that her isolation would become
our isolation, and we had come to Columbia for the express, though largely assumed and
unspoken, purpose of foreclosing upon that peril. Besides, people said she was crazy.
Later, when I attended UC Berkeley, I saw a Native American man sitting on the sidewalk of
Telegraph Avenue. On the ground in front of him was an upside down hat and a sign
informing pedestrians that here was where they could settle the “Land Lease Accounts” that
they had neglected to settle all of their lives. He too, so went the scuttlebutt, was “crazy.”
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to
say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demands—and, by extension, the grammar
of their suffering—was indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are the only
ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw our
attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and
violently powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world’s capacity
to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body
and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas
could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the
actions of the world to account but to call the world itself to account, and to account for
them no less! The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an
unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of
the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a
triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her
corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to
becoming a “being for the captor” (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus
value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the
other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the
corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to
the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the
world—and not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And
yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her
claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to what does the world attribute the Native American
man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us?” Surely, that
doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big
enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of
ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are
these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and
cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident?
Return Turtle Island to the “Savage.” Repair the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two
simple sentences, twelve simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global)
antagonisms would be dismantled. An “ethical modernity” would no longer sound like an
oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been
promoted to the level of antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights.
When pared down to twelve words and two sentences, one cannot but wonder why
questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so
unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and
politically engaged feature films.
The affirmative’s call for surveillance curtailment is a form of the bill of sale
that allows for genocide of the indigenous, and the exploitation of the black
body
Farley 12 [Anthony Paul Farley, James Campbell Matthews Distinguished Professor of
Jurisprudence at Albany Law School, “Critical Race Theory and Marxism: Temporal Power”]
Repetition is the mode in which we preserve that which overwhelms us. That which
overwhelms us sets itself up in our soul as a repetition of what seems to have been the
original catastrophe. We become a permanent wave of our own undoing.9 But the precise
nature of our own trauma continually eludes us. We give chase, but only through repetition.
We become what we do and this fact of repetition makes what was said of us, “they know
not what they do”, true. What we do is repeat the disaster that originally left us traumatized.
Through repetition we become the very disaster that was our original, albeit
unremembered, disaster. It was unspeakable. It remains unsaid. But the cruelty from which
we imagine ourselves escaped is what we become, and that which we continually make of
ourselves. There are cruelties that happen to us as individuals (“[a]nd I only am escaped
alone to tell thee”11) and there are cruelties that happen to us as collectives (“[l]et my
people go”12). What happens in the individual can happen to the collective and so, as the
long story of philosophy verifies, each is a window to the other. The individual is not the
unity it is often imagined to be (“[m]y name is Legion”13), nor are the borders of the
collective as distinct as they are often imagined to be (“[t]hings fall apart”14). Nevertheless,
it is useful to speak of the individual (“I think, therefore I am”15) and the collective (“[w]e the
people . . .”16) when what is hard to see in the one is easy to make out in the other. Our
beginning was the scene of an unspeakable event. That unspeakable event keeps
repeating. Capital arrived in the world “dripping . . . with blood and dirt.”17 If, as Margaret
Thatcher infamously put it, “There is no alternative”18 to capitalism, then there must not
have been a time before capitalism. Capital, like trauma, is outside of history, outside of the
world of things that change, or so it claims by asserting that there is no alternative. The fact
that capitalism presents itself to us as a horizon less world should give us pause. But it
does not give us pause: We are on the clock—repeating and not living—and so we go on
and on not thinking at all about Modern Times, just repeating.19 Marxism has as its zero
degree the disclosure of the unspeakably cruel event that threw the modern world up all
around us. Its name is Legion,20 but three were introduced in Capital’s first volume with
these birthnames: genocide in the New World, colonialism in the Orient, and the conversion
of the Dark Continent into a hunting ground for slaves. These three mass murders were
race-making moments. These three mass murders were the original accumulation, the first
capital. These three mass murders made capitalism a world system. Modernity is the
repetition of the original accumulation. We are, in other words, still in that original moment
to the extent that we are modern and have always been modern. Time has not passed. We
passed out of the time of the real and into the false eternity of the spectacle. As
psychoanalysis revealed: A condition has long been known and described which occurs
after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk
to life; it has been given the name “traumatic neurosis.” The terrible war which has just
ended gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind . . . The chief weight in their
causation seems to rest on the factor of surprise.21 Before World War I, Josef Breuer and
Sigmund Frued observed,“Hystericssuffermainlyfromreminiscences.”22 After the war to end
all wars, Freud wrote: In the war neuroses, too, observers . . . have been able to explain
certain motor symptoms by fixation to the moment at which the trauma occurred. I am not
aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their
waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not
thinking about it.23 History is this way for us as a collective. We are much concerned with
“not thinking about it.”24 Uranus is castrated by Cronos. The open sky is violated by the
desperate hours. Call the perpetrator and the violated by their Greek names or by any other
names and the scene remains the same: blood rains down on the water, and from that
meeting the Furies are born. The Furies—unceasing Alecto, resentful Tisiphone, avenging
Magaera—immortals all, are born of that meeting of blood and water, and are forever
punishing violations of the order that allows “no alternative.”25 James Baldwin understood
the Furies: History, as no one seems to know, is not merely something to read. And it does
not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history
comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many
ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it
is to history we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. And it is
with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this.26 The time that seems to pass
only seems to pass. Baldwin understood false time. Baldwin understood that this false time
of ours is not even “ours”; it is the time of the spectacle.27 We belong to it, not the other
way round. What is the “spectacle”? The spectacle is the system’s endless hymn of selfpraise. When we have been here 10,000 years / bright shining as the sun / we will have no
less time to sing its praise / than when we’d first begun. That is the spectacle. We are within
the false time of the spectacle, within the repetitions. The repetitions are spectacular time.
We do not live spectacular time, we only repeat, and repetition is not living. The death event
that produces the first capital begins with a mark made or found ready-made on the body:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment
in the mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest
and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial
hunting of black skins, are all things which characterize the dawn of capitalist production.28
Before the great death event all flesh is common. After the event a mark, insignificant in
itself, is made to signify life or death. The mark is a line, a color linel, which separates life
from death and connects now with then. After the mark life becomes having and not having
becomes its opposite. After the murders reach a certain mass, death follows in an
unbending line from now till then, and then becomes a hole in the universe, a hole though
which we fall and are now falling, forever.29 The New World was not new before the killing.
The blacks were not black before the killing. The colonized were not colonized before the
killing. The murders constitute and mark a new species. The production of race is the
production of a race that is to have and another race, subordinate to the first, that is to have
not. The abundance belonging to the One and the lack that is the chief property of the
Other are conjoined twins, born of the same unspeakable event. The black can trace its
origin only as far back as a bill of sale. James Baldwin, speaking in London, was clear on
this point: I tried to explain that if I was originally from [an African point of origin] I couldn’t
find out where it was because my entry into America was a bill of sale. And that stops you
from going any further. At some point I became Baldwin’s Nigger.30 But is the same for the
white? The bill of sale is the official screen memory of the mass murder that is the origin of
capital. The bill of sale is the alpha and omega of law. The bill of sale is a death certificate,
ours. The bill of sale is the recording angel assigned to the children of slaves and children
of slave masters. The legality of that bill of sale is what keeps the chains, the genealogies
of property that bind now to then, and all of us to the repetitions, together.
The 1AC is a form of phallacized whiteness that posits a neutral subject
that eradicates difference in the name of freedom
Winnubst 06 [Shannon Winnubest, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at The Ohio
State University, “Queering Freedom” page 37-43]
Cultures of phallicized whiteness are grounded in the constitutive and categorical exclusion
of useless expenditure. While Locke attempts to maintain the absolute reign of utility by
reasserting a different kind of ‘use’ in the functions of money as capital, the fundamental
tension between systems of value based in utility and those grounded in endless
expenditure threatens utility’s domination. This tension worsens as politics of race, sexual
differ- ence, and sexuality compound this nascent politics of class (and, less explic- itly,
religion) that we find in Locke’s texts. While money appears in Locke’s texts to be the
inevitable outgrowth of utility’s preference for future-oriented labor, cultivated land, and
private property, it also introduces an order of value that may not be reducible to the final
judgment of utility. The intro- duction of money appears to render utility’s closed system
rather fragile, a phenomenon and tension that will resurface repeatedly across the following
chapters. The sort of worldview that we find in Locke is thereby one dominated by the twin
logics of property and utility. Labor, which man must undertake due to an ontological lack,
connects these twin logics: it encloses the world and one’s self into units of private
property and then, elevated into the form of money, invites reason to overstep utility’s
boundary and hoard more property than one can use. Labor initiates the twin
expressions of the logic of the limit: enclosure and prohibition. We ought not own
more than we can use; yet, true to the dynamic of desire grounded in lack, we are drawn
toward transgressing the fundamental prohibition of waste proclaimed by nature’s law,
reason. Labor develops into a system of expression that appears to twist the dynamics of
scarcity and abundance beyond the reach of utility, while simultaneously using utility to
judge all acts within it: one’s labor must be deemed useful if one is to enter into the desired
life of propertied abundance, a possibility that will always be scarce in advanced capitalist
cultures of phallicized whiteness. Locke’s normative model for the liberal individual thereby
becomes he who is bound by his ability to labor within a concept of the future sufficient to
stake out a piece of land as property. While Cynthia Willett gives Locke credit for trying to
articulate a middle-class resistance to “the leisure class and its idle games,” she
nonetheless argues that Locke remains entrapped by a conception of rationality “in terms of
the English middle-class appreciation for the market value of productive labor and property”
(2001, 71). Not only are his concepts of rationality shaped by these historical preferences,
but his concepts of man’s condition—man’s desire, destiny, labor, and individuality— all
carry these historical preferences into universalized discourses that con- tinue to serve as
the bedrock of many of our cultural assumptions and prac- tices. Although Locke’s politics
were moderately progressive for the late seventeenth century, the lasting damage of
these concepts still haunts our political quandaries and the very frameworks through
which we continue to seek redress. The logic of limit as enclosure, as the ways that
the state of society becomes demarcated from—and always preferred over, even while
roman- ticizing—the state of nature, continuously rewrites itself in several registers across
the political histories of the U.S. It fundamentally grounds our un- derstanding of the
individual as the person who is clearly demarcated from nature. The individual becomes
that ‘civilized’ man who takes his natural origin, as an enclosed body that is a product of
God’s labor, and produces private property that is enclosed into durable forms which persist
into and even control the future. From this critical enclosure of the world and the self,
written in the register of property, other modern epistemologies and political projects easily
attach themselves to this clear and distinct unit, the individual. (Adam Smith, for example,
quickly comes to mind.) The indi- vidual, carved out of nature through productive labor and
conceiving the world and himself on the model of appropriating private property, emerges
as the cornerstone of political theories and practices in cultures of phallicized whiteness.
The individual thereby comes to function as an ahistorical unit defined by its productive
labor’s distancing relation to the state of nature, not by any historico-political forces. (With
his unhistorical thinking, Locke acts per- fectly as a liberal individual.) Classical liberalism
writes the individual as the (allegedly) neutral substratum of all political decisions,
positioning it as sep- arable from historico-political forces. In carving the individual out
of both the natural and socio-historico-political landscapes, modern political and
epistemological projects turn around Locke’s fundamental metaphors of en- closure. The
individual, that seat of political and personal subjectivity, is enclosed and thus cut off from
all other forces circulating in the social envi- ronment. The individual effectively functions as
a piece of private property, with the strange twist of owning itself, impervious to all
intruders and pro- tected by the inherent right of ownership, derived from the
ontological right to one’s own enclosed body. History then is reduced to a collection of
what Kelly Oliver has aptly called “discrete facts that can be known or not known, written in
history books, and [that] are discontinuous with the present” (2001, 130). History is that
collection of events that occurred in the past and is now tightly sealed in that past. History is
simply what has happened, with no fundamental effect or influence upon what is happening
now or might happen in the future. Historicity is unthought and unthinkable here. The
modern rational self—the liberal individual—exists in a temporally and historically sealed
vacuum, made possible by the clear disjunction between past, present, and future.
Cartesian concepts of time as discrete moments that do not enter into contact or affect one
another dominate this conception of the individ- ual.10 The logic of the limit thereby
demarcates the past sharply and neatly from the present, turning each into objects
about which we can develop concepts, facts, and truths. The future, that temporal
horizon initiated by preferred forms of complex labor, becomes the sole focus of
intention and desire. But the future never arrives. Therefore, if historicity and ‘the
historical’ mean reading present ideas, values, or concepts as undergoing a constant
shaping and reshaping by material forces, this divorce of the past from the present
effectively renders all temporal zones—past, present, future, and all permutations—
ahistorical. Existence itself is radically dehistoricized. And the individual, that bastion of
political activity and value, accordingly resides in a historical vacuum, untouched by
historical forces—the very realm of whiteness. This ahistorical view of history perpetuates
the modern project of clas- sical liberalism and its damages, creating a particular kind of
individual. The individual becomes the locus of identity, selfhood, and subjectivity in the
modern political project. Demarcated from historical existence, it also re- quires careful
delineation from other bodies, whether persons, institutions, history, or social attitudes. This
concept of the individual develops with a pronounced insistence on its neutrality, rendering
specific attributes of the individual merely particular qualities that function, again, on the
model of private property: characteristics such as race, gender, religion, or nationality
remain at a distance from this insistently neutral individual. (I use the pro- noun “it” to
emphasize the function of this alleged neutrality, a dynamic that is central to the valorization
of the white propertied Christian male as the subject of power in phallicized whiteness.)
This insular existence, under- scored by its ahistorical status, is further ensured by claims of
radical auton- omy, whereby the individual is the source, site, and endpoint of all actions,
desires, thoughts, and behaviors: we choose what we do. And we choose it, of course,
because we are rational: Kantian ethics become the proper bookend to Locke’s initiating of
“high modernity’s”11 schemas. This demarcation of the individual then carves the critical
division between internal and external, and its political-psychic counterpart, that between
self and Other. The self is located squarely and exclusively in one’s rational faculties, the
natural law that, according to Locke, civilizes us into economies of labor, utility, and a
strange mix of scarcity and abundance. The modern rational self is radically selfcontained—enclosed. It is a sovereign self, unaffected by and independent from any thing
or force external to it, whether materiality or the Other. Assuming it exercises rationality
appropriately, this self is radically autonomous, choosing its own place in the world.
(Pointing to America, Locke insists that civilized men are free to leave society.) It does not
heed any call of the Other. It is effectively autog- enous, existing in a pre-Hegelian
philosophical world.12 Utility and its epistemological counterpart, instrumentality,
subsequently become the operative conceptions of power in this schema of the liberal
individual as the self. Autonomous, autogenous, and ahistorical, the modern rational
individual is in full control of its self. Its power is thereby something that it owns and
wields, as it chooses. Power is not some force that might shape the individual
without its assent or, at a minimum, its acknowledg- ment. It is something that an
individual, even if in the form of an individual state, wields intentionally. It can still use
this power legitimately or illegiti- mately, but that is a matter of choice. The individual
controls power and the ways that it affects the world: this is its expression of freedom.
Accordingly, the role of the law becomes to vigilantly protect this ahistorical unit, the
individual, from the discriminations and violences of historical vicissitudes. The role of the
law is to protect the individual’s power, the seat of its freedom. We are far from Foucaultian
ideas that perhaps power and history constitute the ways we view and experience the
world, shaping our categories and embedding us in this very notion of the individual as
autonomous, au- togenous, and ahistorical. The liberal individual, untouched by material,
po- litical, and historical conditions, is a neutral substratum that freely wields its power as it
chooses: this is the liberal sovereignty and mastery of freedom. Because the individual is
this neutral substratum, differences may or may not attach themselves to it. But those
differences are cast into that incon- sequential space of material conditions along with
history and the Other. The odd twist of self-ownership surfaces more fully here. Following
Locke’s metaphors of enclosure, the individual is enclosed and sealed off not only from all
historical and social forces in the environment, but also from the very attributes of difference
within itself. While specific attributes that con- stitute “difference” in North American culture
continuously shift, with new categories emerging and old ones receding, the particular
vector of difference that matters depends on our historical location, and all its
complexities.13 Consequently, these attributes do not fundamentally affect the neutrality of
the modern individual. These differences occur at the level of the body and history, realms
of existence that do not touch the self-contained individual. The neutral individual relates to
these differences through the models of enclosure and ownership. It experiences these
discrete parts of itself (e.g., race, gender, religion, nationality) as one owns a variety of
objects in econ- omies of (scarce) private property: one chooses when one wishes to
purchase, own, display, or wear such objects as one freely desires. The unnerving influence of power surfaces, however, as we realize that this free choice be- comes the
exclusive power of the subject position valorized in cultures of phallicized whiteness, the
white propertied Christian (straight) male14 who determines when, how, and which
differences matter. Neutrality thus functions as the conceptual glue of the modern political
project of classical liberalism. It allows the model of ownership to take hold as the dominant
conception of selfhood: one’s true self resides in a neutral space and from that space one
owns one’s power, one’s freedom, and one’s attributes. Just as the capitalist fantasy still
convinces us today that we choose and control our private property, the neutral individual
also resides in a self- enclosed, self-contained space that hovers above these matters. Just
as the kind of car an American drives today supposedly does not affect the kind of person
that he or she is, so too the rational and therefore neutral individual resides in a space that
transcends material conditions and their entrapments. Differences between individuals,
whether of race or religion or gender or nationality or sexuality, become a mere matter of
ownership—i.e., what one has and has not chosen to own. And as the inherent rights of
private property imply, one consequently has the right to protect or dispense with one’s
prop- erty: the individual is free to choose how to wield its power and how to respond to
these (inconsequential) differences. Not to have this ability—i.e., not to be able to choose
and control when and how one’s gender, race, nationality, sexuality, or religion matters—
signifies a lack of individualism, a lack of power, a lack of civility.15 The individual thus
becomes the proprietor of its differences and the various, discrete rights obtaining to them.
The logic of enclosure and de- marcation, expressing the logic of the limit here, grounds the
conceptions of difference itself in these schemas of classical liberalism. One owns—encloses—one’s differences and, additionally, the differences themselves are dis- crete—
demarcated—from one another. The language of rights derives from the overarching model
of ownership, just as we find it developed out of the fundamental right to one’s own
enclosed body in Locke’s text. The modern project of liberal individualism thereby reads
difference as that which is, can be, or ought to be demarcated, delimited, enclosed—and
owned. When I turn to contemporary debates around affirmative action below, I will return
to several dynamics that have emerged here. First of all, the liberal individual exists as a
neutral substratum to which differences, caused by history and materiality (the body), attach
themselves. Equality conse- quently resides in that neutral substratum of the individual and
we access it only by stripping away the merely historical attributes of difference: equality
and neutrality mutually constitute one another. Consequently, those who cannot abstract
from merely historical attributes of difference (e.g., race and gender) will be read as
unequal to those for whom these historical differences do not matter. Secondly, freedom is
understood as the expression of power, over which one has conscious and rational control.
Power, framed as a tool that one wields, is derived from the model of instrumental reason.
And, finally, the liberal individual experiences differences such as race, gender, religion,
and nationality as attributes that it owns. It consequently exercises rights over them such as
those derived from the inherent right of ownership that Locke locates in the natural
imperative to labor: the language of rights assumes, thrives in, and thereby perpetuates an
economy of scarcity, the economy in which debates around affirmative action are firmly
entrenched. Each of these colludes to give phallicized whiteness the necessary tools to
maintain the white propertied Christian (straight) male as the valorized subject in power.
Functioning through the rhetoric of neutrality, this specific subject disavows its historical and
material conditioning and thereby gains the power to determine when, how, and which
differences matter. Grounded in the fundamental value of neutrality, difference should not
matter; hence, for example, contemporary rhetorics of color-blindness dominate discourses
about the desired endpoint of a ‘just’—and therefore raceless—society.17 However, in
those circumstances in which difference insists on its existence (i.e., circumstances in
which ‘minorities’ or the disenfranchised insist on their rights, voices, and even votes), the
decisions about when, how, and which differences matter will remain in the power of the
neutral individual, the subject in power—and the one who is free.
The AFFs politics of inclusion is structural adjustment of the black body
that forecloses black liberation. If we win their scholarship produces this
structural violence that is a reason to vote negative
Wilderson 2010- Frank B Wilderson III- Professor at UC irvine- Red, White and Black- p. 810
I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my ar- gument wedded to the
disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established,
first, as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of
intent, or racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed. If the
position of the Black is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere,
indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject, as
imagined by Marxism and psy- choanalysis, then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply
a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (as political science and
sociology would have it). This banishment from the Human fold is to be found most
profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of Black people's staunchest "allies," and in
some of the most "radical" films. Here—not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police
brutality, or conservative scholarship—is where the Settler/Master's sinews are most
resilient. The polemic animating this research stems from (1) my reading of Native and
Black American meta-commentaries on Indian and Black subject positions written over the
past twenty-three years and ( 2 ) a sense of how much that work appears out of joint with
intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political praxis and socially
engaged popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of
abandonment I experience when I read the meta-commentaries on Red positionality (by
theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria Jr., and
Haunani-Kay Trask) and the meta-commentaries on Black positionality (by theorists such
as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson,
and Achille Mbembe) against the deluge of multicultural positivity is overwhelming. One
suddenly realizes that, though the semantic field on which subjec- tivity is imagined has
expanded phenomenally through the protocols of multiculturalism and globalization theory,
Blackness and an unflinching articulation of Redness are more unimaginable and illegible
within this expanded semantic field than they were during the height of the F B I ' S
repressive Counterintelligence Program ( C O I N T E L P R O ) . On the seman- tic field on
which the new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed lO become partially legible
through a programmatics of structural adjust- ment (as fits our globalized era). In other
words, for the Indians' subject position to be legible, their positive registers of lost or
threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point of fact the antagonistic
register of dispossession that Indians "possess" is a position in relation to a socius
structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have
been subjected to genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a
constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which Indians would not,
paradoxically, "exist." 9 Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims
suc- cessfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an
operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a
dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we
think of today's Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception
of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrat- ing how nothing
remotely approaching claims successfully made on the state has come to pass. In other
words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality, mass incarceration,
segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of H I V infection,
and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong
direction; we would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which would only mystify, rather than
clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and
empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with
more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political sci- ence,
history, and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question:
the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic
whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell
labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has
already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he
demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery.
Once the "solid" plank of "work" is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent
notion of "claims against the state"—the proposition that the state and civil society are
elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black
position—disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic
on the Middle Passage. Put an- other way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as
Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a
grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which
Hu- manity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal in- tegrity; if the
Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous
violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized,
a being outside of re- lationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric
of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the
interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits
the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between
Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the
gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.
The alternative is an unflinching paradigmatic analysis that poses the
question of whether civil society is ethical
Wilderson 10 [Frank, Professor of African American Studies and Drama at UC Irvine, Ph.D.
in Rhetoric/Film Studies from UC Berkeley, “Red, White, & Black”, pp ix-]
STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During the last
years of apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and aboveground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During
this period, I began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a
movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing order. The neoliberal
compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist Movement made with the moderate
elements were due, in large part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet
to tthe fire of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead,
we allowed our energies and points of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic
considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the question—and the power to
pose the question is the greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I have written about this
unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so I'll not
rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and
academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic
moment and in a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers
and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and
appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick
Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye
(deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani
Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.
The black body is the site of social death par excellence, having become
dead by a 700-year injunction barring its subjectivity. Social death is a
condition of existence and not some avoidable impact—how we relate to
this condition is all that is important
Wilderson 02 - The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal-Presented a t #Imprisoned
Intellectuals # Conference Brown University]
Civil society is not a terrain intended for the Black subject. It is coded as waged and wages
are White. Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced, contested, mapped.
And th e invitat ion to p articipate in hegemony's gestures of influence, leadership, and
consent is not ext ended to t he unwaged. We live in the world , but ex ist out side of civil s
ociety. This structurally impossible position is a paradox, because the Black subject, the
slave, is vital to political economy: s/he kick-starts capital at its genesis and rescues it from
its over-accumulation crisis at its end. But Marxism has no account of this phenomenal birth
and life-saving role played by the Black subject: from Marx and Gr amsci we have con
sistent s ilence. In taking Foucau lt to ta sk for a ssum ing a univ ersal s ubject in r evolt ag
ainst d iscipline, in the same s pirit in which I have t aken Gr amsci to ta sk for as suming a
u niversal sub ject, the subject of civil societ y in revolt a gainst capita l, Joy Jam es writes :
The U.S. carceral network kills, however, and in its prisons, it kills more blacks than any
other ethnic group. American prisons constitute an "outside" in U.S. political life. In fact, our
society displays waves of concentric outside circles with increasing distances from
bourgeois self-policing. The state routinely polices the14 unassim ilable in the hell of
lockdow n, deprivat ion tanks , control units , and holes for political prisoners (Resisting
State Violence 1996: 34 ) But this peculiar preoccupation is not Gramsci's bailiwick. His
concern is with White folks; or with folks in a White (ned) enough subject position that they
are confronted by, or threat ened by th e remova l of, a wag e -- be it monetary or social.
But Black subjectivity itself disarticulates the Gramscian dream as a ubiquitous
emancipatory strategy, because Gramsci, like most White activists, and radical American
movements like the prison abolition movement, has no theory of the unwaged, no solidarity
with the slave If we are to take Fanon at his word when he writes, #Decolonization, which
sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder
# (37) then we must accept the fact that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the
Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body.
Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of
bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil
society is possible: namely, those other bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent.
Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in
America generates no categories for the chromosome of History, no data for the categories
of Immigration or Sovereignty; it is an experience without analog # a past, without a
heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of t he Imaginary for
#whoever says #rape # says Black, # (Fanon) , whoever says #prison # says Black, and
whoever says #AIDS # says Black (Sexton) # the #Negro is a phobogenic object #
(Fanon). Indeed &a phobogenic object &a past without a heritage &the map of gratuitous
violence &a program of complete disorder. But whereas this realization is, and should be
cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal # not at least, for
a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison a bolition. 15
If a social movement is to be neither social democratic, nor Marxist, in terms of the structure
of its political desire then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of
subjects of social death that present themselves; and, if we are to be honest with
ourselves we must admit that the “Negro “ has been inviting Whites, and as well as civil
society #s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have
wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today # even in the most antiracist movements, like the prison abolition movement # invested elsewhere. This is not to
say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-White, but it is to say that it is almost
always “anti-Black” which is to say it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a
prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. Not because it raises the
specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of existing
resources) but because its condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance
functions as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refus al to affirm , a program of
complete disorder. One mus t embrace its disorder, its in coherence and allow oneself to
be elaborated by it, if indeed one's politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this
country down. If this is not the desire which underwrites one #s politics then through what
strategy of legitimation is the word #prison # being linked t o the wo rd #abolition #? Wh at
ar e this movem ent #s lines of po litical a ccount abilit y? There #s nothing foreign,
frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire
to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of
itself: no one, for example, has ever been known to say #gee-whiz, if only my orgasms
would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all. # But few so-called radicals desire to be
embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness # and the state
of politica l movemen ts in A merica to day is ma rked by t his very N egroph obogen isis:
#gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all. # Perhaps
there #s something more terrifying about the joy of Black, then there is about the joy of sex
(unless one is talking sex wit h a Negr o). Perhaps coalitions today p refer to remain inorgas mic in the fa ce of civilsociety # with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case.
But if, through this stasis, or paralysis , they tr y to do t he work of pr ison a bolit ion # that
work will fail; because it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e. the worker) on
behalf of a position of incoherence, the Black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social
formations on the Left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions bet ween worker s
and s laves. T hey remain coalitions opera ting with in the logic of civil society; and
function less as revolutionary promises and more as crowding out scenarios of Black
antagonisms # they simply feed our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker #
be s/he a factory worker demanding a monetary wage or an immigrant or White woman
demanding a social wage # gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the
positionality of the Black subject # be s/he a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting #
gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society: from the coherence of civil society, t
he Black subject beckons with the in coherence of civil war. A civil war which reclaims
Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of
“absolute dereliction“: a scandal which rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then,
becomes that unthought, but never forgotten understudy of hegemony. A Black specter
waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or
reparation) but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.
L: State
The 1AC is an investment in the killing state, which governs by expanding
democracy, "requires citizens who imagine themselves to be potential
victims or those responsible for the care of such victims." The rule of law
does not end conflict or war, it uses the discourse of liberalism to eradicate
racialized monsters who threaten it
Anthony Paul Farley, 2002, Amusnig Monsters, pg. 1511-16
The world, according to the theology of the killing state, is filled with demons, angels,
purity, and danger. We the people imagine ourselves to be angels in danger. Our
imagined innocence is a requirement of the killing state. The killing state, which governs
through crime, being democratic, "requires citizens who imagine themselves to be
potential victims or those responsible for the care of such victims." 80 For such citizens
"[t]he death penalty remains the ultimate form of public victim recognition."81 Leviathan, then,
sets "the victim" in a high place. As Alison Young writes, "the victim.., offers us a kind of
certainty against such loss of limits. 8 2 Further, "[t]he victim assures us that there is an
end to the loss of faith, that there is a point beyond which nihilism will not go." 3 Former
Attorney General Janet Reno states, "I draw most of my strength from victims,.., for they
represent America to me .... You are my heroes and heroines. You are but little lower than
the angels."' In thinking about these angelic victims from whom the Attorney General
"draw[s] most of her strength, 85 as the ideal citizens of the killing state it is also important
to remember those whose exclusion is the wind beneath their wings. In the theology of
the killing state, blacks appear as demons: "Capital punishment also has been crucial in the
processes of demonizing young, black males and using them in the pantheon of public
enemies to replace the Soviet 'evil empire. '86 A "little lower than the angels,"87 but, as
Sarat writes, "the victims' rights movement wants more. '88 Why? Because "[p]unishment
lives in culture through its pedagogical effects. It teaches us how to think about
categories like intention, responsibility, and injury, and it models the socially appropriate
ways of responding to injuries done to us."89 The victims' rights movement, therefore,
"seeks participation and power by making the victim the symbolic heart of modern
legality."' Sarat argues that attempts to differentiate revenge and retribution fail. The
former cannot be contained, only renamed. The latter is usually just the cloak for the
former: "The demand for victims' rights and the insistence that we hear the voices of the
victims are just the latest 'style' in which vengeance has disguised itself."91 Vengeance
appears in the form of the victims' rights movement demand to amplify the voices of
victims, a demand that is itself "but a symptom of the fragility and instability of the
myths... that have been used to legitimate the killing state. 9 2 This symptom-disguisedas-a-demand is disastrous because the legal system seeks, impossibly, to "replace ...
vengeful violence with an economy of violence controlled and disciplined by legal
norms."93 Vengeance is what the victims' rights movement wants but state violence,
"controlled and disciplined by legal norms," is not vengeance, at least, not exactly.94
State violence, therefore, fails to satisfy those who desire it. And this, I argue, is precisely
what causes the demands to increase in intensity. The desire for vengeance cannot be
satisfied legally and is, therefore, the perfect ally of the Leviathan to whom the prayerful,
angry voices of the victims' rights movement are directed. Just as vengeance of times
appears as retribution, so too does the entity to whom these monsters are monstrously
sacrificed Of times appear as Apollo. A closer examination, however, reveals a decidedly
Dionysian aspect to the face that governs the ceremony. We might imagine-with an imagination
amplified by the electricity coursing through the body of the condemned, an electricity we can
feel coursing though our own monstrous corporate body, an electricity that causes our hearts to
beat as one-how our own faces must look to the anybody strapped to the electric chair or any of
our other killing devices: "A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture,
to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like
an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic."95
The body electric sings its hymns to Apollo (retribution) or Dionysus (vengeance) or, and this is
most likely, to itself and its hierarchies. These hierarchies, our hierarchies, expressed through
law, are the same hierarchies that produce amusing monsters. And these hierarchies,
expressed through law, take bodily form: white-over-black, man-over-woman, citizenover-alien, and so on. Law does not settle anything: "Humanity does not gradually
progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of
law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules
and thus proceeds from domination to domination."96 The legal system is the way in
which we take pleasure in the sacrifice. Executions concern us all. Our hierarchies, "the
system," produce monsters: monsters whose murders and executions are found
amusing. Monsters who find amusement in executions and who look upon the scaffold
as if it were a stage peopled with actors. And this peculiar passion play justifies the
entire state apparatus of poverty, racism, sexism, neglect that creates the distortionsmonstrous distortions-distortions that often find themselves expressed in and through
monsters who kill. The passion play-state killing-justifies the entire monstrous apparatus
that is Leviathan by focusing our anger, a collective anger cultivated by the system, on
the individual monster that killed. We have become, all of us, amusing monsters. Sarat
writes of the old spectacle of the scaffold, a spectacle that has, in his view, largely disappeared:
Viewers obtained pleasure as well as schooling in their relation to sovereign power, by
witnessing pain. The excesses of execution and the enthusiasm of the crowd blended the
performance of torture with pleasure, creating an unembarrassed celebration of death that
knew no law except the law of one person's will inscribed on the body of the condemned. The
display of violence, of the sovereignty that was constituted in killing, was designed to
create fearful, if not obedient, subjects.97 This spectacle has not, however, disappeared. It
appears today in a form more suitable for Apollo than Dionysus: "Today the death penalty... has
been transformed from dramatic spectacle to cool, bureaucratic operation, and the role of
the public now is strictly limited and tightly controlled."" Apollo, however, is, as often as
not, Dionysus disguised: "the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the
promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the
staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence."99 The pleasure of domination is a
many-splendored thing."° It can appear in a wild, rough, up-close form or it can appear in
a highly stylized, sophisticated distanced form. Ecstasy-in-domination can secret itself
anywhere and every where-even in state killing. State killing is secret, yes, but it is, more
importantly, public. We participate, as a public, in the general ritual of state killing as well
as in those individual killings that are accompanied by media storms such as that
surrounding Timothy McVeigh. Regarding these public secrets of the scaffold, Phyllis Goldfarb
reveals: Empathy, more broadly and deeply experienced, would have prevented the Oklahoma
City bombing. We rightly ask: Why couldn't the McVeigh who could sympathize so deeply with
the humanity of the Branch Davidians appreciate the humanity of the innocents of the Murrah
building? Let us then extend the question to ourselves: Are we too suffering from selective
empathy? In expressing compassion for the victims in the Oklahoma City bombing, are we
replicating the very same thing that we must always fight if we are to have any hope of
preventing further atrocities-the dehumanization of another human being, even a human being
as deeply disturbed as Timothy McVeigh? What is secret is the way that Leviathan allows,
even encourages us all to take pleasure in the ritual denial of the humanity of the
condemned. What is secret is the way that Leviathan, by encouraging us all to deny the
humanity of the condemned, encourages us also to sanctify the terrible hierarchies that
produced the atmosphere of violence that joined the condemned to the victim through
the act of murder. The stormy violence of our laws gathers and darkens and clouds our
futures and, with what strangely seems like suddenness, sometimes joins victim and
murderer with the lightning act of murder, an act which our laws, Leviathan, attributes to
the lightning, the murderer, and not the storm. What is secret is the way that Leviathan
makes itself sinless and therefore holy by killing the evidence of its evils. What is secret
is the way that the "flattened narratives" of Leviathan's anti-gospel hide this entire
monstrous process from our eyes-eyes too busy watching Leviathan's executions
through Leviathan's eyes to see through the false necessities of the killing state." Our
own all-too-human eyes stay closed (too busy watching Leviathan). The modern scaffold
is pleasurable only when we experience the spectacle as Leviathan would have us
experience it. °3 Allen Lee Davis was burned to death in the electric chair by the state of
Florida. The picture of his post-electrocution body appears, like a sharp stick in the eye, as
"Figures 3, 4, and 5" in When the State Kills."' Figures 3, 4, and 5 depict a bald, bloated,
bleeding, marshmallow-colored man with eyes of burnt cork.' It is an ugly picture, an awful
picture, an unsettling picture of a monstrous moment. "If you want a picture of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever": it is a picture of the future, according to
Leviathan."
L: Chain of Equivalence
Note: this card could also be used as an alternative (multiracial coalition as
politics of opposition).
Analysis that does not center black existence, including that which lists it
on a chain of equivalents, is doomed to undermine multiracial coalition as
politics of opposition.
Sexton 07 (Jared, Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control from “Warfare in the American
Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy” edited by Joy James, Duke University
Press, p. 212. Sexton is an associate professor of African American Studies and an associate
professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. They have a Ph.D
from the University of California, Berkeley in Ethnic Studies // EMS).
The good news, if it can be called that, is that
this effort to repress a sustained¶ examination of black
positionality-"the position of the unthought"50-will¶ only undermine multiracial coalition as
politics of opposition. Every analysis¶ that attempts to account for the vicissitudes of racial
rule and the machinations¶ of the racial state without centering black existence within its
framework, which¶ does not mean simply listing it among a chain of equivalents-is
doomed¶ to miss what is essential about the situation, because what happens to blacks
indicates¶ the truth (rather than the totality) of the system, its social symptom, and¶ all other
positions can (only) be understood from this angle of vision.5¶ ! More¶ important for present purposes,
every attempt to defend the rights and liberties¶ of the latest victims of racial profiling will
inevitably fail to make substantial¶ gains insofar as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of
blacks, the prototypical targets¶ of this nefarious police practice and the juridical
infrastructure built up around¶ it. Without blacks on board, the only viable option, the only
effective defense¶ against the crossfire will entail forging greater alliances with an antiblack civil¶
society and capitulating further to the magnification of state power-a bid that¶ carries its
own indelible costs, its own pains and pleasures.
L: No History
Racial profiling cannot be understood free from its historical context on the
plantation. Other approaches fail because they render this concrete
situation metaphorical.
Sexton 07 (Jared, Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control from “Warfare in the American
Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy” edited by Joy James, Duke University
Press, p. 200-02. Sexton is an associate professor of African American Studies and an
associate professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. They have
a Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley in Ethnic Studies // EMS).
In theory, everyone in the United States (and many outside its boundaries)¶ is subject to these rules of engagement. Yet, as Ira
Glasser, former director of the¶ America Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), recently noted, while
the police could,¶ say,
randomly raid apartment buildings on the Upper West Side of Manhattan¶ and yield
fruitful results, they clearly do not. As he puts it, "They don't do it¶ because most of the folks who
live in those apartment buildings are white. They¶ don't do it because if they tried to do it,
the outrage would become so big, so¶ fast that it would become politically impossible to
sustain."12 We might wonder¶ who would be outraged at such operations and whose outrage would make a¶ difference? At any
rate, the verdict of his analysis is clear: On our highways, on our streets, in our airports, and at our customs checkpoints, skin color
once again, irrespective of class, and without distinctions based on education or economic status, skin color once again is being
used as a cause for USDIClOn, and a sufficient reason to violate people's rights. ¶ For blacks in particular the situation is acute. The
most recent attack on Fourth¶ Amendment protections followed immediately the Warren Court's "due process ¶ revolution," as
inaugurated by its decisions in the Mapp (1961) and Miranda¶ (1966) cases. This shift in judicial opinion in favor of criminal suspects
and defendants,¶ disproportionately black and characteristically depicted as such, was¶ supposed by some to be the criminal-law
equivalent to or extension of then recent¶ civil law reforms. The
motion toward constitutional protections for
blacks¶ was, then, taken to be a byproduct of the limited success of the Civil Rights¶ Movement, but its broader implications
were rapidly conflated with the perceived¶ threat of the radicalization of struggle dubbed
"Black Power," which for¶ the mainstream presented ominous criminal tendencies, among
other things.¶ The idea that blacks could or should have both civil and criminal rights thus ¶ entered the furor of an emergent "law
and order" political culture whose executive'¶ legislative, and judicial wings all feverishly and collaboratively retrenched. ¶ The
legal history from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George W Bushfrom¶ "war on
crime" to "war on drugs" to "war on terror" -is alarmingly short.¶ The liberal civil-rights
legislation and judiciary review enjoyed a very brief and¶ largely ineffective life. But the
"revolution" in criminal rights never even got¶ off the ground; it never actually happened except in the
collective paranoid¶ fantasy of "white America." There is, finally, no golden age for blacks before¶ the criminal law. Therefore, in our
discussions of a so-called creeping fascism¶ or nascent authoritarianism or rise of the police state, particularly in the wake ¶ of the
Homeland Security and PATRIOT acts, we
might do better than trace its¶ genealogy to the general
warrant (or even the Executive Order), whose specter¶ forever haunts the democratic
experiment of postrevolutionary civil society.¶ Instead, the proper object of investigation
is the antebellum slave code and its¶ antecedents in colonial statute, not because the
trajectory of this legal history¶ threatens to undo the rights of all, but precisely because
the prevailing libertarian¶ impulse in the United States has so resourcefully and rendered¶
the concrete situation in metaphoric terms.¶ Under the force of this blacks, who were clearly in the but
definitively¶ not of it, were not only available to arbitrary search and seizure-the¶ bane of the general warrant-but were, in the main,
always already searched¶ and seized. More to the point, they had, in the famous phrase, "no rights that a¶ white man bound to
respect," including the right to life. The
ethos of slavery- in other¶ words, the lasting ideological and affective matrix of the
white supremacist project-admits no legitimate black self-defense, recognizes no¶ legitimate
assertions of black self-possession, privacy, or autonomy. A permanent¶ state of theft, seizure, and
abduction orders the affairs of the captive community¶ and its progeny. Structural vulnerability to appropriation,
perpetual and¶ involuntary openness, including all the wanton uses of the body so finely
detailed¶ by scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers, should be understood¶ as the paradigmatic
conditions of black existence in the Americas, the defining¶ characteristics of New World
antiblackness.14 In short, the black, whether¶ slave or "free," lives under the commandment
of whites.Is Policing blacks in the¶ colonial and antebellum periods was, we recall, the prerogative of every white¶ (they could
assume the role or not) and was only later professionalized as the¶ modern prison system emerged out of the ashes of
Reconstruction.I6 Without¶ glossing the interceding history, suffice it to say that such policing was organized ¶ across the twentieth
century at higher orders of magnitude by the political,¶ economic, and social shifts attending the transition from welfare to warfare¶
state. "Racial
profiling," then, is a young term, but the practice is centuries-old. In¶ other
words, the policing of blacks-whose repression has always been state sanctioned,¶ even
as it was rendered a private affair of "property management" _¶ remains a central issue
today; it has not recently emerged. Amnesty International's¶ public hearings on racial profiling, the stalled federal
legislation termed¶ "HR 1443," the ACLU'S "Driving while Black" campaign, and the problematic¶ reworking of the issue of racial
The effects of
crude¶ political pragmatism, legalistic single-mindedness, or historical myopia enable¶ us
to identify the unleashing of the police with the advent of the war on drugs¶ or the
xenophobic panic around the New Immigration or the emergence of¶ Homeland Security
against the threat of terrorism.
profiling after September 11 all unfold against¶ the backdrop of this long history of "policing black people."
AT: Racial Progress
Racism still runs rampant in today’s society, no matter how “Post Racial”
we claim to be.
John Gillespie Jr. 2015 of Towson University.
(https://solidphilosophy.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/post-racial-racism-and-kendrick-lamar-how-do-we-know-racismis-still-bad-in-america/#)
There used to be a time where your neighborhood racist was easily distinguishable. Well,
not your neighborhood, but the white neighborhood that still just so happens to be close enough
for you to see the crosses burning in the back yard and the black bodies still hanging
from the “party-down-at-the-square.” This racism, this overt racism, has been arguably
destroyed. Arguably, because the black population still sees that symbolic cross burning over
futures left standing in the flames of poverty, institutional racism and white supremacy,
and covert discrimination in housing markets, conflict governmental policies, and
school-to-prison pipelines. Arguably, because black bodies still hang from white police chokeholds, spinal breakages,
and white nationalist gun shells; because black bodies still hang from their social death, their status of
fungibility, and what is essentially, the hazardous de-facto unlawfulness of that black
body. Nonetheless, we will say, arguably, American racism in its former form has diminished. But does this mean that racism
has? Now, I can hear conservative pundits with their fist-raised and their cheeks glowing that disdainful red exalting, “Of course! No
one is hung any longer! No crosses burn any longer! And your argument that ‘crosses are burning over futures’ or that ‘bodies are
hanging from police bullets’ is not only an inflation of contemporary reality, but a negation of the truth.” And I can hear the left and
the black nationals contemptuously refuting their claims with piles of evidence to support that it is not an inflation nor a negation, but
a fact that conservatives aren’t willing to acknowledge. Since this is the case and the articles are piled high with people trying to
prove or disprove that either racism exist or that it may exist, but its “getting better,” I wish to redirect the conversation for a moment.
For the most part we can agree that racism exist in America. The problem, however problematic this problem may be, is identifying
the quantity of the racist practices or the reality of white love for black folks. How can we tell definitively if we have a race problem in
America, if we live in a nation of “racism without racist” as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls it? Lewis Gordon stated in his lecture Living
Thought, Living Freedom: A Lecture on Black Existential Philosophy, “We
live in the great age of the post . . .
postmodern, postcolonial, postracism, posthumanism, a lot of post, but all post these
days ultimately means is that you continue doing the same except your admitting that
you’re ashamed of it . . . Post-racism essentially means racism in a world where people
are ashamed of being racist.” Even if this is true, a conflict still arises when shame becomes denial. When denial
permits the continuing practice of post-racial racism and ultimately, all the maledictions of the past transfuse into contemporary
forms under the guise of shameful faces and white guilt. What results from this post-racial racism is Kendrick Lamar’s truly
philosophic inquiry in The Blacker, The Berry, “You hate me don’t you? You hate my people your plan is to terminate my culture?”
What is so philosophic and significant about this inquiry in our age is that it is the race question of our age. Do white people hate
black people still? How pervasive is this hatred? And why do we feel all too often as black persons in America that are lives are
secondary, our existence is fungible, and our body is an absence-desired-presence? Why do we feel like black lives don’t matter?
The question bring us to Du Bois. Whereas Du Bois was asking, “What does it mean to be a problem?” We are forced to ask, “What
does it mean to exist as a problem while living in a world ashamed and unwilling to admit that we are one?” Du Bois didn’t have to
ask if white people hated him. It was clear that they did. He wasn’t blind to the bodies, to the cross, to the segregated cities, to the
howling souls of black folks scratching with bleeding nails on the stern walls of white supremacy, begging for acknowledgement,
opportunity, and humanity. Kendrick isn’t blind either; however, the bodies Kendrick are seeing are hidden behind a cloak of shame,
guilt, and relentless dismissal of his reality, the crosses being burnt are churches with “bad electric wiring,” the segregated cities are
poverty stricken enclaves dominated by the “lazy” and “thuggish,” the howling souls are hip hop artist “poisoning the youth” with
notorious tales of their reality. How can we know if the white Other is not racist, apologetic to racism, or silent and submissive to
racial realities? Black Lives Matter! That is how we know. The discontent this phrase raises in the white Conservative right is a
discontent of black lives. It is an uneasiness on behalf of the right to face the cries of black persons in this country. It is a wish to
return to silence, to the swept-under-the-rug racism of post-racial America. The importance of this phrase for white people is truly in
its opposite. Black Lives Don’t Matter! This is the articulation of those who remain silent in fear of saying, “Black Lives Matter.” For
when your sister cries, “I feel insignificant. I feel worthless. Do you love me?” And you stare at that broken black body and dismiss
her, you would have done better just saying, “I don’t.” This is the articulation of those who say, “All Lives Matter.” For when sorrow
reigns in the heart of your brother, and he says, “I feel insignificant. I feel worthless. Do you love me?” And you say, “I love
everyone.” Your brother will spurn your inflated humanism as inconsiderate to his current condition and situation. What Black Lives
Matters is saying truly is, “I love you,” to a group of oppressed persons burned by the weight of historic oppressions, suffering under
the disaster that is post-racial racism. When Kendrick Lamar asks, “You hate me don’t you?” And you answer with silence or you
answer with, “I love everyone,” you are unwilling to say you love him. Put plainly, you are unwilling to say you love or care about
black life. And that is how we found out. That is how we know how bad racism is in Post-Racial America. We
discover the
secret racism in post-racial America in its unwillingness to be outspoken in its love for
black life and its unwillingness to be considerate to black suffering. And the dreadful
silence that has occurred in the aftermath of the Dylann Roof shooting, the dreadful
silence that has occurred in the aftermath of the burning of 8 black churches in America,
the dreadful silence that has occurred in the wake of mass incarceration, on the schoolto-prison pipeline, on the cases of police brutality, on the rise of rape cases to black
women, on the rise of black suicide, on the decline in opportunities for black persons, all
make it painfully clear, that the post-racial America is just as racist as the racist America
of the past.
Even Black Youth consistently report that the racist police system makes
them see as if they are targeted rather than protected.
Jon C. Rogowski and Cathy J. Cohen “Democracy Remixed: Black Youths and the Future of
American Politics” in 2009
Equal protection under the law is a key component of political equality and human rights,
especially for historically marginalized groups. Jury verdicts in the Trayvon Martin and
Jordan Davis cases, in particular, have once again raised questions about whether all
citizens are treated equally under the law. In January 2014, we asked young people to indicate
whether they believe the U.S. legal system treats all groups equally, and whether they
themselves feel like a full and equal citizen in this country with all the rights and
protections that other people have. The results are shown in Table 3 below. Though young people in general
do not believe that the legal system treats all groups fairly, there are clear differences by
race. Across both questions, Black youth consistently report the least support for the idea that
equal protection currently exists in the United States. Only about a quarter (26.8 percent) of Black youth
believe that the American legal system treats all groups fairly. A substantially larger percentage of Latino youth (36.7) believe that
Black and Latino
youth reported feeling like a full and equal citizen at considerably lower rates than white
youth. Nearly three-quarters (72.9 percent) of white youth reported that they felt they had all
the rights and protections of a full and equal citizen, compared with just 60.2 percent of Black youth and
64.1 percent of Latino youth. As the data in this table indicate, young people nationwide view the legal
system quite differently across racial groups. Young people’s lived experiences inform
their views of the legal system, and Black youth disproportionately appear to reject the
notion that justice is blind.
the American legal system treats all groups fairly, compared with 41.0 percent of white youth. In addition,
Countergazing
White Gaze Bad
The white gaze functions to transform Black bodies into criminals and
reduce them to objects that are hyper-sexualized and feared.
Yancy 12 (George, “How Can You Teach Me If You Don’t Know Me? Embedded Racism and White Opacity,” Philosophy
of Education Archive, P. 49-51. Yancy is a professor of philosophy who works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy
of race and critical whiteness studies // EMS).
As Black, I am the “looked at.” As white, she is the bearer of the “white look.” But note
that I have not given my consent to have my body transformed, to have it reshaped, and
thrown back to me as something I am supposed to own, as a meaning I am supposed to
accept. Then again, who does? She clutches her purse, eagerly anticipating the arrival of her floor, “knowing” that this Black
predator will soon strike. As she clutches her purse, I am reminded of the sounds of whites locking their car doors as they catch a
glimpse of my Black body as I walk by (click, click). She fears that a direct look might incite the anger of the Black predator. She
fakes a smile. By her smile she hopes to elicit a spark of decency from me. But I don’t return the smile. I fear that it might be
After all, within the social space of the elevator, which has
become a hermeneutic transac- tional space within which all of my intended meanings
get falsified, it is as if I am no longer in charge of what I mean/intend. What she “sees” or
“hears” is governed by a racist epistemology of certitude that places me under erasure.
Her alleged literacy regarding the semiotics of my Black body is actually an instance of
profound illiteracy. Her gaze upon my Black body might be said to function like a camera
obscura. Her gaze consists of a racist socio-epistemic aperture, as it were, through
which the (white) light of “truth” casts an inverted/distorted image. It is through her gaze
that I become hyper-vigilant of my own embodied spatiality. On previous occasions, particularly when
interpreted as a gesture of sexual advance.
alone, I have moved my body within the space of occasions, my “being-in” the space of the elevator is familiar; my bodily
movements, my stance, are indicative of what it means to inhabit a space of familiarity.¶ The
movement away from the
familiar is what is effected vis-à-vis the white woman’s gaze. My movements become and remain the
elevator in a non-calculative fashion, paying no particular attention to my bodily comportment, the movement of my hands, my eyes,
the position of my feet. On such ¶ stilted. I dare not move suddenly. The apparent racial neutrality of the space within the
elevator (when I am standing alone) has
become one filled with white normativity. I feel trapped. I no
longer feel bodily expansiveness within the elevator, but constrained. I now begin to
calculate, paying almost neurotic attention to the proxemic positioning of my body,
making sure that this “black object,” what now feels like an appendage, a weight, is not
too close, not too tall, not too threatening. So, I genuflect, but only slightly, a movement that feels like an act of
worship. My lived body comes back to me like something ontologically occurrent,
something merely there in its facticity. Notice that she need not speak a word to render my Black body “captive.”
She need not scream “Rape!” She need not call me “Nigger!” Indeed, it is not a necessary requirement that she hates me in order
for her to script my body in the negative ways that she does.
White America has bombarded me and other
Black males with the “reality” of our dual hyper-sexualization: “you are a sexual trophy
and a certain rapist.” Fanon, aware of the horrible narrative myths used to depict Black bodies, notes that the Negro is the
genital and is the incarnation of evil, being that which is to be avoided and yet desired. Ritualistically enacting her
racialized and racist consciousness/embodiment, she reveals her putative racist
narrative competence. “One cannot decently ‘have a hard on’ everywhere,” as Fanon says, but within the white imaginary,
I apparently fit the bill. To put a slight interpretive inflection on Fanon here, as the insatiable, ever desiring Black penis, a walking,
talking, hard-on, I am believed eager to introduce white women into a sexual universe for which the white male “does not have the
key, the weapons, or the attributes.Ӧ I am often reminded of my purpose, my inner racial teleology, that is, my essence, through
popular culture. I sit in movie theaters waiting for “me” to appear on screen, waiting to see “my body” appear before me. For
example, in the movie White Chicks (2004), I am the character Latrell Spencer who reminds white women: “You know what they
say: when you go Black, you’re going to need a wheelchair.” I am the sadistic Black body in search of masochistic white female
bodies. I also saw myself in the movie The Heartbreak Kid (2007), where a white woman who plays Ben Stiller’s wife pleads with
him while having sex. She shouts, “Fuck me like a Black guy!”10 One, of course, feels sorry for Stiller’ s character as he really tries,
with pronounced gyrations, “to have sex with her like a Black guy.” But he does so to no avail. And in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
(1999), I was the Black man who entered a closet with a white woman who was blind. After having sex with her, not only does she
miraculously gain sight, but she says: “You’re Black? I knew it!”11 Here, the Black male penis reveals its multiple talents: not only is
it capable of temporarily crippling white women and confining them to wheelchairs and rendering extreme pleasure, but the Black
penis is also capable of healing the blind.¶ The
white gaze has fixed me. Like looking into Medusa’s
eyes, I have been made into stone, stiff, forever erect. It is as if Viagra runs naturally through my veins. In
fact, I have become a phantasm. So fictive has the Black body become, that its very
material presence has become superfluous. There are times when the Black body is not
even needed to trigger the right response. All that is needed is the imago. Fanon observes, “A [white] prostitute
told me that in her early days the mere thought of going to bed with a Negro brought on an orgasm.” 12 While actual Black
bodies suffered during the spectacle of lynchings, one wonders to what extent the Black
body as phantasmatic object was the fulcrum around which the spectacle was animated.¶
Within the lived and consequential semiotic space of the elevator, the white woman has
“taken” my body from me, sending an extraneous meaning back to me, an extraneous
thing, something foreign. What then am I to do? Within this racially saturated field of visibility, I have somehow
become this “predator-stereotype” from which it appears hopeless to escape. The white
woman thinks that her act of “seeing” me is an act of “knowing” what I am, of knowing what I
will do next, that is, hers is believed to be simply a process of unmediated/uninterpreted
perception. How- ever, her coming to “see” me as she does is actually a cultural achievement. It is an achievement
that not only distorts my Black body, but also distorts her white body. I am, as it were, a
phantom, indeed, a “spook,” that lives between the interstices of my physical,
phenotypically dark body and the white woman’s gesticulatory performances. She
performs, ergo, I become the criminal.¶
Countergazing Good
Must unconceal whiteness which makes white seem normal and black
dangerous
Yancy 12 (George, “How Can You Teach Me If You Don’t Know Me? Embedded Racism and White Opacity,” Philosophy
of Education Archive, P. 43-46. Yancy is a professor of philosophy who works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy
of race and critical whiteness studies // EMS).
So, my contention is that instances
of diversity where whiteness remains the center of privilege,
invisibility, and power are not genuine instances of diversity at all. If diversity-talk is to be more robust, and if diversity at the
level of lived experience is to be more fruitful and vivacious, then it is necessary that we engage¶ in the process of
un-concealing whiteness, revealing its subtle dynamism and structure. After all, without this
pre-conditional critical work of naming whiteness, of critically engaging whiteness,
“diversity” might simply function to serve the hidden values of whites as a group;
diversity might function as a way of feeding white moral narcissism; and, diversity might
function as a way of making whites comfortable, giving them a false sense of post-racial and
post-racist arrival. What we really want to do, then, is to make whiteness “unsafe” as a
normative category. Therefore, it is important to put whiteness at risk. Otherwise, whiteness can maintain its stability precisely through
the rhetoric of self-congratulatory processes as it constructs its own safe vision of diversity. What is necessary is a discussion about diversity that
raises the stakes, like walking from Jerusalem to Jericho, where something is “lost,” where we disorient ourselves, were we “dwell near” others in a
transformative way, where we do not simply walk by and notice that which is different from us, but where we “dwell near” differences, where we tarry
with differences. So, before we can talk about happy stories of diversity, we
must, as Sara Ahmed would say, hear unhappy
stories about racism,1 specifically the way in which the Black body constitutes not a site
of difference as the human other, but difference as the problematic other, the other who
is only allowed a voice so long as that voice does not disrupt whiteness as usual. The title of
this essay — “How Can You Teach Me if You Don’t Know Me?” — suggests the idea that to know me as an embodied Black person it is necessary that
I am actually heard, that is, that I am not occluded by white voices from speaking from my own embodied experiences. Indeed, it is also important that
my voice is not simply rearticulated through a prism of white discourse that can and often does obfuscate the voices of people of color. Another way of
thinking about the critique of whiteness as implied within the title of this essay is to ask: How
can you critically engage the
theme of diversity if you don’t know yourself? This question gives the problem back to whites, signifying their own
cognitive and emotive distortion vis-à-vis themselves. Indeed, the heart of this question posed to whites involves a
powerful act of transposition: How does it feel to be a white problem? Rethinking the term “nigger”
through the process of reversal, James Baldwin asks, “But if I am not the ‘nigger’ and if it is true that your invention reveals you, then who is the
As long as whites see
themselves as normative, and I am different qua “nigger,” diversity will function as a cover, a
political maneuver, a mere empty gesture. Baldwin’s point forces us to ask: Will the real “nigger” please stand up? The sounds
of car doors locking are deafening: Click. Click, Click. Click, Click,¶ Click. Click, Click, Click, Click.
nigger?” Baldwin goes on to say, “I give you your problem back. You’re the nigger, baby, it isn’t me.”
ClickClickClickClickClickClickClick. The clicking sounds are always already accompanied by white nervous gestures, and eyes that want to look, but
are hesitant to do so. The
click ensures their safety, effectively re- signifying their white bodies as
in need of protection vis-à-vis the site of danger, death, doom, and blackness. In fact, the
clicks begin to return me to myself as this dangerous beast, a phantom, rendering my
body the site of microtomy and volatility.¶ The clicks attempt to seal my identity as a dark savage. The clicking
sounds mark me; they inscribe me, “re-materializing” my presence, as it were, in ways that I know to be
untrue — in ways that are not me. Unable to stop the clicking, unable to stop white women from tightening the hold of their purses as I walk by, unable
to stop white women from crossing to the other side of the street once they have seen me walking in their direction, unable to stop white men from
looking several times over their shoulders as I walk behind them minding my own business, unable to establish a form of recognition that creates a
space of trust or liminality, there are times when I want to become their fantasy, to become their Black monster, their bogeyman. In the case of the
clicks, I want to pull open the car door and shout: “Surprise! You’ve just been carjacked by a ghost, a fantasy of your own creation. Now, get the hell
out of the car!” But, of course, this act of agency, this act of protest would simply reinforce the racist stereotype of the Black male as brutal and violent.¶
But what if the clicking sounds could speak? What would they communicate to me? Click (nigger). Click (nigger). Click (nigger). Click (nigger). Click,
Click (nigger, nigger). Click, Click, Click (nigger, nigger, nigger). Click, Click, Click, Click (nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger).
ClickClickClickClickClickClickClickClick (niggerniggerniggerniggerniggerniggerniggernigger). The clicking sounds would begin to fragment my
existence, cut away at my integrity, depicting me in the form of an essence, a solid-type. Click
(thug), Click (criminal), Click
(thief), Click (danger), Click (hypersexual), Click (predator), Click (violent), Click (wild),
Click (primitive), Click (angry), Click (savage), Click (rapist). I am on the receiving side of
the clicks. And yet, those whites in their cars, through the sheer act of locking their doors,
perform their white identities as in need of “safety,” as in need of “protection.” The clicks signify multiple layers of their identity.
Click (white), Click, Click (white, white), Click, Click, Click, (white, white, white), Click
(pure). Click (innocent). Click (good). Click (law-abiding). Click (vulnerable). Click
(decent). Click (threat- ened). Click (prey). Click (better than). Click (epistemically
credible). Click (civi- lized).¶ Not only are the bodies that initiate the clicks performing their white identities through the clicks, but
the clicks themselves install white identities, interpellate white identities, and solidify
white identities. The clicks are not isolated, pure auditory data, but markers of social
meaning, signifiers of regulated space, forms of disciplining bodies, and part of a racial
and racist web of significance that bespeaks the sedimentation of racist history and
racist iteration. Yet, as suggested, the clicks misidentify me. The clicks “de-materialize” me, only to “rematerialize” me in a form that I do not recognize. W.E.B. Du Bois argues that for those Blacks who have given
2
thought to the situation of Black people in America they will often ask themselves, “What, after all, am I?” Through an uneventful, mundane act of
white index fingers locking their car doors (click, click), the Color Line is drawn. After so many clicks, on so many occasions, I am installed as a
stranger to myself, forcing a peculiar question: Where is my body? The question itself makes sense once the
body is theorized not as a brute
res extensa, but as a
site of confluent norms, as that whose meaning is a function of a complex interpretive and perceptual
They have created a
false dichotomy: an outside (the Blacks) as opposed to the inside (the whites). But what
if that inside, that feeling of safety, that fabricated space, is a construction that is
parasitic upon the false construction of the Black body as dangerous? If so, then their sense of
framework.¶ I am not a criminal, a beast waiting to attack white people. Hence, their sense of safety is a fabrication.
themselves as “safe” is purchased at the expense of the possibility for a greater, more robust sense of human community or Mitsein. They have cut
themselves off from the possibility of fellowship, of expanding their identities, of reaping the rewards of being touched by the Black other and thereby
shaking the boundaries of their white selves. To live a life predicated upon a lie often requires more lies to cover it over. Black
bodies,
then, function to conceal the truth that so many whites lead lives that are constructed
around a profound deception — namely, white people need protect- ing from Black
people. The need for this lie bespeaks a (white) self that is on the precipice of
ontological evisceration.
Countergazing redirects attention to whiteness making it visible
Yancy, 12 (George Yancy Ph.D. at Philosophy, Duquesne University) Look, A White!
Philosophical Essays on Whiteness [1-3]
Look, a Negro!" The utterance grabs ones attention. It announces something to be seen,
to be looked at, to be noticed, to be watched, and, in the end, to be controlled. "Look"
catches our attention, forcing us to turn our heads in anticipation, to twist our bodies, to
redirect our embodied consciousness. The entire scene is corporeal. "Negro!" functions as a
signifier that gives additional urgency to the command to "Look." So the imperative "Look"
becomes intensified vis-a-vis the appearance of a "Negro." "Look, a shooting star!" elicits a
response of excitement, of hoping to catch sight of the phenomenon and perhaps even to make
a wish. "Look, a Negro!" elicits white fear and trembling, perhaps a prayer that one will not be
accosted. In short, "Look" has built in it—when followed by "a Negro!"—a gestured warning
against a possible threat, cautioning those whites within earshot to be on guard, to lock their car
doors, to hold their wallets and purses for dear life, to gather their children together, to prepare
to move house, and (in some cases) to protect the "purity" of white women and to protect white
men from the manipulating dark temptress.
Frantz Fanon writes about his experiences when a little white boy "sees" him:
"Look, a Negro!" It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight
smile.
"Look, a Negro!" It was true. It amused me.
"Look, a Negro!" The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.
"Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!" Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be
afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.1
Note the iterative "Look, a Negro!" It is repetitive and effectively communicates
something of a spectacle to behold. Yes. It's a Negro! Be careful! Negroes steal, they
cheat, they are hypersexual, mesmerizingly so, and the quintessence of evil and danger.
The tight smile on Fanons face is a forced smile, uncomfortable, tolerant. Fanon feels the
impact of the collective white gaze. He is, as it were, "strangled" by the attention. He has
become a peculiar thing. He becomes a dreaded object, a thing of fear, a frightening and
ominous presence. The turned heads and twisted bodies that move suddenly to catch a
glimpse of the object of the white boy's alarm function as confirmation that something
has gone awry. Their abruptly turned white bodies help to "materialize" the threat
through white collusion. The white boy has triggered something of an optical frenzy.
Everyone is now looking, bracing for something to happen, something that the Negro will
do. And given his "cannibal" nature, perhaps the Negro is hungry. Fanon writes, "The little white
boy throws himself into his mother's arms: Mama, the niggers going to eat me up."2
Fanon has done nothing save be a Negro. Yet this is sufficient. The Negro has always already
done something by virtue of being a Negro. It is an anterior guilt that always haunts the Negro
and his or her present and future actions. After all, this is what it means to be a Negro—to have
done something wrong. The little white boy’s utterance is felicitous against a backdrop of white
lies and myths about the black body. As Robert Gooding-Williams writes, "The [white] boy's
expression of fear posits a typified image of the Negro as behaving in threatening ways. This
image has a narrative significance, Fanon implies, as it portrays the Negro as acting precisely
as historically received legends and stories about Negros generally portray them as acting."3
One can imagine the "innocent" white index finger pointing to the black body. "Here the
'pointing' is not only an indicative, but the schematic foreshadowing of an accusation,
one which carries the performative force to constitute that danger which it fears and
defends against."4 The act of pointing is by no means benign; it takes its phenomenological or
lived toll on the black body. As Fanon writes, "My body was given back to me sprawled out,
distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the
Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger."5 Fanon is clear that the
white boy, while not fully realizing the complex historical, psychological, and phenomenological
implications, has actually distorted his (Fanons) body. "Look, a Negro!" is rendered intelligible
vis-a-vis an entire play of white racist signifiers that ontologically truncate the black body; it is an
expression that calls forth an entire white racist worldview. The white boy, though, is not a mere
innocent proxy for whiteness. Rather, he is learning, at that very moment, the power of racial
speech, the power of racial gesturing. He is learning how to think about and feel toward the socalled dark Other. He is undergoing white subject formation, a formation that is fundamentally
linked to the object that he fears and dreads.
FLIPPING THE SCRIPT AND REVERSING POWER DYNAMICS ALLOWS US
TO SURVEIL AND PREDICT WHITENESS IN ORDER TO NAVIGATE IT
Yancy, 12 (George Yancy Ph.D. at Philosophy, Duquesne University) Look, A White!
Philosophical Essays on Whiteness
"Look, a Negro!" is a form of racist interpellation that, when examined closely, reveals
whites to themselves- One might say that the "Negro" is that which whites create as the
specter/phantom of their own fear.17 Thus, I would argue that the whites who engage in a
surveillance of Fanons body don't really "see" him; they see themselves- James Baldwin,
speaking to white North America with eloquence and incredible psychological insight, says, "But
you still think, I gather, that the 'nigger' is necessary. But he's unnecessary to me, so he must be
necessary to you. I give you your problem back. You're the 'nigger', baby; it isn't me."18
What is so powerful here is the profound act of transposition. One might ask, "Will the real
'nigger' please stand up?" Ah, yes, "Look, a white!" Such naming and marking function to
flip the script. Flipping the script, which is a way of changing an outcome by reversing
the terms or, in this case, recasting the script19 of those who reap the benefits of white
privilege says, "I see you for what and who you are!" Flipping the script is, one might
say, a gift offering: an opportunity, a call to responsibility—perhaps even to greater
maturity. "Look, a white!" is disruptive and clears a space for new forms of recognition.
Public repetition of this expression and the realities of whiteness that are so identified
and marked is one way of installing the legitimacy that there is something even seeable
when it comes to whiteness. Moreover, public repetition functions to further an antiracist
authority over a visual field20 historically dominated by whites. It is important to note,
though, that the subject of the utterance, "Look, a white!" is not a sovereign, ahistorical,
neutral subject that has absolute control over the impact of the utterance. "Look, a
Negro!" is already embedded within citationality conditions that involve larger racist
assumptions and accusations as they relate to the black body that shape the
intelligibility, and the meaningful declaration, of the utterance. "Look, a Negro!"
presupposes a white subject who is historically embedded within racist social relations and a
racist discursive field that preexists the speaker. As a form of repetition, one that would be cited
often and by many, "Look, a white!" has the potential to create conditions that work to
install an intersubjective intelligibility and social force that effectively counter the
direction of the gaze, a site traditionally monopolized by whites, and perhaps create a
moment of uptake that induces a form of white identity crisis, a jolt that awakens a
sudden and startling sense of having been seen. In response, one might hear, "You
talkin' to me?" But unlike the scenario played out in Taxi Driver (1976), where Robert De
Niro poses this question, in this case the mirror speaks back: "You're damn right.
Indeed, I am!"
"Look, a white!" returns to white people the problem of whiteness. While I see it as a gift,
I know that not all gifts are free of discomfort.21 Indeed, some are heavy laden with great
responsibility. Yet it is a gift that ought to engender a sense of gratitude, a sense of
humility, and an opportunity co give thanks—not the sort of attitude that reinscribes
white entitlement. As bell hooks writes, "Those white people who want to continue the
dominant-subordinate relationship so endemic to racist exploitation by insisting that we
'serve' them—that we do the work of challenging and changing their consciousness—are
acting in bad faith."22
COUNTER-GAZING OFFERS THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE FLIPPED SCRIPT WHICH
COMPLICATES WHITE IDENTITY
Yancy, 12 (George Yancy Ph.D. at Philosophy, Duquesne University) Look, A White!
Philosophical Essays on Whiteness [Intro]
As stated previously, “Look, a white!” presupposes a black counter-gaze. Moreover, it is this
black gaze that I encourage my white students to cultivate. "Look, a white!" is a way of engaging
the white world, calling it forth from a different perspective, a perspective critically cultivated by
black people and others of color. It is a perspective gained through pain and suffering, through
critical thought and daring action. Seeing the world from the perspective of a flipped script
("Look, a white!") does not, however, reinscribe a form of race essentialism. In Fanon's case,
"Look, a Negro!" was never intended as a gift; it functioned as a penalty. For the "object" so
identified, this phrase meant that there was a price to be paid. The public declaration was
designed to fix the black body racially, to forewarn those whites within earshot that a "beastly"
threat was near. "Look, a white!" is not meant to seal white bodies "into that crushing
objecthood'*45 that Fanon speaks of vis-a-vis the white gaze. There is no desire to fix white
people "in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye."46 Instead, "Look, a white!"
has the goal of complicating white identity. It has the goal of fissuring white identity, not
stabilizing it according to racist myths and legends. To say, "Look, a white!" is an act of
ostension, a form of showing, but it is not limited to phenotype, though this necessarily shows
up in the act of ostension. "Look, a white!" points to what has been deemed invisible,
unremarkable, normative.
Whiteness cannot be remedied through introspection directed towards the
white problematic self because this ignores the ways that it has made itself
opaque. The only solution is to begin with the racist white self.
Yancy 12 (George, “How Can You Teach Me If You Don’t Know Me? Embedded Racism and
White Opacity,” Philosophy of Education Archive, P. 52-53. Yancy is a professor of philosophy
who works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy of race and critical whiteness studies //
EMS).
Just as my white
students have difficulty accepting the “conception of the¶ embedded white racist,” they resist what I refer
to as the “conception of the opaque white racist.” Most of them rely on the assumption that
they can ascertain their own racism through a sincere act of introspection. They assume
that if they “look” deep enough, shine the light of consciousness bright and long
enough, that they will be able to ascertain the limits of their racism. Indeed, they assume that the
process of ascertaining the limits of one’s white racism is guaranteed by an “all-knowing” consciousness that is capable of peeling
back, as it were, various levels of internalized racism and at once discovering a nonracist innocent white core. Yet, I find problematic
the very conception of the white racist self as fully capable of such levels of epistemic depth. So,
just as the white
subject undergoes white racist interpellation within the context of white racist systemic
structures and institutional practices, the white self undergoes processes of
interpellation vis-à-vis the psychic opacity of the white racist self. One responds, as it were, to the
hail of one’s “immanent other” — the opaque white racist self. Faced with important facets of themselves that belie the metaphysics
of self-grounding and the metaphysics of presence, whites, more generally, find
themselves as already having
undergone insidious racist forces that delimit the specious claims to absolute selfknowledge or self-transparency. More compellingly, perhaps this psychic configuration of white
racist opacity has a structural “permanence” that has no exit. Moreover, it would seem that the
attempt to “stand outside” white racist configurations of embedded, systemic power and
privilege is also “pointless,” also providing no exit. To use Otto Neurath’s analogy of “sailors who must rebuild their
ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best material,”17 there is no
“dry-dock” where white people can go to rehabilitate their whiteness. The white self is
already on the open sea of white power, privilege, and narcissism. To invoke the
discourse of repair or rehabilitation, there is no exit where the problematic white self, the
fractured and broken white vessel, can be repaired or rehabilitated in toto and from the
bottom up. One must begin with the racist white self. To invoke René Descartes’ metaphor, one
cannot “raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations.”18
And there is no innocent fictive tabula rasa to which one can return. The white self that desires to flee white power and privilege is
precisely the problematic white self of power and privilege, a white self whose desire may constitute a function of that very white
power, privilege, and narcissism ab initio. Indeed, the white self that desires and attempts to “rebuild” or “rehabilitate” itself does so
precisely within the context of complex and formative white racist social and institutional material forces and intra-psychic forces.¶
So, what are the implications for genuine diversity? How do we make sense of educare (“to lead out”) given that there are so many
complex layers of whiteness through which to navigate? Indeed, what if the effort to undo whiteness completely is like reaching for
the horizon that forever recedes. In conclusion, then, perhaps there is no place called white innocence. And if this is so, what are the
implications for Black bodies and white gazes?
A: Zapatistas
Inverted Periscope
El Kilombo Intergaláctico 2007 [A people of color collective made up of students, migrants, and
other community members in Durham, NC that has met with and connected their cause with that of
the Zapatistas and the global anti-capitalist movement, “kilombo” is a Kimbundu (a Bantu dialect)
term that has rhizomatically become the basis for the Brazillian term for encampment or commune
“quilombo” built and utilized by marooned communities of Afro-Brazillians as a form of resistance
from slavery, translation would be “intergalactic commune,” such that it references the many layers
of meanings of Afro-Futurism, Pan-Americanism and Anti-Globalization, Beyond Resistance:
Everything: An Interview With Subcommandante Marcos, p. 5-6/AK47]
The Fourth World War continues unabated and the result has been a near total devastation of the earth and the misery of the grand majority of its inhabitants. Given this
situation and the sense of despair it brings, it would be easy to lose a sense of purpose, to raise our hands in defeat and utter those words that have been drilled into us for the
past thirty years: “there is in fact no alternative.” Despite the new contours of the Fourth World War and the sense of social dizziness that it has created, it is important for us to
realize that this war shares one fundamental constant with all other wars in the modern era: it has been foisted upon us in order to maintain a division (an inequality) between
those who rule and those who are ruled. Since the attempted conquest of the “New World” and the consequent establishment of the modern state-form, we have so internalized
this division that it seems nearly impossible to imagine, let alone act on, any social organization without it. It is this very act of radical practice and imagination that the Zapatistas
believe is necessary to
fight back in the era of total war. But how might this alternative take shape? In order to begin to address this question, the
Zapatistas implore us to relieve ourselves of the positions of “observers” who insist on their own
neutrality and distance; this position may be adequate for the microscope-wielding academic or the “precision-guided” T.V. audience of the latest bombings over
Baghdad, but they are completely insufficient for those who are seeking change. The Zapatistas insist we throw away our microscopes and our televisions, and instead
they demand that we equip our “ships” with an “inverted periscope.” 12 According to what the Zapatistas have stated, one can
never ascertain a belief in or vision of the future by looking at a situation from the position of “neutrality”
provided for you by the existing relations of power. These methods will only allow you to see what
already is, what the balance of the relations of forces are in your field of inquiry. In other words, such methods allow you to see that field only from the
perspective of those who rule at any given moment. In contrast, if one learns to harness the power of the periscope not by honing in on
what is happening “above” in the halls of the self-important, but by placing it deep below the earth, below even the very bottom of
society, one finds that there are struggles and memories of struggles that allow us to identify not “what
is” but more importantly “what will be.” By harnessing the transformative capacity of social movement,
as well as the memories of past struggles that drive it, the Zapatistas are able to identify the future and
act on it today. It is a paradoxical temporal insight that was perhaps best summarized by “El Clandestino” himself, Manu Chao, when he
proclaimed that, “the future happened a long time ago!”13 Given this insight afforded by adopting the methodology of
the inverted periscope, we are able to shatter the mirror of power,14 to show that power does not belong
to those who rule. Instead, we see that there are two completely different and opposed forms of power in any society: that which emerges from above and is
exercised over people (Power with a capital “P”), and that which is born below and is able to act with and through people (power with a lower case “p”). One is set on
maintaining that which is (Power), while the other is premised on transformation (power). These are not only not the same thing; they are (literally) worlds apart. According to the
Zapatistas, once we have broken the mirror of Power by identifying an alternative source of social organization, we can then see it for what it is—a purely negative capacity to
once we have broken that mirror-spell, we can also see that power does
not come from above, from those “in Power,” and therefore that it is possible to exercise power without taking it—
that is, without simply changing places with those who rule. In this regard, it is important to quote in its entirety the famous Zapatista
isolate us and make us believe that we are powerless. But
motto that has been circulated in abbreviated form among movements throughout the world: “What we seek, what we need and want is for all those people without a party or an
organization to make agreements about what they don’t want and what they do want and organize themselves in order to achieve it (preferably through civil and peaceful
means), not to take power, but to exercise it.”15 Only now can we understand the full significance of this statement’s challenge.16 It is important to note how this insight sets the
Zapatistas apart from much of the polemics that has dominated the Left, be it in “socialist” or “anarchist” camps, throughout the 20th century. Although each of these camps has
within itself notable historical precedents that strongly resemble the insights of Zapatismo (the original Soviets of the Russian revolution and the anarchist collectives of the
Spanish Civil War come most immediately to mind), we must be clear that on the level of theoretical frameworks and explicit aims, both of these traditions remain (perhaps
despite themselves) entangled in the mirror of Power. That is, both are able to identify power only as that which comes from above (as Power), and define their varying positions
accordingly. Socialists have thus most frequently defined their project as the organization of a social force that seeks to “take [P]ower.”17 Anarchism, accepting the very same
presupposition, can see itself acting in a purely negative fashion as that which searches to eliminate or disrupt Power—anarchist action as defenestration, throwing Power out
the window. 18 Thus, for each, Power is a given and the only organizationally active agent. From this perspective, we can see that despite the fact that Zapatismo contains
within itself elements of both of these traditions, it has been able to break with the mirror of Power. It reveals that Power is but one particular arrangement of social force, and
that below that arrangement lies a second—that of power which is never a given but which must always be the project of daily construction. In sum, according to the Zapatistas,
through the construction of this second form of power it is possible to overcome the notion (and the practice which sustains it) that society is possible only through conquest, the
idea that social organization necessitates the division between rulers and ruled. Through the empowerment of power, it is possible to organize a society of “mandar
obedeciendo” (rule by obeying),19 a society that would delegate particular functions while ensuring that those who are commissioned to enact them answer to the direct voice of
the social body, and not vice-versa. In other words, our choices now exceed those previously present; we are not faced with the choice of a rule from above (we would call this
Sovereignty), or no rule at all (the literal meaning of Anarchy). The
Zapatistas force us to face the imminent reality that all can
rule—democracy (as in “Democracy, Liberty, and Justice”). Dddd
A: White Self-Reflexivity
The Affirmative endorses in various forms of self-reflexivity as a means to
distort the image of whiteness that has been projected upon the world. We
must interrogate ourselves are disaffiliate with the white ways of being to
progress toward any form of liberation.
GEORGE YANCY Professor at McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal ArtsDepartment of
Philosophy and published in 2008
Hence to live her phenotypic white body in freedom, which is a continuous act of reclamation, is to live her body in ways that
living one's whiteness in the mode of the serious
attempts to occlude the nonwhite from speaking, from exercising greater spatial mobility,
and, in many cases, from being. To challenge the serious world of whiteness is to
question, to counter what one sees, even as the field of one's white gaze continues to
construct the social world falsely. It is to welcome a fan of "distortion" that sees through
what has been constituted via white racist orders as "clarity." Hence, as the body of color enters
facilitate the freedom of nonwhite bodies; whereas,
various radicalized spaces, indeed, elevator spaces, one must valorize the cracks, one must valorize the experience of ambush.
"Don't repair them. Instead, welcome the crumble of white supremacist lies. In other words, one strives to disrupt the hail of
whiteness. This raises the issue of ambiguity that I raised earlier. One is at once an expression of whiteness, but its possibility for
cracking, disrupting, and resigniftcation renders problematic such an expression. As Alecia Y. Jackson notes, " I
am produced
through certain power relations, but I am also a site for reworking those power relations
so that something different and less constraining can be produced. I conceptualize
existential conversion in relation to whiteness as a constant affmnation of new forms of
responsiveness, new fonus of challenging unearned privileges, and assiduous attempts
at founding antiwhiteness values. After all, one has to live in the everyday world in which
whiteness--despite one's commitment to live one's body in freedom, that is, contrary to the expectations and ready-made
meanings that always already exist in the serious world of whiteness-continues to be seductive. To "live one's
body in freedom" therefore does not mean that one lives one's body outside various
situational constraints and historical forces, but that one continues to achieve those selfreflexive moments that attempt to destabilize various habituated white normative
practices. Hence existential conversion, at least with respect to whiteness, must involve a selfreflexive way of being-in-the-world where the newcomer continually takes up the project
of disaffiliation from whitely ways of being, even as she undergoes processes of interpellation. My point here is
that as she lives her body in freedom, as she challenges the white racialized and racist world, its discourses and power relations, as
she attempts to forge new habits and new forms ofself-knowledge, she does not live her body outside ofhistory. There is no
nonracial Archimedean point from which she can unsettle racism. Hence, while a process of constant destabilization that cracks
away at whiteness is indispensable as a value and a form of praxis, there is the realization that "a cartography of race would better
describe a white race traitor as 'offcenter,' that is, as destabilizing the center while still remaining in it.,,67 So, even as the newcomer
conceivably extends her hand across the color-line, reaching out to the young W. E. B. Du Bois, thus throwing her whiteness
offcenter and situates herselfin that space ofliminality, she will, at some point, leave the classroom and be thrown back into the
serious world of whiteness where the rich possibilities ofambush are covered over.
Answers
Not speaking for other reflects blame and maintains the oppression of
others – speaking for other is necessary and good
Laura Sells, Instructor of Speech Communication at Louisiana State University, 1997, “On
Feminist Civility: Retrieving the Political in the Feminist Public Forum”
In her recent article, "The Problems of Speaking For Others," Linda Alcoff points out the
ways in which this retreat rhetoric has actually become an evasion of political
responsibility. Alcoff's arguments are rich and their implications are many, but one implication is relevant to a vital feminist public forum.
The retreat from speaking for others politically dangerous because it erodes public
discourse. First, the retreat response presumes that we can, indeed, "retreat to a
discrete location and make singular claims that are disentangled from other's locations."
Alcoff calls this a "false ontological configuration" in which we ignore how our social locations are always already implicated in the locations of others.
The position of "not speaking for others" thus becomes an alibi that allows individuals to
avoid responsibility and accountability for their effects on others. The retreat, then, is
actually a withdrawal to an individualist realm, a move that reproduces an individualist
ideology and privatizes the politics of experience. As she points out, this move creates a
protected form of speech in which the individual is above critique because she is not
making claims about others. This protection also gives the speaker immunity from
having to be "true" to the experiences and needs of others. As a form of protected
speech, then, "not speaking for others" short-circuits public debate by disallowing
critique and avoiding responsibility to the other. Second, the retreat response undercuts
the possibility of political efficacy. Alcoff illustrates this point with a list of people-Steven Biko, Edward Said, Rigoberta Menchu--who have indeed spoken for others with
significant political impact. As she bluntly puts it, both collective action and coalition
necessitate speaking for others.
As intellectuals in the academia, it is important and possible to reclaim the
debates space and resist militarization – the alternative is complete
takeover and a military state
Henry A. Giroux, #1 badass, 11-20-2008, “Against the Militarized Academy,”
http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/81138:against-the-militarized-academy
While there is an ongoing discussion about what shape the military-industrial complex will take under an Obama presidency, what
is often left out of this analysis is the intrusion of the military into higher education. One
example of the increasingly intensified and expansive symbiosis between the militaryindustrial complex and academia was on full display when Robert Gates, the secretary of
defense, announced the creation of what he calls a new "Minerva Consortium," ironically
named after the goddess of wisdom, whose purpose is to fund various universities to "carry out
social-sciences research relevant to national security."(1) Gates's desire to turn
universities into militarized knowledge factories producing knowledge, research and
personnel in the interest of the Homeland (In)Security State should be of special concern for intellectuals,
artists, academics and others who believe that the university should oppose such interests and alignments. At the very least, the
emergence of the Minerva Consortium raises a larger set of concerns about the ongoing militarization of higher education in the
United States. In a post-9/11 world, with its all-embracing war on terror and a culture of fear, the
increasing spread of
the discourse and values of militarization throughout the social order is intensifying the
shift from the promise of a liberal democracy to the reality of a militarized society.
Militarization suggests more than simply a militaristic ideal - with its celebration of war as the truest
measure of the health of the nation and the soldier-warrior as the most noble expression
of the merging of masculinity and unquestioning patriotism – [and] an intensification and
expansion of the underlying values, practices, ideologies, social relations and cultural
representations associated with military culture. What appears new about the amplified
militarization of the post-9/11 world is that it has become normalized, serving as a powerful
educational force that shapes our lives, memories and daily experiences . As an
educational force, military power produces identities, goods, institutions, knowledge,
modes of communication and affective investments
- in short, it now bears down on all aspects of social
life and the social order. As Michael Geyer points out, what is distinctive about the militarization
of the social order
is that civil society not only "organizes itself for the production of violence,"(2) but
increasingly spurs a gradual erosion of civil liberties. Military power and policies are expanded to address
not only matters of defense and security, but also problems associated with the entire health and social life of the nation, which are
now measured by military spending, discipline and loyalty, as well as hierarchical modes of authority. As citizens increasingly
we see
the very idea of the university as a site of critical thinking, public service and socially
responsible research being usurped by a manic jingoism and a market-driven fundamentalism that
assume the roles of informer, soldier and consumer willing to enlist in or be conscripted by the totalizing war on terror,
enshrine the entrepreneurial spirit and military aggression as means to dominate and control society. This should not surprise us,
since, as William G. Martin, a professor of sociology at Binghamton University, indicates, "universities, colleges and schools have
been targeted precisely because they are charged with both socializing youth and producing knowledge of peoples and cultures
beyond the borders of Anglo-America."(3) But rather than be lulled into complacency by the insidious spread of corporate and
military power,
we need to be prepared to reclaim institutions
such as the university
that have
historically served as vital democratic spheres protecting and serving the interests of
social justice and equality . What I want to suggest is that such a struggle is not only political, but
also pedagogical in nature. Over 17 million students pass through the hallowed halls of
academe, and it is crucial that they be educated in ways that enable them to recognize
creeping militarization and its effects throughout American society, particularly in terms
of how these effects threaten "democratic government at home just as they menace the
independence and sovereignty of other countries." (4) But students must also recognize how such antidemocratic forces work in attempting to dismantle the university itself as a place to learn how to think critically and participate in
public debate and civic engagement.(5) In part, this means giving them the tools to fight for the demilitarization of knowledge on
college campuses - to resist
complicity with the production of knowledge, information and
technologies in classrooms and research labs that contribute to militarized goals and
violence. Even so, there is more at stake than simply educating students to be alert to the dangers of militarization and the way
in which it is redefining the very mission of higher education. Chalmers Johnson, in his continuing critique of the threat that the
politics of empire presents to democracy at home and abroad, argues that
if the United States is not to
degenerate into a military dictatorship , in spite of Obama's election, a grass-roots movement will
have to occupy center stage in opposing militarization, government secrecy and
imperial power, while reclaiming the basic principles of democracy .(6) Such a task may seem
daunting, but there is a crucial need for faculty, students, administrators and concerned citizens to develop
alliances for long-term organizations and social movements to resist the growing ties among higher
education, on the one hand, and the armed forces, intelligence agencies and war industries on the other - ties that play a crucial role
Opposing militarization as part of a broader pedagogical
strategy in and out of the classroom also raises the question of what kinds of competencies, skills and knowledge might be
crucial to such a task. One possibility is to develop critical educational theories and practices that
define the space of learning not only through the critical consumption of knowledge but
in reproducing militarized knowledge.
also through its production for peaceful and socially just ends. In the fight against militarization and "armed intellectuals,"
educators need a language of critique, but they also need a language that embraces a
sense of hope and collective struggle. This means elaborating the meaning of politics through a concerted effort
to expand the space of politics by reclaiming "the public character of spaces, relations, and institutions regarded as private" on the
other.(7) We live at a time when matters of life and death are central to political governance. While registering the shift in power
toward the large-scale production of death, disposability and exclusion, a new understanding of the meaning and purpose of higher
education must also point to notions of agency, power and responsibility that operate in the service of life, democratic struggles and
the expansion of human rights. Finally, if higher education is to come to grips with the multilayered pathologies produced by
the global space
in which intellectuals, educators, students, artists, labor unions and other social actors and movements can form
transnational alliances to oppose the death-dealing ideology of militarization and its effects on
militarization, it will have to rethink not merely the space of the university as a democratic public sphere, but also
the world - including violence, pollution, massive poverty, racism, the arms trade, growth of privatized armies, civil conflict, child
it is time for educators
and students to take a stand and develop global organizations that can be mobilized in
the effort to supplant a culture of war with a culture of peace, whose elemental principles
must be grounded in relations of economic, political, cultural and social democracy and
the desire to sustain human life.
slavery and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the Bush regime comes to an end,
Education is a prerequisite
Marimba Ani, 1994, Yurugu: An African-centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, p. 1-2
This study of Europe is an intentionally aggressive polemic. It is an assault upon the European paradigm; a repudiation of its essence. It is initiated with
the intention of contributing to the process of demystification necessary for those of us who would liberate ourselves from European intellectual
Europe's political domination of Africa and much of the "non-European" world
has been accompanied by a relentless cultural and psychological rape and by devastating
economic exploitation. But what has compelled me to write this book is the conviction that beneath this deadly
onslaught lies a stultifying intellectual mystification that prevents Europe's political
victims from thinking in a manner that would lead to authentic self-determination.
Intellectual decolonization is a prerequisite for the creation of successful political
decolonization and cultural reconstruction strategies. Europe's political imperialistic
success can be accredited not so much to superior military might, as to the weapon of
culture: The former ensures more immediate control but requires continual physical
force for the maintenance of power, while the latter succeeds In long-lasting dominance
that enlists the cooperation of its victims (i.e., pacification of the will). The secret Europeans discovered
early in their history is that culture carries rules for thinking, and that if you could impose
your culture on your victims you could limit the creativity of their vision, destroying their
ability to act with will and intent and in their own interest. The truth is that we are all
"intellectuals," all potential visionaries. / This book discusses the evolution of that process of imposition, as well as the
characteristics of cultural beings who find it necessary to impose their will on others. It is not a simple process to explain,
since the tools we need in order to dissect it have been taken from us through colonial
miseducation.1 It is necessary to begin, therefore, with a painful weaning from the very
epistemological assumptions that strangle us. The weaning takes patience and
commitment, but the liberation of our minds is well worth the struggle. / My chosen field is Africanimperialism.
Centered cultural science — the reconstruction of a revolutionary African culture. I teach Pan-African studies. The experience convinces me more and
more, however, that teaching Pan-African studies well means teaching European studies simultaneously.
To be truly liberated,
African people must come to know the nature of European thought and behavior in order
to understand the effect that Europe has had on our ability to think victoriously. We must
be able to separate our thought from European thought, so as to visualize a future that is
not dominated by Europe. This is demanded by an African-centered view because we are Africans, and because the
future towards which Europe leads us is genocidal.
MISC
The End of Forgetting represents a danger to personal identity—media and
information are approximating the lived experience
Bossewitch and Sinnreich 09
(Sinnreich, Aram and Bossewitch, Jonah. Aram Sinnreich is a Professor in Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers
University. Jonah Bossewitch holds a BA in Philosophy from Princeton, a MA in Communication and Education from
Teachers College, and a PhD candidate at Columbia University. “Beyond the Panopticon: Strategic Agency in an Age of
Limitless Information,” Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, April 24-26, 2009.
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/Bossewitch.pdf//ghs-kw)
the media we build are ever closer to
approximating the phenomenology of lived experience (in many ways, they are more faithful than actual
memory). Records continue to extend, evoke, and replace our experience of memories. Yet, unlike
memories, records are effectively permanent, part of an ever-growing archive. The era we are
embarking on may well be described as “The End of Forgetting.” We use the phrase to
signal the close connections between memory and identity, and to raise an important question—who is
Increasingly, machines function as cognitive prostheses, and
doing the remembering? The tight relationship between memory and identity has been a mainstay of philosophy, psychology, and
fiction for centuries.5 The terrain most often explored is the connection between the loss of memories or amnesia and the ways in
which this alters, compromises, or threatens personal identity.6 However, an exploration of permanent memories, the obverse
condition, has been largely neglected, with a few exceptions.7 The
spectre raised by omniscient surveillance
and perfect transparency is an idea that deserves broader and more in-depth treatment,
both ethically and strategically. We are already witnessing the initial political effects of
these changes, as various constituencies maneuver to increase the flow of information in
their direction. Citizens are clamoring for more transparency in government and the private sector. Governments
and corporations are constructing the apparatus to surveil, analyze, predict, and control the behavior of
their citizens and customers. Organizations of all kinds are clamoring for increased intra-network transparency in their
Perhaps no segment of society has more
thoroughly internalized the new paradigm than youth culture. Today, most young people
(and an increasing number of adults) throughout networked society volunteer an ever-growing volume of
personal data, from the mundane to the profound, with little apparent regard for its recoverability, using
services such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. This behavior resembles transparency, but the asymmetrical control
over these records is cause for concern. Historically, we have taken for granted that we
communications, often at the expense of individual privacy.
know more about our lives than any third party possibly could, and this knowledge has
been vital to our sense of ourselves. The fact that digital databases can now know more
about us than we know about ourselves suggests that the very process of identityconstruction is in distress . Information Flux These competing flows of information exchange are happening within a
rapidly changing context. While society is negotiating the directional flows of information, the sheer amount of information being
collected continues to rise. The
vast number of records that are being collected, correlated, and
analyzed will have a strong impact on personal and organizational identity, irrespective of the net
direction of information flow. However, while the rise in the volume of records being collected
seems increasingly inevitable, the net direction of their flow remains to be decided. This
open question—who is doing the remembering?—is an essential component of the
emerging knowledge/power dynamics. The physical sciences make frequent use of a measurement known as
flux: the rate of flow of “stuff” passing through a given surface. The flow of particles, fluids, heat, and electro-magnetic fields can all
be quantitatively described by this analysis, yielding valuable generalizations and predictions.8 The description of this flow has a
geometric representation that is useful for imagining the logical space of possibilities. Many physical laws have been formulated
based on the direction, rate, and net passage of “stuff” across the boundaries of the surfaces being studied.9 This
model can
help us to conceptualize the quality and shape of the information society that we are in
the midst of co-constructing. While the sheer quantity of information changing hands is certainly an important factor in
understanding the current transformation, equally important is the relative rate at which various individuals send and receive
information, the gradient of the information flow, and whether the flux is negative, positive, or neutral.10 The designation of 'positive'
and 'negative' is not intended to signify any ethical or strategic value. By mathematical convention positive flux leaves a closed
surface, and negative flux enters a closed surface. Consider our “personal information clouds” as metaphorical enclosing
surfaces.11 The information flux represents all the information that passes through this boundary. We are hurtling towards a society
in which data collection, storage, and analysis are ubiquitous and pervasive. However, these capacities are not likely to be evenly
distributed12 and there are already major variations in the net flux of information and the capacity to derive meaning from it. Simply
put, regardless of the quantity or nature of the information being captured, the information flows we are describing can be divided
into three broad geometrical outcomes: 1) Positive flux—you are leaking information, and others have access to more than you do.
2) Negative flux—you gather and retain more information than you emit. 3) Neutral flux—everyone has equal access to everyone
A corollary of this detailed and
permanent history is an increasing ability to predict and foretell future behavior.13
Additionally, variations in the information flux and in the expertise and resources to analyze this information, will
determine who has access to these predictions. We can also extend our fundamental unit of analysis from an
else’s information, a situation we could describe as a form of perfect transparency
individual to a community or an organization, and describe the information flux within and across the boundaries of these groups.
Misinformation is an effective strategy to combat surveillance—Face
Painting proves
Bossewitch and Sinnreich 09
(Sinnreich, Aram and Bossewitch, Jonah. Aram Sinnreich is a Professor in Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers
University. Jonah Bossewitch holds a BA in Philosophy from Princeton, a MA in Communication and Education from
Teachers College, and a PhD candidate at Columbia University. “Beyond the Panopticon: Strategic Agency in an Age of
Limitless Information,” Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, April 24-26, 2009.
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/Bossewitch.pdf//ghs-kw)
Disinformation Campaigns– A nother
strategy for managing
the net flux of
information is to propogate
misinformation, thereby reducing the flow of accurate information outwards and producing a
more negative flux overall. This strategy is familiar at the institutional level, in a variety of contexts from political
propaganda to advertising campaigns, to corporate “astroturfing.”29 It also has begun to
appear as a strategy for individuals to mitigate the threats of surveillance on social
networks. Face Painting is an underground collaborative game designed to resist the
privacy threats that Facebook poses. From the Urban Dictionary: Face Painting (also referred to as 'MySpin')
is internet slang for the practice of sprinkling a social networking profile with
embellishments, fantasy, and satire, often with humorous or political intentions. F ace
painters play with the truthiness of identity by conducting a campaign of misinformation
to protect their true identity. 30 This strategy, though it may appear on the surface to be no more than a mischievous
lark, has significant ramifications for information flux.
By reintroducing chaos and noise back into the
system, face painters protect their identities with a campaign of disinformation, and
game the corporate profiling technologies with odd juxtapositions and preferences.
These
campaigns also aim to raise awareness around omniscient surveillance, and in particular to critique Facebook's problematic privacy
policies. Face
painters have assembled teams for scavenger hunts, recruiting the children
of corporate executives to join oppositional causes (e.g. the child of an oil company executive to join an
environmental campaign, or the child of a record company executive to join a campaign for progressive Intellectual Property reform).
Face painting
won't significantly divert the torrential flow of information, but it
does cleverly illustrate how
individuals can reassert control over their digital footprint, and redirect
information
flux
the net
if they are aware of its significance.
Individual action is key—surveillance destroys personal identity and the
Self
Bossewitch and Sinnreich 09
(Sinnreich, Aram and Bossewitch, Jonah. Aram Sinnreich is a Professor in Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers
University. Jonah Bossewitch holds a BA in Philosophy from Princeton, a MA in Communication and Education from
Teachers College, and a PhD candidate at Columbia University. “Beyond the Panopticon: Strategic Agency in an Age of
Limitless Information,” Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, April 24-26, 2009.
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/Bossewitch.pdf//ghs-kw)
Spaces of Action This preliminary catalog of communicative strategies gestures at the span of choices available to actors in an
information-rich environment. The information flux model helps us to discover and situate these strategies in relation to each other.
An understanding of this range of possibilities is essential for creating a space of
effective resistance. Individuals, communities and organizations have very similar options within
this space. They can choose to actively receive or ignore the information that flows past
them. If they collect the information, they can archive, index, and analyze it. They can
choose to send or withhold information about themselves. The information they
broadcast can be truthful or spoofed. This spectrum of strategies defines space of
actions with varying information flux characteristics. Different strategies correspond to different ways of
arriving at similar differential values of information flux. For example, negative flux can be increased by voraciously collecting more
information or by broadcasting more disinformation. A technology like the BioPort is one way to support individuals maintaining a
negative information flux, and continue living in a society where the flow of information is centered around the individual. This social
reality is distinctly different than a perfectly transparent society.
Prevailing currents are steering the flow of
information away from the individual into the waiting hands of those who would benefit
from the control over their records and memories. However, we can imagine
technologies and strategies to redirect the flow of information back around the
individual and achieve more balance and control over our digital footprints. Conclusion
Freud and his followers postulated a depth model of psychology in which suppression,
repression, and the ability to forget are vital aspects of our psychological makeup. These
defense mechanisms, which allow us to maintain our sense of self, rely upon our ability to
selectively recall and subconsciously filter the personal narratives that are consistent
with the reality we want to believe. Our ability to cope with trauma and stress depends
upon the function of forgetting. We doubt we are alone in contemplating the discomfort
of revisiting the growing pains of childhood with the precision of modern day
surveillance apparatus . And yet, this is the world that we are on the verge of
establishing, without the slightest consideration of the consequences , for every child born
throughout network society in the 21st century. Perhaps more shocking than memories that can’t be filtered and don’t
dissipate, is the impact that surveillance might have on deception. Arguably, modern day society is
founded on lies,31 ranging from small little white lies between friends and neighbors, to corporate advertising and marketing, to
surveillance
threatens to rip apart the fabric of constructive deception that currently weaves together
individuals, social groups, and nations. The net flux of information flowing into and out of individuals,
Orwellian political spin, to the lies we tell ourselves to bolster our confidence and support our identities. Pervasive
communities and institutions will have a significant impact upon the emerging models for network society. Depending upon whether
the net information flux is negative, positive, or neutral, we
will begin to see dramatic shifts in the balance
of knowledge and power that exists between citizens and governments, consumers and
corporations, and even individuals and others. A positive flux of information from
institutions of power to individuals may improve social equality and individual agency by
providing accountable checks and balances through distributed oversight. However, the design
of these information systems are complicated by the details of representation, storage, and access which can undermine and thwart
reasserting the right to privacy, and even anonymity, may be a central
component in sealing the personal information leaks that are distorting the balance in
information flux, and assuring the future of democratic political states. Considering
these balancing forces. Furthermore,
what is at stake, we have an obligation to proceed with rigor and caution when
introducing technologies whose implications can potentially disrupt the structure of our
personal identities and social networks.
flux need to be analyzed in greater depth
The differences between a negative, positive, and neutral information