1NC
Off
Academia is a pollution of the affirmative project—an inoculation and re-scripting
of the very terms of contestation such that nothing is left but the continued
propagation of social death
Occupied UC Berkeley ‘9 (“The Necrosocial – Civic Life, Social Death, and the University of
California,” November 2009, Craccum Magazine – University of Auckland Student Magazine. Iss. 4, 2012.
http://craccum.ausa.auckland.ac.nz/?p=286) [m leap]
Yes, very much a cemetery. Only here
there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold
for anxiety, humiliation, and debt. The classroom just like the workplace just like the university just like the
state just like the economy manages our social death , translating what we once knew from high
school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social conflict.
Who knew that behind so much civic life (electoral campaigns, student body representatives, bureaucratic
administrators, public relations officials, Peace and Conflict Studies, ad nauseam) was so much social
death? What postures we maintain to claim representation, what limits we assume, what desires we dismiss? And in this moment
of crisis they ask us to twist ourselves in a way that they can hear. Petitions to Sacramento, phone calls to Congressmen—even the
chancellor patronizingly congratulates our September 24th student strike, shaping the meaning and the
force of the movement as a movement against the policies of Sacramento. He expands his institutional
authority to encompass the movement. When students begin to hold libraries over night, beginning to take our first baby
step as an autonomous movement he reins us in by serendipitously announcing library money. He manages movement, he
kills movement by funneling it into the electoral process. He manages our social death. He looks forward
to these battles on his terrain, to eulogize a proposition, to win this or that—he and his look forward to
exhausting us. He and his look forward to a reproduction of the logic of representative governance, the
release valve of the university plunges us into an abyss where ideas are wisps of ether—that is,
meaning is ripped from action . Let’s talk about the fight endlessly, but always only in their managed
form: to perpetually deliberate , the endless fleshing-out-of—when we push the boundaries of this form
they are quick to reconfigure themselves to contain us : the chancellor’s congratulations, the reopening of the
libraries, the managed general assembly—there is no fight against the administration here, only its own extension. Each day
passes in this way, the administration on the look out to shape student discourse—it happens without
pause, we don’t notice nor do we care to. It becomes banal, thoughtless . So much so that we see we are
accumulating days: one semester, two, how close to being this or that, how far? This accumulation is our shared history. This
accumulation—every once in a while interrupted, violated by a riot, a wild protest, unforgettable fucking, the overwhelming joy of
love, life shattering heartbreak—is a muted, but desirous life. A dead but restless and desirous life. The university steals and
homogenizes our time yes, our bank accounts also, but it also steals and homogenizes meaning . As
much as capital is invested in building a killing apparatus abroad, an incarceration apparatus in California,
it is equally invested here in an apparatus for managing social death. Social death is , of course, simply
the power source, the generator, of civic life with its talk of reform, responsibility, unity. A ‘life,’ then,
which serves merely as the public relations mechanism for death: its garrulous slogans of freedom and democracy
designed to obscure the shit and decay in which our feet are planted. Yes, the university is a graveyard , but it is also
a factory: a factory of meaning which produces civic life and at the same time produces social death. A
factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality can be separated; which everywhere
reproduces the empty reactionary behavior of students based on the values of life (identity), liberty
(electoral politics), and happiness (private property). Everywhere the same whimsical ideas of the future.
Everywhere democracy. Everywhere discourse to shape our desires and distress in a way acceptable to
the electoral state, discourse designed to make our very moments here together into a set of
legible and fruitless demands . Totally managed death. A machine for administering death, for the
proliferation of technologies of death.
As elsewhere, things rule. Dead objects rule. In this sense, it matters
little what face one puts on the university —whether Yudof or some other lackey. These are merely the
personifications of the rule of the dead, the pools of investments, the buildings, the flows of materials into and out of the physical
space of the university—each one the product of some exploitation—which seek to absorb more of our work,
more tuition, more energy. The university is a machine which wants to grow, to accumulate, to expand, to absorb more and
more of the living into its peculiar and perverse machinery: high-tech research centers, new stadiums and office complexes. And at
this critical juncture the only way it can continue to grow is by more intense exploitation, higher tuition, austerity measures for the
departments that fail to pass the test of ‘relevancy.’ But the ‘irrelevant’ departments also have their place. With their ‘pure’
motives of knowledge for its own sake, they perpetuate the blind inertia of meaning ostensibly
detached from its social context . As the university cultivates its cozy relationship with capital, war and
power, these discourses and research programs play their own role, co-opting and containing radical
potential . And so we attend lecture after lecture about how ‘discourse’ produces ‘subjects,’ ignoring the most obvious fact that
we ourselves are produced by this discourse about discourse which leaves us believing that it is only words which matter, words
about words which matter. The
university gladly permits the precautionary lectures on biopower; on the
production of race and gender; on the reification and the fetishization of commodities. A taste of the
poison serves well to inoculate us against any confrontational radicalism. And all the while power weaves the
invisible nets which contain and neutralize all thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture halls. There is no need to
speak truth to power when power already speaks the truth. The university is a graveyard– así es. The graveyard of liberal good
intentions, of meritocracy, opportunity, equality, democracy. Here the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a
nightmare on the brain of the living. We graft our flesh, our labor, our debt to the skeletons of this or that
social cliché. In seminars and lectures and essays, we pay tribute to the university’s ghosts , the
ghosts of all those it has excluded—the immiserated, the incarcerated, the just-plain-fucked. They are
summoned forth and banished by a few well-meaning phrases and research programs , given their
book titles, their citations . This is our gothic —we are so morbidly aware, we are so practiced at
stomaching horror that the horror is thoughtless. 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 shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given
meaning. We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and
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
subcultures—and thankfully
else. Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than 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 value from their capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying, completing. 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 of sacred
values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own students—we have
used their words on their stages: Save public education! 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 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 university economically and socially—which is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an
escalation, a provocation. 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. Every institution has
of course our best interest in mind, so much so that we’re willing to pay, to enter debt contracts, to strike a submissive pose in the
classroom, in the lab, in the seminar, in the dorm, and eventually or simultaneously in the workplace to pay back those debts. Each
bulging institutional value longing to become more than its sentiment through us, each of our empty
gestures of feigned-anxiety to appear under pressure, or of cool-ambivalence to appear accustomed to
horror, every moment of student life, is the management of our consent to social death. Social death is
our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning. It’s the positions
we thoughtlessly enact . It’s the particular nature of being owned. Social rupture is the initial divorce
between the owners and the owned. A social movement is a function of war . War contains the ability to
create a new frame , to build a new tension for the agents at play, new dynamics in the battles both
for the meaning and the material. When we move without a return to their tired meaning, to their tired
configurations of the material, we are engaging in war. It is November 2009. For an end to the values of social
death we need ruptures and self-propelled, unmanaged movements of wild bodies. We need, we desire occupations. We
are an antagonistic dead.
The aff is curriculum – the 1AC’s strategy is premised upon utilizing knowledge
as a telos which runs parallel to settler colonialism – they mystify the structuring
foundation for the modern university: the walling off of indigenous bodies from
civil society
Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez ’13. (Eve Tuck – professor of educational foundations and
coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and RUBÉN A.
GAZTAMBIDE-FERNÁNDEZ, “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity,” Journal of Curriculum
Theorizing, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2013, p. 72-89)
Natty Bumppo, not savage, and no longer European, is positioned to claim “native status,” symbolically taking the place of “the last
of the mohicans” and of all the other vanishing tribes. The figure of the frontiers man who is one with nature saturates the U.S.
cultural imaginary, from the Adirondack backwoodsman and the Order of the Arrow of the Boy Scouts of America (Alonso Recarte,
2010), to Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves and the most recent expression of the White settler-becoming-Indian,
Johnny Depp’s characterization of Tonto. Natty Bumppo also resurfaces within the contentions over colonization and
race that mar the politics of progressive fields such as curriculum studies. Here, the future of the settler is
ensured by the absorption of any and all critiques that pose a challenge to white supremacy , and
the replacement of anyone who dares to speak against ongoing colonization. This article does the
simultaneously blunt and delicate work of exhuming the ways in which
curriculum and its history in the U nited S tates
has invested in settler colonialism, and the permanence of the settler-colonial nation state . In particular,
we will describe the
settler colonial curricular project of replacement, which aims to vanish Indigenous
peoples and replace them with settlers , who see themselves as the rightful claimants to land, and
indeed, as indigenous. To do this, we employ the story of Natty Bumppo, as an extended allegory to understand the ways in
which the field of curriculum has continued to absorb, silence, and replace the non-white other ,
perpetuating white supremacy and settlerhood . As we discuss in this article, even as multiple responses
have evolved to counter how curriculum continues to enforce colonization and racism, these responses
become refracted and adjusted to be absorbed by the whitestream , like the knowledge gained by Natty
Bumppo, only to turn to the source and accuse them of savagery, today through a rhetorical move against
identity politics. White curriculum scholars re-occupy the “spaces” opened by responses to racism
and colonization in the curriculum , such as multiculturalism and critical race theory, absorbing the knowledge,
but once again displacing the bodies out to the margins . Thus, we will discuss how various interventions
have tried to dislodge the aims of replacement, including multiculturalism, critical race theory, and browning, but
have been sidelined and reappropriated in ways that reinscribe settler colonialism and settler
futurity .
We must exhaust the 1ac through a parasitic act which dooms the system to
crumble under its own weight – otherwise, logics of incorporation ensures the
recuperation of juridical domination
Bifo 11
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, After the Future, pg.
104-108
Time is in the mind. The essential limit to growth is the mental impossibility to enhance time (Cybertime)
beyond a certain level. I think that we are here touching upon a crucial point. The process of re-composition, of
conscious and collective subjectivation, finds here a new – paradoxical – way. Modern radical thought has always seen
the process of subjectivation as an energetic process : mobilization , social desire and political
activism , expression, participation have been the modes of conscious collective subjectivation in the
age of the revolutions. But in our age energy is running out , and desire which has given soul to
modern social dynamics is absorbed in the black hole of virtualization and financial games , as Jean
Baudrillard (1993a) argues in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death, first published in 1976. In this book Baudrillard analyzes the
hyper-realistic stage of capitalism, and the instauration of the logic of simulation. ¶ Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the
meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to
medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through
its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object : no longer the object
of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. [...] ¶ The reality principle corresponds
to a certain stage of the law of value. Today
the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy , and every reality
is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather that
the outdated reality principle. We feed on those forms whose finalities have disappeared. No more ideology, only simulacra. We
must therefore reconstruct the entire genealogy of the law of value and its simulacra in order to
grasp the hegemony and the enchantment of the current system . A structural revolution of value. This genealogy
must cover political economy, where it will appear as a second-order simulacrum, just like all those that stake everything on the real:
the real of production, the real of signification, whether conscious or unconscious. Capital no longer belongs to the order of political
economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated model. The
entire apparatus of the commodity law of
value is absorbed and recycled in the larger apparatus of the structural law of value, this becoming
part of the third order of simulacra. Political economy is thus assured a second life, an eternity, within the confines of an
apparatus in which it has lost all its strict determinacy, but maintains an effective presence as a system of reference for simulation.
(Baudrillard 1993a: 2)¶ Simulation is the new plane of consistency of capitalist growth: financial speculation, for instance, has
displaced the process of exploitation from the sphere of material production to the sphere of expectations, desire, and immaterial
labor. The simulation process (Cyberspace) is proliferating without limits, irradiating signs that go everywhere in the attention
The brain is the market , in semiocapitalist hyper-reality. And the brain is not limitless, the brain
cannot expand and accelerate indefinitely.
The process of collective subjectivation (i.e. social recomposition) implies the
market.
development of a common language-affection which is essentially happening in the temporal dimension. The semiocapitalist
acceleration of time has destroyed the social possibility of sensitive elaboration of the semio-flow. The
proliferation of
simulacra in the info-sphere has saturated the space of attention and imagination . Advertising and
stimulated hyper-expression (“just do it”), have submitted the energies of the social psyche to
permanent mobilization . Exhaustion follows, and exhaustion is the only way of escape :¶ Nothing,
not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation , and it is in this trap that the only chance of a
catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the
challenge of death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The
system must itself
commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide . So hostages are
taken . On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of the
victims is ruled out the hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the terrorist , the hostage’s death
for the terrorist. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same sacrificial act.
(Baudrillard 1993a: 37)¶ In these impressive pages Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern dialectics of revolution against power,
of the labor movement against capitalist domination, and predicts the advent of a new form of action which will be marked by the
sacrificial gift of death (and self-annihilation). After the destruction of the World Trade Center in the most important terrorist act ever,
Baudrillard wrote a short text titled The Spirit of Terrorism where he goes back to his own predictions and recognizes the emergence
of a catastrophic age. When the code becomes the enemy the only strategy can be catastrophic: ¶ all the counterphobic ravings
about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep-seated
complicity, the event would not have had the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy the terrorists
doubtless know that they can count on this unavowable complicity. (Baudrillard 2003: 6)¶ This goes much further
than hatred for the dominant global power by the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global order.
This malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share this order’s benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive
power is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally
twin-ness), this definitive order:¶ No need, then, for a death drive or a destructive instinct, or even for perverse,
unintended effects. Very logically – inexorably – the increase in the power heightens the will to destroy it. And it
was party to its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the
suicide of the suicide-planes with their own suicides. It has been said that “Even God cannot declare war on Himself.” Well, He can .
The West, in position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal, and declared
war on itself. (Baudrillard 2003: 6-7)¶ In Baudrillard’s catastrophic vision I see a new way of thinking subjectivity: a reversal of the
energetic subjectivation that animates the revolutionary theories of the 20th century, and the opening of an implosive theory of
subversion, based on depression and exhaustion.¶ In the activist view exhaustion is seen as the inability of the
social body to escape the vicious destiny that capitalism has prepared: deactivation of the social energies
that once upon a time animated democracy and political struggle. But exhaustion could also become the
beginning of a slow movement towards a “wu wei” civilization, based on the withdrawal , and frugal
expectations of life and consumption. Radicalism could abandon the mode of activism, and adopt the
mode of passivity . A radical passivity would definitely threaten the ethos of relentless productivity
that neoliberal politics has imposed.¶ The mother of all the bubbles, the work bubble, would finally deflate.
We have been working too much during the last three or four centuries, and outrageously too much
during the last thirty years. The current depression could be the beginning of a massive abandonment of competition,
consumerist drive, and of dependence on work. Actually, if we think of the geopolitical struggle of the first decade – the struggle
between Western domination and jihadist Islam – we recognize that the most powerful weapon has been suicide. 9/11
is the most impressive act of this suicidal war, but thousands of people have killed themselves in order to
destroy American military hegemony. And they won, forcing the western world into the bunker of paranoid
security, and defeating the hyper-technological armies of the West both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan.¶ The
suicidal implosion has not been confined to the Islamists. Suicide has became a form of political action
everywhere. Against neoliberal politics, Indian farmers have killed themselves. Against exploitation hundreds of workers and
employees have killed themselves in the French factories of Peugeot, and in the offices of France Telecom. In Italy, when the 2009
recession destroyed one million jobs, many workers, haunted by the fear of unemployment, climbed on the roofs of the factories,
threatening to kill themselves. Is it possible to divert this implosive trend from the direction of death, murder, and suicide, towards a
new kind of autonomy, social creativity and of life?
I think that it is possible only if we start from exhaustion, if we
emphasize the creative side of withdrawal. The exchange between life and money could be deserted ,
and exhaustion
could give way to a huge wave of withdrawal from the sphere of economic exchange. A
new refrain could emerge in that moment , and wipe out the law of economic growth. The selforganization of the general intellect could abandon the law of accumulation and growth , and start a
new concatenation, where collective intelligence is only subjected to the common good.
We do this through a politics of stealing away – we must refuse interpellation and
take back what belongs to the undercommons
Moten and Harney ‘13 (Stefano Harney, Professor of Strategic Management Education at the Lee
Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University and a co-founder of the School for
Study and Fred Moten, Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke, “The University and the
Undercommons,” The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, pg. 26-28) [m leap]
The Only Possible Relationship to the University Today is a Criminal One. “ To the university I’ll steal,
and there I’ll steal ,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only
possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be
true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the
university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment . In
the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can . To abuse its
hospitality , to spite its mission , to join its refugee colony , its gypsy encampment, to be in but not
of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university. Worry about the university. This is the
injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald
Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive
intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual
came under false pretenses , with bad documents , out of love . Her labor is as necessary as it is
unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings . And on top of all
that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the
university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets
subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong . What is that work and what is its social capacity for both
reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the work of the
university. Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of what Jacques Derrida calls the
onto- /auto-encyclopedic circle of the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the
hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters . The university needs
teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it . It is not teaching then
that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of
teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the
prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and
journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate
students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to
run the Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the course designed to be a new book,
teaching happened. The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually, one should
not teach for food. If the stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the
stage is surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the
sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it
with having the “determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.” “Have the courage to use
your own intelligence.” But what would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call “the beyond of teaching” is
precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance ? And what of those minorities who
refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond2 (that which is beyond “the beyond of
teaching”), as if they will not be subjects , as if they want to think as objects , as minority ? Certainly,
the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste . But
their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of the Enlightenment .
The waste lives for those moments 102 Moten/Harneybeyond2 teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase—
unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower of the Enlightenment truly better than this?
Perhaps the biopower of the Enlightenment know this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this
labor as it must. But even as it depends on these moles, these refugees, they will call them uncollegial,
impractical, naive, unprofessional. And one may be given one last chance to be pragmatic—why steal when one can have it
all, they will ask. But
if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with
hands full into the underground of the university, into the Undercommons —this will be regarded as
theft , as a criminal act . And it is at the same time, the only possible act . In that Undercommons of the
university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualization
of research.
To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that
fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal , matricidal , queer , in the cistern, on the stroll of the
stolen life , the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back , where the commons give refuge,
where the refuge gives commons. What the beyond2 of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not
completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others , a radical passion
and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of
agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative
torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the prophecy
in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that predicts its own organization and has
therefore passed, as commons, and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet
can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the Undercommons is arrayed its own
deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the negligence of professionalization, and the
professionalization of the critical academic. The Undercommons is therefore always an unsafe
neighborhood .
Off
The aff is a sentimental politics which utilizes spectacles of trauma in order to
form political coalitions – those communities run parallel to nation-building which
means those communities devolve into gatekeeping
Strick 14 [Simon, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin,
American Dolorologies, 2014, p. 132-6]
The concluding argument concerns late modern figurations of the body in pain. Spectacles of pain have
proliferated in many forms in the contemporary American public sphere—if indeed pain hasn't become its
primary and all-pervading obsession. Confessional TV shows exchange narratives of personal trauma
and hurt for public intelligibility; cinematic spectacles of suffering, from The Passion of the Christ (2004) to torture-porn
favorite Hostel (2005), exhibit the body in pain for profit, thrill, and public outrage; news reports narrate national-scale
catastrophes through individual testimonials of pain; reality game shows such as Survivor measure their contestants' bodily pain
capacities against their resistance to (or aggressiveness in) traumatizing and abusive group dynamics. There is also a
proliferation of political discourse disclosing the injuries caused by contemporary forms of governing: public
movements raise consciousness for excluded and abjected forms of living, feeling, and aching in Western democracies; critical
discourses continue to shed light on the structural violence of regimes of power; the interventions of
identitarian movements and groups successfully expand public recognition of social and political injury,
changing the scope of intelligibility in the process.¶ These diverse affective phenomena are not always
readily distinguishable in neoliberal regimes. Scholars such as Wendy Brown or Sara Ahmed have pointed
out the coopting of identitarian politics in contemporary governmental regimes . These critical
voices urge "[c]aution . . . against the assumption that 'speaking out' and 'making visible' within so-called radical
politics can be separated from the conventions of self-expression in neoliberal forms of governance" (Ahmed
and Stacey 2001, 4). Bill Clinton's infamous tagline "I feel your pain" or Barack Obama's ongoing focus on a " politics
of empathy "1 are only the presidential cases in point for an ongoing politics of pain that links recognition of suffering to
democratic progress. Academic debates have matched this capitalization on pain and compassion as
necessary ingredients to the development of politics , ethics , or community making , such as in Rosi
Braidotti's call for the unification of feminist, gay, lesbian, and transgender identity politics under the label of a "community of the
suffering."2 The various diagnoses of America as "wound culture" (Seltzer 1998) or "trauma culture" (Kaplan 2005), in
this view, describe
a highly disparate, tension-laden, and ambivalent field of affective discourse , rather than a
unified or unifying fixation on pain in contemporary Western societies.¶ Lauren Berlant has argued that these
politics of affect dictate the continuous envelopment of the political in sentimental rhetoric .
Sentimentalism holds up the promise that subjectivity is granted in the recognition of pain and that democracy
is realized as the participation in an ideal of common suffering and compassion. Sentimental discourses "locate the
human in a universal capacity to suffer and romantic conventions of individual historical acts of compassion and
transcendence. [They] imagine a nonhierarchical social world that is . . . 'at heart' democratic because good
intentions and love flourish in it" (2008, 6). Sentimental rhetoric produces a public sphere assembled around
pain bonded by feeling with what is unspeakable : a commonality of passionate and compassionate
bodily subjects, or a "fantasy of generality through emotional likeness in the domain of pain" (Berlant 2008, 6).¶
These arguments suggest a fundamental link between the sentimental evocation of pain and the discourses imagined as "at heart
democratic." Indeed, the emancipatory project of democracy relies on articulations of pain, the recognition of those
suffering, and a unified politics as remedy of this suffering. This is certainly true for American culture and its
foundational ideas of promise and exceptionalism. The cultural sites I have pointed to participate in this evocation of a
public sphere , where oppressive hurtings and social injuries are "counted in" toward a better politics of
integration, understanding, and recognition. The sentimental linkage of emancipation through the circulation of
pain and compassion as politics indicates a larger genealogy that dominates American culture and that this book has
tried to elucidate. This genealogy was traced back to America's emancipatory foundation as a nation freed from
colonial injury, and informed by a national history of successful incorporations of marginalized subjects
into the national project (suffrage, abolitionism). American dolorologies has related this discourse to an
apparatus of cultural technologies such as compassion, testimony to oppression, and articulations of affect and
pain, and the materializations of race and gender they covertly enact . My analysis concurs with Berlant's
observation that the various claims to pain as identity disarticulate their marginalizing effects in a rhetoric of universalization: ¶ In the
liberal tradition of the United States [testimony of pain] is not simply a mode of particularizing and puncturing self-description by
minorities, but a rhetoric of universality located, not in abstract categories, but in what was thought to be, simultaneously, particular
sentimentality has long been a popular
rhetorical means by which pain is advanced, in the United States, as the true core of personhood and citizenship. (2000,
34)¶ This connection of pain, nation, and subjectivity has , on the one hand, led to the public sphere becoming
more and more a site of intimate "affect" exchange . This transformation is visible in the proliferation of
mediatized forms of confession, testimony, and other articulations of traumatized selfhood, such as reality TV or
and universal experience. Indeed, it would not be exaggerating to say that
the culture of therapeutic discourse. These governmental forms of achieving public subjectivity through speaking pain imitate and
appropriate the critical formulations of differential experience from identitarian movements, at times becoming indistinguishable from
them: "We
can also see a . . . collusion between liberal, capitalist forms of mass entertainment and
individualist therapies, and the feminist importance of the personal" (Ahmed 2000, 12). The achievement of public
visibility through the articulation of trauma and pain is furthermore supplemented by mainstream political
discourse becoming compassionate and revolving primarily around the recognition of bodies in
pain .3¶
The 1ac’s strategy of narration assumes a notion of animacy and coherency
which excludes nonhuman bodies – instead you should queer the notion of the
human
Chen 12. Mel Y. Chen, professor of linguistics and women’s studies at UC Berkeley, Animacies:
Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Duke U Press, pg. 10
Furthermore, political
interest stokes public alarm toward “toxins.” We must therefore understand the ways in
which toxicity has been so enthusiastically taken up during times of economic instability and
panic about transnational flow . Animacies demonstrates that interests in toxicity are particularly
(if sometimes stealthily ) raced and queered . Indeed, toxins participate vividly in the racial
mattering of locations , human and nonhuman bodies , living and inert entities , and events
such as disease threats . This book aims to offer ways of mapping and diagnosing the mutual imbrications of race, sexuality,
ability, environ¬ment, and sovereign concern.¶ In addition, animal and science studies have offered tools through which we can
rethink the significance of molecular, cellular, animal, vegetable, or nonhuman life.22 Animacies not only takes into
account the broadening field of nonhuman life as a proper object , but even more sensitively, the
animateness or inanimateness of entities that are considered either “ live ” or “ dead .” Considering
differential animacies becomes a particularly critical matter when “ life” versus “death ” binary
oppositions fail to capture the affectively embodied ways that racializations of specific groups are
differentially rendered. Sianne Ngai explores the affective meanings of the term animatedness, focusing on its manifestation as
a property of Asianness and of blackness: “the affective state of being ‘animated’ seems to imply the most
basic or minimal of all affective conditions: that of being, in one way or another, ‘moved.’ But, as we press
harder on the affective meanings of animatedness, we shall see how the seemingly neutral state of ‘being moved’
becomes twisted into the image of the overemotional racialized subject .”23 Animacy has consequences for both
able-bodiedness and ability, especially since a consideration of “inanimate life” imbues the discourses around environmental illness
and toxicity. For instance, the
constant interabsorption of animate and inanimate bodies in the case of
airborne pollution must account for the physical nonintegrity of individual bodies and the merging of
forms of “ life” and “nonlife .” This book seeks to trouble this binary of life and nonlife as it offers a
different way to conceive of relationality and intersubjective exchange .¶ I detail an animacy that is in
indirect conversation with historical vitalisms as well as Bennett’s “vital materiality.”24 Yet this
book focuses critically on
an interest in the animal that hides in animacy, particularly in the interest of its attachment to things
like sex , race , class , and dirt . That is, my purpose is not to reinvest certain materialities with life ,
but to remap live and dead zones away from those very terms , leveraging animacy toward a
consideration of affect in its queered and raced formations. Throughout the book, my core sense of
“queer” refers, as might be expected, to exceptions to the conventional ordering of sex , reproduction ,
and intimacy , though it at times also refers to animacy’s veering-away from dominant ontologies
and the normativities they promulgate. That is, I suggest that queering is immanent to animate
transgressions , violating proper intimacies (including between humans and nonhuman things).¶ For
the purposes of this book, I
define affect without necessary restriction, that is, I include the notion that affect is
something not necessarily corporeal and that it potentially engages many bodies at once , rather
than (only) being contained as an emotion within a single body. Affect inheres in the capacity to affect and be
affected. Yet I am also interested in the relatively subjective, individually held “emotion” or “feeling.” While I prioritize the former, I
also attend to the latter (with cautions about its true possessibility) precisely because, in the case of environmental illness or multiple
chemical sensitivity, the entry of an exterior object not only influences the further affectivity of an intoxicated
human body, but “emotions” that body: it lends it particular emotions or feelings as against others . I take my
cue from Sara Ahmed’s notion of “affective economies,” in which specific emo¬tions play roles in binding subjects and objects. She
writes, “emotions involve subjects and objects, but without residing positively within them . Indeed, emotions
may seem like a force of residence as an effect of a certain history, a history that may operate by concealing its own traces.”25 The
traces I examine in this book are those of animate hierarchies. If
another— then
affect includes affectivity — how one body affects
affect , in this book, becomes a study of the governmentality of animate hierarchies , an
examination of how acts seem to operate with, or against , the order of things (to appropriate Foucault’s
phrasing for different purposes).26¶ Queer theory, building upon feminism’s critique of gender difference, has been at the
forefront of recalibrating many categories of difference , and it has further rewritten how we
understand affect, especially with regard to trauma, death, mourning, shame, loss, impossibility, and
intimacy (not least because of the impact of the hiv/ aids crisis); key thinkers here include Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Ber- lant,
Heather Love, and Lee Edelman, among others.27 As will be dem¬onstrated, these are all terms that intersect in productive ways
with animacy.
The object position is the only means of freedom. They deny this possibility
through an emphasis on ability, utility, and work work work. Dare to be stupid,
dare to be object.
Baudrillard 1985 (Simulacra and Simulation, 83-86)
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 [she or] 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 non-reception. 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.
Off
Counteradvocacy: The United States should legalize the sale of human organs.
Solves the aff better than they do
Fry-Revere ‘14
Sigrid Fry-Revere. The Kidney Sellers: A Journey of Discovery in Iran. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic
Press, 2014. 93-94. 100-101.
It is important to point out that I found fewer donors and recipients who were satisfied with their foundation in Tehran than elsewhere
in Iran. It was only in retrospect, after having traveled to Isfahan, Mashhad, Tabriz, and Kermanshah, that I started to piece together
some of the factors that helped guarantee long-term satisfaction on both sides of the transplant equation.¶
Half of the donors and recipients we interviewed in Iran believed it was better if their relationship was just an
economic one with no long-term ties. Donors clearly wanted to put their current crisis behind them , and for
some that meant not maintaining a relationship that would be a reminder of their failings. For recipients ,
it could be that some were influenced by the horrible incident in 1987 where a donor came to a recipient’s house and attacked his
family, stabbing several of the recipient’s children to death. But most recipients had a more mundane reason for not wanting a longterm relationship with their donor: They saw a mutually agreed-upon financial transaction as having a finality that
would prevent the interminable feeling of indebtedness they feared would result if the donor became a
friend. This latter concept of endless indebtedness came up several times in our interviews with recipients and was
explained in depth by the Ayatollah Mohaghegh Damad in my discussion with him toward the end of our stay in Tehran. ¶
[Continues]¶ The final issue the ayatollah addressed was that it is one thing to allow gifts of thanks for an altruistic act, but it is quite
another to require them. The reciprocal gifting
of money in exchange for a kidney, Mohaghegh Damad said, must
be legally enforceable . The donor must either give back the money or donate. And the recipient, who can’t give back a
kidney, must be legally forced to pay the monetary gift promised the donor. This point was made by several of the
donors we interviewed. For example, Sasan, whom we interviewed later at Alzahra Hospital in Isfahan, said he had heard rumors
that donors could get 15 or even 20 million tomans for a kidney if they did it illegally without the Anjoman’s assistance, but he had
looked into it and didn’t see how he could be sure to get his money without the Anjoman. With the Anjoman’s oversight, Sasan
would get the six million he was promised, and he knew the deal included the recipient paying for his lab work and other benefits,
none of which could be guaranteed outside the legally sanctioned system. ¶ While the notion of a gift in Western thought
implies an absence of legal obligations (like the notion of altruism implies a lack of self-interest), under Sharia
law a promise of reciprocal gifting is legally enforceable. Under Sharia law the result is not a commercial contract but a
binding decision to provide each other with a gift – in the one instance a kidney, in the other a predetermined amount of money or
another gift. There is no commercial contract in the Western sense of money or another gift. There is no commercial contract in the
Western sense but an implied promise which, as with gifting a Qur’an, Iranian law has decided to enforce: “I donated my
kidney to you unconditionally, and you donate a predetermined amount of money to me unconditionally, and if I
don’t receive the promised payment, I can take you to court.” This may seem like a commercial
transaction to Westerners, but the Iranian attitude toward this type of reciprocal gifting is clearly something more than a mere
buying and selling – such transactions entail an altruistic element not required in the usual course of business. ¶ Another reason
to make a promised gift to donors a matter of law is to prevent indefinite indebtedness. Some gifts, like
the gift of a kidney, are so great that they can never be repaid. So to mediate the fear that acceptance of
a kidney will cause an unbearable burden on the recipient, the law creates a system whereby the donor
can agree to a finite reward for his or her gift, thereby relieving the recipient of any further obligation. Thus, if
the parties wish, payment can be the full extent of their relationship .¶ In the United States the concept of
immeasurable debt is described as “tyranny of the gift.” Interestingly, we often heard Iranian recipients tell us
the reason they used a paid donor instead of an altruistic relative or friend was to avoid the potential burden
of feeling permanently indebted. Asad, a recipient we interviewed at Labafinejad Clinic, received his first kidney
from his brother, but he said he would never get a kidney from a relative or friend again.¶ My brother has
done a saving and kind act for me. But every time I see him – there’s a psychological and spiritual issue
involved. I have to be appreciative of my brother for donating his kidney, right? Yes, it is true that his donation has
worked to my benefit, but I will be indebted to him indefinitely: always appreciative, always saying thank you. If
a person gets paid five or ten million, then the relationship is over. In that situation, I would be grateful but my
debt is paid, and I could move on with my life.
Case
Commodification is better than their politics of sentimentality – they are the sign
of a sacrifice made by the Other, a gift of life the recipient can never repay. This
reproduces the tyranny of the gift
Siminoff and Chillag `99
Laura A. Siminoff and Kata Chillag. “The Fallacy of the Gift of Life.” The Hastings Center Report 29.6
(November-December 1999): 34-41. 35-36.
In discussions of the gift of life, nu- merous scholars have invoked gift exchange theory based on the work of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss. In The Gift, Mauss outlines the
central features of gift exchange in "techno- logically simple" societies. Through systematic comparison of cultures in the American Northwest, Melanesia, and Polynesia, Mauss
patterns of giftgiving created relationships of obligation and reciprocity that struc- tured and perpetuated the social systems of such
cultures. Even if one is not required to pay with money "up front," Mauss contends, debt is creat- ed and there is
always the expectation that debt will be redressed, directly or indirectly, at some future time.
As Mary Douglas writes, Mauss recognized an overriding social truth, that "the idea of a pure gift is a contradiction ."8 If the debt
is not ac- knowledged or no possibility exists for its repayment, the consequences are formidable for both
the individu- als immediately involved in the trans- action and for the society as a whole. A debt that by its nature
cannot be repaid is fundamentally threatening to the social order and (most relevant to our discussion of transplantation) must
somehow be recategorized to fit into existing models of reciprocity.
identified com- mon principles governing the opera- tion of these "money-less" econo- mies.7 Mauss paid particular atten- tion to the ways in which
Those who have drawn on Mauss's analysis identify several key aspects of gift exchange theory that are particu- larly relevant to organ transplanta- tion.
Mauss's conclusions seemingly map well onto the practice of organ donation because, at present, the ex- change of
money does not take place in this context. Thus Sque and Payne suggest that "organ transplantation is sociologically and psychologically related to the dynamics of gift ex- change, as monetary reimbursement for organs is outlawed in developed
countries."9 Yet though no money is involved, the "gift" of an organ is not freely made . Renee Fox and Judith Swazey write, "even
though the American organ donation system has been organized around the cardinal societal principles of voluntarism and freedom of choice, in the type of sit- uations where
prospective donors and their families are subject to strong inner and outer pressures to make the gift."'0
the recipient and his or her family are obligated to "re- ceive" the gift of the organ and all it entails.
transplants are per- formed,
Moreover,
The metaphor of the gift suggests that the donor gives the organ to the recipient.11 That is not the case. The donor is
dead. And although he or she may have signed an organ donor card, or expressed his or her wishes to the family, in reality the
donor partic- ipates in the actual gift exchange not as knowing giver, but as gift object. Yet the dead donor (more properly, source) is
still largely identified as the giver, that is, the individual to whom the person on the other end of the ex- change owes a debt of
reciprocity.
the debt cannot be repaid to the deceased, the ostensible giver. Nor can a gift of such magnitude-of life itself-be adequately
The greater the magnitude of the gift and the "need" of the recipi- ent, the less "free" the gift
becomes. The families of organ donors and transplant candidates, recipients, and their families are thus caught in a complex
web within which, as Ver- nale and Packard assert, there exists "obligation to give, obligation to re- ceive, and
obligation to repay."
Critical to any discussion of organ as gift is an acknowledgment of the magnitude of that gift. There is no act or commodity that would
be commensurate to what has been given. This does not, however, elimi- nate the impulse to repay (in fact, it
may magnify this propensity, albeit in unexpected and/or indirect ways). This sense of obligation to make amends exists in
the community as a whole and is taken on by individual members . In other words, the pres- sure comes from
within as well as from without, from both self and other. In combination with the extra- ordinary practical and emotional de- mands on
Clearly,
repaid to a proxy.
members of donor fami- lies, transplant patients, and their families, this is bound to have pro- found consequences. This is what Fox and Swazey identify as "the tyranny of the
gift." They write:
As Marcel Mauss could have fore- told, what recipients believe they owe to donors and the sense of obligation they feel about repaying "their" donors weigh
This psychological and moral burden is especially onerous because the gift the recipient has
received from the donor is so ex- traordinary that it is inherently It has no physical or unreciprocal. symbolic equivalent. As a conse- quence, the
heavily on them.
giver, the receiver, and their families may find themselves locked into a creditor-debtor vise that binds them to one another in a mutually fettering way.
Rumors of illegal organ sales are rooted in fear of chaos and desire for purity.
Scheper-Hughes `96
Nancy Scheper-Hughes. “Theft of Life: Globalization of the Organ Stealing Rumors.” Anthropology Today
12.3 (June 1996). 3-11. 4.
Allegations of `baby farms` and
`fattening houses` in Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Brazil where newborns were said to be housed awaiting transport to the
Needless to say, perhaps, verifying actual cases of kidnapped children exported for organ transplants has not been easy.
were investigated by various authorities and roundly denied
United States (sometimes via Paraguay) for use as organ donors
. The
International Children Rights Monitor published a report raising the obvious questions: where would the operations take place? How could the murder of the child donors be
concealed? Wouldn't the cost and difficulty of an illegal and criminal trade far surpass the advantage of contravening normal procedures? In the US every organ made available
to patients awaiting a transplant is strictly monitored by computer through UNOS, the United Network for Organ Sharing. And, of course, organs must be carefully matched to
Why is it, then, that the `baby parts story just won't die despite the appointment of a USIA disinformation specialist,
Making sense of rumors¶ What does it mean when a lot of people
around the world tell variants of the same bizarre and unlikely story? One current explanation is that the rumors
indicate a kind of global mass hysteria – a sort of transnational St. Vitus`s dance reflecting predictable fin de siécle anxieties and
post-modern malaise. The rumors may be taken as the emergence of a global new religion or a world cult in
which medieval images of Satan and vampires are now cloaked in the guise of a ghoulish cyborg medical
technology. Underlying the rumors is a New Age spirituality that focuses on the body and on the
vulnerability of organs in the face of everyday threats to personal security in urban violence, anarchy,
theft, and assault. The world's cities have never been so dangerous, so violent.¶ Oral historians and folklorists prefer to see
recipients to avoid rejection.
Todd Leventhal, who has led a long and expensive US government campaign to kill it?¶
the body parts rumor as constituting a genre, an oral literary form: the urban legend. The stories are circulated and repeated, at least in part, because they are `good to think`
continuities over space and time linking
anti-semitic `blood libel` rumors of the Middle Ages with the baby and body part rumors of the late 20th
century, both presumably founded in universal structures of the subconscious.
and `good to tell`; they entertain by fright just like good old-fashioned ghost stories. Folklorists, like Dundes, tend to note the
the
They essentialize life by surveying it in purely biological terms.
Colebrook 2004 (Claire, Department of English Literature at University of Edinburgh, "The Sense of
Space: On the Specificity of Affect in Deleuze and Guattari" MUSE)
Deleuze offers a similar account of the genesis of the subject and humanity, but differs from Foucault in
two crucial respects. First, Deleuze remains committed to the notion of life: the disciplines of evolutionary
science, linguistics, and even a form of psychoanalysis which explain the relations or strata that produce
terms or points or relative stability. Thinking life radically, however, involves freeing the movements that
produce any single series of relations, or any plateau, from any single term. Thus, neither biology, nor
geology, nor linguistics, nor sociology, can account for life as such. Indeed, life is just that which
unfolds in all these distinct series. Second, one can see each of these series or plateaus as a problem, as
one of many ways in which the striving of life creates, produces, expands, and expresses itself. The
problem with modern power in its capitalist form is just the reduction of all these series to the single plane
of capital, all these forms of stratification to the space of man. Here, Deleuze is in accord with Foucault's
genealogy but allows for the thought of life, the problem of life, to open up a new space, a virtual space or
a space of sense.
2NC
University
Alt
brokenness
Halberstam 13 (Jack Halberstam, professor of English and Director of the Center for Feminist
Research at USC, 2013, “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study,” pp 5-9) gz
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.
Let’s come at this by another path. In the melancholic and visionary 2009 film version of Maurice Sandak’s
Where The Wild Things Are (1963), Max, the small seeker who leaves his room, his home, his family to find the wild beyond,
finds a world of lost and lonely beasts and they promptly make him their king. Max is the first king the wild things have had whom
they did not eat and who did not, in turn, try to eat them; and the beasts are the first grown things that Max has met who want his
opinion, his judgment, his rule. Max’s power is that he is small while they are big; he promises the beasts that
he has no plans to eat them and this is more than anyone has ever promised them. He promises that he
will find ways through and around and will “slip through cracks” and re-crack the cracks if they fill up. He
promises to keep sadness at bay and to make a world with the wild creatures that “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their
terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.” That Max fails to make the wild things happy
or to save them or to make a world with them is less important than the fact that he found them and
he recognized in them the end of something and potentially the path to an alternative to his
world . The wild things were not the utopian creatures of fairy tales, they were the rejected and lost
subjects of the world Max had left behind and, because he shuttles between the Oedipal land where his mother rules and
sees what is included and what is left out and he
is now able to set sail for another place , a place that is neither the home he left nor the home to which
he wants to return.
Moten and Harney want to gesture to another place, a wild place that is not simply the left over space that
limns real and regulated zones of polite society; rather, it is a wild place that continuously produces
the ruined world of the wild, he knows the parameters of the real – he
its own unregulated wildness . The zone we enter through Moten and Harney is ongoing and exists
in the present and, as Harney puts it, “some kind of demand was already being enacted, fulfilled in
the call itself .” While describing the London Riots of 2011, Harney suggests that the riots and insurrections do not separate out
“the request, the demand and the call” – rather, they enact the one in the other: “I think the call, in the way I would understand it, the
call, as in the call and response, the response is already there before the call goes out. You’re already in something.” You are
already in it. For Moten too, you are always already in the thing that you call for and that calls you. What’s
more, the call is always a call to dis-order and this disorder or wildness shows up in many places: in
jazz, in improvisation, in noise . The disordered sounds that we refer to as cacophony will always be cast as “extramusical,” as Moten puts it, precisely because we hear something in them that reminds us that our desire for harmony is arbitrary and
in another world, harmony would sound incomprehensible. Listening
to cacophony and noise tells us that there is a
wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.
And when
we are called to this other place, the wild beyond, “beyond the beyond ” in Moten and Harney’s
apt terminology, we
have to give ourselves over to a certain kind of craziness . Moten reminds us that even as
Fanon took an anti-colonial stance, he knew that it “looks crazy” but, Fanon, as a psychiatrist, also knew not to
accept this organic division between the rational and the crazy and he knew that it would be crazy for him
not to take that stance in a world that had assigned to him the role of the unreal, the primitive and
the wild .
MARKED
Fanon, according to Moten, wants not the end of colonialism but the end of the standpoint from which
colonialism makes sense. In order to bring colonialism to an end then, one does not speak truth to
power , one has to inhabit the crazy, nonsensical, ranting language of the other , the other who has
been rendered a nonentity by colonialism . Indeed, blackness, for Moten and Harney by way of Fanon, is the
willingness to be in the space that has been abandoned by colonialism, by rule, by order . Moten takes
us there, saying of Fanon finally: “Eventually, I believe, he comes to believe in the world, which is to say the other
world, where we inhabit and maybe even cultivate this absence, this place which shows up here and now,
in the sovereign’s space and time, as absence, darkness, death, things which are not (as John Donne would
say).”
The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal . In The Undercommons if we begin anywhere, we
begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you . Citing Gayatri Spivak, Moten and Harney call this
refusal the “first right” and it
is a game-changing kind of refusal in that it signals the refusal of the choices as
offered . We can understand this refusal in terms that Chandan Reddy lays out in Freedom With Violence (2011) – for Reddy,
gay marriage is the option that cannot be opposed in the ballot box. While we can circulate multiple critiques of gay marriage in
terms of its institutionalization of intimacy, when you arrive at the ballot box, pen in hand, you only get to check
“yes” or “no” and the no, in this case, could be more damning than the yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as
offered .
Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what they term “the call to order.” And what
to refuse to call others to order , to refuse interpellation and the
reinstantiation of the law. When we refuse, Moten and Harney suggest, we create dissonance and more
importantly, we allow dissonance to continue – when we enter a classroom and we refuse to call
would it mean, furthermore,
it to order , we are allowing study to continue , dissonant study perhaps, disorganized study, but
study that precedes our call and will continue after we have left the room . Or, when we listen to music, we
must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument ; music
is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and
around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when we refuse the call to order – the teacher
picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening
the noose – we refuse order as the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge,
pain and truth.
These kinds of examples get to the heart of Moten and Harney’s world of the undercommons – the
undercommons is not a
realm where we rebel and we create critique ; it is not a place where we “take arms against a sea of
troubles/and by opposing end them.” The undercommons is a space and time which is always here . Our
goal – and the “we” is always the right mode of address here – is not to end the troubles but to end the
world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed. Moten and Harney
refuse the logic that stages refusal as inactivity, as the absence of a plan and as a mode of stalling
real politics. Moten and Harney tell us to listen to the noise we make and to refuse the offers we receive to
shape that noise into “music.”
Perm
Mirroring disad – they revert the ballot to normalcy and continue metastasized
exchange
Zupancic ‘3 (Alenka, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, pp. 13-14) [Henry]
A very good example of this kind of doubleness would be the famous “play scene” (or “mousetrap”) in
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Obviously, the “play-within-the-play” does not have the same structure, logic, and
impact as it would have, for instance, as a play-within-theplay- within-the-play-within- the-play. . . .Not
only is it the case that “two are enough,” but further multiplication or mirroring would clearly lead to an
entirely different configuration— that of an endless metonymic illusion . In Hamlet, the redoubling of
fiction, far from avoiding or lacking the Real, functions as the very “trap” (the “mousetrap”) of the Real.
One could also say that the “mousetrap” in Hamlet has exactly the status of the “declaration of
declaration.” Through the staging of the “Murder of Gonzago,” Hamlet declares what was declared to him
by his father’s Ghost. At the same time, this “declaration of declaration,” taking the form of a stage
performance, succeeds precisely because it produces a dimension of: “I, the Real, am speaking.” This is
what throws the murderous king off balance. Nietzsche is often praised for his insistence on multiplicity
against the ontology of the One. Yet his real invention is not multiplicity, but a certain figure of the Two.
The logic of the “two” that we will pursue in different contexts, and in diverse conceptual formations,
implies a specific temporal structure, a kind of “time loop” that introduces a singular temporality into the
(Nietzschean) notion of truth. For Nietzsche, truth is bound up with a certain notion of temporality, rather
than being atemporal. The temporality at stake here, however, is not the one usually opposed to eternal
truths. The fact that the truth has its temporality does not simply mean that truths are transient “children of
their Time”; it means that the very core of truth involves a temporal paradox in which the truth only
“becomes what it is.” The temporal mode of truth is that of existing as its own antecedent. Or, to use
Lacan’s formula (which is quite Nietzschean in this respect), “the truth, in this sense, is that which runs
after truth.”14 This temporal mode of antecedence is correlative to the temporal mode of the (notion of)
subject, caught in a “loop” wherein the subject will have to appear at the point of the Real which
inaugurated her in some “other time.” Or, to put it slightly differently, the subject will have to appear at the
point of the Real where she is inaugurated as if “from elsewhere.”
Case
Tyranny of the Gift
They have been infected with the tyranny of the self – a fate matched by no other
Baudrillard '93 (Jean, The transparency of evil : essays on extreme phenomena / Jean Baudrillard ; translated by James
Benedict. London : New York : Verso, 1993. P. 167-168)
At all events, it is better to be controlled by someone else than by oneself. Better to be oppressed,
exploited, persecuted and manipulated by someone other than oneself.
In this sense the entire movement for liberation and emancipation, inasmuch as it is predicated on a
demand for greater autonomy – or, in other words, on a more complete introjection of all forms of control
and constraint under the banner of freedom – is a regression. Whatever it may be that comes to us from
elsewhere, even the worst exploitation, the very fact that it comes from elsewhere is positive. This is why
alienation has its advantages, even though it is so often denounced as the dispossession of the self, with
the other treated in consequence as an age-old enemy holding the alienated part of us captive. The
inverse theory, that of disalienation, is equally simplistic, holding as it does that the subject merely has to
reappropriate his alienated will and his alienated desire. From this perspective everything that befalls the
subject as a result of his own efforts is good, because it is authentic; while everything that comes from
outside the subject is dubbed inauthentic, merely because it does not fall within the sphere of his
freedom.
Exactly the opposite position is the one that has to be stressed, while at the same time broadening the
paradox. For just as it is better to be controlled by someone else rather than by oneself, it is likewise
always better to be made happy, or unhappy, by someone else rather than by oneself. It is always better
to depend in life on something that does not depend on us. In this way I can avoid any kind of servitude, I
am not obliged to submit to something that does not depend on me – including my own existence. I am
free of my birth – and in the same sense I can be free of my death. There has never been any true
freedom apart from this one. The source of all interplay, of everything that is in play, of all passion, of all
seduction, is that which is completely foreign to us, yet has power over us. That which is Other, that which
we have to seduce.
1NR
Liberalism
1NR Turns Case
The attempt to include a rejection and problematization of liberalism and still
endorse the AFF reaffirms a belief in a responsible agent that reduces politics to
morality and still relies on a venomous and imperial compassion. We must reject
liberalism writ large if we are to avoid its ability to co-opt criticism and reduce it
to a footnote.
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. 38-39/
The dizzying back and forth between professed Kantians and Humeans blurs the fact that, regardless of
whether morality is anchored interior to the acting subject or determined by the effects of the actions of
the subject as they play out in the outside world, the unit of analysis is quite the same. Thus, when touchy
liberals desire better attention to the fact of human pain and suffering, they manage to talk about cruelty
where, ironically, cruel actions are derivatives of cruel agents and the victim’s suffering is just fallout.
Besides this shared inability to dispel the primacy of the agent and the perpetrator in favor of the sufferer
of pain, the rift between Kant and Hume is deceptive in another way. In terms of historical evolution, the
current status of cruelty betrays a fetish of the active agent. It is no accident that the terms “good” and
“evil” require a focus on cruelty and its infliction, leaving untouched the suffering of cruelty. Moral
psychology ends up being the psychology of cruelty, which is a moral question, and hence of those who
cause it. In the same frame, suffering is never a moral, let alone political or legal, question unless a moral
agent with a conscience has caused it. All sufferers automatically become victims in the eyes of politics
and law when “recognized.” Suffering is thus relevant as a political question only after it is a moral one,
when it is embodied and located in a certain way, when it surpasses arbitrary thresholds. It is one thing to
claim that liberalism, whether empiricist or idealist, cannot overcome its subject-centeredness even in its
moments of empathy for the “victim.” It is another to understand the stubborn constitution of the agent at
the helm of liberal justice and ask what makes it so incurable and headstrong and what the temperament
of this stubbornness might be: is it pathetic, squishy, helplessly compassionate, humble, philanthropic,
imperialist, venomous, neurotic, all of the above, or none of these? Not figuring out this pathos is bound
to reduce all interaction with liberal assertions to one or another act of editing or “correcting” them.
Inadvertently, all protests to liberalism tread a limited, predictable path and will be, at some point,
incorporated within it. Liberalism’s singular gall and violence is accessed every time a resistance to it is
accommodated by liberalism. Think, for instance, not only of how often liberals affirm their clumsiness and
mediocrity in speaking for the other’s suffering but also of how quickly its antagonists—purveyors of many
a righteous anti-representational politics—“make space” for the voice of others without challenging the
(liberal, colonizing) structures that determine and distribute the suffering and speaking self, and the
suffering and speaking other, to begin with. This protest leaves unquestioned what it means to speak for
one’s own, or others’, suffering and whether there are other ways of speaking suffering that problematize
these as the only options.
1NR Perm
The alternative is mutually exclusive – we must abandon a politics of the organic
sphere to engage in effective forms of becoming
Dema 2007 (Leslie, ""Inorganic, Yet Alive": How Can Deleuze and Guattari Deal With the Accusation of
Vitalism?" Rhizomes 15)
Deleuze and Guattari are interested in the question of what life might be if it is not confined to the organic
sphere. In A Thousand Plateaus they claim that "the organism is that which life sets against itself in order
to limit itself, and there is a life all the more intense, all the more powerful for being anorganic."[1] It is not
so much that organisms are not alive, but that life can be articulated in all things. Oblivious to the
organism's wisdom and limits, the inorganic life of things can assume a frightful power: This streaming,
spiralling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation liberates a power of life that human beings had
rectified and organisms had confined, and which matter now expresses as the trait, flow or impulse
traversing it. If everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organized, but, on the
contrary, because the organism is a diversion of life. In short the life in question is inorganic,
germinal, and intensive, a powerful life without organs, a body that is all the more
alive for having no organs.[2] This is not the easiest concept to digest. How can something be:
"inorganic, yet alive, and all the more alive for being inorganic"?[3] In the course of this paper I aim to
defend the legitimacy of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of inorganic life from one of the strongest
objections to it: that inorganic life is nothing more than a naive neovitalism or an empty emergentist theory
of life. This is an accusation that is spearheaded by Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. I will attempt to
demonstrate that Deleuze and Guattari do not succumb to the characteristic weaknesses of vitalist
philosophical positions; on the contrary, their concept of inorganic life thrives as a compelling and
defensible reimagining of life.[2] I will begin with a brief overview of how Deleuze and Guattari
characterize inorganic life. Deleuze and Guattari have chosen the oxymoronic term 'inorganic life'
because the deliberate juxtaposition of contradictory terms calls attention to how their theory of life
directly challenges the idea of organic life that we find in contemporary biology. [3] The best way to
understand inorganic life is through Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the assemblage. This concept is
most thoroughly explained in the "Geology of Morals" chapter of A Thousand Plateaus.[4] For them the
"minimum real unit" of inorganic life "is not the word, the idea, the concept or the signifier, but the
assemblage."[5] Assemblages are the symbiotic or sympathetic co-functioning of heterogeneous
elements. They are formed through a rapport between partial objects that enter into monstrous couplings,
experimental alliances, unnatural participations, and rhizomatic structures.
Abandoning the humanism of the 1AC is a necessary precondition to authentic
politics
Seem 83 (Mark, Intro to Anti-Oedipus, Murray)
While Deleuze and Guattari use many authors and concepts, this is never done in an academic fashion
aimed at persuading the reader. Rather, they use these names and ideas as effects that traverse their
analyses, generating ever new effects, as points of reference indeed, but also as points of intensity and
signs pointing a way out: points-signs that offer a multiplicity of solutions and a variety of directions for a
new style of politics. Such an approach carries much along with it, in the course of its flow, but it also
leaves much behind. Chunks of Marx and Freud that cannot keep up with the fast current will be left
behind, buried or forgotten, while everything in Marx and Freud that has to do with how things and people
and desires actually flow will be kept, and added to the infernal machine evoked above. This political
analysis of desire, this schizoanalysis, becomes a mighty tool where schizophrenia as a process-the
schiz-serves as a point of departure as well as a point of destination. Like Laing, they encourage mankind
to take a journey, the journey through ego-loss. They go much further than Laing on this point, however.
They urge mankind to strip itself of all anthropomorphic and anthropological armoring, all myth and
tragedy, and all existentialism, in order to perceive what is nonhuman in man, his will and his forces, his
transformations and mutations. The human and social sciences have accustomed us to see the figure of
Man behind every social event, just as Christianity taught us to see the Eye of the Lord looking down
upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk
figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They blind us to other realities, and
especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the
fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.
1NR Links
Their empathetic witnessing is liberalism par excellence where debate is
converted into a factory where subjectivity is produced and shipped out to the
dispossessed other in sardine cans
Berlant 1999 (Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago,
“The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics and the
Law ed. Sarat & Kearns, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Pg. 49-54)
Ravaged wages and ravaged bodies saturate the global marketplace in which the United States seeks desperately
to compete “competitively,” as the euphemism goes, signifying a race that will be won by the nations whose labor
conditions are most optimal for profit? In the United States the media of the political public sphere regularly
register new scandals of the proliferating sweatshop networks “at home” and “abroad,” which has to be a good
thing, because it produces feeling and with it something at least akin to consciousness that can lead to
action.3 Yet even as the image of the traumatized worker proliferates, even as evidence of exploitation is
found under every rock or commodity, it competes with a normative/utopian image of the U.S.
citizens who remains unmarked , framed, and protected by the private trajectory of his life project
which is sanctified at the juncture where the unconscious meets history: the American Dream.4 in that story one’s identity is
not borne of suffering, mental, physical, or economic. If the U.S. Worker’s lucky enough to live at an economic moment that sustains
the Dream he gets to appear at his least national when he is working and at his most national at leisure, with his family or in
semipublic worlds of other men producing surplus manliness (e.g., via sports). In the American dreamscape his identity is private
property, a zone in which structural obstacles and cultural differences fade into an ether of prolonged, deferred, and individuating
enjoyment that he has earned and that the nation has helped him to earn. Meanwhile, exploitation only appears as a
scandalous nugget in the sieve of memory when it can be condensed into an exotic thing of momentary
fascination, a squalor of the bottom too horrible to be read in its own actual banality. The exposed
traumas of workers in ongoing extreme conditions do not generally induce more than mourning on the part of the
state and the public culture to whose feeling based opinions the state is said to respond . Mourning is what
happens when a grounding object is lost, is dead, no longer living (to you). Mourning is an experience of
irreducible boundedness: I am here, I am living, he is dead, I am mourning. It is a beautiful, not sublime,
experience of emancipation: mourning supplies the subject the definitional perfection of a being no longer
in flux. It takes place over a distance: even if the object who induces the feeling of loss and helplessness
is neither dead nor at any great distance from where you are? In other words, mourning can also be an act of
aggression, of social deathmaking: it can perform the evacuation of significance from actually-existing
subjects. Even when liberals do it, one might say, are ghosted for a good cause.6 The sorrow songs of
scandal that sing of the exploitation that is always "elsewhere" (even a few blocks away) are in this sense
aggressively songs of mourning. Play them backward, and the military march of capitalist triumphalism
(The Trans-Nationale) can be heard. Its Lyric, currently creamed by every organ of record in the U nited
States, is about necessity. It exhorts citizens to understand that the "bottom line" of national life is neither
utopia nor freedom but survival, which can only be achieved by a citizenry that eats its anger,
makes no unreasonable claims on resources or controls over value, and uses its most creative
energy to cultivate intimate spheres while scrapping a Life together flexibly in response to the market
world’s caprice8. In this particular moment of expanding class unconsciousness that looks like consciousness emerges a
peculiar, though not unprecedented, here: the exploited child. If a worker can be infantilized, pictured as young, as small, as
feminine or feminized, as starving, as bleeding and diseased, and as a (virtual) sieve, the righteous indignation around procuring his
survival resounds everywhere. The child must not be sacrificed to states or to profiteering. His wounded image speaks a truth that
subordinates narrative: he has not “freely” chosen his exploitation; the optimism and play that are putatively the right of childhood
have been stolen from him. Yet only "voluntary" steps are ever taken to try to control this visible sign of what is ordinary and
systemic amid the chaos of capitalism, in order in make its localized nightmares seem uninevitable. Privatize the atrocity, delete the
visible sign, make it seem foreign. Return the child to the family, replace the children with admits who can look dignified while being
paid virtually the same revoking wage. The problem that organizes so much feeling then regains livable proportions, and the
uncomfortable pressure of feeling dissipates, like so much gas. Meanwhile, the pressure of feeling the shock of being
uncomfortably political produces a cry for a double therapy—to the victim and the viewer. But
before "we" appear too complacently different from the privileged citizens who desire to caption the mute
image of exotic suffering with an aversively fascinated mooning (a desire for the image to be dead, a ghost), we
must note that this feeling culture crosses over into other domains, the domains of what we call identity
politics, where the wronged take up voice and agency to produce transformative testimony, which
depends on an analogous conviction about the self-evidence and therefore the objectivity of painful
feeling. The central concern of this essay is to address the place of painful feeling in the making of political worlds. In particular, I
mean to challenge a powerful popular belief in the positive workings of something I call national
sentimentality , a rhetoric of promise that a nation can be built across fields of social difference through
channels of affective identification and empathy. Sentimental politics generally promotes and maintains
the hegemony of the national identity form , no mean feat in the face of continued widespread
intercultural antagonism and economic cleavage. But national sentimentality is more than a current of feeling that
circulates in a political field: the phrase describes a longstanding contest between two models of US. citizenship. In one, the classic
made}, each citizen’s value is secured by an equation between abstractness and emancipation: a cell of
national identity provides juridically protected personhood for citizens regardless of anything specific
about them. In the second model, which was initially organized around labor, feminist, and antiracist
struggles of the nineteenth-century United States, another version of the nation is imagined as the
index of collective life. This nation is propled by suffering citizens and noncitizens whose structural
exclusion from the utopian-American dreamscape exposes the state's claim of legitimacy and virtue to an
acid wash of truth telling that makes hegemonic disavowal virtually impossible, at certain moments of
political intensity. Sentimentality has long been the means by which mass subaltern pain is advanced, in
the dominant public sphere, as the true core of national collectivity. It operates when the pain of
intimate others burns into the conscience of classically privileged national subjects, such that they feel the
pain of flawed or denied citizenship as their pain. Theoretically, to eradicate the pain those with power will do whatever
is necessary to return the nation once more to its legitimately utopian order. Identification with pain, a universal true
feeling, then leads to structural social change. In return, subalterns scarred by the pain of failed democracy will
reauthorize universalist notions of citizenship in the national utopia, which involves in a redemptive notion of law as the guardian of
public good. The object of the nation and the law in this light is to eradicate systemic social pain, the absence of which becomes the
definition of freedom. Yet, since these very sources of protection—the state, the law, patriotic ideology—have
traditionally buttressed traditional matrices of cultural hierarchy, and since their historic job has been to
protect universal subject I citizens from feeling their culture} and corporeal specificity as a political
vulnerability, the imagined capacity of these institutions to assimilate to the affective tactics of subaltern
counterpolitics suggests some weaknesses, or misrecognitions, in these tactics. For one thing, it may be that
the sharp specificity of the traumatic model of pain implicitly mischaracterizes what a person is as what a
person becomes in the experience of social negation; this model also falsely premises a sharp picture of
structural violence's source and scope, in tum promoting a dubious optimism that law and other visible
sources of inequality, for example, can provide the best remedies for their own taxonomizing harms. It is also
possible that counterhegemonic deployments of pain as the measure of structural injustice actually sustain
the utopian image of a homogeneous national metaculture, which can look like a healed or
healthy body in contrast to the scarred and exhausted ones. Finally, it might be that the tactical use of
trauma to describe the effects of social inequality so overidentifies the eradication of pain with the
achievement of justice that it enables various confusions: for instance, the equation of pleasure with
freedom or the sense that changes in feeling, even on a mass scale, amount to substantial social change .
Sentimental politics makes these confusions credible and these violences bearable, as its cultural power
confirms the centrality of inter-personal identification and empathy to the vitality and viability of
collective life. This gives citizens something to do in response to overwhelming structural violence.
Meanwhile, by equating mass society with that thing called "national culture," these important
transpersonal linkages and intimacies are too frequently serve as proleptic shields, as ethically
uncontestable legitimating devices for sustaining the hegemonic field. 9
1NR Alt
Maybe we have an alt, maybe we don’t. You’ll never know.
Baudrillard, 1990 (Jean, Fatal Strategies, 1990)
At the end of all that, if the object is ingenious, if the object is fatal, what can we do about it? After the art
of survival, the ironic art of disappearance? The subject has always dreamed of this, a dream inverse to
its dream of totalization, and the one has never been able to erase the other. Quite the contrary. Its failure
today awakens passions that are much more subtle. At the heart of banal strategies is the fiery desire of
fatal strategies. Nothing can guarantee us a fatality, even less a strategy. What is more, the conjunction
of these two terms is paradoxical: how could there be fatality if there is strategy? That’s just the point: the
enigma is that fatality is at the heart of every strategy. It’s what peeks through the heart of more banal
strategies. It’s the object, whose fatality would be a strategy —something like the rule of another game.
Basically, the object mocks the laws we attach to it; it would rather figure in our calculations as a sarcastic
variable, and leave it to the equations to verify themselves. But the rules of its game, the conditions
according to which it accepts playing? No one knows them, and they can change without notice. No one
knows what a strategy is. There are not enough means in the world for us to be able to dispose of ends.
And, therefore, no one is capable of articulating a final process. God himself is forced to employ a trialand-error method. The interesting thing about this is the inexorable logical process that is visible here, by
which the object is taken in the very game that we wanted to make it play — doubling the ante somehow,
escalating the bidding on the strategic limits it will tolerate, installing thereby a strategy that doesn’t have
its own ends: a “playful” strategy that stills the play of the subject, a fatal strategy in that the subject
thereby succumbs to the surpassing of its own objectives. We are accomplices in this excess of finality
that is there in the object (this can be the excess of meaning, and therefore the impossibility of
deciphering a word that plays the game of meaning all too well). We invent all these strategies in the
hope of having them result in the unexpected event. The real we invent wholly in the hope of seeing it
result in a prodigious artifice. From any object we hope for a blind response that hampers our projects.
From strategy we expect control. From seduction we look for surprise. Seduction is fatal. It’s the effect of
a sovereign object that recreates in you an original confusion and seeks to surprise you. Fatality, in turn,
is seductive, like the discovery of a hidden rule. The discovery of a hidden rule of the game is dazzling,
and compensates us in advance for the cruelest losses. Likewise with the joke. If I look for a fatal
connection in language, I fall on the joke, which is itself the denouement of language immanent to
language (that is the fatal: the same sign presiding over a life’s crystallization and its resolution, at the
knotting of the intrigue and its denouement). In language become pure object, irony (of the Witz*) is the
objective form of this denouement. Everywhere, as in the Witz, redoubling and escalating the stakes are
spirited forms of denouement. Everything must unfold in a fatal and ingenious way, just as everything was
caught from the start in an original subversion. Even predestination is a form of ironic subversion of
fatality. Chance is also one. What’s the use of trying to establish chance as an objective process, if it is an
ironic one? Of course it exists, but against all science, in the irony of the aleatory, and even at the
molecular level. And of course fatality exists too, simultaneously — there’s no paradox involved in this.
The difference is that the irony of fatality is greater than the irony of chance, which just makes it more
tragic and more seductive. It’s true that this is a difficult and obscure route: to side with the object, to take
up the cause of the object. To find another rule, another axiom: nothing mystical in this, nothing of the
otherworldly delirium of a subjectivity trapped and escaping headlong into a paroxysmal inventory. But
simply to delineate this other logic, unravel those other strategies, leave the field open to objective irony.
That also is a challenge — eventually it threatens absurdity, and runs the risk of what it describes — but
the risk is to be taken. The hypothesis of a fatal strategy must itself be fatal, too. If there be a morality, it
too must be engaged in the eccentric cycle of its effects, must itself be hyper-moral, like the real is hyperreal, must be no longer a moral stasis, but a moral ecstasy, must itself be a special effect. Levi-Strauss
claimed that the symbolic order had left us, yielding to history. Today, says Canetti, history itself has
withdrawn. What remains but to pass on the side of the object, and on the side of its eccentric and
precious effects, of its fatal effects (fatality is only the absolute liberty of effects )? Semiorrhage. Today,
now that all critical radicality has become useless, now that all negativity seems resolved in a world that
pretends to realize itself, and now that the critical spirit has found its summer home in socialism, and the
effects of desire are largely depleted — what remains but to bring things back to their enigmatic ground
zero? Now the enigma is inverted: once it was the Sphinx that posed men the question of man, the
question Oedipus thought he answered, that we all thought we answered. Today it’s man that poses to
the Sphinx — the inhuman — the question of the inhuman, of the fatal, of the indifference of the world
toward our affairs, of its fickleness toward objective laws. The object (the Sphinx), subtler than man,
hardly answers. But it’s certain nevertheless that in disobeying laws, in unravelling desire, it answers
secretly to some enigma. What remains but to side with this enigma? Everything can be summed up in
this: let’s believe for a single instant the hypothesis that there is a fatal and enigmatic bias in the order of
things. In any case, there is something stupid about our current situation. There’s something stupid in the
raw event, to which destiny, if it exists, could not be insensible. There’s something stupid in the current
forms of truth and objectivity that a superior irony could spare us. Everything is expiated in one way or
another. Everything is headed somewhere. Truth only complicates things. And if the Last Judgement
consists, as everyone knows, for each of us, in saving and eternalizing a moment of our lives, and one
only, with whom do we share this ironic end?