K Ans Grab Bag – DDI 15
More law good stuff is in the T v K Affs file
Queer Pessimism Answers
A2: Edelman – Co-option
The K will be co-opted by right wing and abandon the queer community to
emmediate social violence
Fitzpatrick (associate professor of media studies @ Pomona College) 7
(Kathleen, must we abandon reproductive futurism?, December 3, http://machines.pomona.edu/1492007/node/225)
Edelman makes the disclaimer that this is more of a theoretical exercise of resistance, however, it seems a
dangerous road to go down given the possibility for co-optation by a violent right wing rhetoric. He
hails the Right for their acknowledgment of the truly devastating connotations of queerness, in light of the
less radical-discourse of the Left which refuses to speak in terms of apocalyptic scale. Yet I can imagine an
indignant Neo-Con reading this as the ultimate proof that the gays want to destroy us all - and while all of
us are busy taking up Edelman's call for rhetorical queerness against reproductive futurism, there remains
the queer community receiving the social violence of oppression as a result of this getting to the
wrong hands. Pardon my paranoid musing,; I'm just concerned with the implications of making these
delineations.
A2: Edelman – Kills Collective Politics
Aff makes collective resistance to oppression impossible and reprivatizes queerness
Fox (poet and writer) 7
(Dominic, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, June 15th, http://codepoetics.com/poetix/?p=418)
The snare that I think proves most damaging to No Future’s thesis is not in fact that of special pleading
on behalf of “the queer”, with all the attendant question-begging issues of identification that would entail,
but that of emphasizing the particularity of the sinthome over its universality: both are equally
destructive of communal politics, but it is in the latter that the aleatory trajectory of the affinitive comes
into play. This, needless to say, remains to be worked out, but the specific problem with Edelman’s
emphasis on particularity, primary narcissism and an essentially private communing with the real of
the drives is that it reinvests precisely the psychiatric model of queerness as individual perversion and
social disorder that the “queer event” sought to overturn. The urgent question remains that of the
anabasis which might convoke a collective body – and with it a politics worthy of the name.
A2: Edelman – Utopianism Good
Refusing the future is a gay white male’s bourgeois fantasy – it imagines a queer
subject abstracted from the multiude of oppressions that mark everyday life. [We
must reposition queerness as the desire for another way of being, to queer the
future, not abandon it]
Munoz (the chair of the Department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York
University) 7
(Jose Esteban, Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer
Futurity, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.2-3, 353-367)
The question of children hangs heavily when one considers Baraka's present. On August 12, 2003, one of his daughters, Shani Baraka,
and her female lover, Rayshon Holmes, were killed by the estranged husband of Wanda Pasha, who is also one of Baraka's daughters.
The thirty-one- and thirty-year-old women's murders were preceded a few months earlier by another hate crime in Newark, the killing
of fifteen-year-old Sakia Gunn. Gunn was a black transgendered youth who traveled from Hoboken to Greenwich Village and the
Christopher Street piers to hang out with other young queers of color. Baraka and his wife, Amina, have in part dealt with the tragic
loss of their daughter by turning to activism. The violent fate of their child has alerted them to the systemic violence that faces queer
people (and especially young people) of color. The Barakas have both become ardent antiviolence activists speaking out directly on
LGBT issues. Real violence has ironically brought Baraka back to a queer world that he had renounced so many years ago. Through
his tremendous loss he has decided to further diversify his consistent commitment to activism and social justice to include what can
only be understood as queer politics. In the world of The Toilet there are no hate crimes, no lexicon that identifies homophobia per se,
but there is the fact of an aggression constantly on the verge of brutal actualization. The mimetic violence resonates across time and to
the scene of the loss that the author will endure decades later. This story from real life is not meant to serve as the proof for my
argument. Indeed, the play's highly homoerotic violence is in crucial ways nothing like the misogynist violence against women that
befell the dramatist's family or the transgenderphobic violence that ended Gunn's young life. I mention these tragedies because it
makes one simple point. The future is only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the
sovereign princes of futurity. While Edelman does indicate that the future of the child as futurity is different from the future of
actual children, his framing nonetheless accepts and reproduces this monolithic figure of the child that is
indeed always already white. He all but ignores the point that other modes of particularity within the social are constitutive
of subjecthood beyond the kind of jouissance that refuses both narratological meaning and what he understands as the fantasy of
futurity. He anticipates and bristles against his future critics with a precognitive paranoia in footnote 19 of his first chapter. He rightly
predicts that [End Page 364] some identitarian critics (I suppose that would be me in this instance, despite my ambivalent relation to
the concept of identity) would dismiss his polemic by saying it is determined by his middle-class white gay male positionality. This
attempt to inoculate himself from those who engage his polemic does not do the job. In the final analysis, white gay male cryptoidentity politics (the restaging of whiteness as universal norm via the imaginary negation of all other identities that position
themselves as not white) is beside the point. The deeper point is indeed "political," as, but certainly not more, political as Edelman's
argument. It is important not to hand over futurity to normative white reproductive futurity. That dominant
mode of futurity is indeed "winning," but that is all the more reason to call on a utopian political
imagination that will enable us to glimpse another time and place: a "not-yet" where queer youths of
color actually get to grow up. Utopian and willfully idealistic practices of thought are in order if we are to
resist the perils of heteronormative pragmatism and Anglo-normative pessimism. Imagining a queer
subject who is abstracted from the sensuous intersectionalities that mark our experience is an
ineffectual way out. Such an escape via singularity is a ticket whose price most cannot afford. The way to
deal with the asymmetries and violent frenzies that mark the present is not to forget the future. The here and
now is simply not enough. Queerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being in both the
world and time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that which is not enough.
Futurity Good
Focusing on the future is good
a) Only way to challenge oppressive structures
b) It’s not deterministic – focus on reproductive futurism allows us to be reflexive of
the past and present as well
Unger 7
Roberto Mangabeira Unger Professor of Law Harvard,
http://www.law.harvard.edu/unger/english/docs/pragmatism.doc.THE SELF AWAKENED:
PRAGMATISM UNBOUND
The third theme is Futurity. Whether or not time is for real in the vast world of nature, of which our knowledge
always remains at once remote and contradictory, is a subject that will always continue to arouse controversy. That time
is for real in human existence is not, however, a speculative thesis; it is a pressure we face
with mounting force, so long as we remain conscious and not deluded, in our passage from
birth to death. The temporal character of our existence is the consequence of our
embodiment, the stigma of our finitude, and the condition that gives transcendence its
point.
We are not exhausted by the social and cultural worlds we inhabit and build.
They are finite. We, in comparison to them, are not. We can see, think, feel, build, and
connect in more ways than they can allow. That is why we are required to rebel against them: to advance our
interests and ideals as we now understand them, but also to become ourselves, affirming the polarity that constitutes the lawbreaking law of our being.
To seek what goes beyond the established structure and represents,
for that very reason, the possible beginning of another structure, even of a structure that organizes
its own remaking, is to live for the future. Living for the future is a way of living in the present
as a being not wholly determined by the present conditions of its existence. We never completely
surrender. We go about our business of passive submission, of voiceless despair, as if we knew that the established order
were not for keeps, and had no final claim to our allegiance. Orientation to the future -- futurity -- is a defining
condition of personality.
So fundamental is this feature of our existence that it also shapes the experience of
thinking, even when our thoughts are directed away from ourselves to nature. Ceaselessly reorganizing our experience of
particulars under general headings, constantly breaking up and remaking the headings to master the experience, intuiting in
one set of known relations the existence of another, next to it or hidden under it, finding out one thing when we had set out to
find out another, and discovering indeed what our assumptions and methods may have ruled out as paradoxical,
contradictory, or impossible, we come to see the next steps of thought -- its possibilities, its future -- as the point of the whole
past of thought.
Futurity should cease to be a predicament and should become a program: we
should radicalize it to empower ourselves. That is the reason to take an interest in ways of organizing thought
and society that diminish the influence of what happened before on what can happen next. Such intellectual and institutional
innovations make change in thought less dependent on the pressure of unmastered anomalies and change in society less
dependent on the blows of unexpected trauma. In any given historical situation, the effort to live for the future has
consequences for how we order our ideas and for how we order our societies. There is a structure to the organized revision of
structures. Its constituents, however, are not timeless. We paste them together with the time-soaked materials at hand.
Provides a value to life
Unger 7
Roberto Mangabeira Unger Professor of Law Harvard,
http://www.law.harvard.edu/unger/english/docs/pragmatism.doc.THE SELF AWAKENED: PRAGMATISM
UNBOUND
The hope held out by the thesis that we can change our relation to our contexts will remain hollow unless we can change this
relation in biographical as well as in historical time, independently of the fate of all collective projects of transformation. It
will be hollow as well unless that change will give us other people and the world itself more fully. That the hope is not
hollow in any such sense represents part of the thesis implicit in the idea of futurity: to live for the future is
to live in the present as a being not fully determined by the present settings of organized
life and thought and therefore more capable of openness to the other person, to the
surprising experience, and to the entire phenomenal world of time and change. It is in this
way that we can embrace the joy of life in the moment as both a revelation and a prophecy
rather than discounting it as a trick that nature plays on spirit the better to reconcile us to
our haplessness and our ignorance. The chief teaching of this book is that we become more
godlike to live, not that we live to become more godlike. The reward of our striving is not
arousal to a greater life later; it is arousal to a greater life now, a raising up confirmed by
our opening up to the other and to the new. A simple way to grasp the point of my whole
argument, from the vantage point of this its middle and its center, is to say that it explores a world of
ideas about nature, society, personality, and mind within which this teaching makes sense and has
authority.
Futurity Good – Queerness
Edelman has it entirely backwards. Queerness requires futurity. Their framework
closes off the possibility of altering the present, thereby crushing social change and
naturalizing hetero-normativity
Muñoz 6
José Esteban, Associate Professor of Performance Studies at NYU, PMLA, v121, n3, May, p. 825-826
I have chosen to counter polemics that argue for antirelationality by insisting on the essential need for an understanding of
queerness as collectivity. At the 2005 MLA panel, in recent essays, and in my forthcoming book Cruising Utopia, I respond
to the assertion that there is no future for the queer by arguing that queerness
is primarily about futurity.
have any value whatsoever, it must be
considered visible only on the horizon. My argument is therefore interested in critiquing
the ontological certitude that I understand to accompany the politics of presentist and
pragmatic contemporary gay identity. This certitude is often represented through a narration of
disappearance and negativity that boils down to another game of fort-da. My conference paper and the forthcoming book
Queerness is always on the horizon. Indeed, for queerness to
it is culled from have found much propulsion in the work of Ernst Bloch and other Marxist thinkers who did not dismiss
utopia. Bloch found strident grounds for a critique of a totalizing and naturalizing idea of the
present in his concept of the no-longer-conscious. A turn to the no-longer-conscious enabled a critical hermeneutics
attuned to comprehending the not yet here. This temporal calculus deployed the past and the future as
armaments to combat the devastating logic of the here and now, in which nothing exists
outside the current moment and which naturalizes cultural logics like capitalism and
heteronormativity. Concomitantly, Bloch has also sharpened our critical imagination’s emphasis on what he
famously called “a principle of hope.” Hope is an easy target for antiutopians. But while antiutopians might
understand themselves as critical in the rejection of hope, they would, in the rush to denounce it,
miss the point that hope is spawned of a critical investment in utopia that is nothing like naive but,
instead, profoundly resistant to the stultifying temporal logic of a broken-down present. My turn
to Bloch, hope, and utopia challenges theoretical insights that have been stunted by the lull of presentness and by various
romances of negativity and that have thus become routine and resoundingly anticritical.
Futurity Good – Queerness
Edelman is wrong about social change—Democratic politics can transform social
relations without reaffirming homophobia
Brenkman 2
John, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate School, “Politics, Mortal and
Natal: An Arendtian Rejoinder,” Narrative 10:2,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/narrative/v010/10.2brenkman02.html, p. 187-8,
In my view, Edelman
effaces this difference between democracy and totalitarianism. He attributes to
democracy the workings of totalitarianism: he makes no distinction between civil society and the state,
equates "the social order" with politics as such, and equates both with the symbolic order.
This misconception of democratic politics is what anchors his call for "a true oppositional politics"
whose meaning-dissolving, identity-dissolving ironies would come from "the space outside the frame within which 'politics' appears" ("PostPartum" 181). The
democratic state, as opposed to the totalitarian, does not rule civil society but
secures its possibility and flourishing; conversely, civil society is the nonpolitical realm
from which emerge those initiatives that transform, moderately or radically, the political realm of laws and
rights. For that very reason, the political frame of laws and rights, and of debate and decision, is intrinsically inadequate to the plurality of
projects and the social divisions within society—there
is always a gap in its political representation of the "real" of the social—
and for that very reason the political realm itself is open to change and innovation. Innovation
is a crucial concept for understanding the gay and lesbian movement, which emerged from within civil society as citizens who were stigmatized
and often criminalized for their sexual lives created new forms of association, transformed their own lifeworld, and organized a political
offensive on behalf of political and social reforms. There was an innovation of rights and freedoms, and what I have called innovations in
sociality. Contrary to the liberal interpretation of liberal rights and freedoms, I do not think that gays and lesbians have merely sought their
place at the table. Their struggle has radically altered the scope and meaning of the liberal rights and freedoms they sought, first and foremost
by making them include sexuality, sexual practices, and the shape of household and family. Where the movement has succeeded in changing
wherever it becomes
unlawful to deny housing to individuals because they are gay, there is set in motion a
transformation of the everyday life of neighborhoods, including the lives of heterosexuals and their children. Within civil society, this
is a work of enlightenment, however uneven and fraught and frequently dangerous. It is not a reaffirmation of the
symbolic and structural underpinnings of homophobia; on the contrary, it is a challenge to
homophobia and a volatilizing of social relations within the nonpolitical realm.
the laws of the state, it has also opened up new possibilities within civil society. To take an obvious example,
Futurity Good – Queerness
Edelman’s claim that sexual reproduction is the core of politics is just wrong. He
treats reactionary movement as the norm and would reverse decades of cultural
change
Brenkman 2
John, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate School, “Politics, Mortal and
Natal: An Arendtian Rejoinder,” Narrative 10:2,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/narrative/v010/10.2brenkman02.html, p. 188-9,
What I have challenged is the claim that this discourse defines, or even dominates, the political realm as such. It
is the
discourse of conservative Catholicism and Christian fundamentalism, and even though it resonates
in strands of liberal discourse, it represents an intense reaction, backlash, against changes that
have already taken place in American society, many of them as the direct result of feminism and the gay and lesbian
movement. It is indeed important not to underestimate the depth and danger of this reaction, but it is a reactionary,
not a foundational, discourse. The uncoupling of sexuality and reproduction is ubiquitous
in American culture today as a result of multiple developments beyond the expansion of gay
rights and the right to abortion, including birth control, divorce, and changing patterns of family
life, as well as consumerism and mass culture; it may well be that the sheer scope, and
irreversibility, of these developments also intensifies the targeting of gays by conservative
ideology and Christian fundamentalist movements. But that is all the more reason to recognize that the
deconstruction of the phobic figuration of the queer is a struggle to be pursued inside as
well as outside politics.
( ) Queer politics aren’t a root cause – focus on reproductive futurism can’t explain
gay oppression in family life, consumerism, mass culture or religion. Accepting the
multiple intersections underscores the necessity of working through political
institutions to achieve change.
Political calculation doesn’t necessitate a conservative social order. Edelman’s
argument is ridiculously totalizing
Brenkman 2
John, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate School, “Politics, Mortal and
Natal: An Arendtian Rejoinder,” Narrative 10:2,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/narrative/v010/10.2brenkman02.html, p. 189,
I stand by my claim that Edelman builds a psychoanalytic theory of the political realm, in the sense that he gives a
psychoanalytic account of what the political realm is. Politics in his account fuses the Symbolic order to the social order and,
in response to the Symbolic's inherent failure to symbolize the Real of the drives that unhinge every human being's
integration into the social-symbolic order, generates a subtending futurist-nostalgic fantasy of sexuality as reproduction.
Because the fantasy too is everywhere exceeded by reality, this mechanism in turn produces the homophobic figuration
Edelman has described in "The Future is Kid Stuff": "the order of social reality demands some figural repository for what the
logic of its articulation is destined to foreclose, for the fracture that persistently haunts it as the death within itself" ("Future is
Kid Stuff" 28). I cited Claude Lefort at some length because he visits the same precincts of the psychoanalytic theory of
discourse in order to formulate the discursive dynamic of democracy. But rather than conceptualizing the entire
social-political order as a psychic apparatus as Edelman does, Lefort draws on Lacan's notion of the
inherent gap between symbolization and the "real" to formulate the modern state's representation of the "real" of
the social. Since the democratic state limits its own powers and thus delimits civil society as the
nonpolitical space it impossibly must represent, the gap between symbolic and real is the opening of
political conflict and change, not an endless replication or reaffirmation of the social order.
Every ideological or political articulation—whether the particular discourses of power (law, economics,
aesthetics, etc.) or the institution of the state itself—holds a potentiality for change because of, not in
spite of the fact that its representation of the "real" fails.
( ) Queer pessimism is fatalism at its worst – the gap created by the symbolic and the
Real is civil society – progressive politics are possible in the state because the
representation of the Real is not totalizing.
Futurity Good – Social Change
Failure to evaluate responsibility for the future denies any collective social change
Grossberg 3
Lawrence, Professor of Communication Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, “Cultural studies, the war against
kids, and the re-becoming of US modernity,” Postcolonial Studies, 6:3, 346-347
The war on kids is about erasing the future as a burden on the present. Or better, it is about changing the very mode by which
the future functions, for the future is itself necessary to the possibility of an individualizing identity built on labour and
citizenship. The rejection of kids as the core of our common national and social identity is, at the same time, a rejection of the
future as an affective investment. Increasingly, the future is defined as either indistinguishable from the present35 (and
therefore as the servant of the present rather than vice versa), or apocalyptically (as radically other than the present, without
any continuity). To put it simply, the claim that we are no longer responsible to/for our children (because
they no longer deserve it) ‘signifies’, if you will, that the present is no longer responsible to the future . On the
contrary, in the re-imagined modernity, the future is to be held responsible to the present. We may be witnessing the attempt
to reinvent the individual and the relationship of individuality to the forces that produce reality and are producing our
collective futures, and the emergence of a new and distinct mode of individualization and (as)sociation. This ‘revolution’
involves economic, political, ideological, social, theoretical, cultural and media vectors, all together, and their multiple
articulations. It is what brings together new conservative, neo-conservative and neo-liberal groups, and sometimes other
constituencies, however temporarily. What is at stake is the production of a new modernity and of the impossibility of those
conceptions of agency which have sustained us for centuries. This new modernity would seem to negate the very
reality, and even the possibility, of the social or, more accurately, of social agency. What we are witnessing, what I have been
trying to describe and imagine, is the production of a new context, a new modernity, out of the old. This production seems to
require and seek the negation of many forms of individual and collective agency, including the very
possibility of imagining alternative futures, of imagining the future as always holding open the possibility
of alternatives. That is, the attack on kids is about the relationship between individuality and time. It is a struggle to
change our investment in and the possibility of imagining the future. And it is, as Bauman says, a struggle about escaping
from the present.36 Because as long as you believe in the future, there’s always an escape route, there’s always
a way to get from here to there. And as long as there’s an escape route, there is always a possibility
of a community defined in opposition to the present. This struggle against modernity (in the name of a new
modernity) must negate the possibility of imagination, of the imaginative power of the future. And in fact, the new modernity
seems to demand that we deny the importance of the future. But if
we are to take back control of our
present, if we are to take back the possibility of imagining the future, we must somehow return to kids—all
over the world—the possibility of embodying hope for themselves (without once again imposing on them
the burden that they embody hope for us as well). We must also claim hope for ourselves as intellectuals. I recognize that my
argument may stretch one’s credulity, but I want to defend myself by agreeing with my good friend Meaghan Morris, who
has suggested, ‘Things are too urgent now to be giving up our imagination’.37 I want to suggest that there is no other way
except imaginatively to make sense of what is going on and that, in the end, it is precisely our ability to imagine
that is at stake in the current political struggle.
Futurity Good – Social Change
Futurity is key to new social orders which are less oppressive
Bateman 6
R. Benjamin, Doctoral candidate in English, University of Virginia, “The Future of Queer Theory,”
Minnesota Review, Spring,
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf1.shtml
Certain readers might chafe at Edelman's suggestion that Butler's politics is insufficiently radical. After all, Butler has been
criticized, like Edelman, for trafficking in recondite theories and postmodern argot and for failing to offer a viable model of
political agency. To be sure, Butler's post-structuralist and Foucaultian commitments constrain her ability to posit a stable
political agent and to conceive a politics that would radically oppose, rather than merely reinforce or marginally reinflect, a
dominant cultural order. But in her recent work, perhaps most strikingly in 2004's Undoing Gender, Butler has turned to the
"question of social transformation" (the title of UG's tenth chapter), arguing, quite programmatically, that social
transformation "…is a question of developing, within law, within psychiatry, within social and literary theory, a new
legitimating lexicon for the gender complexity that we have always been living" (219). Lest she be accused of nominalism,
Butler stresses the importance of real bodies in forging such a vocabulary: "…the body is that which can occupy the norm in
myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as open to
transformation" (217). While Edelman rejects the future as a site of social reproduction, Butler prizes it as
a space of uncertainty, an ambiguous terrain upon which competing and perhaps
unforeseeable claims will be made and new social orders elaborated. Butler's model offers
queer theory a brighter future than Edelman's, not simply because it confers agency upon social actors and highlights the
social's capacity for transformation, but because it supersedes the liberal inclusiveness for which
Edelman faults it. Butler's queer world is not one in which the dominant order remains
stable as it incorporates, or ingests, peripheral sexualities into its fold. Rather, it is one in which the
periphery remakes the center, rearticulating what it means to be "normal" or "American"
or "queer." Thus, queers do not simply enter society on heterosexuality's terms; they recast
such terms, seizing upon instabilities in signification to elaborate previously unarticulated and
perhaps unanticipatable ways of life. Edelman's point that 'queer' names "the resistance of the social to itself" (2002)
combats the very anti-futurism he endorses; in this formulation, queerness functions as the force that prevents a particular
social order from coinciding with itself, from congealing into a futureless nightmare. Queer, then, might denote the instability
of all norms and social orders, their intrinsic capacity for change.
Futurity is necessary to alter the current social order
Kurasawa 4
Fuyuki, Assistant Professor of Sociology at York University, “Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of
Prevention and the Work of Foresight,” Constellations, 11:4, p. 454
But neither
evasion nor fatalism will do. Some authors have grasped this, reviving hope in large-scale socioof an alternative world order. Endeavors like
these are essential, for they spark ideas about possible and desirable futures that transcend
the existing state of affairs and undermine the flawed prognoses of the post-Cold War world order; what ought
to be and the Blochian ‘Not-Yet’ remain powerful figures of critique of what is, and inspire us
to contemplate how social life could be organized differently. Nevertheless, my aim in this paper is to
political transformation by sketching out utopian pictures
pursue a different tack by exploring how a dystopian imaginary can lay the foundations for a constructive engagement with
the future.
Futurity Good – Environment
Focusing on the future is key to prevent environmental destruction
Dator 99
Jim Dator is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Director of the Hawaii
Research Center for Futures Studies., http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/dator/governance/futgen.html
But simultaneously, and in stark contrast, "the
environmental movement" began to question
"development" as a proper basis for anticipating the future. Looming threats of
environmental pollution, resource exhaustion, overpopulation, and global change seemed
to many people vastly more important than continuing to urge blind economic growth.
Fretting over the problems of a world of abundance and leisure was viewed as utter folly.
Indeed, it was the unanticipated consequences of continued economic growth itself which
caused many people to have such a bleak and fearful view of the future. "Development" was
definitely not all it was cracked up to be. So, whatever view one might have of the future--be it bright or dark, prosperous or
penurious--more and more people were becoming aware of their obligation to take the needs
of future generations into account when making present decisions. Various advocates
for governmental foresight have created, or attempted to create, new processes or institutions
within existing systems of democratic government in different parts of the world. These
include long-range planning departments, futures commissions, requirements that
legislatures conduct future-impact statements on proposed legislation, environmental
protection agencies, offices of technology assessment, and the like. Examples of these are discussed
elsewhere in this volume.
Environmental destruction causes extinction
Richard Margoluis, Biodiversity Support Program, 19 96,
http://www.bsponline.org/publications/showhtml.php3?10
Biodiversity not only provides direct benefits like food, medicine, and energy; it also affords us a "life support
system." Biodiversity is required for the recycling of essential elements, such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. It is also
responsible for mitigating pollution, protecting watersheds, and combating soil erosion. Because biodiversity acts as a buffer
against excessive variations in weather and climate, it protects us from catastrophic events beyond human control. The
importance of biodiversity to a healthy environment has become increasingly clear. We
have learned that the future well-being of all humanity depends on our stewardship of the
Earth. When we overexploit living resources, we threaten our own survival.
Futurity Good – Extinction
Focusing on the future solves extinction – solves resource planning that averts
conflict and environmental collapse
Dator 99
Jim Dator is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Director of the Hawaii
Research Center for Futures Studies., http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/dator/governance/futgen.html
Thus, future-oriented political philosophies and processes are given meaning not through
specific policies about the future per se, but through certain perspectives, institutions, and
actions intended to bring the interests of future generations into the decision making and
implementation of the present. Future-oriented actions also include those made by governments and citizens
which attempt seriously to assess the potential impacts of proposed policies on future generations before the policies are
made or implemented. Recent discussions about why we need to be aware of our obligations to future generations fall into
four general categories: fairness, maintaining options, quality of life, and humility. The "fairness" obligation concerns not
imposing risks on future generations that present generations would also not accept. For example, MacLean states that "levels
of risk to which future generations will be subjected will be no greater than those of present persons'" [4]. Risks can include
those of premature "death owing to environmental or other preventable catastrophes" [5] or other significant threats to the
quality of life. "Fairness" also implies "consent." According to Schrader-Frechette, "until or unless a risk
imposition receives the consent of those who are its potential victims, it cannot be
justified"[6]. Future generations can offer no such consent, so ways need to be invented
and created which attempt to include the interests, and consent, of future generations in all
current decisions which will impact them. The "maintaining options" obligation entails giving to our posterity
future worlds that are as free of human-made constraints as possible. In other words, there is a need to prevent
environmental and other catastrophes "that would restrict the future of the human race by
cutting off certain possible futures" [7]. By cutting off many futures, the ability of future societies to grow and
mature is reduced [8] as is the freedom for people to "reason about means and ends and evaluate preferences, to match desires
and beliefs and then act" [9]. Frankenfeld [10] argues that current generations owe posterity a world as simple, controllable,
and affordable as possible. Brown's "Principle of Conservation of Options" holds that "each generation should conserve the
diversity of the natural and cultural resource base so that is does not unduly restrict options available to future generations..."
[11]. The "quality-of-life" obligation refers to ensuring that future generations enjoy all the
most important aspects of life. From an international survey, Tough distilled the following quality-of-life obligations to future
generations: peace and security, a healthy environment, a small risk of preventable
catastrophe, stable governments, conservation of knowledge, a good life for children, and
opportunities for living [12]. DesJardings' three quality-of-life obligations to future generations are development of
alternative energy sources, conservation of energy resources, and a reasonable chance of happiness [13]. Economic concerns
relating to quality-of-work and increasing standards of living could be added to this list, in addition to other variables that are
found important by the world's diversity of cultures. Bell believes that "humility" should inhibit humanity from creating
obligations to future generations. In his words, "humble ignorance ought to lead present generations to act with prudence
toward the well-being of future generations." In addition, he states that "there is a prima facie obligation of present
generations to ensure that important business is not left unfinished" [14] National governments make numerous decisions that
bear on such obligations, either positively or negatively. Decisions within the sphere of the interest of
obligations to future generations include environmental and energy policies, science and space programs,
agriculture, land use, infrastructure, and education--indeed, almost everything. A future-oriented
government might make decisions that support sustainability, species protection,
ecosystem protection, reduction of pollutants into the environment, and conservation of
non-renewable resources, with concomitant focus on using renewable resources.
Afro-Pessimism Answers
Alt 2AC
The alternative cannot solve – they do not have evidence or explanation for how
they can undo all of social relations up until this point. The huge structural claims
that they have had to advance in order to get their framing claims doom their alt
solvency. They will say that you should just imagine it or somehow invoke it with
your ballot but this all begs the question of what this means for practical politics
The Neg should have to defend the material implementation of their alternative and
how they would produce large scale social change. The Neg has no explanation for
how they could galvanize large scale social movements let alone end America or the
world.
Results matters – failure to have a course of action for mobilizing populations
dooms the alt. EVEN if they win their ethics claims, you have to evaluate the
question of alt solvency first.
Day 9
(Christopher, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary
Project,
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/historical_failure_of_aanarchism_chris_day_kasama.pdf)
The strength of anarchism is its moral insistence on the primacy of human freedom over
political expediency. But human freedom exists in a political context. It is not sufficient,
however, to simply take the most uncompromising position in defense of
freedom. It is neccesary to actually win freedom. Anti-capitalism doesn’t do the
victims of capitalism any good if you don’t actually destroy capitalism. Anti-statism
doesn’t do the victims of the state any good if you don’t actually smash the
state. Anarchism has been very good at putting forth visions of a free society and that is for the
good. But it is worthless if we don’t develop an actual strategy for realizing those
visions. It is not enough to be right, we must also win.
Continues…
Finally revolutionaries have a responsibility to have a plausible plan for making
revolution. Obviously there are not enough revolutionaries to make a revolution
at this moment. We can reasonably anticipate that the future will bring upsurges in popular
opposition to the existing system. Without being any more specific about where those
upsurges might occur it seems clear that it is from the ranks of such upsurges that the numbers
of the revolutionary movement will be increased, eventually leading to a revolutionary situation
(which is distinguished from the normal crises of the current order only by the existence of a
revolutionary movement ready to push things further). People who are fed up with the existing
system and who are willing to commit themselves to its overthrow will look around for
likeminded people who have an idea of what to do. If we don’t have a plausible plan for
making revolution we can be sure that there will be somebody else there who
will. There is no guarantee that revolutionary-minded people will be
spontaneously drawn to anti-authoritarian politics. The plan doesn’t have to be an
exact blueprint. It shouldn’t be treated as something sacred. It should be subject to constant
revision in light of experience and debate. But at the very least it needs to be able to answer
questions that have been posed concretely in the past. We know that we will never confront the
exact same circumstances as previous revolutions. But we should also know that certain
problems are persistent ones and that if we can’t say what we would have done in the past we
should not expect people to think much of our ability to face the future.
We win even if its a debate of competing methodologies – deliberative spaces like
political discussions between college students are valuable but we need to tie our
advocacies to addressing particular problems in the world. This is crucially effective
in the context of Black politics. The democratic public sphere is not structurally
closed to Black bodies
Glaude (William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Department of Religion,
and Chair, Center for African American Studies at Princeton) 7
(EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the
Politics of Black America, pg. x-xii)
Another young man stood up and offered a slight correction to his colleague's impassioned
remarks. He said, "I agree with what has just been said, but we should know that knowledge
without action is useless. We must do something with that knowledge." The conversation
that followed was instructive. Students weighed in on the matter. West and Smiley of- fered
their views. I asked, "What if we understand knowledge not as sepa- rate from doing, but rather
as a consequence of it? What if knowledge is s simply the fruit of our undertaking? To use one
of Tavis Smiley's favorite words, we proceeded to "marinate" for a while on the implications of
the relation between how we think and how we act. At one level, my questions had been aimed
simply at countering an implicit anti-intellectualism. But what I had also done was to invoke,
verbatim, John Dewey's definition of knowledge as the "fruit of our undertakings." In a room
full of young people with varied backgrounds and challenges in their lives, we
found ourselves thinking with distinctly pragmatic tools about epistemology and
how our thoughts about the subject could affect how we seek to change the
world.
Why John Dewey in this context? Because I believe that the tradition of American pragmatism
exemplified by Dewey offers powerful resources for redefining African American leadership
and politics. This book seeks to make that case. I argue that pragmatism, when attentive to
the darker dimensions of human living (what we often speak of as the blues), can
address many of the conceptual problems that plague contemporary African
American political life. How we think about black identity, how we imagine black
history, and how we conceive of black agency can be rendered in ways that
escape bad racial reasoning - reasoning that assumes a tendentious unity among
African Americans simply because they are black, or that short- circuits
imaginative responses to problems confronting actual black people.
The relationship I propose between pragmatism and African American politics is mutually
beneficial. Pragmatism must reckon with the blues or remain a stale academic exercise. The
blues, of course, are much more than a musical idiom. They constitute, as Albert Murray notes in
his classic book on the subject, "a statement about confronting the complexities inherent in the
human situation and about improvising or experiment- ing or riffing or otherwise playing with
(or even gambling with) such posibiliteis as are inherent in the obstacles, the disjunctures, and
the jeopardy." Murray goes on to say, in words that I hope will resonate through the pages that
follow, that the blues are "a statement about perseverance and .about resilience and thus also
about the maintenance"of equilibrium despite precarious circumstances and about achieving
elegance in the very process of coping with the rudiments of subsistence." In one sense, to take
up the subject of African American politics is inevitably to take up the blues. That is to say, the
subject cannot but account for the incredible efforts of ordinary black folk to persevere with
elegance and a smile as they confront a world fraught with danger and tragedy. To embrace
pragmatism is to hold close a fundamental faith in the capacities of ordinary
people to transform their circumstances while rejecting hidden and not- so-hidden
assumptions that would deny them that capacity. To bind pragmatism and
African American politics together, I hope to show, is to open up new avenues for
thinking about both.
My book does not offer a political blueprint nor is it concerned with putting forwad concrete
solution to specific political problems, it seeks instead to open up deliberative space
within African American communities and throughout the country for reflection
on how we think about the pressing matters confronting black communities and
our nation. Reflection is not opposed to action. I hope to make clear how the theoretical and
the practical are intimately connected.
To be sure, the bleak realities of our country constitute the backdrop of my efforts. Our
democratic way of life is in jeopardy. Fear and our clamoring need for security have revealed the
more unsavory features of American culture. The foundational elements of a free and open
society are being eroded, and our political leaders lie to justify their destruction. The corrosive
effects of corporate greed on the form and content of our democ- racy are also apparent: the top
1 percent of the population is getting richer while the vast majority of Americans, of whatever
color, struggle to make ends meet. In many African American communities in particular, we see
the signs of crisis: deteriorating health, alarming rates of incarceration, the devastating effects of
drug economies, and the hypercon- centration of poverty because work has simply disappeared.
Political fac- tions stay the course, exploiting faith communities, stoking the fires of homophobia
(while denying the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in black commu- nities), and appealing to uncritical
views of black solidarity that often blind our fellow citizens to the destructive policies that,
ultimately, undermine the values of democratic life. All the while, established African American
leaders seem caught in a time warp in which the black revolu- tion of the 1960s is the only frame
of reference, obscuring their ability to see clearly the distinctive challenges of our current
moment.
In dark and trying times, particularly in democracies, it is incumbent upon citizens to engage one
another in order to imagine possibilities and to see beyond the recalcitrance of their condition.
Participatory democracies are always fragile, and moments of crisis serve as easy excuses to
discard the values that sustain them. When we stop talking with and provoking our fellows we in
effect cede our democratic forms of life to those forces that would destroy it. In a Shade of Blue
seeks, among other things, to make explicit the values and commitments that inform my own
think- ing about African American politics and democratic life. The book continuously
asserts the primacy of participatory democracy the necessity for responsibility
and accountability, and the pressing need for more imaginative thinking about
African American conditions of living.
For me, these are not abstract concerns. I have been blessed over the last couple of years to be
able to speak all around the country and talk with fel- low citizens about the challenges
confronting African American commu- nities specifically and our democratic form of life
generally. On college campuses from New Haven to Denver to Urbana, and in townhall meet- ings from Oakland to Houston, I have invoked my pragmatic commitments
as a basis for reimagining African American politics-to reject specious
conceptions of black identity, facile formulations of black history, and easy appeals to
black agency. I have insisted that we hold one another accountable and responsible
in light of an understanding that democracy is a way of life and not merely a set of
procedures—that it involves a certain moral and ethical stance and requires a
particular kind of disposition committed to the cognitive virtues of free and open
debate. I have urged young African Americans to take up the challenge to forge
a politics that speaks to the particular problems of this moment and not simply to
mimic the strategies and approaches of the black freedom struggle of the 1960s.
I have done so because of my philosophical commitment to the idea that
publics come into
and out of existence all the time and that our challenge is to find the requisite
tools to respond to the shifts and transformations that call new publics into
being.
This book emerged out of these encounters. It carries the burden of making the case that
pragmatism, rightly understood, offers resources for thinking about African
American politics in the twenty-first century. As such, In a Shade of Blue isn't for the
philosophically faint of heart. Chapter 1 is perhaps the most challenging, as it seeks to make
clear the significance of John Dewey's moral and political philosophy. I hope that the gen- eral
reader will find it worthwhile to persevere through the book's more difficult passages. My
argument ends with the call for a "post-soul politics"—a form of political engagement that steps
out of the shadows of the black freedom struggles of the sixties and rises to the challenges of our
current moment with new voices, innovative thinking, and an unshakable commitment to the
values of participatory democracy.
AND engaging in public sphere debates over issues like nuclear weapons is crucial
to the success of Black movements. An Aff ballot can affirm multiple overlapping
counter-publics simultaneously and even if we lose our framework arguments about
materiality this evidence is an impact turn to rejecting optimism and democratic
deliberation
Dawson (Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and
Culture at the University of Chicago) 1
(Michael C., BLACK VISIONS The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies, pg.
321-3)
But building a mass base is not sufficient. One of the planks from the BRC "Principles of
Unity" included the following language: " We must be democratic and inclusive in our
dealings with one another" (Black Radical Congress 1998). To do so, however, means
rebuilding a black counterpublic that allows people to air differences of opinion
honestly and vigorously without worrying about having their "blackness" questioned. To
build a successful political movement requires more. It means building
overlapping counterpublics and public spheres which reach across the racial and
other divisions that plague the American political landscape. It will also take
considerably more than black willingness to engage in democratic debate about
the nature and future of the country. It will require two components that have been sadly lacking
from the political landscape. First, po- litical leaders must be willing to engage in a dialogue
concerning race with- out either ducking and not engaging or resorting to race-baiting in order to
gain votes, Second, white Americans in particular must be willing both to engage in such a
debate and to seriously question the sources of their privilege as well as the legacy ofwhite
supremacy, As Martin Luther King Jr. remarked thirty years ago, black nationalist resurgence is
a reaction to the lack of active goodwill on the part of white America when it comes to matters
of race and economics.
We must finally ask whether African Americans can rely on a totalizing ideology
to shape our visions of black justice and our future in America. My answer is no.
I believe we need a more flexible approach than ideologies such as black Marxism,
black nationalism, and at least the Cold War version of liberalism have allowed. We need a
black critical theory that draws on and combines liberalism's concern with
individual rights and autonomy, republican concerns with community, socialist concern
with an egalitarian society and economic justice for all, feminist traditions such as resistance to
suppressing intragroup differences in the name of a false and oppressive unity, and blends these
with recognition of the need for autonomous organization and cultural pride. No single world
view or ideology comfortably accommodates all of these, But a critical theory can—and such a
theory must be political. We've had a black aesthetic, black power, and a plethora of black
public policy pronouncements. But a black political theory has to embody a theory of the state,
power, human nature, and the good life. And such a theory must be based on the hope
for and potential of the improvement of human nature while recognizing the
wickedness of the world. Kantian pronouncements about systems that can be
governed by devils have led us to a world where ethnic strife and nuclear and
other horrors proliferate. We must strive for something better, something
democratic, something cosmopolitan, not in the elite sense but in the sense that, since
homogeneity is a thing of the past, even within states, we must fall back on our basic
humanness.
It is no coincidence that within American political thought this perspective appears most often in
the black traditions and in black political thought, at least in the contemporary period—most
often in the black feminist tradition, Thus the best legacy of black political ideologies
for America is a tough, activist, inclusive democracy willing to challenge
privileges of power and resources in the name of a grander vision which asserts that we are
more than the mere aggregation of our individual preferences, Its morality, while democratic,
would not be based on the latest consumer fad nor use the return to stockholders as the final
arbiter of the public good, That we often fail in living up to our standards of justice within black
activism as well as within America—that we are imperfect as individuals and as communities—
does not mean, as King so eloquently demonstrated, that the vision itself is not a worthy goal.
What black critical theory and e a c h b l a c k i d e o l o g y h a v e d e mo n s t r a t e d i s t h a t
t h e d o a b l e , t h e mu n d a n e , i n – c r è m e n t a l r e f o r m of the workings of American
society is not enough; only the full promise of America has the potential to be truly liberating,
Any other solution is not only unsatisfactory—it is likely to provoke the ldnd of deadly conflict
most clearly seen in the Civil War but also seen today in the rapid upward spiral of political and
personal violence which results as people measure their circumstances against what they see as
the lies that fester at the center of the American Dream. Anew, black, critical theory needs to
retain one aspect of black ideological visions, At the heart of all of the black visions is a
sense of pragmatic optimism combined with a stead- fast determination to gain black
justice. Both the optimism and the determination are needed now as ever to
sustain the political projects and new visions of African Americans.
Descriptive Claims 2AC
Now we’ll answer their descriptive claims about the world
First, blackness is not an unchanging ontological void – it is political, contingent and
able to be changed. If we win this claim then every one of their framing issues is
disproven.
Hudson 13 (Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)
(Peter, Social Dynamics (2013): The state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal of
African studies, DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2013.802867)
[BEGIN FOOTNOTE]
My foil here is the ontological fatalism of Frank Wilderson’s argument. See
Wilderson (2008), according to which “the only way Humanity can maintain both its corporeal
and libidinal integrity is through the various strategies through which Blackness is the abyss into
which humanness can never fall” (105). And “were there to be a place and time for blacks
cartography and temporality would be impossible” (111). Here then, the closure of
colonialism is absolute.
[END FOOTNOTE]
“Whiteness” as whiteness – the meaning of whiteness and that of “blackness” – is
carried via “a constellation of postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and subtly
work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world of the group to which one
belongs” – “a thousand details, anecdote stories” which are “woven” into
“prejudices, myths, the collective attitudes of a given group” (Fanon 1968, 78, 133).
This is how the “subject positions” of both whites and blacks are constituted. We
can call this constellation the Colonial Big Other (symbolic) in and through which the colonial
relation is constituted and reproduced. This Big Other is white, in that whiteness is its master
signifier and therefore all identities are “white” under colonialism.
Everyone is white in the colonial symbolic – including blacks; it is just that they are “less white”
than “whites” to the point of not being at all – Fanon says again and again that “the black man
desires to be white” – but, when he looks at himself through the eyes he has adopted, the “eyes”
that are “his” – what he (qua white eyes) sees is something that doesn’t exist – “inequality, no
non-existence” (Fanon 1968, 98, original emphasis). He “subsists at the level of non-being”
(131) – just as the white, when it sees the black, sees an other that is, as Fanon says “absolutely
not self,” so does the black see himself – “as absolutely not self” (114). This is the depth of the
fissure in the black colonial subject position, caught between two impossibles: “whiteness,”
which he desires but which is barred to him, and “black- ness,” which is “non-existence.”
Colonialism, anxiety and emancipation3
Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself. There
always has to exist an outside, which is also inside, to the extent it is desig- nated as the
impossibility from which the possibility of the existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou
2009, 220). But although the excluded place which isn’t excluded insofar as it is necessary for
the very possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal (may be
considered “ontological”), its content (what fills it) – as well as the mode of this
filling and its reproduction – are contingent. In other words, the meaning of the
signifier of exclusion is not determined once and for all: the place of the place of
exclusion, of death is itself over-determined, i.e. the very framework for deciding the
other and the same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in ontological
stone but is political and never terminally settled. Put differ- ently, the “curvature of
intersubjective space” (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the
specific modes of the “othering”
of “otherness” are nowhere decided in advance (as a certain ontological fatalism
might have it) (see Wilderson 2008). The social does not have to be divided into white and
black, and the meaning of these signifiers is never necessary – because they are signifiers.
To be sure, colonialism institutes an ontological division, in that whites exist in a way
barred to blacks – who are not. But
this ontological relation is really on the
side of the ontic – that is, of all contingently constructed identities, rather than
the ontology of the social which refers to the ultimate unfixity, the
indeterminacy or lack of the social. In this sense, then, the white man doesn’t exist, the
black man doesn’t exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the colonial symbolic itself,
including its most intimate structuring relations – division is constitutive of the social, not the
colonial division.
“Whiteness” may well be very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but respect for the
“ontological difference” (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its ontological
status as ontic. It may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even to
identify the very possibility of the separation of whiteness from the very
possibility of order, but from this it does not follow that the “void” of
“black being” functions as the ultimate substance, the transcendental
signified on which all possible forms of sociality are said to rest.
What gets lost here, then, is the specificity of colonialism, of its constitutive axis,
its “ontological” differential.
And this is an impact turn to the alt – their dualistic description of the world is
incorrect but makes challenging white supremacy impossible
hooks 12 (Distinguished Professor in Residence at Barea)
(bell, Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice, 177)
Religion is important because it is there that many folks learn the western metaphysical
dualism—the notion of world divided between the good and the bad, the chosen
and the unchosen, the worthy and the unworthy, the blacks and the whites—that is the
philosophical foundation for white supremacy and other forms of domination.
As long as this thinking serves as the foundation for how most people think
about life (in neat binaries) then it will be impossible to eradicate racism. White
supremacist capitalist patriarchy thrives on the core dualistic thinking that is the
foundation of all systems of domination.
Second, accepting their impact framing makes any specific action impossible and
locks in structural violence. The public sphere is not absolutely determined by antiblackness and can be altered by political action
Yancy 13
(George, Introduction: Black Philosophy and the Crucible of Lived, The Black Scholar, Vol. 43, No. 4,
Special Issue: Role of Black Philosophy (Winter 2013), pp. 5-10)
Black philosophy and its role are funda- mentally linked with existential struggle.
The lived experiences of struggle and resistance (etymologically, “to take a stand”)
speak to the fact that the social ontological structure of the world is not
a metaphysical fait accompli. Black philosophy acknowledges its historical
conditionality and emergence against the backdrop of white racism, vio- lence,
colonialism, dehumanization, enslavement, oppression, and objectification. It
recognizes this
backdrop as constituted through lived embodiment and configurations of
thought and action that were not necessary, but that are predicated upon
contingent sites of power and hegemony that are linked to oppressive
ideologies and the possession of material power to superimpose such oppressive
ideologies. Hence, relevant to black philosophy is its clarion call: “The world is not as it
ought to be!”
It is the power of “ought” that points to the openness of human history, agency,
and counter-hegemonic praxis. The “ought” implies slippage, excess, lacunae,
and the capacity to create. The subtext here is that one can reconfigure the
world, reshape its direction, undo its normative repetitions, and create new and
ever freeing forms of political formation, relationality, and performance. [Italics in
original article – DQ] The role of black philosophy, then, having its point of origin within a
matrix of oppression, even as this oppression was/is diasporic, is antagonistic and iconoclastic;
indeed, resis- tant to claims of philosophical universality that are actually forms of discourse that
are predicated upon a philosophical anthropol- ogy that is, in this case, underwritten by
whiteness as the transcendental norm and that valorizes its vision of the world and the meaning
of humanity at the exclusion of others. Hence, to engage in black philosophy on
conceptual terms set forth here is to affirm one’s humanity in the face of those who
deem you a sub-person, ersatz, ontologically nugatory.
Ethics 2AC
Anti-ethics is not a desirable frame for the debate
a. Begs the question of both the prag and method debates above – they have to
win the entire weight of their framing claims in order to win this as a
relation to the ballot
b. Err Aff on late breaking explanations of what this means – their evidence
does not support this as a ethical d-rule to vote for them or against
rationality. If the block has a new explanation of what anti-ethics means we
get new 1AR answers
c. Ethics are good – the Aff’s project of survival of others, allowing the agency
to work, play, struggle and desire free from the destruction of their biological
life is ethical
[can read a different card if desired, like a different exn first card]
Fassin 10 (James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced
Study, Princeton, as well as directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.)
(Didier, ETHICS OF SURVIVAL: A DEMOCRATIC APPROACH TO THE POLITICS OF LIFE,
http://www.humanityjournal.org/humanity-volume-1-issue-1/ethics-survival-democratic-approach-politicslife)
“Long before the experience of survival that I am presently facing, I wrote that survival
is an
original concept which constitutes the very structure of what we call existence.
We are, structurally speaking, survivors, marked by this structure of the trace, of
the testament. That said, I would not endorse the view according to which survival is more on
the side of death and the past than of life and the future. No, deconstruction is always on the side
of the affirmation of life.”3 A few weeks before his death, Jacques Derrida gave his last
interview in which he developed at length his conception of life as survival. Suffering from a
terminal disease, he confided: “Since certain health problems are becoming more pressing, the
question of survival and reprieve, which has always haunted me, literally, every moment of my
life, in a concrete and tireless way, takes on a different color today.” In reference to a sentence
he had used in one of his books (“I would finally like to know how to live”) he commented with
a penetrating irony: “No, I never learned to live. Definitely not! Learning to live should mean
learning to die. I never learned to accept death. I remain impervious to being educated in the
wisdom of knowing how to die.”
However, beyond the emergency of this “shrinking time of reprieve” (which he rejected with
humor, saying, “we are not here for a health bulletin”), it is the more general problem of survival
on which the philosopher wanted to meditate: “I have always been interested in the question of
survival, the meaning of which does not add to life and death. It is originary: life is survival.” In
fact, both dimensions were for him intimately related, the personal experience repeating the
existential experience, the circumstantial ordeal making the structural reality more evident and
more painful. How else to understand that on the verge of death, thinking about survival could
become so insistent in this interview, until the final profession of faith? “Everything I say
about survival as a complication of the opposition between life and death
proceeds from an unconditional affirmation of life. Survival is life beyond life, life
more than life, and the discourse I undertake is not about death. On the contrary, it is the
affirmation of a living being who prefers life and therefore survival to death,
because survival is not simply what remains; it is the most intense life possible.”
I want to show that Derrida’s conception of life as survival, in its polysemy and even its
ambiguity, may offer an alternative to conceptions of life which, from Benjamin to Agamben,
and in a quite different perspective, from Lamarck to Canguilhem, have presented a seductive
dualistic framework for the humanities and social sciences. Both visions are inherited from
Aristotle. On the one hand, life is presented as biopolitical fact: “Behind the long strife-ridden
process that leads to the recognition of rights and formal liberties stands the body of the sacred
man with his double sovereign, his life that cannot be sacrificed yet may be killed,” affirms
Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer, where he develops his theory of “bare life.”4 From the
“politicization of life” in totalitarian systems to the “isolation of the sacred life” in contemporary
democracies, he therefore establishes a continuum of the power over life. On the other hand, life
is conceived as a biological phenomenon: “any datum of experience possible to trace as a history
comprised between its birth and its death is living, is the object of biological knowledge,” writes
Georges Canguilhem for the entry “Life” in theEncyclopedia Universalis.5 He presents life
successively as “animation,” “mechanism,” “organization,” and “information,” in a
chronological review of biological theories extending from ancient conceptions to contemporary
genetics—and everyone knows that the genome is often said to be the “code of life.”
In other words, these two readings present life as what can be put to death (for Agamben), and as
what is comprised from birth to death (for Canguilhem). The social sciences have largely drawn
from these two repertoires: the former has been used to comprehend the government of
populations and human beings; the latter has nourished the sociology and anthropology of
sciences and techniques. However different they may be, these two models rest on the same
premises. Both treat life as a physical phenomenon, whether it is “bare life” or “biological life”
(both philosophers insisting that it is the dimension shared with the entire animal kingdom). And
both assume that life can be separated, for scientific or political reasons, from
life as an existential phenomenon, whether it is called “qualified life” or “lived
experience” (by Agamben and Canguilhem respectively). 6 It seems to me that Derrida’s
reflection shatters this distinction: “survival” mixes inextricably physical life,
threatened by his cancer, and existential experience, expressed in his work. To survive is to
be still fully alive and to live beyond death. It is the “unconditional affirmation” of life and the
pleasure of living, and it is the hope of “surviving” through the traces left for the living.
There is, I believe, in this revelation much more than the last testimony of a philosopher who did
not accustom us to such clarity and simplicity. I see it as an ethical gesture through
which life is rehabilitated in its most obvious and most ordinary dimension —life
which has death for horizon but which is not separated from life as a social
form, inscribed in a history, a culture, an experience. I consider the consequences of
this gesture to be decisive for the humanities and social sciences: or so I want to argue here.
Their prioritization of social death plays into dominant forms of politics and papers
over the inevitable resistance of bodies to domination
Fassin 10 (James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced
Study, Princeton, as well as directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.)
(Didier, ETHICS OF SURVIVAL: A DEMOCRATIC APPROACH TO THE POLITICS OF LIFE,
http://www.humanityjournal.org/humanity-volume-1-issue-1/ethics-survival-democratic-approach-politicslife)
Survival, in the sense Jacques Derrida attributed to the concept in his last interview, not only
shifts lines that are too often hardened between biological and political lives: it
opens an ethical space for reflection and action. Critical thinking in the past decade has
often taken biopolitics and the politics of life as its objects. It has thus unveiled the way in which
individuals and groups, even entire nations, have been treated by powers, the market, or the
state, during the colonial period as well as in the contemporary era.
However, through indiscriminate extension, this powerful instrument has lost some of its
analytical sharpness and heuristic potentiality. On the one hand, the binary reduction of life
to the opposition between nature and history, bare life and qualified life, when
systematically applied from philosophical inquiry in sociological or anthropological study,
erases much of the complexity and richness of life in society as it is in fact observed.
On the other hand, the normative prejudices which underlie the evaluation of the
forms of life and of the politics of life, when generalized to an undifferentiated
collection of social facts, end up by depriving social agents of legitimacy, voice,
and action. The risk is therefore both scholarly and political. It calls for ethical attention.
In fact, the genealogy of this intellectual lineage reminds us that the main founders of these
theories expressed tensions and hesitations in their work, which was often more complex, if even
sometimes more obscure, than in its reduced and translated form in the humanities and social
sciences today. And also biographies, here limited to fragments from South African
lives that I have described and analyzed in more detail elsewhere, suggest the
necessity of complicating the dualistic models that oppose biological and
political lives. Certainly, powers like the market and the state do act sometimes as
if human beings could be reduced to “mere life,” but democratic forces,
including from within the structure of power, tend to produce alternative
strategies that escape this reduction. And people themselves, even under
conditions of domination, manage subtle tactics that transform their physical life
into a political instrument or a moral resource or an affective expression.
But let us go one step further: ethnography invites us to reconsider what life is or rather what
human beings make of their lives, and reciprocally how their lives permanently question what it
is to be human. “The blurring between what is human and what is not human shades into the
blurring over what is life and what is not life,” writes Veena Das. In the tracks of Wittgenstein
and Cavell, she underscores that the usual manner in which we think of forms of life
“not only obscures the mutual absorption of the natural and the social but also
emphasizes form at the expense of life.”22 It should be the incessant effort of social
scientists to return to this inquiry about life in its multiple forms but also in its everyday
expression of the human.
Social Positions – Yes Contingent Ext.
Ext. Hudson
The Black body is not ontologically closed or devoid of relationality – they can’t
account for Black resistance as subjectivity
Yancy (Prof of Philosophy at Duqesne) 8
(George, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Contining Significance of Race, Pg. 109-10)
The history of Black resistance is a complex narrative, particularly as this history is tied to the
context of a white racist episteme. After all, it is the dominant white culture's view that Black
people have no role to play in "the world of meaning as meaning-makers,"1 Frantz Fanon was
painfully aware of the hegemony and misanthropy of white racist ideology with regard to the
denial of Black peoples' subjectivity and humanity, "All 1 wanted was to be a man among other
men," he noted, "I wanted to come lithe and young into the world that was ours and to help to
build it together," However, within the lived or phenomenological domain of anti-Black racism,
Fanon was expected to live, to think, to feel, to exist, to be "like a nigger."3 Within the context of
an anti-Black racist world, the lived experience of the Black is under the constant threat of being
collapsed into the phenomenological or lived experience of the nigger. Once collapsed into
the one-dimensional mode of niggerhood, as it were, it is easy to undergo a certain
ontological resignation, a capitulation in the face of a reality whose past,
present, and future seem fixed and stacked against any possibility of historical breach. For
Fanon, "transformation,.. requires something like a critical resistance to the dominating [white]
episteme-an active denial of the mythos that intervenes in the formation of body-images."4
Historically, "the imago of the [Black] in the European mind" has involved a process of
discursive and material violence,5 Whether discursive or extra-discursive, this violence was
designed originally to aid in breaking the Black body's claim to dignity and humanity. As I have
argued, the Black body, through the hegemony of the white gaze, undergoes a phenomenological
return that leaves it distorted and fixed as a pre-existing essence. The Black body becomes a
"prisoner" of an imago-an elaborate distorted image of the Black, an image whose reality is held
together through white bad faith and projection— that is ideologically orchestrated to leave no
trace of its social and historical construction, The aim is to foreclose any possibility of slippage
between the historically imposed imago and how the Black body lives its reality as fixed. But
like the white body, the Black body is never simply pregiven. While "history has
been terribly unkind to the African body," the Black body has, within the context of
its tortuous sojourn through the crucible of American and European history, been a site of
discursive, symbolic, ontological, and existential battle. If the Black body's
metastability had reached a point of ontological closure as a result of the power
of the distorted imago projected from the white imaginary, there would have been no
history of the Black body engaged in struggle and transformation. Blacks have
struggled mightily to disrupt, redefine, and transcend white fictions. They have struggled with
profound issues around identity and place. Yet Blacks have always struggled to make a
way out of no way, using the resources they had available. Although I will return to a
discussion of the Middle Passage in chapter 5, one might look at the movement through the
Middle Passage to the so-called New World as a medium through which an especially dynamic
and difficult challenge to define and redefine a narrative of Black identity emerged, This
narrative tells a complex story of the Black experience, one that is shaped through syncretism,
bricolage, the blending of cultural, epistemological, and ontological retentions with ever-new
horrific and challenging experiences, There is no aim here to celebrate or recuperate an
"authentic" identity qua essence or to ground a sense of identity in fixed meta-narratives, There
is the effort, however, to make sense of one's existence within the context of lived history, one
that recognizes and acknowledges the reality of fissures in collective and individual identity
formation and refuses to romanticize origins or points of historical continuity. Nevertheless, it is
my sense that Black identity-talk within the context of North America must begin from below,
that is, one must begin with the existential terror of whiteness faced by Black people, and realize
that Black people continue to define and redefine themselves through the deployment of
conceptual and affective resources that are themselves historical.
***And the White subject position is also contingent. Some limited change and
progress is possible.
Yancy (Prof of Philosophy at Duqesne) 8
(George, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race, Pg. 150) [Italics original –
DQ]
The process of becoming a white racist is linked to larger racially embedded sociohistorical
practices of intelligibility. Yet, within the context of America's racist history, there was always
already the counter-white racist position, the counter-anti-Black voice, to be taken up, and
pursued, even as various social forces militated against the taking up of such a counter-white
racist position/ voice. Whites were not determined by the fixity of a racist
axiological framework. There was still the freedom to challenge the "rigid
training, long persisted i en in" that reinforces the fixity of values. Hence, there is
always the possibility of troubling one subject position and "leaning" into
another. Along with heteronomy, then, there is autonomy. Without the concept of
autonomy, we would be forced to claim that the self is no more than the
plaything of external forces, a constantly shifting "voice" with absolutely no agency. There
is thus the sense that the human subject is not a plenum, but always already
incomplete, capable of claiming a counter-racist voice, though not one created ex
nihilo, For the white racist to admit that one is always already becoming what one is not yet calls
into question whiteness as an essential category of identity and mode of being, The consequence
of this admittance is coming face-to-face with a profound sense of anguish. Even as whites
are interpellated within a racist social structure, there is the reality of a reflective
apprehension of themselves as freedom and the realization that they can continually engage
in the action of choosing themselves as antiracists over and over again.
Black subject position is contingent and alterable
Yancy (Prof of Philosophy at Duqesne) 8
(George, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Contining Significance of Race, Pg. xxii) [Italics original – DQ]
Given the above, it is clear that part of the meaning of Black embodiment is disclosed within
the context of an anti-Black racist world, The disclosure of its meaning, while
inextricably and relational tied to the history of anti-Black racism, is not reduced
to that history. The point here is that the meaning of the Black body is historical.
And as historical, the Black body and the white body are explored not in terms
of an ontology of essences, but in terms of a historical ontology that appreciates
the fluidity of the historical formation of the meaning of, in is case, the Black body
and the white body, even as the white body engages in bad-faith practices of stipulating its
modes of being as sacrosanct, reified, and independent of meaning-bestowing human beings. As
historical, the Black body does not have its meaning ontologically (qua essence)
given or sealed in advance. The Black body is a historical project and as such is
capable of taking up new historical meanings through struggle and affirmation.
As affirmative, the Black body is not simply defined in its opposition to a racist
episteme, but engages its meaning beyond the horizon of the Black imago in the white
imaginary while always keeping track of whiteness's recuperative efforts, its institutional
rigidity, material power, and various complex forms of insidious manifestation.
Social Positions – Contingency Good Ext.
Ext hooks
This prevents the ability to affirm the beauty of Black life and modify the conditions
of living
Glaude (Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Department of Religion, and Chair, Center
for African American at Princeton) 7
(EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the
Politics of Black America, Pg. 110)
My general aim in this chapter has been to insist on the complexity of African American
religious life and to resist naive attempts to reduce that complexity to an easily manageable
political reality—a tendency that is, I believe, typical of this country's melodramatic approach to
the problem of race. I am of the firm belief that appeals to a fixed and stable notion of
black identity, to a conception of history as a storehouse stocked with answers to all our
problems, or appeals to an idea of black agency that presumes our inclination to resist limit our
imaginations and in various ways blunt our capacity to modify our conditions of
living, precisely because each denies the active work e do in the face of problematic situations.
Such appeals too often direct our attention to antecedent and not consequent phenomena. They
seek to tame the potential chaos of contingency but end up obscuring the moral
imperative that we act intelligently and earn our deaths by passionately embracing the
conundrum of life. In short, bad thinking about African American history,
identity, and agency compromises what James Baldwin referred to as all of that
beauty—those funded experiences, colored in a dark shade of blue, that enable us to
invade the future with a bit more than luck.
Social Positions – A2: Middle Passage/Bill of Sale
Blackness is dynamic and contingent – structuring it on the Middle Passage is
flawed and functions monolithically to conceal the diversity of Black life
Yancy 13
(George, Introduction: Black Philosophy and the Crucible of Lived, The Black Scholar, Vol. 43, No. 4,
Special Issue: Role of Black Philosophy (Winter 2013), pp. 5-10)
Consistent with the idea of an open- ended perspective and a diversity of voices, I conceptualize
black philosophy within the crucible of lived history. This raises the in- terrelated themes of
context, situation, and philosophical thought. Indeed, this dynamic interrelation points to the
dialectical rela- tionship between philosophical thought and socio-existential setting. On this
score, and as philosopher William R. Jones’s epigraph implies, black philosophy is protean and
historically contextual. To refer to “black” philosophy is not to imply a chromosomal matrix out
of which philosophical thought causally proceeds. There is no genetic sub- stratum (or biological
telos) that inexorably dictates the existence of black philosophy r the diverse philosophical
content and tra- jectories of black philosophy, though the process of racialization is central to
thinking about the meaning of black philosophy and its role. And since “blackness” is itself
an identity category that has its origins within history, the idea of a black
philosophy and its role must be couched within a hermeneutic lens that takes
seriously the dimension of black Erlebnis, through a form of lived experience that is not
homogenous for all of those who identify as black people even as there are
shared dimensions of historical and contemporary forms of black oppression,
marginalization, and dehumanization.
In my book Black Bodies, White Gazes, I point to the middle passage as the crucible in terms of
which black identity is marked and the black body is ontologically truncated and returned to
itself as distorted and mon- strous, thus locating the black body within a context of anti-black
racism. Theorizing the black body from this location critiques an ontogenic perspective and
raises the is- sue of the sociogenic. The middle passage, I argue, functions as that space
of death, do- cility, amalgamation, and resistance that is important for comprehending black
people in North America. So, it becomes a central existential and social ontological motif
through which I theorize what it means to be black and how I understand black philosophy and
its role. Yet, it is important to note that those black bodies were scattered and not
confined to North America. So, I think that it is important to theorize the ways in which
that oceanic experience shaped other black bodies that were dispersed throughout the world. As
such, then, one must be attentive to and examine the different genealogies and
phenomenological configurations that speak not only to those bodies that were
not enslaved in North America, but also speak to those black bodies that did not
arrive at their “destinies” through the transatlantic slave trade at all. This raises
important questions regarding the lived meaning of “blackness” and how
blackness is differentially defined diachronically and in terms of points of geographical origin, suggesting that blackness is dynamically protean.
Although above I point to the middle pas- sage as the matrix in terms of which
black identity is shaped, we must be cognizant of how black identity and black
subjectivity can be erroneously tethered to that moment in time and physical
space,3 which then raises the issue of how a specific black historical narrative
can function monolithically and thus exclude those black bodies that don’t
narrativize the middle passage in the same way or even at all. While I will not
pursue this issue here, I want to be clear that there is a diverse “terrain of blackness” in
terms of the changing landscape and mean- ing of blackness and that this change im- pacts
differential experiences for those who consider themselves black people. Indeed,
such differential experiences have an impact on how we think about the dynamics of
black identity and black philosophizing, and the latter’s key normative
assumptions, mo- dalities, and different morphologies of ques- tions and responses that
emerge. My point is to remain critically cognizant of the ways in which I privilege the middle
passage and how that privileging might function as a his- torical gap for black people who
neverthe- less see themselves as black and yet whose experiences are shaped differently, though
not incommensurably vis-à-vis other black people who contend with anti-black racism.
Social Positions – A2: Blackness = Negativity
Defining Blackness as a purely negative erases the joy of black life and prevents
action to solve suffering
Glaude (Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Department of Religion, and Chair, Center
for African American at Princeton) 7
(EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the
Politics of Black America, Pg. 78-9)
Metaphysical claims are collapsed here into ontological claims and the re- sult,
despite Cone's protestations, is a reification of blackness. Tradition and History, far wiser
than we will ever be, have settled the problems of our living in advance of our experience. The
meanings of African American historical experiences are thus oversimplified.
The complexity of in- dividual African American lives denied. Such a view of
history can deny us the power of reflexive thought about ourselves and our
interactions with the world, the exercise of which informs daily, sometimes tragic,
choice sand recognizes the contingency and indeterminacy at the heart of action.
In my view, three difficulties – descriptive, theoretical and existential- attend such accounts. The
descriptive problematic involves the plotline of the story. I am reminded here of James Baldwin
and Ralph Ellison’s critique of Richard Wright. Both worried that Wright’s representations
of black life betrayed the complexity of African American existence. The same
can be said of stories of African American experience that are mainly about
liberation and presuppose a subject in constant struggle. There is much more to
our living than simply resisting white supremacy. Moreover, the singular focus often
results in a relatively coherent account in which internal fissures of black communities are
obscured. Suffering and resistance then subordinate all other considerations—
even the differential experience of that suffering and the different aims of
resistance.
The theoretical problematic refers to the Christian dimension of the problem of being both black
and Christian. Like Anderson, I worry that God talk among black theologians, at least in their
worst moments, functions merely as a source of the strenuous mood, serving simply to justify
and sanctify a particular political orientation—even though it is precisely in our relation to God
and His relation that we resist oppression.24
Lastly, the existential problematic again entails a simplification of the complexity of African
American lives. The existential involves how to live, how to hope, and how to love. But if our
lives are reduced simply to struggle and our stories presume an understanding of
black agency as always already political, then the various ways we have come
to love and hope are cast into the shadows as we obsess about politics, narrowly
understood, and as History orients us retrospectively, instead of prospectively. We end up,
despite our best intentions, ignoring the sheer joy of black life and unwittingly
reducing our capacity to reflect and act in light of the hardships of our actual
lives. Perhaps, more importantly, "our ability to make delicate distinctions" is lost as History
settles beforehand the difficult existential questions "Who am I?" "How should I live?" and
“What should I do?”
And it is a false description and ignores the messy realities of African American life
Glaude (Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Department of Religion, and Chair, Center
for African American at Princeton) 7
(EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the
Politics of Black America, Pg. 112)
I do hold the view, however, that much
of the politics of the black power era was
premised on, problematic conceptions of black identity, history and agency such
as I have addressed in the previous chapters. In chapter 4, for example, I sought to trouble
conceptions of black agency that presuppose a teleology of emancipatory politics. My aim was
not to deny the notion of black agency but to insist, given my pragmatic commitments, that
agency be viewed as an emergent property of particular situations. We ought not to offer a
phenomenology of black agency as inclined, in advance of the contexts within
which it is exercised, to resist oppression and to seek freedom. To do so narrows, often
in the name of unspecified ideological commitments, our descriptions of what African
Americans actually do. This is particularly relevant for characterizations of African American
religious life.
I made this point about description explicit in my earlier discussions of black identity and
history. In each instance, I invoked specific political formulations associated with some variant
of black nationalist politics as examples of bad ways of thinking about political and moral
matters. Black identity, I argued, should not be thought of as the findings of an archeological
project aimed at discovering, once and for all, who we really are. And African American
history should not be viewed as a reservoir meaning that singularly and prior to
individual experience determines who we are and provides us with the tools to
become who we are destined to be. These formulations, I maintained, amount to
what can be called black quests for certainty detached from the messy realities of
African Americans' actual beliefs, choices, and actions. Such seeming certainty
often entails a crude reduction of the moral complexity of the moral lives of
African Americans and an attachment to one value to the exclusion of others. In other words,
black quests for certainty too often deny the lessons of tragedy and produce melodramatic
politics.
Social Positions – A2: Excluded from Civil Society
“Civil society” does not exist as a unitary object. There are multiple overlapping
Black and white public sphere and their presumption that the Black body is
permanently excluded from civil society centers a White bourgeois unitary civil
society
Dawson (Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and
Culture at the University of Chicago) 1
(Michael C., BLACK VISIONS The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies,
pg. 24-5) [Italics original –DQ]
Black political thought evolves and develops through the clash of ideologies
which typifies political debate among African Americans. The discursive site for
these debates has historically been the black public sphere, or more precisely, the
black counterpublic. The concept of a black counterpublic sphere that interacts
with other spheres within American society is useful for understanding how the
ideologies contained within black political thought both develop semiautonomously and interact with the political debates coursing throughout the
polity.
The idea of a black counterpublic is needed because for most of Amer- ican political history,
blacks were excluded from the "American" bourgeois public sphere. Just as
feminist critics have pointed out that Habermas's c o n c e p t o f t h e b o u r g e o i s p u b l i c s
p h e r e i s b o t h e x c l u s i o n a r y a n d h e g e mo n i c , there are several aspects of
Habermas's formulation which render it in- appropriate as a model for black politics (Fraser
1989; Ryan 1989). First, Habermas consistently presented a romanticized version of Western
Eu- ropean history (Eley 1989; Fraser 1989). Anumber of scholars have dem- onstrated that
historically existing bourgeois public spheres were always exclusionary. Gender was a prime
basis for exclusion, and spheres were formed in some circumstances as a patriarchal alternative
to already existing spheres in which women's voices were prominent (Fraser 1989; Ryan
10
1989). What emerged in these and other Western polities were a variety of
alternatives to the bourgeois and post-bourgeois public spheres that facilitated
women's and other excluded groups' access to public life. Several scholars explicidy
connect the stratification of a society and the creation of alternative subaltern counterpublics
(Fraser 1989; Ryan 1989), We canre- state the thesis of Fraser and others as follows; Alternative
public spheres have developed in Western democracies, at least in keeping with the fundamental constitutive stratification lines of a given society.
By fundamental constitutive stratification lines I mean that, histori- cally, societies of which we
have records have been organized systemati- cally to provide favorable outcomes for privileged
groups. Favorable out- comes include material goods, life chances (including the ability to
capture resources), status, individual autonomy(consider the role ofwomen inmany societies, or
of slaves), and ideological privileging/degradation of a pap) place in the social order. Most,
perhaps all, societies on record which reach a certain stage of development have at least two
such organizing principles. These are gender and howeconomic activity (including the
distribution of 11 resources) is organized.
These systems of stratification produce social groups which are systematically
excluded from the bourgeois public sphere. However, I agree with Fraser (1989) that
the claim that these groups are excluded from the public sphere is an ideological
claim, since it privileges the bourgeois sphere as being the only sphere
of consequence for discourse that is capable of critiquing the state and its policies.
[Italics original –DQ]
Social Death – Yes Black Agency
The Black body should be understood as active subject – refuse to allow their notion
of a monolithic white civil society control all description of the world
Yancy (Prof of Philosophy at Duqesne) 8
(George, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Contining Significance of Race, Pg. 122)
As agential, Black people confront the world and construct the world from unique
perspectives. They take up their ex-istence within the framework of a given set of
circumstances.42 Despite the horrible conditions that came with being forced
to
live and to work on plantations, many Blacks were able to reconfigure what was
given, They were able to take a stand against dehuman-ization and negotiate
ways of achieving a sense of dignity. Moreover, this had to be done while making
whites think that they had succeeded in producing the most obedient and docile slaves around. In
short, Blacks had to "conform" to white myths while undermining those myths simultaneously.
The negotiation between myth and reality took place within a variety of work activities, For
example, as stated, many Blacks would break tools and destroy crops, As stated, whites
rationalized such behaviors as the result of clumsiness and stupidity, Apparently, these same
tools were not broken when Blacks worked their own meager areas for planting. In fact, "one
slaveholder felt aggrieved when he saw that the small patches which his Negroes cultivated for
themselves were better cared for and more productive than his own field."43 This suggests a
process of selective valuing. To be selective, of course, involves deliberation,
which is indicative of having a perspective on the world. Hence, contrary to the
myth that Black people were devoid of agency, they cultivated these small
patches of their own in order to exercise a measure of economic independence
and agency. Blacks would grow their own food, as well as steal food from the
plantation, selling it through a complex network of trade with passing ships.
Breaking tools was one way that enslaved Black people were able to exercise
control over their work. To break a tool (or destroy a patch of land) requires the
establishment of a different/alternative way of relating to a given object (the tool or the land).
To engage in this type of alternative engagement involves the telic dimensions
of embodied subjectivity. In short, Blacks assumed a position of transcendence in
relationship to a field of objects, Deborah White notes, "While some Southern whites called such
behavior [breaking tools, for example] 'rascality,' slaves [or the ensltma) understood it to be an
effective form of resistance,"
Social Death – A2: Humanism Kills Resistance
Black resistance is a profoundly positive and human act
Yancy (Prof of Philosophy at Duqesne) 8
(George, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Contining Significance of Race, Pg. 111-2) [Italics original –
DQ]
The significant point here is that the needed slippage did occur; indeed, the Black body's
history in the "New World" has been a history of resistance. This history does not
deny the Black body's history of self-hatred, its passing for white, and its history of
accommodation, In other words, "resistance is cardinal and crucial to any description, definition,
and interpretation of African American culture,,,. [That culture] in its full substance and scope is
more complex than a singular thrust in the monodirection of resistance,"'
Despite the power of white discursive disciplinary control and physical brutality,
the Black body has historically disrupted the reduction of its being to that of a
thing, To comprehend the Black body as a site of resistance, it is important to understand
that the body "is not what it is and it is not yet what it will become,"10 In short, the
Black body (as with the white body) is a process, It might be argued that the Black
body/embodied Black existence in relation to the white gaze is ontologically excessive,
something more than the white gaze is capable of nullifying through its power, Of course, to
refer to the Black body as a site of resistance, I am referring to Black embodied
existence as socially situated, that perspective from which the embodied self is
capable of recognizing the possibility of reconfiguring or overcoming a set of
circumstances. Resistance is linked to a level of comprehension of one's social conditions and
not simply a question of psychological renewal. Resistance involves seeing through the
"impersonal" discursive practices of whites, rejecting the "naturelike" constructions of social
reality that threaten Blacks' lives, and transforming the debilitating psyche and the physical
conditions in terms of which they have been imprisoned," As Paget Henry notes, "Agency
against these normative and institutional structures requirefs] the decoding of their impersonal,
nature-like appearance and their rewriting in codes that reveal their roots in ordinary
communication and social action," Indeed, Black resistance is a form of decoding of the
ideological prison house of racist discourse, a discourse that "operates in the name of values"
that valorize whiteness and dehumanize Black people.13 Of course, such values assume the status
of neutrality so as to appear natural.
I argue that Black resistance, as a mode of decoding, is simultaneously a process of
recoding Black embodied existence through processes of opposition and
affirmation. According to bell hooks, "Opposition is not enough, In that vacant space
after one has resisted there is still the necessity to become-to make oneself
anew."14 While I agree with hooks's claim that opposition is certainly not enough, I question her
thesis that there is a "vacant space after one has resisted," Indeed, I argue that resistance can
occupy that "vacant space" and that the process of becoming and making oneself anew has
already been enacted, though time is certainly needed to nourish and further develop the process
of becoming and remaking the self anew, Rather than asking what exists on the other side of
resistance, one might explore the affirmative dimensions of what is already embedded within
resistance itself, The moment of resistance, in other words, is the moment of becoming, of being
made anew. And while "human transcendence always involves becoming.,,, self-creation for an
oppressed people whose transcendence is denied often finds its founding moments in
resistance,"15
Within a context where Black bodies are constantly under discursive and physical erasure, to
resist {re-sistere), "to take a stand," is linked, existentially, to taking up a different project, that
is, not settling for an antiblack project superimposed by the white other,
Resisting is not
simply limited to saying "No, I refuse!" It is not simply a negative process .
Resistance is an instantiation of affirmation. Within the context of white mythmaking
regarding the docility and subhumanity of the Black body and the refusal to grant the Black body
a perspective on the world, taking a stand demonstrates and affirms the existential
and ontological force of having a perspective, a subjectivity. Indeed, the moment of
Black resistance calls into question the philosophical anthropological assumptions of white
racism, assumptions that deny the reality and complexity of Black self-determination, selfreflexivity, and interiority. Black resistance, then, is a profoundly embodied human
act of epistemological re-cognition, an affirmation that carries with it an
ontological repositioning of the being of Black embodiment as a significant site
of discursive (and material) self-possession.
A2: Humanism Link
[Insert after the Yancy card]
The human is contingent, rather than ontologically fixed
Lewis R. Gordon
(Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at UConn and one of the
premier Fanon scholars in the world) 13
(The Black Scholar, Vol. 43, No. 4, Special Issue: Role of Black Philosophy (Winter 2013), pp. 46-51)
The problem cannot be transformed, however, simply by making blacks the
standard, especially since that history was not granted the opportunity to be interrogated on
terms beyond conditions of white su- premacy and anti-black racism. The task, then, is to
raise the standard of humanity by going through and beyond black, white,
brown, yellow, and red to the conditions of standards themselves. Standards of
the human, it soon becomes evident, are open and incomplete by virtue of depending
for their creation on those whom they are supposed to evaluate. The human, in
other words, is humanity’s project, and we see that in the ever-expanding reach of
culture as a condition of possibility of the materially human.
A2: Survival Link
The political significance of humanity is both terrible and terribly important.
Though the concept of humanity makes us guilty, it also is a pre-requisite for a
politics that can fight atrocity.
Hannah Arendt 3 [The Portable Hannah Arendt p. 155]
For many years now we have met Germans who declare that they are ashamed of
being Germans. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed of being
human. This elemental shame, which many people of the most various nationalities
share with one another today, is what finally is left of our sense of international
solidarity; and it has not yet found an adequate political expression. Our fathers’ enchantment
with humanity was of a sort which not only light-mindedly ignored the national question; what is far worse, it did not even conceive of
the terror of the idea of humanity and of the Judeo-Christian faith in the unitary origin of the human race. It was not very pleasant
even when we had to bury our false illusions about “the noble savage,” having discovered that men were capable of being cannibals.
Since then people
have learned to know one another better and have learned more and
more about the evil potentialities in men. The result is that they have recoiled more
and more from the idea of humanity and they become more susceptible to the
doctrine of race, which denies the very possibility of a common humanity. They
instinctively felt that the idea of humanity, whether it appears in a religious or
humanistic form, implies the obligation of a general responsibility which they do not
wish to assume. For the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious
consequence that in one form or another mean must assume responsibility for all
crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil by all others.
Shame at being a human being is the purely individual and still non-political expression of this thought. In political terms,
the idea of humanity, excluding no people and assigning a monopoly of guilt to no
one, is the only guarantee that one “superior race” after another may not feel
obligated to follow the “natural law of the right of the powerful, and exterminate
“inferior races unworthy of survival”’ so that at the end of an “imperialistic age” we
should find ourselves in a stage which would make the Nazis look like crude
precursors of future political methods. To follow a non-imperialistic policy and
maintain a non-racist faith becomes daily more difficult because it becomes daily
clearer how great a burden mankind is for man. Perhaps those Jews, to whose forefathers we owe the
first conception of the idea of humanity, knew something about the burden when each year they used to say “Our Father and King, we
Those who
today are ready to follow this road in a modern version do not content themselves
with the hypocritical confession “God be thanked, I am not like that,” in horror at
the undreamed-of-potentialities of the German national character. Rather, in fear
and trembling, have they finally realized of what man is capable—and this is indeed
the precondition of any modern political thinking. Such persons will not serve very
well as functionaries of vengeance. This, however, is certain: Upon them and only upon them,
who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race, can
there be any reliance when it comes to fighting fearlessly, uncompromisingly,
everywhere against the incalculable evil that men are capable of bringing about.
have sinned before you,” taking not only the sins of their own community but all human offenses upon themselves.
A2: Freedom Link
Freedom is a necessary goal and tactic of human liberation that must be practiced in
the now
Gibson 10 (Professor in postcolonial and African/a studies at Emerson, one of the leading figures in
Fanon scholarship)
(Nigel C., Fanonian Presences in South Africa: From Theory and from Practice, in Fanon and the
Decolonization of Philosophy, Pg. 236-7)
Whatever challenges the movement faces in the future, the strength of the shack
dwellers movement must be judged by its commitment to freedom and
liberation. The idea of freedom is central to "Living Learning." How could it not be, ~Jnce
fifteen years after freedom was won there is no freedom for the poor? An Idea of freedom
becomes necessary because of the daily situation. The quest for freedom is the human
response to the situation, the daily emergency, of millions of shack dwellers
and rural dwellers in South Africa; it is a situation that de- mands freedom.
This is uncomplicated and absolute, in Fanon's sense, a situation of life and death.
This world is un viable and therefore people must rebel: "Our world is burning and so we need
another world.,,136 This absoluteness is expressed in the movement's uncompromising
language of change: "There is a difference when the poor say another world is necessary and
when civi I society says that another world is possible. We conclude to say that it is the
formations of the poor and the grassroots that are the agency to make this other world comenot civil society."!" The emphasis on the concrete condition of the shack dwellers highlights the
fact that the fundamental difference between pos- sibility and necessity turns on the
importance of their own agency, In other words, the necessity of another world in the
here-and-now is something demanded by conscious agency, their thought
and their action. There is another philosophical point about necessity and freedom that
Marx makes in Capital that has a resonance with the Living Learning discussion. Marx argues
that freedom is not about imagining the possible but freedom only begins where necessity
ends: "[t]he true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself,
begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.
The nature of freedom is also a complicated question. The answer devel- oped here is that it is
the self-organization of the shack dwellers and the insis- tence on their own agency and
intelligence-as force and reason for ~he recon- struction of societi39-that gives content to
freedom. Freedom is not an abstraction. Its content is generated out of the reality of
"unfreedom." In other words Abahlali do not need to hear a philosophic discourse on
Freedom because 'they are already "professors of our own poverty." Freedom "will come
from becoming masters of our own history ... and from makmg our own paths
Out of unfreedom.,, It is this vision of freedom as collective empowerment
that transforms the struggle into one for a whole new society. The struggle does.
not demand greater technical efficiency from the state nor a change in the relationship
between a community and the state, but rejects the states logic of freedom" which is limited to
voting in exchange for "bits and pieces of service dell very" and argues instead that the state
become subservient to poor people's needs. The participants are clear that:
We also see that our ideas about freedom go much further and deeper than the way our
struggles arc presented when they arc described as "service delivery protest." If the heart of
our struggle was just for houses and services to be deli- vered, we would be just like beggars
with our hands out, waiting someone to help us- No, what we are struggling for, a real
freedom, goes much further than that! 141
They insist, against the stunted and antipolitical language of the NGOs and hu- man rights
organizations, that freedom is not only the goal but must also be something that
is practiced now in the day-to-day critical, democratic, open- ended. and
praxis-based vision that Fanon envisioned would be needed to counter the
degeneration of liberation: "[w]e don't say that we in the movements are perfect, but at
least we are opening these gates; at least we are on a right path to search for the truth. We
have a deep responsibility to make sure that no-one can shut the gates." They stress that
collective reflection on the experience of oppression and resistance is essential to that praxis:
"[o]ur experience in life and in the movement means that we must always remain open to
debate, question and new learning from and with the people." The point is not to tell the
people what to think but to create spaces that can enable people to discuss how and why they
are not free. The notion is dialogic rather than hierarchical and relies on the "damned of the
earth" speaking for themselves. As Fanon reminds us, the strug- gle for freedom aims for a
fundamental change in social relations. After the con- flict, there is not only the disappearance
of the unfreedom but also the unfree person.l'" It is praxis that enables the
transcendence of unfreedom, transforming the system and individuals . That
transcendence depends on breaking the mind forged manacles of unfreedom. 143
Fanon's visionary critique of postcolonial elite politics mapped out a "living politics"
based on a decentralized and democratic form of self-governing which opens
up new spaces for the politics of the excluded from the ground up is being
practiced in "living learning." It is only a small beginning toward building coun- ter-hegemony
from below that opens up spaces that fundamentally change the political status quo and
contest the moral and intellectual narcissism of the rul- ing elites. Recently Fanon's conclusions
to The Wretched of the Earth-with its challenge to Europe and its call to work out a "new
humanism" based on the inclusion, indeed centrality, of the "enlightening and fruitful work" of
nation building has been concretely rearticulated by S'bu Zikode of Abahlali: "[it] is one
thing if we are beneficiaries who need delivery. It is another thing if we are
citizens who want to shape the future of our cities even our country. It is another
thing if we are human beings who have decided that it is our duty to
humanize the world."!"
A2: Futurism Link
Humanism requires a positive orientation towards the future and our
responsibilities towards others
Gordon
9 (Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at UConn and one of the premier
Fanon scholars in the world)
(Lewis R., Introduction to Neither victim nor survivor: thinking toward a new humanity, pg. viii)
This book is aptly entitled Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking toward a New Humanity.
Nissim-Sabat's commitments, as a philosopher, therapist, and activist, are against the
stultifying social forces and interpretations of reality that, as Fanon once
observed, make life "brittle" and block the path of action and imagination ,
which led to her struggle for thinking about the future, of future thinking, of
responsibilities faced each generation for those who succeed them. In the
course of such thought, the constitutional paradox comes to the fore, where we in effect make
that which we are trying to find. This effort, in which our humanity haunts our
failings, demands our not collapsing into a state of permanent ruin. There is a
sense in which ruin is unavoidable, since, at least in psychoanalytical terms, the separation
from the womb is a loss for which we seek external reconciliation in our cultivation of a home.
History, however, reveals that although such a journey is shared by all, the obstacles placed on
the majority of humankind renders its prize, not only coming home but also having a home,
available to few. The human condition reveals a common goal that's an
uncommon achievement.
To remain only tied to the past an exclude the future prevents any transformative
action and destroys the radical potential of humanism
Nissim-Sabat 9 (Professor Emeritus and Adjunct Professor, Department of Philosophy, Lewis
University)
(Marilyn, Neither victim nor survivor: thinking toward a new humanity, pg. 188-89)
It is true, as Morrison tells us, that the past is disremembered. It is also tragic that this
forgetting of immense human suffering seems to be hereto- fore concomitant with our need to
move forward and integrate or reintegrate ourselves. To this extent, we are all compromised,
all condemned to repeat history. Far, far better it would be to remember, and
in remembering be, not traumatized, but rather empowered to create the
conditions for the possibility of a future for humanity such that there will be
no more victims, no more holocausts, and thus no more survivors . The paralysis
and total devastation brought about by surviving in a perpetual state of trauma-that
is, by not forgetting, is, of course, not a solution either for in such a state
constructive or transformative action is impossible. This should not be taken as a
critique of the traumatized, for that would indeed be to blame the victims, and doing so is both
incorrect and ethically anathema. Rather, it is meant as a critique of those who think that
traumatized persons have no resources within that can enable them to move beyond survival
toward personal wholeness, even in conjunction with "forgetting." To deny this is to blame the
victims by seulng them apart as a special category-those condemned perpetually to relive their
trauma and survival of it. If the "fairy tale" ending of Beloved is ambiguous, and I believe it is, it
is not because it is marked by trauma denying implausi- bility, but precisely becauseit is not a
"fairy tale" in the pejorative senseor an act of "willful optimism." Sethe can achieve subject
status. She can be- come a self through her Own struggles and with the intervention of
Beloved, Beloved's baby, and Paul D. For Sethe, life can now, after living for eighteen years in a
free stale, be more than mere survival for she has reconnected with her self before her most
devastating traumas, and this enables her to recon nec~w.ith .the people whom she loves and
who love her. Moreover, there is no IOdlc~tlon whatsoever in the novel that Sethe and Paul D's
future in this world will be a blissful happi ly-cver-after, even if it is much, much happier than
what really happened 10 Margaret Garner and Ihe Sixty-Million victims of the Middle Passage'.
What really would be a "fairy tale" in the pejorative sense,a fairy tale thai IS not at all
represented in Beloved. is the notion that we, any and all of us, can fully realize our humanity,
can become whole, no ~at1er how favorable our circumstances, in a world of continued,
pervasive inhumanity, The ending of Beloved shows, therefore, that Paul D and Sethe are
enabled to live a meaningful life together becausethey understood from all of their struggles to
survive that they survived partly in virtue of their implicit realization that just surviving was not
enough; they were implicitly aware that they are not the animals that slavery held them to be,
but human beings. For, they might have survived in slavery, but not living human lives. Just so,
Frederick Douglass asserted himself and turned on his overseer Covey when he realized that
not his survival but his humanity, his dignity as a human being, was at stake.
"I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors ," wrote
Panon.? How can we throw off this slavery? Fanon has his own ideas about this, ideas that are
not very different from Toni Morrison's in Beloved. We must abandon the abstract, reined
victim-survivor binary, the dialectic of false consciousness. We, as both individual
persons and as the human community, must trace the line of fusion that
connects our best things-our personhood before victimization and our human
future beyond mere survival.
A2: “Destroy the Human” Link
Attempting to destroy the category of the human prevents an effective critique of
anti-blackness
Nissim-Sabat 9 (Professor Emeritus and Adjunct Professor, Department of Philosophy, Lewis
University)
(Marilyn, Neither victim nor survivor: thinking toward a new humanity, pg. 102)
The difference between this Fanonian critique of the modus operandi of universals
in antiblack racist thought on one hand, and postmodern thought’s discarding
of universals on the other hand, is clear. Gordon's statement that the "European
practice of science . . . denied the existence of the black in its construction of the human being"
is a critique of the failure of Eurocentrism in its exclusion of the black from the universal:
"human being." Just so, the critique is not of the universal "human being' qua
universal, but of the attempt to pass off a particular, the white human being, as
the universal. From this point of view, discarding universality in toto does not
advance the critique of antiblack racism; on the contrary, it obstructs that
critique: "Philosophy that fails to account for existence is, therefore, trapped in a bad-faith
claim to universality. In Fanon's critique, then, there is a perspective beyond particularity and
universality, a perspective that sees multiple worlds" (44). The bad faith universality of
which Gordon speaks is that of the racist; however, it applies just as well to the
postmodern perspective. First, those who discard universality believe that just invoking it
entails bad faith—tlierefore, from this perspective, all uses of universality arc in bad faith, and
arc equally complicit. In other words, neither the racist nor the postmodern critic of the racist
acknowledge that the category "human being' encompasses all human beings, past, present,
and future, and therefore that racism artificially limits its scope to some. So, how then can
the racist be held accountable as a racist? What then would be a notion of
universality that is not complicit in one form or another of oppression? It
seems to me that when Gordon refers to Fanon's critique as a "perspective bevond
particularity and universality" that sees multiple worlds" he suggests something akin to, or
better an existential recasting of, Hegel's concrete universal or individuality as the unity of the
universal and particular.' Such a notion is also expressed by Alice Cherki in her recent biography
of Fanon.
A2: Ethics Impact
Every individual has an ethical imperative to recognize not only themselves and
each other as responsible human agents rather than as objects. Their call for an
immediate inversion of our internal ethical imperatives is a destructive overreading
of Fanon’s pessimism that refuses to allow human freedom and responsibility as a
telos for politics, especially in the tactical short term.
We are called to do battle for the creation of a human world, using all possible
revolutionary tactics. Freedom and responsibility are not just an ethically neutral
description of the human condition. They are also a positive ethical position
Pithouse (teaches politics at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa) 1
(Richard, FRANTZ FANON AND THE PERSISTENCE OF HUMANISM, from Protest and Engagement:
Philosophy After Apartheid at an Historically Black South African University
http://www.crvp.org/book/Series02/II-7/chapter_i.htm)
Fanon’s thought is clearly existentialist in that he shares, with other existentialist thinkers like
Jean-Paul Sartre, a belief that the human condition is to be free – in the sense that
existence precedes essence – and to be fully responsible for the exercise of
that freedom. The nature of that freedom lies in the capacity to choose and to act – to
create within the context of the unchosen facts in response to which we negotiate our lives –
facticity in existential discourse. So, for example, Fanon insists that: ‘the body of history
does not determine a single one of my actions. I am my own foundation. "
(1967:231) Denial of that freedom is considered to be self-deception – bad faith –
and is, clearly, considered as an ethical failure by Fanon. So, for example, he argues
that "Every one of my acts commits me as a man. Everyone of my silences, every one of my
cowardices reveals me as a man." (1967:88-89) Two of the more important examples of bad
faith mentioned by Fanon are denial of the embodied nature of existence and denial of the
humanity of the Other. The embodied nature of existence is obviously important in the context
of racism. And, indeed, Fanon, in the chapter from Black Skin White Masks titled The Fact of
Blackness reproached Sartre on the grounds that: "Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the
Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man." (1967:138) In the context
of anti-black racism, blackness becomes a stark reality in the social world . To
deny it is bad faith.
It is also vitally important in the context of the bodily needs that must be met if the body is to
survive and be healthy and so allow consciousness to survive and flourish. So, while it is
important to recognise that a man in prison is free to choose how to respond
to the fact of his imprisonment, it is also important to acknowledge that
human beings are not pure consciousness and that , therefore, a full
understanding of freedom must include some recognition of the needs of the
body. There is a clear recognition of this throughout Fanon’s work – from Black Skin White
Masks through to The Wretched of the Earth. He takes somatic well-being very seriously. But
the recognition of the importance of embodiment does not mean that the body is always prior
to consciousness in value. Clearly, consciousness cannot survive without the body, but Biko,
who would be considered a hero in existentialist terms, put his body on the line to defend the
integrity of his consciousness.
There is also an important connection between embodiment and the other. As Lewis Gordon
explains: "The human being is at least three perspectives of embodiment: the perspective from
a standpoint in the world; the perspective seen from other standpoints in the world; and the
human being is a perspective that is aware of itself being seen from other standpoints in the
world." (1995:19) For Fanon it is imperative that human beings recognise not
only themselves but also each other as human – as agents who are
free/responsible and expansive rather than as objects who are
determined/not responsible and contained. "I do battle" he says "for the
creation of a human world – that is, of a world reciprocal of recognition."
(1967:219) Fanon’s central concerns – a desire to avoid bad faith in general and a particular
desire to avoid the objectification of human beings – leads to a short but clear statement of his
basic (existential humanist) ethical position: "I have one right alone: That of demanding human
behaviour from the other. One duty alone: that of not renouncing my freedom through my
choices." (1967:229) So, for Fanon freedom and responsibility are not just an
ethical neutral description of the human condition. They are also a positive
ethical position. It is an ethics which takes truth as fundamental, not received truth or any
form of doxa, but rather truth as an honest examination of one’s self and the world. For
Fanon the humanity of man is the truth and so inhumanity must either be founded on
conscious lies, a failure to face up to the truth or sheer, conscious contempt for humanity. But,
because even in the latter case contempt for humanity will often mask itself, an inhuman
society is a society in which "everyday reality is a tissue of lies, of cowardice, of contempt for
man." (1967 b:52)
This commitment to truth is not the reactionary humanism that presents
some normalising orthodoxy/ideology as the essence of what it is to be human.
This is a humanism that returns to the truth of the experiences of individual
human beings – to immanence.
Affirming the power to make ethical prescriptions and alter the world is possible
and crucial to agency and counter-hegemonic praxis. The black human is not a
contradiction and its ontological position can be altered
Yancy 13
(George, Introduction: Black Philosophy and the Crucible of Lived, The Black Scholar, Vol. 43, No. 4,
Special Issue: Role of Black Philosophy (Winter 2013), pp. 5-10)
Black philosophy and its role are funda- mentally linked with existential struggle.
The lived experiences of struggle and resistance (etymologically, “to take a stand”)
speak to the fact that the social ontological structure of the world is not a
metaphysical fait accompli. Black philosophy acknowledges its historical
conditionality and emergence against the backdrop of white racism, vio- lence,
colonialism, dehumanization, en- slavement, oppression, and objectification. It recognizes
this backdrop as constituted through lived embodiment and configurations of
thought and action that were not necessary, but that are predicated upon
contingent sites of power and hegemony that are linked to oppressive
ideologies and the possession of material power to superimpose such
oppressive ideologies. Hence, relevant to black philosophy is its clarion call: “The world
is not as it ought to be!”
It is the power of “ought” that points to the openness of human history,
agency, and counter-hegemonic praxis. The “ought” implies slippage, excess,
lacunae, and the capacity to create. The subtext here is that one can
reconfigure the world, reshape its direction, undo its normative repetitions,
and create new and ever freeing forms of political formation, relationality,
and performance. [Italics in original article – DQ] The role of black philosophy, then, having
its point of origin within a matrix of oppression, even as this oppression was/is diasporic, is
antagonistic and iconoclastic; indeed, resis- tant to claims of philosophical universality that are
actually forms of discourse that are predicated upon a philosophical anthropol- ogy that is, in
this case, underwritten by whiteness as the transcendental norm and that valorizes its vision of
the world and the meaning of humanity at the exclusion of others. Hence, to engage in
black philosophy on conceptual terms set forth here is to affirm one’s humanity in
the face of those who deem you a sub-person, ersatz, ontologically nugatory.
Humanism Good – Structural Violence
Adopting an ethic of revolutionary humanism is necessary to solve global structural
violence, create an enabling language of revolutionary praxis and animate a
material force for stealing hope
Pithouse (teaches politics at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa) 3
(Richard, THAT THE TOOL NEVER POSSESS THE MAN: Taking Fanon’s Humanism Seriously, Politikon: South
African Journal of Political Studies, Volume 30, Issue 1, 2003)
So what if Fanon is a humanist? So what if, against the positivists, we discover that that
means something in the world of lived experience? So what if Fanon developed a destalinized
and dehistoricized radicalism before the post-structuralists? Fanon is not an end in
himself. We do no justice to his spirit by defending him while Bush bombs
Baghdad, the World Bank reorganises the world so that the poor can step up their
subsidisation of the rich and 600 of us die from a manageable disease every day.
Fanon didn’t invest his energies in the defence of Toussaint l’Ouverture. He made history.
Revolutionary humanism is the strongest current in the movement of
movements that seek to subordinate the market, state and empire to
democratic control. In Seattle and Chiappas and Namada and Vrygrond (‘Ons is nie fokken
honde nie!’) humanism is the spontaneous, universal and enabling language of
resistance. And it is at the core of the work of the great essayists and scholars that
inspire and are inspired in this movement of movements. Humanism animates a
material force that is inventing and tending and stealing hope. This matters.
Everywhere – the media, the academy, trade unions, NGOs, government, business, social
movements – transcendent ideas like The Market, The Leader, The Nation, Africa,
International Norms, The Party, Economic Fundamentals, The Struggle, The Foreign Investor,
uBuntu, The International Community, Competitiveness, Development and Professionalism
still slip in to thought, so smoothly, as easy justification for choices that inflict
deprivation, suffering and death. This matters.
We are so constrained by colonial Manicheanism that many of us think that we were born to
take a side on the African potato vs. anti-retovirals or Mugabe vs. the white farmers or Bush vs.
Hussein; or that it is a crisis when white policemen set their dogs on black Mozambiqueans but
that Lindela is just business. Business as usual. This matters.
Humanism is just a way of saying that everybody’s right to self-creation
matters. It isn’t even a map. Its just a signpost. It only matters when we are
lost.
A posititve orientation towards history and the ideals of radical humanist freedom
are key to global liberationist struggles. Only this can avert every major crisis of our
times.
Karenga (Professor and Chair Department of Africana Studies California State University, Long Beach,
activist and author, best known as the creator of Kwanzaa, was a major figure in the Black Power
movement and co-founded the black nationalism organization US) 6
(Maulana, Philosophy in the African Tradition of Resistance: Issues or Human Freedom a.nd Human
Flourishing in Not Only The Master’s Tools, pg. 242-5)
Surely, we are at a moment of history fraught with new and old fOnTIS of anxiety,
alienation, and antagonism; deepening poverty in the midst of increasing wealth;
proposals and practices of ethnic cleansing and genocide; pandemic diseases; increased
plunder; pollution and depletion of the environment; constant conflicts , large
and small; and world-threatening delusions on the part of a superpower
aspiring to a return to empire, with spurious claims of the right to preemptive
aggression, to openly attack and overthrow nonfavored and fragile governments openly, and to
seize the lands and resources of vulnerable peoples and establish "democracy" through
military dictatorship abroad, all the while suppressing political dissent at home (Chang
2002; Cole et at. 2002). These anxieties are undergirded by racist and religious
chauvinism, by the self-righteous and veiled references of these rulers to themselves as a
kind of terrible and terrorizing hand of God, appointed to rid the world of evil (Ahmad
2002; Arnin 2001; Blum1995). At the same time, in this context of turmoil and terror and
the use and threatened use of catastrophic weapons, there is the irrational and
arrogant expectation that the oppressed will acquiesce, abandon resistance ,
and accept the disruptive and devastating consequences of globalization,
along with the global hegemony it implies (Martin and Schumann 1997). There is
great alarm among the white-supremicist rulers of these globalizing nations,
given the metical resistance rising up against them, even as globalization'S
technological, organizational, and economic capacity continues to expand (Barber 1996;
Karenga 2002e, 2003a; Lusane 1997). There is great alarm when people who should
"know" when they are defeated ridicule the assessment, re- fuse to be
defeated or dispirited, and, on the contrary, intensify and diversify their
struggles (Zepezauer 2002).
Certainly the battlefields of Palestine, Venezuela, long"suffering Haiti,and Chiapas, Mexico,
along with other continuing emancipatory struggles everywhere, reaffirm the
indomitable character of the human spirit and the durability and adaptive
vitality of a people determined to be free, regardless of the odds and
assessments against them. Indeed, they remind us that the motive force of history
is struggle, informed by the ongoing quest for freedom, justice, power of the
masses, and peace in the world. Despite "end of history" claims and single-superpower resolve and resolutions, these struggles continue. For still the oppressed want
freedom, the wronged and injured want justice, the people want power over their
destiny and daily lives, and tbe world wants peace. And all over the world-especially in
this U.S. citadel of aging capitalism with its archaic dreams of empire-clarity in the
analysis of issues, and in the critical determination of tasks and prospects,
requires the deep and disciplined reflection dlaracteristic of the personal and
social practice we call philosophy.
But this sense of added urgency for effective intervention is prompted not
only by the critical juncture at which we stand but also by an awareness of
our long history of resistance as a people, because in our collective strivings
and social struggles we seek a new future for our people, our descendants,
and the world. Joined also to these conditions and considerations is the compelling
character of our self-understanding as a people, as a moral vanguard in this country and the
world. For we have launched, fought, and won with our allies struggles that
not only have expanded the realm of freedom in this country and the world
but also have served as an ongoing inspiration and a model of liberation
struggles for other marginalized and oppressed peoples and groups throughout
the world. Indeed, they have borrowed from and built on our moral vocabularyand moral
vision, sung our songs of freedom, and held up our struggle for liberation as a model to
emulate. Now, self-understanding and self-assertion are dialectically linked. In
other words, how we understand ourselves in the world determines how we
assert ourselves in the world. Thus, an expansive concept of ourselves as
Africans-continental and diasporan-and as Africana philosophers forms an
essential component of our sense of mission and the urgency with which we
approach it.
It is important to note that I have conceived and written this chapter within the framework of
Kausaida ph.ilosoph.y (Karenga 1978, 1980, 1997)K.awaida is a philosophic initiative that was
forged in the crucible ofi deological and practical struggles around issues of freedom, justice,
equalitys, self-determination, conullunal power, self-defense, pan~African- ism, coalition and
alliance, Black Studies, intellectual emancipation, and cultural recovery and reconstlouction. It
continued to develop in the midst of these ongoing struggies within the life of the mind and
stmggles iottbtn the life of the people, as well as within the context of the conditions of the
world. Kawaida is defined as an ongoing synthesis of the best of African thought and practice in
constant exchange tuttb tl3e 'U)()ltd. It characterizes culture as a unique, instruc- tive,a nd
valuable way of being human in the world-as a foundation and framework for selfunderstanding and self-assertion.
As a philosophy of culture and struggle, Kawaida maintains that our intellectual and
social practice as Nricana activist scholars must be undergirded and informed by
ongoing efforts to (1) ground our- selves in our own culture; (2) constantly
recover, reconstruct, .and bring forth from our culture the best of what it
means to be African and human in the fullest sense; (3) speak this special cultural
truth to the world and (4) use our culture to constantly make our own unique
contribution to the reconception and reconstruction of this country, and to
the forward flow of human history.
Prag Good – No Black Only Movement
Black only movements can’t generate steam – too many internal and external social
cleavages
Dawson (Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and
Culture at the University of Chicago) 1
(Michael C., BLACK VISIONS The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies, pg.
318-9)
An additional consequence of the conditions which face black activists is that most blacks still
believe that Wright was bitterly prophetic when he stated (in the epigraph that opens the chapter)
that America lacks commit- ment to racial equality. Remember that 65 percent of African
Americans during the middle 1990s believed that racial progress in America would ei- ther not
be achieved in their lifetime or would never be achieved at all. By late 2000 this percentage had
climbed to 71percent (from data compiled by the author). In the face of this level of
disillusionment, black activists and ideologues face three additional extremely daunting
problems, First, the changes in the political economy of the black community mean
that con- ditions are dramatically worsening for some black Americans but
improv- ing for others, This has led not just to growing class divisions. As Cohen (1999)
details, among others, these divisions are not confined to ones of class; black politics is
fracturing along the many lines of social cleavage. The result, claims Marable (as I did in my
earlier work), is that "many of the social, economic, and cultural linkages which
previously connected various social classes and organizations began to erode"
(Marable and Mullings 1995,204; see also Dawson 1994a). These bridging organizations have
been undermined in many cases by having to cope with a hostile po- litical environment and
occasionally by the self-interested strategies chosen by their leaders. Political unity, which
has been achieved in the past even without ideological unity, will be increasingly difficult
to achieve given the class, gender, and generational divisions that are becoming
increasingly prominent. Second, the rest of country has moved much more profoundly
to the right than the black community, leaving a political environment and
establishment that is hostile even to just claims of either racial or economic
redistribution and justice, Third, the growing magnitude of problems fac- ing the black
community and the simultaneous dwindling of political op- portunities has led to widespread
dissatisfaction with the racial status quo and significant dissatisfaction with the economic status
quo, The result has been a resurgence in both nationalism and liberal
disillusionment that makes it more difficult to build political movements and
coalitions, both within the black community and between the black community
and other communities.
Prag Good – Unitary Identity Fails
Movements based on unitary black ID fails
Glaude (Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Department of Religion, and Chair, Center
for African American at Princeton) 7
(EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the
Politics of Black America, Pg. 129-30)
Katrina revealed that the many challenges confronting black America require an imaginative and
immediate shift in our political lexicon-that our traditional "vocabularies of struggle" require
recalibration in light of the particular conditions of our current circumstances. This effort goes
far beyond the narrow debate between those who would deny or accept the relevance of race to
political matters. The question instead is how we address the actual problems African American
communities confront, realizing that those communities fracture and fragment in varying ways
and along different fault lines. What are our mobilizing tropes in light of this differentiation?
How do they inspire us to respond passionately and intelligently to the problems at hand? Of
course, these questons require a closer examination of what we mean by "our" and "us"; Katrina,
after all, revealed the extraordinary class cleavages among African Americans.
I have tried to show on pragmatic grounds, that there are ways to imagine "us" without falling
into the trap of racial essentialism or succumbing to what Adolph Reed rightly "decries as a
misguided view of corporate racial interests. My aim has been to turn our the actual “doings and
sufferings" of black folk. There we find richly textured experiences that trouble any reductive
account of the lives of African Americans. Time and again, appeals to racial identity and
unity, or to notions of black history and agency, have masked, often to the
detriment of the most vulnerable, the competing interests informing the political
and moral choices of African Americans. Competing interests are ignored in
favor of racial politics that presumes, dangerously, that black individuals see
themselves as necessarily in solidarity with other black individuals solely on the
ban of race. This assumption, more often than not, results in a form of racial politics that relies
heavily on a set of tropes that signal to those willing to listen that black interests, whatever they
may be, are in jeopardy. We need only invoke the images of our past, or the many
persons who gave their lives in the struggle for black freedom, to orient ourselves
appropriately to any political matter. For some, these tropes stand in for democratic deliberation;
they, in effect, do our thinking for us. But such invocations blind us to a crucial insight:
that democratic and participatory value must be the cornerstone of credibility for the notion of
black politics; group consensus must be constructed through active participation. Even then, it is
inmportant to realize that often there will be no universal racial consensus on key issues; that
some conflicts derive from irreconcilable material differences. Unity is always on specific terms
and in pursuit of specific objectives.
By my pragmatic lights, African American politics, if they are to be genuinely
democratic, must, like the nation in general, embrace the full complexity of the
racialized experiences of black folk and not succumb to what I termed in chapter 3 the
descripdve, theoretical and existential problematic). That complexity will give the lie to
any facile racial politics that fails to exemplify the black democratic energies
necessary for a fundamental transformation in this nation.
These difference are real and matter as much as racial identification – other IDs can
supercede Blackness
hooks (Distinguished Professor in Residence at Barea) 12
(bell, Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice, Pg. 2-3)
Public discourses about race and gender did create new ways of thinking and
knowing. Talking about class and the various ways class differences separate groups has
been much harder. Class standing and status tend frequently to link us more intimately to the
dominant economic system and its concomitant hierarchies, For example: it is much more likely
that a white person will bond with a black person when the two share a common class lifestyle,
It is less likely that a materially prosperous person will establish a mutual bond with someone
who is poor and indigent. One of the most difficult and delicate subjects to discuss
among African Americans is the reality of class differences and of class
difference among us. The central position race has occupied in our political
discourse has often obscured the way in which class differences disrupt notions
of racial unity. And yet, today, class differences coupled with racial integration have
created a cultural context where the very meaning of blackness and its impact on
our lives differs greatly among black people. There is no longer a common
notion of shared black identity.
In other words, a sense of shared identity is no longer a platform that can draw
folks together in meaningful solidarity. Along with class, gender issues and
feminist awareness have served to place black folks in different camps, creating
conflicts that can only be resolved through education for critical consciousness.
There is also the reality of changing religious practices. There was a time in our
nation when it was just assumed that every black person was a Christian or at least coming from
a Christian background. This is simply no longer the case. Black children today have diverse
religious practices. Some are raised in Muslim and Buddhist traditions with no understanding of
Christian beliefs. And more young black people than ever before choose no religious practice at
all. Hence the shared theological language that once served as a basis of
communication and bonding can no longer be assumed.
Prag Good – Framing
Can’t separate the question of the desirability of the end of the world or that
imagination from the question of how we achieve that
Glaude (Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Department of Religion, and Chair, Center
for African American at Princeton) 7
(EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the
Politics of Black America, Pg. 8-9)
Pragma is Greek for things, facts, deeds, affairs. Pragmatists hold the view that our practice is
primary. Knowledge, for example, does not re- quire, in the pragmatist view, philosophical
foundations in direct per- sonal awareness. Instead, it is bound up in culture, society, and history,
results, in part, from our doings and sufferings, our ability or inability to secure desired aims in a
somewhat hostile environment. The good pragmatist, in the end, seeks to avoid dogmas
that settle matters prior to experience and calls us to see the ethical import of our
actions—that what we believe about the world has ethical significance and that
what we do has ethical implications for how we will live our lives. C. I. Lewis best
cap- tures this view of pragmatism: "At bottom, all problems are problems of conduct;
all judgments are implicitly judgments of value; that as there can be ultimately no valid
distinction between the theoretical or practical, so there can be no final separation of
questions of truth of any kind from questions of the justifiable ends of actions."
Ths book attempts to show that pragmatism can help to address some of the more
challenging dimensions of contemporary African American politics. But I maintain
that, it first ought to undergo a reconstruction of sorts. Pragmatism must be made to sing the
blues. In chapter, I argue that, contrary to standard accounts, John Dewey's reconstruction of
moral experience insists on the tragic dimensions of our moral lives: we are consistently
confronted with competing values that often require that some good or value is butchered. I then
put Deweyin conversation with one of America's greatest writers, Toni Morrison. Dewey indeed
has re- sources capable of addressing what Stanley Cavell describes as the work of mourningbut my reading of Morrison aims to reconstruct those re- sources in light of the racialized
experiences that haunt American life. What might it mean to think of the tragic in the contest of
those black persons forced to force a self amid the absurdities of a society still fundamentally
committed to racist practices? I suggest that Morrison’s novel exemplifies what it means to hold
a pragmatic view of the tragic that takes seriously the ofte brutal realities of white supremacy.
Morrison then teaches Dewey a lesson about race, American democracy, and the often tragic
choices imposed on this country's darker citizens. The chapter thus opens the way for a more
sustained encounter between pragmatism as I understand it and African American political life.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 examine how pragmatism might aid us in rethinking the various
ways appeals to black identity, history and agency impact and form content of
African American political activity. Too often such appeals settle political
matters beforehand. Black history, for some, constitutes a reservoir of meaning
that predetermines our orientation to problem, irrespective of their particulars and
black agency is imagined from the start as bound up an emancipatory politics. When identity is
determined by way of reference to a fixed racial self, the complexity of African American
life is denied. Moreover, the actual moral dilemmas. African American face
reduced to a crude racial calculus in which the answers are somehow genetically or
culturally encoded.
Prison Abolition Answers
Non-Reformist Reform Perm
The aff is a non-reformist reform – not shoring up the system but operating as a
strategic tool to alleviate short term oppression without allowing the possibilities for
a more effective police state or imperialism
Sudbury 8 (2008, Julia Sudbury is Metz Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is a leading
activist scholar in the prison abolitionist movement. She was a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national
abolitionist organization. “Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the Transnational PrisonIndustrial Complex”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 10, Issue 4]
Chronic overcrowding has led to worsening conditions for prisoners. As a result of the unprecedented growth in sentenced
populations, prison authorities have packed three or four prisoners into cells designed for two, and have taken over recreation rooms,
gyms, and rooms designed for programming and turned them into cells, housing prisoners on bunk beds or on the floor. These new
conditions have created challenges for activists, who have found themselves expending time and resources in pressuring prison
authorities to provide every prisoner a bed, or to provide access to basic education programs. As prison populations continue to swell,
anti-prison activists are faced with the limitations of reformist strategies. Gains temporarily won are swiftly
undermined, new “women-centered” prison regimes are replaced with a focus on cost-efficiency and minimal programming and
even changes enforced by legal cases like Shumate vs. Wilson are subject to backlash and resistance. 19 Of even greater concern
is the well-documented tendency of prison regimes to co-opt reforms and respond to demands for changes
in conditions by further expanding prison budgets. The vulnerability of prison reform efforts to cooption
has led Angela Y. Davis to call for “non-reformist reforms,” reforms that do not lead to bigger and
“better” prisons. 20 Despite the limited long-term impact of human rights advocacy and reforms, building
bridges between prisoners, activists, and family members is an important step toward challenging the
racialized dehumanization that undergirds the logic of incarceration. In this way, human rights advocacy
carried out in solidarity with prisoner activists is an important component of a radical anti-prison
agenda. Ultimately, however, anti-prison activists aim not to create more humane, culturally sensitive, women-centered
prisons, but to dismantle prisons and enable formerly criminalized people to access services and resources
outside the penal system. After three decades of prison expansion, more and more people are living with criminal convictions
and histories of incarceration. In the U.S., nearly 650,000 people are released from state and federal prisons to the community each
year. 21 Organizations of formerly incarcerated people focus on creating opportunities for former prisoners to survive after release,
and on eliminating barriers to reentry, including extensive discrimination against former felons. The wide array of “post-incarceration
sentences” that felons are subjected to has led activists to declare a “new civil rights movement.” 22 As a class, former prisoners can
legally be disenfranchised and denied rights available to other citizens. While reentry has garnered official attention, with President
Bush proposing a $300 million reentry initiative in his 2004 State of the Union address, anti-prison activists have critiqued this
initiative for focusing on faith-based mentoring, job training, and housing without addressing the endemic discrimination against
former prisoners or addressing the conditions in the communities which receive former prisoners, including racism, poverty, and
gender violence. Organizations of ex-prisoners working to oppose discrimination against former prisoners and felons include All of Us
Or None, the Nu Policy Leadership Group, Sister Outsider and the National Network for Women Prisoners in the U.S., and Justice 4
Women in Canada. All of Us Or None is described by members as “a national organizing initiative of prisoners, former prisoners and
felons, to combat the many forms of discrimination that we face as the result of felony convictions.” 23 Founded by anti-imperialist
and former political prisoner Linda Evans, and former prisoner and anti-prison activist Dorsey Nunn, and sponsored by the Northern
California–based Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, All of Us Or None works to mobilize former prisoners nationwide and in
Toronto, Canada. The organization's name, from a poem by Marxist playwright Bertold Brecht, invokes the need for solidarity across
racial, class, and gender lines in creating a unified movement of former prisoners. Black women play a leading role in the
organization, alongside other people of color. All of Us Or None focuses its lobbying and campaign work at city, county, and state
levels, calling on local authorities to end discrimination based on felony convictions in public housing, benefits, and employment, to
opt out of lifetime welfare and food stamp bans for felons, and to “ban the box” requiring disclosure of past convictions on
applications for public employment. In addition, the organization calls for guaranteed housing, job training, drug and alcohol
treatment, and public assistance for all newly released prisoners. 24 In the context of the war on drugs, many people with felony
convictions also struggle with addictions. The recovery movement, which is made up of 12-step programs, treatment programs,
community recovery centers, and indigenous healing programs run by and for people in recovery from addiction, offers an alternative
response to problem drug use through programs focusing on spirituality, healing, and fellowship. However, the recovery movement's
focus on individual transformation and accountability for past acts diverges from many anti-prison activists' focus on the harms done
to criminalized communities by interlocking systems of dominance. As a result, anti-prison spaces seldom engage with the recovery
movement, or tap the radical potential of its membership. Breaking with this trend, All of Us Or None has initiated a grassroots
organizing effort to reach out to people in 12-step programs with felony convictions. This work is part of their wider organizing efforts
that aim to mobilize former prisoners as agents of social change. Building on the strengths of identity politics, these organizations
suggest that those who have experienced the prison-industrial complex first-hand may be best placed to provide leadership in
dismantling it. As former prisoners have taken on a wide range of leadership positions across the movement, there has been a shift
away from leadership by white middle-class progressives, and a move to promote the voices of those directly affected by the prisonindustrial complex. Politicians who promote punitive “tough-on-crime” policies rely on racialized controlling images of “the criminal”
to inspire fear and induce compliance among voters. Once dehumanized and depicted as dangerous and beyond rehabilitation,
removing people from communities appears the only logical means of creating safety. Activists who pursue decarceration
challenge stereotypical images of the “criminal” by making visible the human stories of prisoners, with the
goal of demonstrating the inadequacy of incarceration as a response to the complex interaction of
factors that produce harmful acts. Decarceration usually involves targeting a specific prison population that
the public sees as low-risk and arguing for an end to the use of imprisonment for this population.
Decarcerative strategies often involve the promotion of alternatives to incarceration that are less expensive
and more effective than prison and jail. For example, Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, which
passed in California in 2000 and allowed first- and second-time non-violent drug offenders charged with possession to receive
substance abuse treatment instead of prison, channels approximately 35,000 people into treatment annually. 25 Drug law reform
is a key area of decarcerative work. Organizations and campaigns that promote drug law reform include
Drop the Rock, a coalition of youth, former prisoners, criminal justice reformers, artists, civil and labor leaders working to repeal New
York's Rockefeller Drug Laws. The campaign combines racial justice, economic, and public safety arguments by
demonstrating that the laws have created a pipeline of prisoners of color from New York City to newly built
prisons in rural, mainly white areas represented Republican senators, resulting in a transfer of funding and electoral influence from
communities of color to upstate rural communities. 26 Ultimately, the campaign calls for an end to mandatory minimum sentencing
and the reinstatement of judges' sentencing discretion, a reduction in sentence lengths for drug-related offenses and the expansion of
alternatives, including drug treatment, job training, and education. Former drug war prisoners play a leadership role in decarcerative
efforts in the field of drug policy reform. Kemba Smith, an African–American woman who was sentenced to serve 24.5 years as a
result of her relationship with an abusive partner who was involved in the drug industry, is one potent voice in opposition to the war
on drugs. While she was incarcerated, Smith became an active advocate for herself and other victims of the war on drugs, securing
interviews and feature articles in national media. Ultimately, Smith's case came to represent the failure of mandatory minimums, and
in 2000, following a nation-wide campaign, she and fellow drug war prisoner Dorothy Gaines were granted clemency by outgoing
President Clinton. After her release, Smith founded the Justice for People of Color Project (JPCP), which aims to empower young
people of color to participate in drug policy reform and to promote a reallocation of public expenditures from incarceration to
education. While women like Kemba Smith and Dorothy Gaines have become the human face of the drug war, prison invisibilizes and
renders anonymous hundreds of thousands of drug war prisoners. The organization Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM)
challenges this process of erasure and dehumanization through its “Faces of FAMM” project. The project invites people in federal and
state prisons serving mandatory minimum sentences to submit their cases to a database and provides online access to their stories and
photographs. 27 The “Faces of FAMM” project highlights cases where sentencing injustices are particularly visible in order to
galvanize public support for sentencing reform. At the same time, it dismantles
popular representations of the war on
drugs as a necessary protection against dangerous drug dealers and traffickers, demonstrating that most
drug war prisoners are serving long sentences for low-level, non-violent drug-related activities or for being
intimately connected to someone involved in these activities. Decarcerative work is not limited to drug law reform. Free Battered
Women's (FBW) campaign for the release of incarcerated survivors is another example of decarcerative work. The organization
supports women and transgender prisoners incarcerated for killing or assaulting an abuser in challenging their convictions by
demonstrating that they acted in self-defense. Most recently, FBW secured the release of Flozelle Woodmore, an African–American
woman serving a life sentence at CCWF for shooting her violent partner as an 18 year old. Released in August 2007, after five parole
board recommendations for her release were rejected by Governors Davis and then Schwarzenegger, Woodmore's determined pursuit
of justice made visible and ultimately challenged the racialized politics of gubernatorial parole releases. 28 While the number of
women imprisoned for killing or assaulting an abuser is small—FBW submitted 34 petitions for clemency at its inception in 1991, and
continues to fight 23 cases—FBW's campaign for the release of all incarcerated survivors challenges the mass incarceration of genderoppressed prisoners on a far larger scale. FBW argues that experiences of intimate partner violence and abuse contribute to the
criminalized activities that lead many women and transgender people into conflict with the law, including those imprisoned on drug or
property charges, and calls for the release of all incarcerated survivors. Starting with a population generally viewed with sympathy—
survivors of intimate partner violence—FBW generates a radical critique of both state and interpersonal violence, arguing that “the
violence and control used by the state against people in prison mirrors the dynamics of battering that many incarcerated survivors have
experienced in their intimate relationships and/or as children.” 29 In theorizing the intersections of racialized state
violence and gendered interpersonal violence, FBW lays the groundwork for a broader abolitionist
agenda that refutes the legitimacy of incarceration as a response to deep-rooted social inequalities
based on interlocking systems of oppression. By gradually shrinking the prison system, Black women
activists involved in decarcerative work hope to erode the public's reliance on the idea of
imprisonment as a commonsense response to a wide range of social ills. At the other end of anti-expansionist
work are activists who take a more confrontational approach. By starving correctional budgets of funds to continue building more
prisons and jails, they hope to force politicians to embrace less expensive and more effective alternatives to incarceration. Prison
moratorium organizing aims to stop construction of new prisons and jails. Unlike campaigns against prison privatization, which
oppose prison-profiteering by private corporations, and seek to return imprisonment to the public sector, prison moratorium work
opposes all new prison construction, public or private. In New York, the Brooklyn-based Prison Moratorium Project (PMP), cofounded by former prisoner Eddie Ellis and led by young women and gender non-conforming people of color, does this work through
popular education and mass campaigns against prison expansion. Focusing on youth as a force for social change, New York's PMP
uses compilations of progressive hip hop and rap artists to spread a critical analysis of the prison-industrial complex and its impact on
people of color. PMP's strategies have been effective; for example, in 2002 the organization, as part of the Justice 4 Youth Coalition,
succeeded in lobbying the New York Department of Juvenile Justice to redirect $53 million designated for expansion in Brooklyn and
the Bronx. 30 PMP has also worked to make visible the connections between underfunding, policing of schools, and youth
incarceration through their campaign “Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” By demonstrating how zero tolerance policies and
increased policing and use of surveillance technology in schools, combined with underfunded classrooms and overstretched teachers,
has led to the criminalization of young people of color and the production of adult prisoners, PMP argues for a reprioritization of
public spending from the criminal justice system to schools and alternatives to incarceration. 31 Moratorium work often involves
campaigns to prevent the construction of a specific prison or jail. In Toronto, for example, the Prisoner Justice Action
Committee formed the “81 Reasons” campaign, a multiracial collaboration of experienced anti-prison
activists, youth and student organizers, in response to proposals to build a youth “superjail” in Brampton, a
suburb of Toronto. 32 The campaign combined popular education on injustices in the juvenile system, including
the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Aboriginal youth, with an exercise in popular democracy that invited
young people to decide themselves how they would spend the $81 million slated for the jail. Campaigners
mobilized public concerns about spending cuts in other areas, including health care and education, to create
pressure on the provincial government to look into less expensive and less punitive alternatives to
incarceration for youth. While this campaign did not ultimately prevent the construction of the youth jail, the size of the
proposed facility was reduced. More importantly, the campaign built a grassroots multiracial antiprison youth
movement and raised public awareness of the social and economic costs of incarceration. Moratorium
campaigns face tough opposition from advocates who believe that building prisons stimulates economic development for struggling
rural towns. Prisons are “sold” to rural towns that have suffered economic decline in the face of global competition, closures of local
factories, and decline of small farms. In the context of economic stagnation, prisons are touted as providing stable, well-paying,
unionized jobs, providing property and sales taxes and boosting real estate markets. The California Prison Moratorium Project has
worked to challenge these assertions by documenting the actual economic, environmental, and social impact of prison construction in
California's Central Valley prison towns. According to California PMP: We consider prisons to be a form of environmental injustice.
They are normally built in economically depressed communities that eagerly anticipate economic prosperity. Like any toxic industry,
prisons affect the quality of local schools, roads, water, air, land, and natural habitats. 33 California PMP opposes prison construction
at a local level by building multiracial coalitions of local residents, farm workers, labor organizers, anti-prison activists, and former
prisoners and their families to reject the visions of prison as a panacea for economic decline. 34 In the Californian context, where most
new prisons are built in predominantly Latino/a communities and absorb land and water previously used for agriculture, PMP
facilitates communication and solidarity between Latino/a farm worker communities, and urban Black and Latino/a prisoners in
promoting alternative forms of economic development that do not rely on mass incarceration. Scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore's
research on the political economy of prisons in California has been critical in providing evidence of the detrimental impact of prisons
on local residents and the environment. 35 As an active member of CPMP, Gilmore's work is deeply rooted in anti-prison activism and
in turn informs the work of other activists, demonstrating the important relationship between Black women's activist scholarship and
the anti-prison movement. 36 Many anti-prison activists view campaigns for decarceration or moratorium as
building blocks toward the ultimate goal of abolition. These practical actions promise short and
medium-term successes that are essential markers on the road to long-term transformation. However,
abolitionists believe that like slavery, the prison-industrial complex is a system of racialized state violence that cannot be “fixed.” The
contemporary prison abolitionist movement in the U.S. and Canada dates to the 1970s, when political
prisoners like Angela Y. Davis and Assata Shakur, in conjunction with other radical activists and scholars
in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, began to call for the dismantling of prisons. 38 The explosion in political
prisoners, fuelled by the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and targeting of Black liberation, American Indian and
Puerto Rican independence movements in the U.S. and First Nations resistance in Canada as “threats” to national security, fed into an
understanding of the role of the prison in perpetuating state repression against insurgent communities. 39 The new anti-prison politics
were also shaped by a decade of prisoner litigation and radical prison uprisings, including the brutally crushed Attica Rebellion.
These “common” prisoners, predominantly working-class people of color imprisoned for everyday acts of survival,
challenged the state's legitimacy by declaring imprisonment a form of cruel and unusual punishment and
confronting the brute force of state power. 40 By adopting the term “abolition” activists drew deliberate links
between the dismantling of prisons and the abolition of slavery. Through historical excavations, the “new
abolitionists” identified the abolition of prisons as the logical completion of the unfinished liberation marked by the 13th Amendment
to the United States Constitution, which regulated, rather than ended, slavery. 41 Organizations that actively promote dialogue about
what abolition means and how it can translate into concrete action include Critical Resistance (CR), New York's Prison Moratorium
Project, Justice Now, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Free Battered Women, and the Prison Activist Resource Center in the
U.S. and the Prisoner Justice Action Committee (Toronto), the Prisoners' Justice Day Committee (Vancouver) and Joint Action in
Canada. CR was founded in 1998 by a group of Bay Area activists including former political prisoner and scholar-activist Angela Y.
Davis. Initially, CR focused on popular education and movement building, coordinating large conferences where diverse organizations
could generate collective alternatives to the prison-industrial complex. Later work has included campaigns against prison construction
in California's Central Valley and solidarity work with imprisoned Katrina survivors. CR describes abolition as: [A] political vision
that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons, policing, and surveillance by creating sustainable alternatives to punishment and
imprisonment … . An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we
want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us
toward making our dreams real and that lead the average person to believe that things really could
be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives. 42 In this sense, prison abolitionists are tasked with
a dual burden: first, transforming people's consciousness so that they can believe that a world without
prisons is possible, and second, taking practical steps to oppose the prison-industrial complex. Making
abolition more than a utopian vision requires practical steps toward this long-term goal. CR describes
four steps that activists can get involved in: shrinking the system, creating alternatives, shifting public
opinion and public policy, and building leadership among those directly impacted by the prison-industrial complex. 43 Since
its inception in the San Francisco Bay Area, Critical Resistance has become a national organization with chapters in Baltimore,
Chicago, Gainesville, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Tampa/St. Petersburg, and Washington, D.C. As such, CR has played a
critical role in re-invigorating abolitionist politics in the U.S. This work is rooted in the radical praxis of Black women and
transgender activists.
And these movements disprove their critiques of intersectionality
Spade 13 (Associate Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law. In 2002, he founded the
Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective in New York City)
(Dean, Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform, Signs, Vol. 38, No. 4, Summer, jstor)
I offer these examples not because they are perfect—certainly a significant range of tactics and
strategies are part of each of these campaigns, and, with detailed analysis, we might find instances of
co-optation, deservingness divides, and other dangers of legal reform work occurring even as some
are avoided and rejected. However, these examples are indicative of resistance to limitations of legal
equality or rights strategies. These demands exceed what the law recognizes as viable claims. These
campaigns suggest that those who argue that a politics based on intersectional analysis
is too broad, idealistic, complex, or impossible—or that it eliminates effective immediate
avenues for resistance—are mistaken. Critical political engagements are resisting
the pitfalls of rights discourse and seeking to build broad-based resistance formations
made up of constituencies that come from a variety of vulnerable subpopulations but
find common cause in concerns about criminalization, immigration, poverty, colonialism,
militarism, and other urgent conditions. Their targets are administrative systems and
law enforcement mechanisms that are nodes of distribution for racialized-gendered
harm and violence, and their tactics seek material change in the lives of vulnerable
populations rather than recognition and formal inclusion. Their organizing methods mobilize
directly affected communities and value horizontal structures, leadership development, mutual aid,
democratic participation, and community solutions rather than top-down, elite-imposed approaches to
political transformation. These analytical and practical methods owe a great deal to women-of-color
feminist formations that have innovated and continue to lead inquiry and experimentation into
transformative social justice theory and practice.15
A2: Prag Bad
The distinction between pragmatism and radicalism is falsely constructed and the
affirmative holds the two in creative tension—legalization strategies enable us to
take advantage of current conditions without sacrificing political vision
Berger 13 [2013, Dan Berger is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Bothell, “Social
Movements and Mass Incarceration: What is To Be Done?”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics,
Culture, and Society, Volume 15, Issue 1-2, 2013, pages 3-18]
The strategy of decarceration combines radical critique, direct action, and tangible goals for reducing
the reach of the carceral state. It is a coalitional strategy that works to shrink the prison system
through a combination of pragmatic demands and far-reaching, open-ended critique. It is reform in
pursuit of abolition. Indeed, decarceration allows a strategic launch pad for the politics of abolition,
providing what has been an exciting but abstract framework with a course of action. 32 Rather than
juxtapose pragmatism and radicalism, as has so often happened in the realm of radical activism, the strategy of
decarceration seeks to hold them in creative tension. It is a strategy in the best tradition of the black
freedom struggle. It is a strategy that seeks to take advantage of political conditions without sacrificing
its political vision. Today we are in a moment where it is possible, in the words of an organizer whose work
successfully closed Illinois's infamous supermax prison Tamms in January 2013, to confront prisons as both an economic
and a moral necessity. 33 Prisons bring together diverse forms of oppression across race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship
status, HIV status and beyond. The movements against them, therefore, will need to bring together diverse
communities of resistance. They will need to unite people across a range of issues, identities, and sectors. That is the coalition
underlying groups such as Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), the Nation Inside initiative, and Decarcerate PA.
The fight against prisons is both a targeted campaign and a broad-based struggle for social justice.
These movements must include the leadership by those directly affected while at the same work to understand that prisons affect us
all. This message is the legacy of prison rebellions from Attica in 1971 to Pelican Bay in 2012. The challenge is to maintain
the aspirational elements of that message while at the same time translating it into a political
program. Decarceration, therefore, works not only to shrink the prison system but to expand community
cohesion and maximize what can only be called freedom. Political repression and mass incarceration are
joined at the hip. The struggles against austerity, carcerality, and social oppression, the struggles for
restorative and transformative justice, for grassroots empowerment and social justice must be equally
interconnected. For it is only when the movement against prisons is as interwoven in the social fabric of
popular resistance as the expansion of prisons has been stitched into the wider framework of society that we
might hope to supplant the carceral state. There are many obstacles on the path toward decarceration; the existence of a
strategy hardly guarantees its success. Until now, I have focused largely on the challenges internal to the movement, but there are even
taller hurdles to jump in encountering (much less transforming) the deeply entrenched carceral state. Perhaps the biggest challenge,
paradoxically, comes from the growing consensus, rooted in the collective fiscal troubles of individual states, that there is a need for
prison reform. In that context, a range of politicians, think tanks, and nonprofit organizations—from Right on Crime to the Council on
State Governments and the Pew Charitable Trusts—have offered a spate of neoliberal reforms that trumpet free market solutions,
privatization, or shifting the emphasis away from prisons but still within the power of the carceral state. Examples include the “Justice
Reinvestment” processes utilized by states such as Texas and Pennsylvania that have called for greater funding to police and
conservative victim's rights advocates while leaving untouched some of the worst elements of excessive punishment. These
neoliberal reforms can also be found in the sudden burst of attention paid to “reentry services” that are not
community-led and may be operated by private, conservative entities. 34 Perhaps the grandest example can be found
in California, where a Supreme Court ruling that overcrowding in the state's prisons constituted cruel and unusual punishment has
been met with a proposal for “realignment,” that shifts the burden from state prisons to county jails. 35 A combination of institutional
intransigence and ideological commitment to punish makes the road ahead steep. Even as many states move to shrink their
prison populations, they have done so in ways that have left in place the deepest markings of the carceral
state, such as the use of life sentences and solitary confinement, and the criminalization of immigrants.
Social movements will need to confront the underlying ideologies that hold that there is an
“acceptable” level of widespread imprisonment, that there is a specter of villainy out there—be they “illegal
immigrants,” “cop killers,” “sex criminals”—waiting
in the wings to destroy the American way of life. 36 There is a
risk, inherent in the sordid history of prison reform, that the current reform impulse will be bifurcated
along poorly defined notions of “deservingness” that will continue to uphold the carceral logic that
separates “good people” from “bad people” and which decides that no fate is too harsh for those deemed
unworthy of social inclusion. This, then, is a movement that needs to make nuanced yet straightforward
arguments that take seriously questions of accountability while showing that more cops and more
(whether bigger or smaller) cages only takes us further from that goal. 37 At stake is the kind of world we
want to live in, and the terms could not be more clear: the choice, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, is either
carceral chaos or liberatory community. The framework of community—as expressed Decarcerate PA slogan “build
communities not prisons” and the CURB “budget for humanity” campaign—allows for a robust imagination of the institutions and
mechanisms that foster community versus those that weaken it. It focuses our attention on activities, slogans, programs, and demands
that maximize communities. In short, it allows for unity. If the state wants to crush dissent through isolation, our
movements must rely on togetherness to win. Solidarity is the difference between life and death. State
repression expands in the absence of solidarity. Solidarity is a lifeline against the logic of criminalization
and its devastating consequences. For the most successful challenges to imprisonment come from
intergenerational movements: movements where people raise each other's consciousness and raise each
other's children, movements that fight for the future because they know their history. Here, in this
pragmatic but militant radicalism, is a chance to end mass incarceration and begin the process of
shrinking the carceral state out of existence.
Reform Good Ext.
Gotta do both – holding them in tension is crucial to the movement and refusing
short term work ignores the real bodies in the system now
Meiners 7 (Ph.D. in Education, Simon Fraser University, Canada; teaches, writes and organizes in
Chicago. Erica R., Right to BeHostile: SCHOOLS. PRISONS, AND THE MAKING OF PUBLIC
ENEMIES, pg. 169-70)
Working toward a horizon of abolition forces me to continue learning and considering the depth of how prisons and incarceration are
natural- ized in our communities. However, this multifaceted goal of prison abolition does not mean not doing reform
work. The horizon of abolition does not preclude working for reforms and changes . Reform work and
service providing are required because there are real bodies who need immediate assistance. As longtime
feminist prison activist and scholar Karlene Faith writes:¶ Every reform raises the question of whether , in Gramsci's tenus,
it is a revolutionary reform, one that has liberatory potential to chal- lenge the status quo, or a reform
reform, which may ease the problem temporarily or superficially, but reinforces the status quo by validating the system through the
process of improving it. We do liberal reform work because real women in real crises occupy the prisons, and
they can't be ignored. Revolutionary reform work is educative: it raises questions of human rights (and thereby
validates prisoners as human beings) and demonstrates that the state apparatus, which is mandated to uphold human rights, is
one of the worst rights abusers. (Faith, 2000,164-165)¶ Faith reminds me of the necessity of doing the "both/and"
where everyday local work may involve service providing or working for reforms, but it is also useful to
place, understand, and connect this labor to a larger movement . For example, I cofacilitated domestic violence
workshops at the Cook County Jail because there are real women in prisons and jails with real needs. We distributed information
about the resources available to women including housing and advocacy services. Yet, despite offering information to women who
generally were not informed about these resources, this service-providing was also problematic if analyzed through a wider
framework. Our work was free and removed responsibility fron; the jail to provide these services. Our program made the jail "look
good because a group of university academics volunteered their time and pro- vided services and did nothing to challenge the
existence of the jail, in fact our work potentially strengthened the jail's legitimacy. This creates a clear contradiction, as how do we
challenge the legitimacy of the jail, yet recognize that there are women who require immediate resources ? There are significant
tensions between these frameworks, reform or service-providing and abolition, and I don't think that these
tensions are necessarily a negative. For me, these tensions about how and where to work, and the conflicts
surrounding short- and long-term strategies for change, can make both the "direct service" and
"abolition" work stronger. I specifically use the term the horizon of prison abolition because this is a goal that shifts yet
simultaneously frames all of my work. Abolition is also a concept that is grounded in histories of successful struggles for racial and
economic (and gender) justice, and invoking these histories is useful.
Can build movements in the long term even if they fail
Spade 11 (lawyer, prominent trans activist, and Associate Professor of Law at Seattle University School
of Law. He founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project which provides free legal services to transgender
individuals who are low-income and/or people of color)
(Dean, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law, pg. 186-7)
Developing law and policy reform rargers as campaign issues. Because administrative systems cause enormous harm [Q transpeople
every day, issues related to how these systems operate tend to be deeply felt and broadly applicable to our constituencies. For that
reason, law and policy reform targets can sometimes be a good place to direct our organizing. This organizing
can provide opportunities ro reframe an issue, bring directly impacted people who have not previously been part of
political organizing into leadership, build shared political analysis about important forms of systemic harm, and establish
and advance relationships within and berween constituencies. When these law/policy reform campaigns are chosen, they can
build momentum and membership in a movement organization. Winning certain reforms may even provide some
relief to members experiencing harm. The limited effect of law and policy reform victories can also often huild
shared analysis among organizers about how empty legal equality can be, and can generate enhanced demands for
transformation as organizing continues. Taking up law and policy targets can make sense when deployed as
a tactic in service of a larger strategy of mass mobilization. If law and policy changes are won solely through the work
of a few white lawyers meeting with bureaucrats or elected officials behind closed doors, this does not achieve the mobilization goals
that require building a demand (and momentum behind that demand) across a broad spectrum of directly impacted people and winning
it through collective efforts of a large group. The goals of this work should not be merely about changing what laws and policies say.
Instead, the work should build the capacity of directly impacted people to work together and push for change that will significantly
improve their lives. Ideally, those who are propelled into political action by involvement in a campaign stay with the work, continue to
develop skills and analysis, and bting others to organizing. Together, people can construct increasingly broad imaginations of
transformative change. Even after small victories enormous harms must still be addressed as newly won policies are often nor
followed or implemented, and important lessons are learned about sustained struggle and the effectiveness of collective action.
Cap Ans
A2: Do Nothing/Negativity Alt
Alt fails and leads to ressetiment
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
But such cinematic labors
of the negative are not sufficient; they certainly do not
suffice to promote positive attachment to this world. Even a "negative dialectic" does not
suffice. If things are left there, the embers of ressentiment can easily become more
inflamed. That is one reason Deleuze is never happy with negative critique alone: the next task is to highlight how
our participation in a world of real creativity that also finds expression elsewhere in the universe depends on and draws
from such fugitive interruptions. To put it too starkly (for situational nuances and adjustments are pertinent here),
the
more people who experience a positive connection between modes of
interruption and the possibility of our modest participation as individuals,
constituencies, states, and a species in creative processes extending beyond us,
the more apt we are to embrace the new temporal experiences around us as
valuable parts of existence as such. Certainly, absent a world catastrophe or a
repressive revolution that would create worse havoc than the conditions it seeks
to roll back, these consummate features of late-modem life are not apt to
dissipate soon. The fastest zones of late-modem life, for instance, are not apt to
slow down in the absence of a catastrophe that transforms everything. So the
radical task is to find ways to strengthen the connection between the
fundamental terms of late-modem existence and positive attachment to life as
such. This should be accomplished not by embracing exploitation and suffering,
but by challenging them as we come to terms with the larger trends.
A2: Reformism Bad/Negativity Alt
Progressive change is possible and effective – the alt fails and leads to
authoritarianism
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
Is it not obligatory to expose and resist the system as such rather than taking
cumulative actions to move it? Don't such actions necessarily fold back in on
themselves, feeding the dosed system they seek to move? Some theorists on the
Left say such things, but they themselves have too dosed a view of the systems
they criticize. No system in a world of becoming composed of multiple,
interacting systems of different types, with different capacities of self-organization, is
entirely dosed. It is both more vulnerable to the outside than the carriers of hubris imagine
and periodically susceptible to creative movement from within and without simultaneously.
Moreover, pure negativity on the Left does not sustain either critique or militancy
for long, but rather, it tends eventually to lapse into resignation or to slide
toward the authoritarian practices of the Right that already express with glee the
moods of negativity, hubris, or existential revenge. We have witnessed numerous
examples of such disappointing transitions in the last several decades, when a negative or
authoritarian mood is retained while the creed in which it was set is changed dramatically. We
must therefore work on mood, belief; desire, and action together. As we do so
we also amplify positive attachment to existence itself amidst the specific
political resentments that help to spur us on. To ignore the existential dimension
of politics is to increase the risks of converting a noble movement into an
authoritarian one and to amplify the power of bellicose movements that mobilize
destructive potential. To focus on the negative dimension alone is to abjure the
responsibilities of political action during a dangerous time.
To review, none of the role interventions listed above nor all in concert could suffice to break
such a global resonance machine. Luck and pregnant points of contact with salutary changes in
state actions, other cross-state citizen movements, the policies of international
organizations, creative market innovations, and religious organization are
needed. But those larger constellations may not themselves move far in a positive direction
unless they meet multiple constituencies primed to join them and geared to press them whenever
they lapse into inertia, if a world resonance machine of revenge and counter-revenge stretches,
twists, and constrains the classical image of sovereign units, regionally anchored creeds, uneven
capitalist exchange, and international organizations, while drawing selective sustenance from all
of them, a new counter-machine must do so too.
Alt Fails – Withdrawal 2AC
Alt doesn’t solve cap
Gordon (PhD from Oxford, teaches environmental politics and ethics at the Arava Institute for
Environmental Studies) 12
(Uri, Anarchist Economics in Practice in The Accumulation of Freedom, pg. 205-7)
Withdrawal
Perhaps better defined as a "non-practice" than as a practice, the
term "withdrawal" here
indicates the various ways in which anarchists may abstain from participation in
central institutions of the capitalist economy-primarily the wage system and the
consumption of purchased goods. The goal of such a strategy is to weaken capitalism
by sapping its energy, reducing its inputs in terms of both human labor and cultural
legitimation. To be sure, the ubiquity of capitalist relations means that the options
for withdrawal remain partial at best. Most of us must work for someone else to
survive, and buy necessities that are not otherwise available for acquisition.
Nevertheless, there are ways in which participation in capitalism can be significantly reduced, or
undertaken on its qualitatively different margins. Rather than seeking full employment and
aspiring to a lifelong career, anarchists can choose to work part-time or itinerantly, earning
enough to supply their basic needs but not dedicating more time to waged work than is
absolutely necessary-perhaps on the way towards the abolition of work as compulsory, alienated
production.3 In the area of housing, squatting a living space rather than renting one also abstains
from participation in capitalism, though this option is less sustainable in most countfies since it
will almost certainly end in eviction. Anarchists may also reduce their participation in the
moneyed circulation of commodities by reusing and recycling durable goods, and by scavenging
or growing some of their own food rather than purchasing it from the supermarket. 4 Such
practices can never by themselves destroy capitalism, since in the final analysis
they remain confined to the level of personal lifestyle and rely on capitalism’s
continued existence in order to inhabit its margins and consume its surpluses.
Nevertheless, strategies of withdrawal do complement other practices in carving
out a separate space from capitalism, as well as in expressing a rejection of its ideologies
of dedication to the workplace and of consumption as the road to happiness.
Alt Fails – 1AR
Alt fails – movements too small, elite backlash, no material interests
Gordon (PhD from Oxford, teaches environmental politics and ethics at the Arava Institute for
Environmental Studies) 12
(Uri, Anarchist Economics in Practice in The Accumulation of Freedom, pg. 215)
On the one hand, the anarchist
movement is so small that even its most consistent
and visible efforts are but a drop in the ocean. On the other hand, political elites
have proven themselves extremely proficient at pulling the ground from under
movements for social change, be it through direct repression and demonization
of the activists, diversion of public attention to security and nationalist agendas,
or, at best, minimal concessions that ameliorate the most exploitative aspects of capitalism while
contributing to the resilience of the system as a whole. It would seem that ethical commitments
to social justice and the enhancement of human freedom can only serve as a motivation for a
comparatively small number of people, and that without the presence of genuine
material interests among large sections of the population there is little hope for a
mass movement to emerge that would herald the departure from existing social,
economic, and political arrangements.
Alt Fails – Reform Key
No revolution against cap possible now – the perm is crucial to avoid rightest
takeover
Castree (School of Environment and Development, Manchester University) 10
(N., Crisis, Continuity and Change: Neoliberalism, the Left and the Future of Capitalism. Antipode,
41: 185–213)
This essay had two major objectives. It sought to describe and explain the temporal coincidence
of political economic and environmental crises less than a decade into the twenty-first century;
and it offered some reasons for a seeming paradox, taking both a national level and international
scale example—the paradox of crisis conditions leading to more of the same rather than a sharp
turn away from the neoliberal path. The hopeful lessons of Marx's, Polanyi's and O’Connor's
work will not (yet) be borne out: “strong reform”, never mind something more radical,
is still a long way off. What we call “neoliberalism” in the singular is, in reality, a
variegated and uneven global formation constituted differentially at a range of
scales. Its existence and multiple incarnations are overdetermined. Even so, I’ve
suggested that this fact does not necessarily render neoliberal policies vulnerable,
even at a time of perceived “crisis”. If my analysis has any validity, then it calls to mind
Gramsci's judgement that the “morbid symptoms” of an existing order unwilling to
die may persist for some considerable time.
When might these symptoms disappear? Answers to this question are likely to be as reliable as a
long-range weather forecast. NaomiKlein (2009:30), sensing the folly of detailed prophecy,
offers some general speculations. Reflecting, as I have done, on the coincident political
economic and ecological crisis, she argues that “Capitalism can survive this [double] crisis.
But the world can't survive another capitalist comeback”. I agree entirely with the first part of
this statement, but not necessarily the second. Capitalism will morph and adapt as it has
always done: the operating hardware will remain intact, even as the all important
details will alter quite profoundly. But at what cost? Leftists have not just to hope for, but
work vigorously towards, a future that can set capitalism on a path of much greater social and
environmental justice. The legacy of neoliberal capitalism constitutes a sickness that
can be cured sooner rather than later: but the Left, in its national and international
forms, must do a lot more to administer the necessary medicine. An essential, if not sufficient,
condition is to occupy the political space vacated by established political parties
that claim to be on the left. Until then, the Left's case will remain marginal to
public life worldwide.
A2: Change Possible Now/Collapsing Now
Cap isn’t collapsing now – the economic and environmental crisis are not sufficient
to dislodge the system
Castree (School of Environment and Development, Manchester University) 10
(N., Crisis, Continuity and Change: Neoliberalism, the Left and the Future of Capitalism. Antipode,
41: 185–213)
Left should not get its hopes up—at least not yet. It's sad to say, but
only the most wild-eyed optimist could believe that the two perceived crises of
our time are harbingers of a better future. Taking two cases—one national scale, one
international—I want to argue that Gramsci was right. The “old” may be dying, but it's
far from dead. The essay comprises four parts. I begin in the heat of the moment, by
To my mind, the
describing how and why the idea of two concurrent worldwide “crises” became commonplace in
a surprisingly short space of time (2007–2009). Following this, I take a theoretical detour
intended to explain why these crises have arisen, and how they might play out. Marx, Karl
Polanyi and James O’Connor are my guides. Focusing on Britain as an illustrative case, I then
explain why the present moment is not, regrettably, a propitious one for left-wing
change-makers. My point is to show that even in neoliberalism's heartlands, in the
thick of a financial crisis, there is only weak impetus for change. After this
examination of how crisis is playing-out at the scale of one notable nation state, I delve into the
world of international emissions trading philosophy and practice—with a particular focus on the
European Union's still young scheme. I suggest that the myriad practical failures of this and
other market approaches to greenhouse gas mitigation belie the abstract logic of “free market
environmentalism”. Even so, these approaches will be with us for many years to come in all
probability. A short conclusion looks to a future hopefully free of those “morbid symptoms” that
Gramsci described just after the Great Crash of 1929. It's a future that will, I fear, be very hard to
make. If William James were writing today, he probably would not bet on the Left making its
ideals flesh any time soon. Not for the first time, some optimism of the will is required—quite a
lot, in fact.
Perm – Reform Solves/Withdrawal Fails
Hybrid strategies like cooperative are crucial to the destruction of capitalism – the
alt alone fails
Gordon (PhD from Oxford, teaches environmental politics and ethics at the Arava Institute for
Environmental Studies) 12
(Uri, Anarchist Economics in Practice in The Accumulation of Freedom, pg. 205-7)
There is certainly substance; to these objections. Nevertheless, I have chosen to keep the ten as
wide as possible, if only for the reason that readers new to anarchism and less familiar with its
internal controversies deserge to be introduced to the entire variety of practices that broadly fall
within its sphere and left to make up their own minds. More generally, however, I would like to
emphasize that the entire discussion of anarchist economics in practice must take place under the
lens of imperfection and experimentation. This has to do with the distinction that Terry Leahy
makes between purist and hybrid strategies, that is, between strategies that completely embody
anarchist ideals and ones which continue to rely on aspects of capitalism.' Hybrid strategies
have always been part of the anarchist repertoire of social resistance; yet the
relevant question is whether hybrid strategies are viewed as already embodying
the end point of desired social change (that is, a reformed capitalist system), or as
necessary but temporary compromises with the ubiquity of capitalist social relations, a
stepping-stone towards more comprehensive social change. As Leahy argues,
To an extent hybrid strategies are symbiotic with capitalism. They can be seen as productive
for the capitalist class in ameliorating some of capitalism's excesses. Yet they are also
antithetical to the culture and economy of capitalism as a system. Given enough
time and enough proliferation they will replace capitalism with something
completely different... For those who ultimately want nothing but the best that an anarchist
utopia can offer, the thing to do is to be mobile and seize opportunities for hybrids
as they arise and move on as they grow stale.2
It is in this inclusive and experimental spirit that I offer the following examples. While
limitations of space mean that the discussion is necessarily cursory, I have referenced some
relevant literature throughout the exposition, and the reader is invited to consult it for further
information and analysis.
Varieties of Anarchist Economic Practice
Withdrawal
Perhaps better defined as a "non-practice" than as a practice, the term "withdrawal" here
indicates the various ways in which anarchists may abstain from participation in central
institutions of the capitalist economy-primarily the wage system and the consumption of
purchased goods. The goal of such a strategy is to weaken capitalism by sapping its
energy, reducing its inputs in terms of both human labor and cultural legitimation. To be sure,
the ubiquity of capitalist relations means that the options for withdrawal remain partial at
best. Most of us must work for someone else to survive, and buy necessities that
are not otherwise available for acquisition. Nevertheless, there are ways in which
participation in capitalism can be significantly reduced, or undertaken on its qualitatively
different margins. Rather than seeking full employment and aspiring to a lifelong career,
anarchists can choose to work part-time or itinerantly, earning enough to supply their basic
needs but not dedicating more time to waged work than is absolutely necessary-perhaps on the
way towards the abolition of work as compulsory, alienated production.3 In the area of housing,
squatting a living space rather than renting one also abstains from participation in capitalism,
though this option is less sustainable in most countfies since it will almost certainly end in
eviction. Anarchists may also reduce their participation in the moneyed circulation of
commodities by reusing and recycling durable goods, and by scavenging or growing some of
their own food rather than purchasing it from the supermarket. 4 Such
practices can never
by themselves destroy capitalism, since in the final analysis they remain
confined to the level of personal lifestyle and rely on capitalism’s continued
existence in order to inhabit its margins and consume its surpluses. Nevertheless,
strategies of withdrawal do complement other practices in carving out a separate
space from capitalism, as well as in expressing a rejection of its ideologies of dedication to
the workplace and of consumption as the road to happiness.
Perm – Reform Solves – A2: Market Link
Must work with some companies within the market in order to solve transition wars
Lewis and Canaty (executive director of the Center for Community Enterprise; honorary research
fellow at the University of Birmingham and a director of Common Futures) 12
(Michael and Patrick, The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-state Economy, New
Society Publishers, googlebooks)
The agenda of the Great Transition also encompasses three major dimensions of
change. Think of them as the 3 Ps: the personal, practical, and political.
Simplistic silver-bullet solutions, and sound bites spun for culturally stunted
attention spans, will not do. Consciously acting to link up the three Ps with a
multi-level agenda guided by the resilience imperative and cooperative
transitions is complex. Balkanized movements cannot contend with the scale of
the problems and challenges we face, nor the powerful forces that must be
resisted and restrained. All kinds of constituencies must be engaged unions,
regionally based small and medium-sized businesses, all manner of community
and cooperative enterprises and intermediaries, farmers, credit unions and
progressive financial institutions, arts and culture organizations, faith
organizations, environmental groups, politicians, and academics. We can also
work with large companies, though caution and principled shrewdness is
necessary. Companies occupying the low-road/high-carbon economy have too
much power, are unaccountable, and are so addicted to the capitalist logic of
growth that they represent a real and present danger to all of us. However, there
are other companies that are committed to building a highroad/low-carbon
economy, and we need their know-how and partnership if we are to navigate the
Great Transition without violence.
So there we have it we are challenged to work consciously from local to global
across sectors, engage creatively multiple constituencies, while all the while
paying attention simultaneously to the macro and micro features of the transition
challenge. Isn't life interesting?
We have been acutely conscious, while writing this book, that our concentration
has been on the micro side of the transition challenge, though we have attempted
to keep the macro side consciously in play as a kind of counterpoint tension. We
hope we have shown how crucial change at the macro policy and systems level
is for facilitating and easing transition to a low-carbon, more democratic, and
fair economy. Indeed, there are a number of key policy questions that we have
raised directly or indicated in passing. These evident and practical possibilities
can be summarized as: 100 percent debt-free money: Why not mov e step by step
toward governments issuing democratic currency free of interest and, indeed,
removing from banks the power to freely issue money as high-cost debt?
Perm – Reform Solves – A2: Let It Collapse
Letting the system collapse on its own causes extinction – only struggle within the
capitalism can end the system
Schwartzman (Professor in the Department of Biology at Howard University, PhD in Geochemistry
from Brown University) 11
(David, Green New Deal: An Ecosocialist Perspective, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Volume 22, Issue 3,
18 Aug, pages 49-56)
And unlike the New Deal, achieving the GND on a global scale in the context of a robust solar
transition, by necessityaccompanied by demilitarization, will not end with a reinforcement of
militarized capital, as was the case in WWII and the Cold War aftermath. Rather, the GND
has real potential for opening up a path out of capitalism into ecosocialism. WWII
and the emergence of the MIC postponed the terminal crisis of capitalism to this century. Now
we face the welcome project of taking that terminal crisis on and finishing the job.
We need a strategy of transition. This should be a priority in theory and practice for
ecosocialists. Any Left worth its label and demonization by Glenn Beck and company must not
only confront the immediate needs of the great majority of those exploited and oppressed by big
capital, but also be a leader in organizing to fight back. So jobs, affordable housing, health and
child care, environmental quality, and environmental justice must be on the left agenda. But
what kind of jobs? For unsustainable or sustainable green production? And what about the
conditions for the reproduction of labor power, itself a site of multi-dimensional class struggle,
as Michael Lebowitz has argued (2003). Thus, the fightback program must confront the
ecological crisis and demand solutions that address climate change by embracing clean energy.
We should never advocate or even think that the “worse the better” will deliver
socialism by the collapse of capitalism, anticipating its terminal illness as hope.
For capitalism's dead weight will kill us all. No slogan or propaganda alone can
achieve success, as important as this ideological struggle is. Rather, only
multidimensional and local-to-transnational class struggle within capitalism
(see Abramsky's illuminating volume 2010) can terminate this system, which unfortunately
will not die a natural death on its own accord. It will have to be put to sleep forever. A critical
role of the ecosocialist Left is to identify the strategic class sectors—those existing and those in
formation—that will be the gravediggers of capitalism. Additionally, the ecosocialist Left
must also, of course, participate in the creation of a collective vision and its
realization as embryos within capitalism of the new global civilization ending the rule of
capital.
We now witness or can soon anticipate ongoing struggles for social governance of production
and consumption on all scales from neighborhood to global. Areas of struggle in this fight
should include nationalization of the energy, rail, and telecommunications industries;
municipalization of electric and water supplies; the creation and maintenance of
decentralized solar power, food, energy and farming cooperatives; the encouragement of
worker-owned factories (solidarity economy), the replacement of industrial and GMO
agriculture with agroecologies; the creation of green cities; and of course organizing the
unorganized in all sectors, especially GND workers. All of these objectives should be part of the
ecosocialist agenda for struggles around a GND, which of course, must include the termination
of the MIC. One outstanding example of how to begin is found in Mike Davis 2010), who argues
for the potential of a radical movement for green urbanism (see my commentary, Schwartzman,
2008).
Perm – Reform Solves – A2: Green Capitalism Link
A Green investment now is crucial to initiate a transition away from capitalism –
starting now is key to avoid extinction from warming
Schwartzman (Professor in the Department of Biology at Howard University, PhD in Geochemistry
from Brown University) 11
(David, Green New Deal: An Ecosocialist Perspective, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Volume 22, Issue 3,
18 Aug, pages 49-56)
Indeed, imposing such non-market
limits is imperative, but the struggle to impose
them must begin in capitalist societies now, and not be posed simply as the
policies of future socialism. Yes, aggressive energy conservation is imperative,
especially in the United States and other countries of the global North. We can all live better
with a sharp reduction of wasteful consumption, breathe clean air, drink clean water, and eat
organic food. Nevertheless, there needs to be a global increase in the power
capacity, employing clean energy and not fossil fuels or nuclear power, to insure every
child born on this planet has the material requirements for the highest quality of
life (Schwartzman and Schwartzman 2011).
But should we anticipate that Green Capitalism, even pushed to its limits by class
struggle, could indefinitely postpone the final demise of global capitalism and
could actually replace the present unsustainable energy base with a renewable power
infrastructure fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change (C3)? I submit this prospect is
highly unlikely. The legacy and political economy of real existing capitalism alone
makes global solar capitalism a delusion (Schwartzman2009). While the Pentagon pretends to
go “green,” it remains the servant of the imperial system protecting fossil fuel and strategic
metals flowing into the MIC, the Military Industrial (Fossil Fuel, Nuclear, State Terror)
Complex. The immense power of the MIC is the biggest obstacle to implementing an effective
prevention program that has a plausible chance of avoiding C3. The avoidance of C3 requires an
end to coal and fossil fuel addiction, giving up the nuclear option, and a rapid conversion to a
high-efficiency solar energy infrastructure.
To summarize, the MIC is at present the biggest single obstacle to preventing C3 because: It is
the present core of global capital reproduction with its colossal waste of energy and material
resources. The fossil fuel and nuclear industries are integrated within the MIC. The MIC has a
dominant role in setting the domestic and foreign policy agenda of the United States and other
leading capitalist countries. The Pentagon is the “global oil-protection service” for both the U.S.
imperial agenda (Klare 2007) and the transnational capital class itself (e.g., Robinson 2004). The
MIC's Imperial Agenda blocks the global cooperation and equity required to prevent C3.
Nevertheless, what the struggle for a GND [Green New Deal] can accomplish is very
significant, indeed critical to confronting the challenge of preventing C3
[Catastrophic Climate Change]. Humanity cannot afford to wait for socialism to
replace capitalism to begin implementing this prevention program [Italics
Original]. And I have argued that starting this prevention program under existing
capitalism can open up a path toward ecosocialist transition, indeed a 21st century
Socialism worthy of its name.
Climate science tells us we must proceed now for any plausible chance of avoiding
tipping points plunging us into C3. Green job creation is likewise the creation of
a new working-class sector committed to ending the fossil fuel addiction. Such an
historic shift to renewable energy supplies would be comparable to the industrial revolution that
replaced plant power in the form of wood and agricultural products with coal.
Monolith DA
Capitalism as a universal structure is both empirically incorrect and politically
disabling
White and Williams (senior lecturer of economic geography at Sheffield Hallam University; professor
of public policy in the Management School at the University of Sheffield) 12
(Richard J. and Cohn C., Escaping Capitalist Hegemony: Rereading Western Economies in The
Accumulation of Freedom, pg. 117-118)
"[O]n the left, we
get up in the morning opposing capitalism, not imagining
practical alternatives. In this sense, it is partly our own subjection-successful or failed,
accommodating or nppositinnnl that constructs a capitalist socity"1-J.IC Gibsnn-Grabam
"To re-read a landscape we have always read as capitalist, to read it as a landscape of difference,
populated hyvarious capitalist and noncapirslist economic practices and ˆlstirutinns-that is a
difficult task. It requires us to contend not only with our colonized imaginations, but with our
belieft about politics, understandings of power, conceptions of economy, and structures of
desire."--C.C. Williams Introduction
'This chapter contests the widely held belief that we exist in a "capitalist" world, one in
which goods and services are produced, distributed, and organized around the unadulterated
pursuit of profit in the marketplace. That this belief is both misguided and mistaken is
testament to the powerful economic discourse which colonizes the mind and
imagination into believing that capitalism is omnipresent, particularly so in the
Western economies. In 1898, Kropotkin observed:
[I] t is certain that in proportion as the human mind frees itself from ideas inculcated by
minorities of priests, military chiefs and judges, all striving to establish their domination, and of
scientists paid to perpetuate it, a conception of society arises, in which conception there is no
longer room for those dominating minorities.'
It is the desire to free the mind from the ideas inculcated by a dominant minority within
economies that informs the particular focus of this chapter. To this end the chapter will develop
a critical challenge to a central economic discourse-the eommodification thesis-on two important
grounds. The first is related to questioning the empirical data that claims to offer support to such
a dominant thesis. The second involves critically unpacking the regime of representation
and
discursive construction that effectively serves to legitimate the vested interests of
capital and constrain the actions of anarchist (and other) economic agents and policy
makers who desire to engage with and harness meaningful alternative economic
practices.
From a critical perspective, rethinking "the economic" is to engage in a process that
is highly subversive and long overdue. As this chapter argues, such a commitment allows
greater focus and clarity to emerge on a heterodox range of alternative/post-capitalist economic
practices, practices that are firmly embedded in the economic fabric of the contemporary world,
and particularly so in the "advanced" economies of the West. Importantly, the very act of
identifying dynamic, routine, non-capitalist practices as existing in the here and
now offers a practical and tangible opportunity to abandon the market without
the need to envisage, design, or agitate for a completely new alternative
economic system to capitalism. The chapter concludes by drawing on some key implications
that a rereading of economic practices has for transforming the way in which we should think
about our economic futures.
Monolith DA – A2: But it is!
Multiple aspects of the current economic system disprove their monolithic thesis
White and Williams (senior lecturer of economic geography at Sheffield Hallam University; professor
of public policy in the Management School at the University of Sheffield) 12
(Richard J. and Cohn C., Escaping Capitalist Hegemony: Rereading Western Economies in The
Accumulation of Freedom, pg. 129-31)
Further suspicion
about the legitimacy of the capitalist hegemony thesis can be
found in the problematic fact that non-exchanged work is extremely prevalent in
the Western world. The belief that non-monetized exchange is being systematically
overcome by market-based transactions embodied in Harvey's statement that "Monetary
relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect
of social, even private life"28 again begs the obvious question: where is the evidence?
When a concerted attempt is made to gather robust empirical data to support such a central tenet
this proves extremely difficult. In many Western countries there is a significant amount of work
that takes place on an unpaid basis, whether through more formal, voluntary-based groups or
organizations, or through informal networks of reciprocal support, such as mutual aid or unpaid
community exchange. In 2001, for example, the Home Office Active Citizenship Survey
identified that within the previous twelve months around 3.7 billion hours of volunteering had
taken place. Given that twentyseven million people work full-time for an average of thirty-five
hours per week, this 3.7 billion hours of volunteering equates to just over two million people
being in work on a full-time basis. Alternatively, it indicates that in the UK up to one hour is
spent working on a non-monetized basis for every fourteen hours spent working in formal
employment.
These statistics quite clearly indicate that the capitalist hegemonic belief that argues
that these economic spaces are marginal, residual, and disappearing is at best
grossly exaggerated. The reality is that nonmonetized exchange (that is to say
unpaid community work, mutual aid, or more formal voluntary work) continues to occupy
prevalent and important spaces within the contemporary economic landscapes in
Western society.
Not-For-Profit Monetary Transactions
Zelizer observed that Ca power54ideology of our time Us] that money is a single,
interchangeable, absolutely impersonal instrument-the very essence of our rationalizing modern
civilization."29 Certainly, the assumption that monetas' exchange is principally profit-motivated
cuts deep across economic discourses ranging from anarchism to neo-classicaiism.
This crude view of monetized exchange is often promoted across this range too, and is common
to those who welcome such a (natural) development, and those who cite this as another reason to
resist and push against any farther capitalist advances being made in society. Yet there are
many "alternative economic spaces" that exist as sites where not-for-profit
monetary transactions are commonplace including, but not limited to, garage
sales, car boot sales, charity shops, and local currency experiments such as
Local Exchange and Trading Scheme. 33 What quickly becomes apparent when looking
at the complexity of monetized exchange in contemporary society is that "money is neither
culturally neutral nor socially anonymous"34 and thus as Zeizer writes,
The classical economic inventory of money's functions' and attributes, based on the assumption
of a single general-purpose type of money, is unsuitably narrow. By focusing exclusively on
money as a market phenomenon, it fails to capture the very complex range of characteristics of
money as a social medium.. certain monies can be indivisible (or divisible but not in
mathematically predictab1e proportions), nonfungible, nonportable, deeply subjective and
qualitatively heterogeneous."
Ft is also worthwhile reflecting on the public sector, a sector which is not oriented towards profit
and still accounts for about 30-50 percent of GDP in Western economics. 36 Even if the public
sector is no longer as significant as it has been in terms of being a provider of goods and
services, it is important not to make the mistake of assuming that the provisions for these goods
and services have been taken up by the capitalist sector. The growth of the not-for-profit
sector has been seen in many Western economies, which represents around five
percent GDP. Drawing on data gathered by the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector
Project (CNP), Salamon arid Sokolowski examined the not-for-profit sector in twenty-four
countries. 37 In terms of economic impact this is a "$1.1 trillion industry that employs 19.5
million frill-time equivalent (FTE) paid workers in the twenty-four countries on which data are
so far available."38 As Table 3 shows, on average the nonprofit sector grew by 24 percent
between 1990-1995, compared to just an 8 percent rise in employment. In the United States, the
growth in employment stood at 8 percent during this time, whereas the growth in employment in
the nonprofit sector was 20 percent. In Europe (UK, Netherlands, Germany, France), whereas
growth in the total economy grew by 3 percent, the nonprofit sector increased by 24 percent.
Given such trends-far from reinforcing the link between the profit-motivated and
monetary exchange-it could be more properly suggested that this relationship is
diminishing.
Within the private sector, it is unquestioningly assumed by the supreme
representation of enterprises (themselves assumed to be coherent, predictable, ordered,
organized sites) that any monetary transactions are always and necessarily market-like, and
therefore driven principally by profit-motive rationales. Yet this relationship has
also come under the critical spotlight, with studies demonstrating that such an
assumption is not entirely robust, and there are examples of private-sector
enterprises that are not always driven by the necessity to make profit and do retain
sub-capitalist economic constructions and practices." To take one example, in seeking to open a
conversation about what a corporation is, O'Neill and Gibson-Graham analyzed the
Australian-based multinational BHP.4° 'The research questioned the capitalist notions of "the
company" in a way that ultimately "[piroduceEd] a decentred, 'disorganized' representation of
the enterprise." The researchers highlighted the unpredictable, social and open nature of the
enterprise-and decoupled the essentialist arguments of these entities, including the logic that they
are only driven by profit-motivated concerns. This itself was seen to be significant not only in
undermining popular representations of enterprise discourses, but in the act of producing a more
nuanced reading that has "the potential to liberate the political and geographical imagination,
and to proliferate alternative possibilities for regional futures and corporate-community
relationships.""
The result of this critique is one that argues that it is simply not the case, despite all the
popular assumptions to the contrary, to say that we live in a capitalist world. When all
the estimates are taken into account, significantly less than half of the Western
economies can be properly said to be aligned with commodity production driven
by capitalist profit-motivated monetary rationales and re1ationships (see Figure 3).
Baudrillard/Nietzsche Ans
Perm – 2AC Ressentiment NB
The force of communication/capital/whatever is not a reason to turn away from the
world – their fear of the fundamental terms of human existence is ressentiment
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
During a time when the expansion of capital, inter-territory media communication,
and population migration generate a more rapid minoridzation of the world, part of the
contemporary predicament is how to respond to the obdurate plurality of being
in positive ways. The pluralization of the world, in conjunction with bellicose
movements that turn militantly against it, forms a critical part of the
contemporary predicament. Today, it is important, first, to articulate comparative
readings of the human predicament, second, to affirm the reading that makes the
most sense of evidence, argument, and experience to you, third, to cultivate a
presumption of agonistic respect for other readings, and fourth, to find ways to
embrace without existential resentment the most fundamental character of being
as you yourself confess it to be. The "you" refers to intra-individual, micro- and
macro-assemblages of desire.
Positive Action Good
***Taking particular action against wrong you perceive in the world is necessary to
overcome ressentiment
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
A set of pertinent skills and dispositions to the enterprise of theory can be distilled from leading
philosophers of time as becoming, particularly if you allow each to be adjusted in the light of
considerations advanced by the others. I refer to Priedrich Nietzsche, William James, Alfred
North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze, though, as we have seen, others such as
Ilya Prigogine, Smart Kauffman, Marcel Proust, Merleau-Ponty, and Catherine Keller could be
added to the list. I will concentrate here, however, on the first group. Taken together, at least
four commendations can be distilled from them: i. To work upon the self and the culture
to which you belong, amplifying the feeling of attachment to the most
fundamental character of existence as such, as you yourself confess those terms in a
theistic or nontheistic vein. 2. To cultivate the capacity to dwell sensitively in
historically significant, forking moments. 3. To seek periodically to usher new
concepts and experimental actions into the world that show promise of
negotiating unexpected situations.. To recoil on those interventions periodically to
improve the chance that they do not pose more dangers or losses than the maxims they seek to
correct. The first task, to amplify attachment to this world, is important to all five thinkers, but it
finds perhaps its most fervent expression in the work of Nietzsche and Deleuze. To them, life in
a world of becoming carries the obdurate risk of fomenting cultural formations
infused with drives to existential revenge seeking available outlets. Both those who
embrace and those who deny this image of time face this risk, however. So it is imperative to
overcome resentment of the fundamental terms of existence as such, as you
understand them, in order to marshal the energy and drive to address the specific
dangers and injustices you perceive. Otherwise what starts as a fight in favor of
something positive can all too easily be twisted into a crushing demand to
punish others for faults you secretly resent about the most fundamental order of
being itself (as you understand it). Bergson, James, and Whitehead concur on this point too,
though it may find less dramatic expression in their work. Bergson and James embrace a limited
God as they cultivate gratitude for being, while Nietzsche and Deleuze, at theft best, exude
gratitude for an abundant world of becoming without divinity. Whitehead, whose thought is still
relatively new to me, seems to support the idea of an impersonal divinity that absorbs "external
objects" and sets limits of the possible in a world of becoming. His stance is perhaps tied to a
more beneficent view of the outer reaches of possibility tinn that advanced by Nietzsche,
Deleuze, and me. We seek to amplify attachment to the most fundamental character
of this world, amidst the tragic possibilities that inhabit a world neither
providential in the last instance nor susceptible to consummate human mastery.
***Acting in a world of becoming is life affirming – taking on the role of the seer is
powerful
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
Today, however, it
is important for more people to hone some of the capacities of a
seer and to exercise them periodically. When a period of turbulence arises in a zone that
had been relatively quiescent, you revisit a habitual pattern of thought by slipping into a creative
suspension of actionoriented perception, doing so to allow a new insight or tactic to bubble forth
if it will, as if from nowhere. You may then intervene in politics on the basis of that
insight, ready to recoil back on the insight in the light of its actual effects. You
soon launch another round as you maintain a relation of torsion between
following a train of thought, dwelling in duration, and exploring a revised course
that has just emerged, until your time runs out. Even those trains of thought will be
punctuated by little jumps and bumps, as they ride on rough tracks more akin to those
between New York and Washington than the smooth ones on the Kyoto-Tokyo line. Such are
the joys, risks, and travails of thinking and action in a world of
becoming -composed of multiple force-fields, and marked by small and large
moments of real creativity.
Positive Action Good – Belief In The World
We must cultivate a belief in the world that goes beyond merely negative breaks
with the features of the world we abhor
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
Such a characterization, as stated, is broad and not subjected to the pertinent qualifications. But such a condensation may
be needed to show how these diverse pressures affect each other. Ewe collect the pertinent shifts in contemporary
experience -from altered experiences of time to the minoritization of the world -we also sense how suth pressures can
accumulate for many to disconnect participation in the world from an automatic sense of belonging to the world. We can
see or at least feel the exaggeration in Merleau-Ponty's sense that the layering of embodiment suffices to secure essential
belonging. Today what Nietzsche called ressentiment- a
resentment of the most fundamental terms
of human existence as you yourself understand them - too readily becomes
insinuated into the pores of experience. The distribution of such a disposition is uneven, but it is not
confined to the interior souls of individuals. It can haunt entire constituencies; it can even
become embedded to varying degrees in institutions of investment, consumption,
electoral campaigns, governing, media reporting, church presentations, Internet debates, and military life. It is
perhaps at this point that Gilles Deleu.ze can enlarge our grasp of this condition and suggest at least one way to forge the
beginnings of a response to it. I refer to Deleu.ze's claim, one that touches the thought of Charles Taylor in advance in a
way that may surprise some, that today
we need to find ways to "restore belief in this
world?' Deleuze contends that today, though not for the first time, the distance between involvement
in the world and belief in it has grown. Recent developments in cinema simultaneously express these
larger developments, amplify them arid may suggest preliminary strategies of response that supersede existential
resentment. To put it another way, both Taylor and Deleuze think that part
of our predicament today is
existential, even though neither thinks that the predicament can simply be resolved
at this level of being. Here area few of Deleuze's formulations about what has been happening, since at least
the end of the Second World War: - It is clear from the outset that cinema had a special relationship with belief. There is
a Catholic quality to cinema (there are many explicitly Catholic authors... ). Cinema seems wholly within Nietzsche's
formula: "How we are still pious." Or better, from the outset, Christianity and revolution, the Christian faith and
revolutionary faith, were the two poles which attracted the art of the masses. - The modern fact is that we no longer
believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us... It is not we who make cinema; it is the
world which looks to us like a bad film. - The
link between man and the world is broken.
link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can
only be restored within a faith.. . Man is in the world as if in a pure optical or sound situation. The
Henceforth, this
reaction of which man has become dispossessed can be replaced only by belief.. . The cinema must film, not the world,
but belief in this world, our only link. - Because the point is to discover or restore belief in the world before or beyond
words... It is only, it is simply believing in the body. - Whether we are Christians or atheists, in our universal
schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world. 19 Deleuze thus speaks to the element of "schizophrenia" to be
addressed by both atheists and theists. He surely would not, then, endorse that group of new atheists who think that
simply following the logic of traditional science will dissolve the issues involved. Let me follow Deleuze further down
this trail: we will consider Taylor's response more closely in the next chapter. I am, of course, not confident that Taylor,
Deleuze, or I can forge a response that is sufficient to the issue. But perhaps it is pervasive and deep enough to warrant
making some preliminary attempts. How to restore belief in this world? Some writers, says Deleuze, (e.g., Artaud,
Kafka, and Proust), artists (Bacon and Magritte), philosophers (Nietzsche and Kierkegaard), and film directors (Welles,
Duras, and Rcantis) help us to think through this issue. They begin by first dramatizing a fugitive sense already there in
life of jumps and interruptions in experience, by portraying interruptions in smooth narratives. This is very active in film,
and such cinematic experience readily becomes coded into the sensitivity of experience beyond the theater. The
depth-of-field shots that conjoin dissonant elements of past and future, the irrational cuts through which sound and visual
experience confound each other, the aberrant modes of behavior in comedies that convey fugitive experiences exceeding
habitual experience, the flashbacks that mark a previous point of bifurcation at which one path was pursued and another
was allowed merely to fester as incipient potentiality- these cinema techniques both dramatize features of everyday life
already dimly available to us and place them at the forefront of attention for further reflection. The film tactics reviewed
by Deleuze anticipate new media experiments presented by Hansen earlier in this chapter. They expose us to experiences
of dissonance that cannot readily be submerged again, so that attempts to do so must be more virulent than under other
conditions of life. But such cinematic labors
of the negative are not sufficient; they certainly
do not suffice to promote positive attachment to this world. Even a "negative dialectic"
does not suffice. If things are left there, the embers of ressentiment can easily become
more inflamed. That is one reason Deleuze is never happy with negative critique alone: the next task is to
highlight how our participation in a world of real creativity that also finds expression elsewhere in the universe depends
on and draws from such fugitive interruptions. To put it too starkly (for situational nuances and adjustments are pertinent
here), the
more people who experience a positive connection between modes of
interruption and the possibility of our modest participation as individuals,
constituencies, states, and a species in creative processes extending beyond us,
the more apt we are to embrace the new temporal experiences around us as
valuable parts of existence as such. Certainly, absent a world catastrophe or a
repressive revolution that would create worse havoc than the conditions it seeks
to roll back, these consummate features of late-modem life are not apt to
dissipate soon. The fastest zones of late-modem life, for instance, are not apt to
slow down in the absence of a catastrophe that transforms everything. So the
radical task is to find ways to strengthen the connection between the
fundamental terms of late-modem existence and positive attachment to life as
such. This should be accomplished not by embracing exploitation and suffering,
but by challenging them as we come to terms with the larger trends.
A2: Nietzsche Link
Resentment of particular aspects of the world is inevitable and necessary to spur
action – acting to change the world is life affirming
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
By "belief
in this world:' neither Deleuze nor I, again, means that the established
distribution of power, exploitation, and inequality now in place is to be
protected, though some critics love to jump to this conclusion. Such arrangements make
people suffer too much, and they rest upon the repression of essential features of
the contemporary condition, including the minoritization of the world occurring
at a more rapid pace. Exploitation and domination are things to contest and
oppose, as Deleuze did actively while embracing the points reviewed above. The restoration
of belief in this world provides an existential resource to draw upon as those
struggles are fought energetically and creatively. Nor do we mean that it is always
illegitimate to resent your place in the world. Resentment is often a needed impetus to
action, even if it carries the danger of becoming transfigured into ressontimont.
It is existential resentment we worry about most, the kind that is apparent today in
practices of capitalist greed, religious exclusivity; media bellicosity, authoritarian strategies,
sexual narrowness, and military aggression. We mean, first, positive affirmation of the
cosmos in which human beings are set, as you yourself understand that cosmos,
second, coming to terms in a positive way with the enduring modem fact of
interruptions in experience and the faster pace at which minorithation occurs, and
third, accepting the contestability of your existential creed without profound
resentment of that condition.
No internal link to their lash out impact – It is only when the desire for revenge and
redemptive justice is allowed to take precedence is action against suffering resentful
and dangerous
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
It is perhaps salient to point out again how my attention to the rolling and roiling
interactions between hubris and existential resentment does not carry with it a
denial of the positive role that anger, resentment, indignation, and the like can
and do play in politics. There is no politics without passion. It is when the trials
of life /or the hubris of mastery slide into institutionally embedded drives to
existential revenge that things become most dangerous. That is a risk
accompanying any and every positive social movement. As we saw in chapter 3, it is
also a risk that we should engage self-critically as we respond to new
configurations of struggle.
A2: Excess of Language
***The part of language that always exceeds control or intention is not the end of
the possibility of communication or subjectivity, it is the beginning
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
Affect consists of relatively mobile energies with powers that flow into
conscious, cultural feeling and emotion; yet these affective energies also exceed
the formations they help to foment. Affect has an element of wildness in it. The human
being thus absorbs pressures from the world that both help to compose its
subjectivity and exceed it. There is no transcendental subject, but rather an
emergent, layered subject. Emotion with no affect would be dead, merely a pile
of words as empty containers; emotion and mood filled with affect often brim
over with energy-potentials that exceed ready-made articulations. The outside,
affect, and the politics of becoming are thus interinvolved. Seers make more of such
a network of inter-involvements than most of us do.
We must constantly hold intention the incompleteness of communication and its
necessity for acting in the world
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
The powers of the nutty professor limit him from another direction: the unruly mass of
incipiencies pressing urgently upon him inhibit his efficacy in everyday life; they can even stop
an incipient thought from being consolidated enough to pose a challenge to this or that
cliché -that is, to disturb something in settled understandings of God, identity, morality,
tolerance, causality, justice, finance, reason, or scientific method. The unruly swarm of
incipiencies consists of half-formed tendencies, while the operational world of well formed
judgments and resolute action unavoidably blocks, diverts, or absorbs some things on the way in
order to attain coherence and stability. This is the paradox residing in the human experience of
temporality as such. Everyone, including the most creative thinker, is thus doomed to be less
than they could be. This may explain why many viewers of The Nutty Professor tacitly include
themselves among the objects of friendly disparagement, as they laugh good naturedly at the
hapless teacher. Such laughter may express a paradox of being in the world : the persistent
discrepancy between the stereotypes appropriate to action-oriented perception
and communication on the one side and the loss of bearings needed to think
experimentally under new conditions on the other. Both modalities are part of
being in the world; each interferes with the efficacy of the other. This, again, is
the paradoxical condition of being in the world that Henri Bergson understood so well
and that theorists need to negotiate sensitively in the contemporary world of
becoming in which things often move faster than heretofore. The need is to
negotiate a new balance between action-oriented perception and dwelling in
fecund moments of temporal disequilibrium.
The acceleration of certain facets of technology and lived experience do not end the
possibility of acting positively in the world nor do they eliminate the possibility of
agency. Affirming a world constantly in a state of becoming is a founding condition
for agency that their strives towards mastery nor gives up on the possibility of
making a little bit better
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
You may initially connect the temper I commend to "optimism" or
"romanticism" rather than to the pessimism, coolness, realism, or abiding sense
of the negative that you respect. I don't see it that way, though. My sense is that those
who jump to such a conclusion have too limited an arsenal of ontological
alternatives available. To appreciate two registers of experience in a world of
becoming can also help us come to. terms with tragic possibility. Such an
appreciation encourages us to embrace the world as we act and intervene
resolutely in it, even though it is replete with neither divine providence nor
ready susceptibility to human mastery. Indeed, I doer read the absence of providence or
mastery as a "lack;' finding the use of that term by some to express a hangover of previous views
inadequately overcome in the view officially adopted. I also know that shared
experiences of grief or loss can help to consolidate connections with others, and
that collective anger, resentment, and indignation are often indispensable spurs
to critical action. So there is no sense here that "thinking it is so makes it so" or that
"optimism is always healthy?' These orientations are attached to a different take on existence
than that advanced here, though there are people who confuse the two. I do suspect that when
inordinate drives for individual self-sufficiency, unity, community, consensus, or divine
redemption are severely disappointed, things can become dangerous. These disappointed
drives -I am sure there• are others as wellreadily cross over into entrenched dispositions to take
revenge on the most fundamental terms of human existence, as a person, a constituency, or a
putative nation grasps those terms. If and when that happens, an exclusionary, punitive,
scandal-ridden, bitter politics is aprto result, regardless of how the carriers represent themselves
to others. Here actions speak louder than words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A world of becoming has considerable evidence on its side, as we shall. see;
and affirmation of this condition without existential taut provides one way to act
resolutely in the world while warding off individual and collective drives to
existential resentment, There are others, as we. shall also see. Given the human predicament
(explored in chapter 4), no theological or nontheological perspective at this level carries
iron-clad guarantees. A crack or fissure running through every final perspective is part of the
human predicament as I construe it . .. . H
On my rendering, the
course of time is neither governed solely by a pattern of
efficient causation -where each event is determined to occur by some prior event in linear
temporal order - nor expressive of an inherent purpose revolving around the human
animal as such. Neither/nor. To put it indifferent terms, time is neither mechanical nor
organic, and its human apprehension is neither susceptible to the method of "individualism" nor
that of "holism? We participate, rather, in a world of becoming in a universe set on multiple
zones of temporality, with each temporal force-field periodically encountering others as outside
forces, and the whole universe open to an uncertain degree. From this perspective, tragic
possibility-not inevitability but possibility- is real: tragic possibility as seen from the vantage
point of your time or country or species; tragic possibility sometimes actualized through the
combination of hubris and an unlikely conjunction of events. Or by some other combination. I
even suspect that differential degrees of agency in other force-fields, with which we enter into
encounters of many types, increases the risk of that possibility. The universe is not only open;
there is an "outside" to every temporal force-field. We are not only limited as agents, but part of
our limitation comes from the different degrees of agency in other force-fields with which we
interact. The operation of multiple tiers of becoming in a world without a higher
purpose amplifies the need to act with dispatch, and sometimes with militancy,
in particular situations of stress. The fact that we are not consummate agents in such a
world, combined with the human tendency to hubris, means that we must work to cultivate
wisdom under these very circumstances. These two dictates, engendering each other while
remaining in tension, constitute the problematic of political action in a world of becoming.
William James, Henri Bergson, Ptiedrich Nietzsche, Alfred North Whitehead, and Glues
Deleuze all advance different versions of time as becoming. Perhaps Merleau-Ponty and Marcel
Proust do too, with qualifications. I draw from several of them the idea that it takes both
philosophical speculation linked to scientific experiment and dwelling in uncanny experiences of
duration to vindicate such an adventure. Both. Luckily, as we shall see, some strains of
complexity theory in the natural sciences also support the theme of time as becoming as they
compose new experiments and rework classical conceptions of causality. Moreover, in
everyday life fugitive glimmers of becoming are available to more people more
of the time, as we experience the acceleration of many zones of life, the
enhanced visibility of natural disasters across the globe, the numerous pressures
to minoritize the entire world along several dimensions at a more rapid pace, the
globalization of capital and contingency together, the previously unexpected ingress of capital
into climate change, the growing number of film experiments with the uncanniness of time, and
the enlarged human grasp of the intelligence and differential degrees of agency in other plant
and animal species. Such experiences and experiments together call into question early modem
conceptions of time. Many. respond to such experiences by intensifying religious
and secular drives to protect an established image, as either linear and progres-. sive or
infused with divine providence. I suspect, however, that such responses - unless their proponents
actively engage the comparative contestsbility of them without deep existential resentment-can
amplify the dangers and destructiveness facing our time Or, at least, they need to be put into
more active competition with a conception that speaks to an array of contemporary experiences
otherwise pushed into the shadows.
To amplify the experience of becoming is one affirmative way to belong to time
today. Active exploration and support of such a perspective can make a positive
contribution to the late-modem period by drawing more people• toward such a
perspective or by showing others how much work they need to do to vindicate
their own perspective. I belong to a growing contingent who think that a perspective defined
by active examination of becoming can make positive contributions to
explorations of spirituality, economics, political action, poetic experience, and
ethics.
As already indicated, periodic sensitivity to a rich drop of time merely sets a threshold condition
to, entertain the themes advanced here. More is needed to endow them with plausibility. The
threshold condition, nonetheless, may be important, for it opens a window to place the
theme of a world of becoming in relation to other conceptions of time and it may
increase the possibility of positive engagement between bearers of alternative
ontotheological images of time. I wish you had been at that party with me.
A2: Ressentiment/Victimization
Resentment of particular aspects of the world is inevitable and necessary – it is only
Loyola’s resentment of the very terms of human experience that is truly dangerous.
We must begin with an affirmation of belief in the world
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
By "belief
in this world:' neither Deleuze nor I, again, means that the established
distribution of power, exploitation, and inequality now in place is to be
protected, though some critics love to jump to this conclusion. Such arrangements make
people suffer too much, and they rest upon the repression of essential features of
the contemporary condition, including the minoritization of the world occurring
at a more rapid pace. Exploitation and domination are things to contest and
oppose, as Deleuze did actively while embracing the points reviewed above. The restoration
of belief in this world provides an existential resource to draw upon as those
struggles are fought energetically and creatively. Nor do we mean that it is always
illegitimate to resent your place in the world. Resentment is often a needed impetus to
action, even if it carries the danger of becoming transfigured into ressontimont.
It is existential resentment we worry about most, the kind that is apparent today in
practices of capitalist greed, religious exclusivity; media bellicosity, authoritarian strategies,
sexual narrowness, and military aggression. We mean, first, positive affirmation of the
cosmos in which human beings are set, as you yourself understand that cosmos,
second, coming to terms in a positive way with the enduring modem fact of
interruptions in experience and the faster pace at which minorithation occurs, and
third, accepting the contestability of your existential creed without profound
resentment of that condition.
No internal link to their lash out impact – It is only when the desire for revenge and
redemptive justice is allowed to take precedence is action against suffering resentful
and dangerous
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
It is perhaps salient to point out again how my attention to the rolling and roiling
interactions between hubris and existential resentment does not carry with it a
denial of the positive role that anger, resentment, indignation, and the like can
and do play in politics. There is no politics without passion. It is when the trials
of life /or the hubris of mastery slide into institutionally embedded drives to
existential revenge that things become most dangerous. That is a risk
accompanying any and every positive social movement. As we saw in chapter 3, it is
also a risk that we should engage self-critically as we respond to new
configurations of struggle.
State Good
Perm/Corporate Offense
Must consider each use of sovereignty as unique – cannot universalize our
opposition to the state or we will create the same problems of universal sovereignty
and give ourselves over to multiple other forms of oppression
Derrida 3
(Jacques, THE "WORLD" OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO COME (EXCEPTION, CALCULATION,
SOVEREIGNTY), Research in Phenomenology. Pittsburgh: 2003. Vol. 33 pg. 9, 44 pgs)
And yet, in the second place, it would be imprudent and hasty, in truth hardly reasonable, to
oppose unconditionally, that is, head on, a sovereignty that is itself unconditional and
indivisible. One cannot combat, head on, all sovereignty, sovereignty in general,
without threatening at the same time, beyond the nation-state figure of sovereignty, the
classical principles of freedom and self-determination. Like the classical tradition of law
(and the force that it presupposes), these classical principles remain inseparable from a sovereignty at
once indivisible and yet able to be shared. Nation-state sovereignty can even itself, in certain
conditions, become an indispensable bulwark against certain international powers,
certain ideological, religious, or capitalist, indeed linguistic, hegemonies, which,
under the cover of liberalism or universalism, would still represent, in a world that
would be little more than a market, a rationalization in the service of particular
interests. Yet again, in a context that is each time singular, where the respectful attention paid
to singularity is not relativist but universalizable and rational, responsibility would consist in
orienting ourselves without any determinative knowledge of the rule. To be
responsible, to keep within reason [garder raison], would be to invent maxims of
transaction for deciding between two just as rational and universal but contradictory
exigencies of reason as well as its enlightenment.
Right Takeover DA
Radical politics must engage the state – the alt is right wing take over
Mouffe 10
(What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pg. 235)
It is clear that, once we envisage social reality in terms of ‘hegemonic and ‘counter-hegemonic’
practices, radical politics is not about withdrawing completely from existing
institutions. Rather, we have no other choice but to engage with hegemonic
practices, in order to challenge them. This is crucial’ otherwise we will be faced with a
chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with and challenge the existing
order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state completely, we leave the
door open for others to take control of systems of authority and regulation. Indeed
there are many historical (and not so historical) examples of this. When the Left
shows little interest, Right-wing and authoritarian groups are only too happy to
take over the state.
The left is failing because of a suspicion of the nation state – we might fight the right
at all levels in order to be effective
Grayson and Little 11
(Deborah Grayson and Ben Little 4 August 2011, The far right are the masters of network politics, not the
'internationalist' left, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/deborah-grayson-and-ben-little/far-rightare-masters-of-network-politics-not-internationa)
While Norway mourns and attends to matters of justice, across Europe the left would be wise to
pause and reflect upon the mixed responses to the worst case of child murder in northern Europe
since the Second World War. We can only hope that Anders Breivik is a lone operator and that
we will not see this kind of politically motivated mass murder repeated in the UK or anywhere
else, but in showing how right wing ideology is formed and disseminated through increasingly
international networks, the Utoya massacre has lessons for us all.
Although globally oriented ‘lefties’ may like to think this is a contradiction in
terms, it is the far right who are pioneering the way towards a new form of
internationalism. This is not to say that they have lost their attachment to the
nation – for all that vigilantes like Breivik may think in civilisational or European terms, “small
state” nationalism remains the bedrock of their politics. Those that see the blurring of
boundaries between European and national perspectives as a sign of incoherence
which will diminish the power of these ideological beliefs are mistaken. In an age
of network politics it's a strength, and one that the left needs to understand if we
are to reverse the electoral successes of the centre-right and the populist rise of the farright across Europe. So far, the left has struggled to match the way far-right
networks have learned to scale seamlessly from the local to the civilisational
through the conceptual space of the national. The English Defence League, for example,
explain local opposition to their marches as stemming from the malign influence of the SWP’s
campaign, Unite Against Fascism; cite the welfare state as evidence of leftist domination in
national politics; and see in the European Court of Human Rights the imposition of socialist,
multicultural values across the entire continent. This sense of multiple scales allows the
EDL to create a language that reflects their politics at every level, and to
communicate their message across local and national boundaries. They create a
unified rhetoric that the left, with their suspicion of the national, cannot
replicate.
Structural Violence Ans
No impact to structural violence
a. Declining Now
Larry Obhof, JD @ Yale, 2003 (“WHY GLOBALIZATION? A LOOK AT GLOBAL CAPITALISM
AND ITS EFFECTS”. University of Florida Journal of Law & Public Policy. Fall 2003)
The effects of globalization have largely been positive for both developed and developing
countries. Consider, for example, the effects of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, which
lasted from 1986 to 1994 and resulted in agreements to reduce tariffs and other non-tariff
barriers. Advanced countries agreed to lower their tariffs by an average of 40%, and [*99] the
signatories agreed to liberalize trade in the important areas of agriculture and clothing. n32
The effects of the Uruguay Round have been both positive and large. Reducing tariffs and
non-tariff barriers has produced annual increases in global GDP of $ 100-300 billion.
n33 This figure is five times larger than the total worldwide aid to developing
countries. n34 More importantly, a significant share of this increase has gone to the
poorest people. The percentage of the population in developing countries living under $ 1 per
day has fallen from 30% to 24% in the past decade. n35 The recent experience of Mexico offers
an excellent example of global capitalism in action. The extent of poverty in Mexico is shocking;
20 million people live on less than $ 2 per day. n36 This is so for a number of reasons, including
government intervention in the market in the form of protectionist measures intended to help
ailing or failing industries. Using government interventions to shape the allocation of resources
traditionally led to gross inefficiencies and a low pace of innovation and adoption of new
technologies. n37 Trade liberalization has helped curb such interventions - indeed, the opening
of its markets has become one of the most important and far-reaching reforms in Mexico. The
effects of trade liberalization on the Mexican economy have been significant. Exports in Mexico
have increased sixfold since 1985, and the GDP of the country has grown at an average rate of
5.4% per year since 1996. n38 Since NAFTA created a "free trade area" among the United
States, Canada, and Mexico in 1994, Mexican labor productivity has grown fast in its tradable
sectors. n39 Not surprisingly, however, productivity has remained stagnant in nontradable
sectors. n40 NAFTA has also improved Mexico's aggregate trade balance and helped to
ameliorate the effect of the [*100] peso crisis on capital flows. n41 As most economists
predicted during the NAFTA debate, the effects of the agreement have been positive and large
for Mexico. n42 The effects have also been positive, although smaller, for the United States.
This is also consistent with the pre-NAFTA analyses of most economists. n43 The positive
effects of globalization have been consistent throughout the developing world. Dramatic
increases in per capita income have accompanied the expansion of trade in countries that have
become more globalized. Korea, for example, has seen average incomes increase eightfold since
1960. n44 China has experienced an average growth of 5.1% during the same period, and other
countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have experienced faster growth
than that in advanced countries. n45 The evidence is incredibly one-sided.
"[P]romoting openness, and supporting it with sound domestic policies, leads to faster growth."
n46 The most successful third of developing countries have lowered average import tariffs by
34% and increased trade relative to income by 104% since 1980. n47 Per capita income in
these countries rose by a yearly average of [*101] 3.5% in the 1980s, and a yearly average
of 5% in the 1990s. n48 The remaining developing countries, which have lowered tariffs by
an average of only 11%, experienced "little or no growth in GDP per capita in the post-1980
period." n49 In countries that have become more open, increased growth has undoubtedly been
good for the poor. "Cross-country evidence suggests that the incomes of the poorest 20 percent
of the population increase roughly one-for-one with the average per capita income." n50 Some
studies have found an even stronger effect: a 1% increase in the average per capita income is
associated with a reduction in poverty rates by up to 3.5%. n51 Poverty rates fall, almost
always, simultaneously with growth in average living standards. The evidence is clear:
increasing integration leads to greater growth, and with it, greater income levels, particularly for
the poorest. n52
b. Not root of war and Case Turns it
Goldstein 1 (Joshua S., Professor Emeritus of International Relations – American University, Adjunct
Professor in the Watson Institute for International Studies – Brown University, War and Gender: How
Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, p. 412)
First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace.
Many peace scholars and activists support the approach, “if you want peace, work for justice.” Then,
if one believes that sexism contributes to war, one can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps among others) in
order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but
rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this book suggests that
causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism,
gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars’ outbreaks and
outcomes. Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices. So, “if you want
peace, work for peace.” Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace. Causality does
not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It
runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military may be the most
important way to “reverse women’s oppression.” The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice
brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this book’s
evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.
Global/Local
Perm Solves
Perm Do Both –connecting the global and local are key to movements success AND
Acting only at the local level ensures domination is just moved to some other locality
Davis (Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Hawaii) 11
(Sasha, The US military base network and contemporary colonialism: Power projection, resistance and the quest for operational
unilateralism, Political Geography xxx (2011))
In this analysis of the shifting US military base network I have endeavored to examine the impacts and resistances going
on in these “towns and villages” so as to better understand the US military’s global network. As geographers have long
been aware, acting
at the global or local scale is not an either/or choice: acting in the
world at any scale has ramifications at a variety of scales. Increasingly, local antimilitarization groups have recognized this and have started to more formally
engage in activism at a variety of other scales including the global. At the global
conference against military bases in 2007 activists put forward the view that the global imperial present is held together
by violences committed in (colonized) place. That violence may be wielded globally, but it is produced at local sites.
Furthermore, its operation relies on particular sites being legitimately seen as landscapes of emptiness or sacrifice. So
when people resist these interpretations of place and claim them as places of life it not only makes everyday life more
tolerable but also has repercussions at other scales. The military has currently been able to use its ability to
spatially shif t its activities to maintain its domination. Activists, however, are
attempting to
incorporate a global vision into their movements so that local victories do not
become someone else’s loss; rather they become the beginning of the empire’s
unraveling.
A2: Trade Off DA
No Trade Off
a. Rooted cosmopolitanism solves their offence – their focus arguments are a false
dichotomy. Our evidence includes testimony from activists that empirically disprove
their value to life claims
Yeo (Assistant Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America) 9
(Andrew, Not in Anyone’s Backyard: The Emergence and Identity of a Transnational Anti-Base Network, International Studies
Quarterly (2009) 53, 571–594)
The choice between local and global is admittedly a false dichotomy. Although an
activist may identify more closely with their local movement over the global
anti-base movement or vice-versa, to some degree, actors identify with both
movements. In response to a question asking whether one identifies more with the local or global movement, a
Philippine activist and IOC member reported, ‘‘[i]t is important for me to say both
(emphasis hers). My work and grounding in the national anti-bases movement in
the Philippines is what I carry and take with me as part of the Global No Bases
Movement. Both works have to be integrated. I can not be an effective member of a global No
Bases movement if I am not grounded in our own local struggle in the Philippines.’’ This comment is telling because it
sheds light on the identity of transnational anti-base activists. The IOC member’s comment confirms what scholars have
transnational activists: they are ‘‘rooted cosmopolitans.’’ The notion
of a rooted cosmopolitan is what enables activists to connect their local frame
of movement with the global No Bases movement.
earlier argued about
b. Working at the global level does not erase local concerns – modern antimilitarism movements proves
Yeo (Assistant Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America) 9
(Andrew, Not in Anyone’s Backyard: The Emergence and Identity of a Transnational Anti-Base Network, International Studies
Quarterly (2009) 53, 571–594)
Without denying the importance of previous anti-base solidarity efforts, I argue that the
Iraq War enabled
anti-base activists to take advantage of global frames to accelerate the process
of organizing an international network against foreign military bases. For sure, a
small space at the transnational level existed even prior to the Iraq War through processes of diffusion and scale shift.
The Iraq War, however, facilitated a horizontal spillover process. In particular, anti-base actors active in broader antiwar and global justice movements acted as brokers, taking concrete steps in forming an international anti-base network.
Through frame-bridging and frame extension, anti-base activists were able to reframe the bases issue. A
master
frame identifying military bases as ‘‘instruments of war and impe- rialism’’
naturally resonated with actors in the larger ‘‘network of networks.’’ Whether
intentional or not, this master frame helped solidify a transnational anti-base
identity. Paradoxically, however, I argue that even as actors crossed horizontal divides
and vertical gaps to come together at the transnational dimen- sion,
transnational identities did not necessarily replace national ones, confirming the
notion of transnational activists as ‘‘rooted cosmopolitans.’’ This conclusion is supported
by the author’s findings through participant observation, group discussions, and a preliminary survey conducted at the
2007 International No Bases conference. Figure 1 highlights the vertical and horizontal processes behind the emerging
international No-Bases network.
A2: Cooption/State Link
And despite threats of cooption, being able to forge ties with those in power is
necessary to the success of movements
Yeo (Assistant Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America) 11
(Andrew, Activists, Alliances, and Anti-U.S. Base Protests, Cambridge University Press, pg 196-7)
In the previous section, 1 covered several policy implications and prescriptions for U.S. overseas basing strategy.
What insights and lessons can be drawn for anti-base movements? I offer four sets of
recommendations for activists regarding anti-base movement strategy and advocacy. The first suggestion stems directly
from the security consensus framework: when
possible, activists should form ties with
political elites. As discussed in the introductory chapter, U.S. base policies are ultimately
decided by government officials. Therefore, anti-base movements gain greater
leverage and influence on basing policy outcomes when they form ties with key
elites. This was certainly the case with successful anti-base movements such as the
Anti-Treaty Movement in the Philippines and No Bases Coalition in Ecuador.
Although not included in this volume, ties qeen Puerto Rican anti-base activists and several U.S. congressional repre
utatives helped activists shut down Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Vieques it, Loo-i. The support of several prominent
U.S. political figures such as Hillary Clinton and Jesse Jackson, and the direct involvement of U.S. representatives 11ch
as Nydia M. Velasquez and Luis V. Gutierrez, increased publicity and political leverage for the Vieques movement.57
Encouraging anti-base movements to form ties with sympathetic elites seems u'f-evident. Yet, one might find surprising
the level of resistance to this suggestion by some activists. Ties
to political elites raise the specter of
co-optation. The lack of trust in politicians, the political establishment, or more generally formal politics often
stems from activists' own experience and interaction with government officials over the course of several movement
episodes. This attitude was expressed by several anti-base activists in South Korea, Japan, and even the Philippines.
Activists in \ticeura also faced heated discussions over strategy: Should they maintain support for radical
left parties? At the local level, should movement leaders move from informal to more formal
avenues of politics? Although the wariness of movements in engaging formal political actors is
understandable, research across several anti-base movement episodes suggests that
movements that form alliances with political elites and engage base politics
through both formal and informal channels tend to have a greater impact on basing policy
outcomes.
A2: Global-Local – Alt  Right Wing
The left is failing because of a suspicion of the nation state – we might fight the right
at all levels in order to be effective
Grayson and Little 11
(Deborah Grayson and Ben Little 4 August 2011, The far right are the masters of network politics, not the
'internationalist' left, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/deborah-grayson-and-ben-little/far-rightare-masters-of-network-politics-not-internationa)
While Norway mourns and attends to matters of justice, across Europe the left would be wise to
pause and reflect upon the mixed responses to the worst case of child murder in northern Europe
since the Second World War. We can only hope that Anders Breivik is a lone operator and that
we will not see this kind of politically motivated mass murder repeated in the UK or anywhere
else, but in showing how right wing ideology is formed and disseminated through increasingly
international networks, the Utoya massacre has lessons for us all.
Although globally oriented ‘lefties’ may like to think this is a contradiction in
terms, it is the far right who are pioneering the way towards a new form of
internationalism. This is not to say that they have lost their attachment to the
nation – for all that vigilantes like Breivik may think in civilisational or European terms, “small
state” nationalism remains the bedrock of their politics. Those that see the blurring of
boundaries between European and national perspectives as a sign of incoherence
which will diminish the power of these ideological beliefs are mistaken. In an age
of network politics it's a strength, and one that the left needs to understand if we
are to reverse the electoral successes of the centre-right and the populist rise of the farright across Europe. So far, the left has struggled to match the way far-right
networks have learned to scale seamlessly from the local to the civilisational
through the conceptual space of the national. The English Defence League, for example,
explain local opposition to their marches as stemming from the malign influence of the SWP’s
campaign, Unite Against Fascism; cite the welfare state as evidence of leftist domination in
national politics; and see in the European Court of Human Rights the imposition of socialist,
multicultural values across the entire continent. This sense of multiple scales allows the
EDL to create a language that reflects their politics at every level, and to
communicate their message across local and national boundaries. They create a
unified rhetoric that the left, with their suspicion of the national, cannot
replicate.