Afro Pessimism Negative

Offcase

Social Death K

1NC

( ) The logic of social death replicates the violence of the middle passage – rejection is necessary to honor the deadBrown 2009 – professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)

But this was not the emphasis of Patterson’s argument. As a result, those he has inspired have often conflated his

exposition of slaveholding ideology with a description of the actual condition of the enslaved. Seen as a state of being, the concept of social death is ultimately out of place in the political history of slavery. If studies of slavery would account for the outlooks and maneuvers of the enslaved as an important part of that history, scholars would do better to keep in view the struggle against alienation rather than alienation itself. To see social death as a productive peril entails a subtle but significant shift in perspective, from seeing slavery as a condition to viewing enslavement

as a predicament, in which enslaved Africans and their descendants never ceased to pursue a politics of belonging, mourning, accounting, and regeneration. In part, the usefulness of social death as a concept depends on what scholars of slavery seek to explain—black pathology or black politics, resistance or attempts to remake social life? For too long, debates about whether there were black families took precedence over discussions of how such families were formed; disputes about whether African culture had “survived” in the Americas overwhelmed discussions of how particular practices mediated slaves’ attempts to survive; and scholars felt compelled to prioritize the documentation of resistance over the examination of political strife in its myriad forms. But of course, because slaves’ social and political life grew directly out of the violence and dislocation of Atlantic slavery, these are false choices. And we may not even have to choose between tragic and romantic modes of storytelling, for history tinged with romance may offer the truest acknowledgment of the tragedy confronted by the enslaved: it took heroic effort for them to make social lives. There is romance, too, in the tragic fact that although scholars may never be able to

give a satisfactory account of the human experience in slavery, they nevertheless continue to try. If scholars were to emphasize the efforts of the enslaved more than the condition of slavery, we might at least tell richer stories about how the endeavors of the weakest and most abject have at times reshaped the world. The history of their social and political lives lies between resistance and oblivion, not in the nature of their condition but in their continuous struggles to remake it. Those struggles are slavery’s bequest to us.

( ) This is an apriori questionBrown 2009 – professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)

African American history has grown from the kinds of people’s histories that emphasize a progressive struggle toward an ultimate victory over the tyranny of the powerful. Consequently, studies that privilege the perspectives of the enslaved depend in some measure on the chronicling of heroic achievement, and historians of slave culture and resistance have recently been accused of romanticizing their subject of study.42 Because these scholars have done so much to enhance our understanding of slave life beyond what was imaginable a scant few generations ago,

the allegation may seem unfair. Nevertheless, some of the criticisms are helpful. As the historian Walter Johnson has argued, studies of slavery conducted within the terms of social history have often taken “agency,” or the self-willed activity of choice-making subjects, to be their starting point.43 Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that many historians would find themselves charged with depicting slave communities and cultures that were so resistant and so vibrant that the social relations of slavery must not have done much damage

at all. Even if this particular accusation is a form of caricature, it contains an important insight, that the agency of the weak and the power of the strong have too often been viewed as simple opposites. The anthropologist David Scott is probably correct to suggest that for most scholars, the power of slaveholders and the damage wrought by slavery have been “pictured principally as a negative or limiting force” that “restricted, blocked, paralyzed, or deformed the transformative agency of the slave.”44 In this sense, scholars who have emphasized slavery’s corrosive power and those who stress resistance

and resilience share the same assumption. However, the violent domination of slavery generated political action; it was not antithetical to it. If one sees power as productive and the fear of social death not as incapacity but as a generative force—a peril that motivated enslaved activity— a different image of slavery slides into view, one in which the object of slave politics is not simply the power of slaveholders, but the very terms and conditions of social existence.

2NC Overview

Wilderson’s view of social death dismisses transformative politics

a. By focusing on the horror of slavery, rather than the progressive politics which emerged from it, Wilderson dismisses all forms of African American innovation and resistance

b. Regaining agency by rejecting this deterministic approach is a prerequisite- that’s Brown

Turns Case – Grammar of Suffering

( ) Their essentialist understanding of the history of the slavery silences and obscures the languages of gratuitous freedom – Turns CaseBrown 2009 – professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)

WRITING THE HISTORY OF SLAVERY in a way that emphasizes struggles against social alienation requires some

readjustment in commonplace understandings of culture and politics. Historians and social scientists have often debated the question of slave cultures and the cultures of slavery through residual Victorian understandings of culture as the civilizational achievements of “the West,” “Africa,” or various other groups, to be attained, lost,

or re-created. The meanings attributed to things are often taken to indicate complete and integrated systems of belief and behavior, even identities, that corresponded to distinct population groups. This approach has been subjected to critical scrutiny in a number of disciplines.45 While culture may still refer to what William Sewell, Jr. has called “the particular shapes and consistencies of worlds of meaning in different places and times” that somehow fit together despite tension and conflict, the fluidity of this definition would suggest that practices of meaning are better seen as tools to be used than as possessions to be lost.46 And though culture is still sometimes portrayed as a holistic set of worldviews or attitudes commensurate with circumscribed populations,

historical writers should begin from a different point of departure, highlighting instead particular meanings as situational guides to consequential action—motivations, sometimes temporary, that are best evaluated in terms of how they are publicly enacted, shared, and reproduced. The focus would be less on finding an integrated and coherent ethos among slaves

and more on the particular acts of communication that allowed enslaved people to articulate idioms of belonging, similarity, and distinction. The virtues of this method are on display in James Sidbury’s Becoming African in America: Race

and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic, which shows how Anglophone black people expressed their sense of being African “in tension with, and in partial opposition to, memories and experiences of the indigenous cultures of Africa, rather than directly out of them.”47 The meaning of the category “African” was not merely a reflection of cultural tenacity but the consequence of repeated acts of political imagination.

Extension – Social Death Bad

Claiming social death turns the aff –

1) It reinforces the notion of black deviance

2) It uses the language of modernity they criticize

3) It applies a snapshot picture of antebellum slavery to justify its assertionBrown 2009 – professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)

Having emerged from the discipline of sociology, “social death” fit comfortably within a scholarly tradition that had generally been more alert to deviations in patterns of black life from prevailing social norms than to the worldviews, strategies, and social tactics of people in black communities. Together with Patterson’s work on the distortions wrought by slavery on black families, “social death” reflected sociology’s abiding concern with “social pathology”; the “pathological condition” of twentieth-century black life could be seen as an outcome of the damage that black people had suffered during slavery. University of Chicago professor Robert Park, the grand-pe`re of the social pathologists, set the terms in 1919: “the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical

temperament.”8 Patterson’s distillation also conformed to the nomothetic imperative

of social science, which has traditionally aimed to discover universal laws of operation that would be true regardless of time and place, making the synchronic study of social phenomena more tempting than more descriptive studies of historical

transformation. Slavery and Social Death took shape during a period when largely synchronic studies of antebellum slavery in the United States dominated the scholarship on human bondage, and Patterson’s expansive view was meant to situate U.S. slavery in a broad context rather than to discuss changes as the institution developed through time. Thus one might see “social death” as an obsolete product of its time and tradition, an academic artifact with limited purchase for contemporary scholarship, were it not for the concept’s reemergence in some important new studies of slavery.9

Turn – Agency

( ) Social death is a reductionist concept that does little to actually explain the slave experience – this pessimistic view erases notions of agency of the oppressed people. Brown 09 [Vincent; AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2009 http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf //liam]

Slavery and Social Death was widely reviewed and lavishly praised for its erudition and conceptual rigor. As a result of its success, social death has become a handy general definition of slavery, for many historians and non-

historians alike. But it is often forgotten that the concept of social death is a distillation from Patterson’s breathtaking survey—a theoretical abstraction that is meant not to describe the lived experiences of the enslaved so much as to reduce them to a least common denominator that could reveal the essence of slavery in an ideal-type slave, shorn of meaningful heritage.6 As a concept, it is what Frederick Cooper

has called an “agentless abstraction” that provides a neat cultural logic but ultimately does little to illuminate the social and political experience of enslavement and the struggles that produce historic transformations.7 Indeed, it is difficult to use such a distillation to explain the actual behavior of slaves, and yet in much of the scholarship that followed in the wake of Slavery and Social Death, Patterson’s abstract distillates have been used to explain the existential

condition of the enslaved. Having emerged from the discipline of sociology, “social death” fit comfortably within a scholarly tradition that had generally been more alert to deviations in patterns of black life from prevailing social norms than to the worldviews, strategies, and social tactics of people in black communities. Together with Patterson’s work on the distortions wrought by slavery on black families, “social death” reflected sociology’s abiding concern with “social pathology”; the “pathological condition” of twentieth-century black life could be seen as an outcome of the damage that black people had suffered during slavery. University of Chicago professor Robert Park, the grand-pe`re of the social pathologists, set the terms in 1919: “the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind almost everything but his dark

complexion and his tropical temperament.”8 Patterson’s distillation also conformed to the nomothetic imperative of social science, which has traditionally aimed to discover universal laws of operation that would be true regardless of time and place, making the synchronic study of social phenomena more tempting than more descriptive studies of historical transformation. Slavery and Social Death took shape during a period when largely synchronic studies of antebellum slavery in the United States dominated the scholarship on human bondage, and Patterson’s expansive view was meant to situate U.S. slavery in a broad context rather than to discuss changes as

the institution developed through time. Thus one might see “social death” as an obsolete product of its time and tradition, an academic artifact with limited purchase for contemporary scholarship, were it not for the concept’s reemergence in some important new studies of slavery.9 WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED AS AMONG the most onerous of social institutions, slavery has much to tell us about the

way human beings react to oppression. At the same time, the extreme nature of the institution naturally encourages a pessimistic view of the capacity for collective agency among subjugated people. As a result, trends in the study of slavery, as with the study of dominance more generally, often divide between works that emphasize the overwhelming power of the institution

and scholarship that focuses on the resistant efforts of the enslaved.

In turn, this division frames a problem in the general understanding of political life, especially for the descendants of the powerless. It might even be said that these kinds of studies form different and opposing genres—hopeful stories of heroic subalterns

versus anatomies of doom—that compete for ascendance. In recent years, if the invocation of Patterson’s “social death” is any indication, the pendulum seems to have swung decidedly toward despair.

Afro Pessimism K

1NC

We criticize the absoluteness of the ontological critique of the Human, the modern, and the Slave. Their absolute ontological division between Master and slave or human and slave does violence to slaves and dooms our political strategy to one of unsuccessful revolutionary violence.

A) Modernity and civil society

Our historical reading of the relationship between slavery and civil society and humanity honors the legacy of slave revolution. The Haitian revolution contained and expanded ideas trafficked in civil society of universal humanityDASH 10 [J. Michael Africana Studies French, Social and Cultural Analysis @ NYU ’10 Book Review: Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and The Radical Enlightenment Slavery & Abolition 31 (1) p. 142-143 //liam ]

Universal Emancipation argues against the French appropriation of universalism as the exclusive product of the revolution of 1789. From the broad focus of Nesbitt’s narrative, the age of revolution becomes a truly global phenomenon and furthermore, the Haitian revolution surpassed that of the metropole in realising the goal of

universal freedom. This is not a new story. Michel Rolph Trouillot, for instance, argued in 1995 ‘The Haitian revolution was the ultimate test to the universalist pretensions of both the French and the American revolutions’.1 Later, for another major scholar Laurent Dubois, the Haitian Revolution ‘represented the pinnacle of Enlightenment universalism’.2 Furthermore, C.L.R. James in the Black Jacobins reminded us that the revolutionary events in France’s colony would take the French Revolution further than was ever intended. The slaves of St Domingue were left out of the universalist

claims of 1789 but they used its ideals to press for their freedom. As James put it, the slaves ‘had heard of the revolution and had construed it in their own image . . .

they had caught the spirit of the thing. Liberty, equality, Fraternity’.3 Nesbitt asserts that there is nothing surprising about the fact that the slaves caught ‘the spirit of the thing’ since they ‘needed no interpreter’ but the fact that they were ‘on the so-called periphery of the modern world-system in 1791’ meant that the ‘truth of 1789 could be most fully comprehended’ (36). Furthermore,

the Haitian revolution ‘serves to disprove the notion that there was any single ‘Enlightenment project’ but ‘a variegated complex of multiple “enlightenments”’ (20). Consequently, the former slaves of St Domingue were not ‘passively parroting ideas imported from France’ but ‘autonomously exercised their faculty of judgement in order to illuminate the universal implications of the natural rights tradition in ways unthinkable for the North American or Parisian political class’ (60). In rejecting a ‘linear filiation’ between Enlightened Europe and savage colony, Nesbitt scrambles centres and peripheries and challenges the silencing of the Haitian Revolution by asserting that ‘it succeeded in displacing the center of modernity . . . not only for a small peripheral island but for the entire world

system’ (131). The revolution is rendered ‘thinkable’ through an intricate discussion of the universally operative nature of Spinoza’s concept of natural law and Kantian universalism, which meant human beings were free ‘to define themselves in their differential singularity’ (101). For Nesbitt the abstract concept of freedom or liberte emanating from Europe was reinterpreted by the ex-slaves of St Domingue as libete and formed the basis for the creation of a self-regulating egalitarian bossale state. In this regard, he ventures where historians of the Haitian revolution fear to tread. For historians, the impact of ideas on the revolution is hard to quantify and is therefore underplayed. He speculates that political awareness came

through such ‘transnational Atlantic sites’ as waterfronts and marketplaces. The slaves then transformed this Enlightenment-derived liberty into the idea of absolute freedom for post-plantation St Domingue. Since Universal Emancipation depends on no new research into the circumstances of the Haitian revolution, Nesbitt depends heavily on the work of Carolyn Fick and the late Gerard Barthelemy to make his case for the importance popular insurgency inthe

making of the revolution. In their refusal of large-scale agrarian capitalism, the exslaves produced an egalitarian peasant system that could harmonise social relations without recourse to government, police, or legal code. He follows Bathelemy in citing social strategies, such as the refusal of technological innovation, the subdivision of property from generation to generation, and active caco resistance to the outside world that supported bossale egalitarianism. Haitian peasant society is presented as a maroon enclave beyond the reach of the liberal individualism and boundless consumerism of the West. This seems a puzzling departure from both Eugene Genovese and Michel-Rolph Trouillot

who are cited at other times with approval. Genovese argued in From Rebellion to Revolution that the great achievement of the Haitian revolution was the attempt to create a modern black state and not continue the restorationist practices of marronage.4 Similarly, Trouillot has argued that those who insist on the isolation of the moun andeyo or the ‘dualist sociologists’ have ‘missed the depth of penetration of urban civil society’ by the peasantry.5 In both instances, Haitian peasants are seen to be part of a global process and not the world’s indigestible other. The modern heroes of Nesbitt’s spirited narrative of mass-based revolution are the agronomist turned broadcaster Jean Dominique and the priest turned politician Jean Bertrand Aristide. In both instances, heroic popular resistance masks the much more complex reality of the spread of modern technology, of cassettes and transistor radios in rural Haiti, and the doctrine of liberation theology spread by the grassroots church or ti legliz. The idealising of strategic marronnage and stateless egalitarianism in Haiti is aimed ultimately at ‘all who believe that the coming shift from unlimited consumerism to an ethics of global responsibility will require fundamental changes to the sociopolitical system that has brought us to the brink of disaster’ (171). It might have been more useful to think of the New World context and not the new World order. Oddly enough there is no reference, except for a fleeting allusion to Brazilian music at the end, to other instances of the radicalisation of the idea of the rights of man in the hemisphere. What of Guadeloupe, for instance, which had a parallel history at the turn of the century? Do other peasant societies in the Caribbean share Haiti’s bossale culture? Trouillot claims to have learned more about the Haitian peasantry after ‘fifteen months doing fieldwork on the peasantry of Dominica’ than he did ‘during eighteen years in Port-au-Prince.’ 6 What Nick Nesbitt does very persuasively is present the Haitian revolution as the most radical revolution of its time. He is less convincing in enlisting the Haitian moun andeyo in his campaign against global capitalism.

B) Humanity

We should not abandon the category of universal humanity. Anti-slavery abolition and its intersections with critiques of gendered citizenship drew on universal humanity as a source of solidarity. GILROY 9 [Paul, Anthony Giddens Prf. of Social Theory @ London School of Economics ‘9 Race and the Right to be Human p. 6-11 //liam]

At times, the movement against slavery was extended into a comprehensive assault on racial hierarchy which invoked an idea of universal humanity (by no means always religious in origin) as well as an idea of inalienable rights1. That alternative provides my point of departure this evening. It was articulated in distinctive accents which were neither bourgeois nor liberal2. It requires us to follow a detour through colonial history which has come under

revisionist pressure as a result of recent attempts to revive imperial relations. That dubious development has made it imperative to place the west’s avowal of modern, liberal, humanistic and humanitarian ideas in the context of the formative encounter with native peoples whose moral personality and humanity had long been placed in doubt. The approach I favour requires seeing not just how all-conquering liberal sensibilities evolved unevenly into considerations of human rights

but how a range of disputes over and around the idea of universal humanity—its origins, its hierarchies and varying moral and juridical dispositions—were connected to struggles over race, slavery, colonial and imperial rule, and how they in turn produced positions which would later be narrated and claimed as liberal. This agonistic enterprise necessitates a different genealogy for human rights than is conventional3. It begins with the history of conquest and European expansion and must be able to encompass the evolving debates over how colonies and slave plantation systems were to be administered4. At its most basic, it must incorporate the contending voices of Las Casas and Sepulveda. It should be able to analyze the contrapuntality of a text like Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan with the introduction of England’s Navigation Acts and illuminate the relationship between John Locke’s insightful advocacy on behalf of an emergent bourgeoisie and his commitment to the colonial improvers’ doctrine of the vacuum domicilium. This counter-narrative would certainly include the Treaty of Utrecht and the Assiento. It could terminate uneasily in the contemporary debates about torture and rendition or in discussion about the institutionalisation of rightslessness which floods into my mind each

time I navigate the halls of the Schiphol complex. Focusing on that combination of progress and catastrophe through a postcolonial lens yields a view of what would become the liberal tradition moving on from its seventeenth century origins in a style of thought that was partly formed by and readily adapted to colonial conditions5. This helps to explain how an obstinate attachment to raciology recurs. Struggles against racial hierarchy have contributed directly and consistently to challenging conceptions of the human. They valorised forms of humanity that were not amenable to colour-coded hierarchy and, in complicating approaches to human sameness, they refused the full,

obvious force of natural differences even when they were articulated together with sex and gender. These struggles shaped philosophical perspectives on the fragile universals that had come into focus initially on the insurgent edges of colonial contact zones where the violence of racialized statecraft was repudiated and cosmopolitan varieties of care took shape unexpectedly across the boundaries of culture, civilization, language and technology6. One early critique of the humanitarian language and tacit racialization of the enlightenment ideal had been delivered by the militant abolitionist David Walker in his 1830 commentary on the US constitution: Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America. His famous text supplies a useful symbolic, starting point for generating the new genealogy we require. Erecting secular demands over the foundation of a revolutionary, Pauline Christianity, Walker made the problem of black humanity and related issues of rights—political and human—intrinsic to his insubordinate conception of world citizenship. His plea that blacks be recognized as belonging to “the human family” was combined with a view of their natural rights as being wrongfully confiscated in the condition of slavery which could, as a result of their exclusion, be justifiably overthrown7. His address was primarily offered to the coloured citizens of the world but the tactical reduction of that universalist argument to the parochial problem of joining the US as full citizens soon followed. The consequences of that change of scale can be readily seen in the humanistic abolitionism that followed. Frederick Douglass—particularly in his extraordinary 1852 speech on the meaning of the 4th of July to the slave8, spoke directly to the US in the name of its polluted national citizenship. His indictment of slavery was a cosmopolitan one in which the eloquent facts of plantation life were judged, just as Walker had suggested they should be, through global comparisons. They were compared with all the abuse to be found in “the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World (and in) South America”. Douglass concluded that “for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival”. He continued, again echoing Walker: “Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slave-holders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. . . . . . How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to

your understanding.”9 In demanding equality based on natural rights and exploring the relationship of debased citizenship and tainted law to racialized life, Douglass was drawing upon the thinking of an earlier cohort of abolitionist writers. Many of them had, like Walker and other anti-slavery radicals, practiced a chiliastic Christianity that built upon St. Paul with incendiary consequences which could not be limited by the heading of anti-slavery. Consider the way in which Angelina Grimké had articulated the concept of human rights in her 1836 Appeal To The Christian Women of The South: . . . man is never vested with . . . dominion over

his fellow man; he was never told that any of the human species were put under his feet; it was only all things, and man, who was created in the image of his Maker, never can properly be termed a thing, though the laws of Slave States do call him ‘a chattel personal;’ Man then, I assert never was put under the feet of man, by that first charter of human rights which was given by God, to the Fathers of the Antediluvian and Postdiluvian worlds, therefore this doctrine of equality is based on the Bible10. Grimké elaborated upon this inspired refusal of the reduction of people to things in a memorable (1838) letter to her friend Catherine Beecher (the older sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe). There, she connected the notion of divinely instituted human rights to a growing sense of what it would mean for women to acquire political rights. Her insight was framed by a deep engagement with the problem of a gendered alienation from the humanity of “species being”: “The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to better understanding of our own. I have found the Anti-slavery cause to be the high school of morals in our land—the school in which human rights are more fully investigated and better understood and taught, than in any other. Here a great fundamental principle is uplifted and illuminated, and from this central light rays innumerable stream all

around. Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grown out of their moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. ”11 It is not easy to assimilate this variety of critical reflection to the political traditions inherited by modern liberalism from revolutionary France. The foregrounding of race is, for example, a fundamental and distinguishing feature as is the suggestion that reflecting upon the thwarted rights of slaves promotes a richer understanding of the rightslessness known by women. Here, slavery was not only a

political metaphor. A different kind of connection was being proposed: whoever we are, we can learn about our own situation from studying the suffering of others which instructively resembles it. This approach makes the disinterest in abolitionism shown by today’s liberal chroniclers of human rights struggles all the more perplexing. The long battle to appropriate the language and political morality of human rights re-worked the assumptions which had led to articulating the unthinkable prospects of black citizenship and black humanity in the form of the ancient rhetorical questions

immortalized in Wedgewood’s porcelain: “Am I not a Man and a brother?” “Am I not a Woman and a sister?”. The liberatory recognition solicited by those inquiries was pitched against the corrosive power of racial categories and mediated by the cosmopolitan power of human shame. It asked that the social divisions signified by phenotypical difference be set aside in favour of a more substantive human commonality. It promised an alternative conception of kinship that could deliver a world purged of injustice in general and racial hierarchy in particular.

Enlightenment understandings of humanity were always fractured – anti-Imperial strands in universal humanity should be recognized. There was a robust strand of anti-Imperial universalism that criticized dispossession and slavery.MUTHU 3 [Sankar, Poli Sci @ Chicago Enlightenment Against Empire p. 266-271 //liam]

Universal Dignity, Cultural Agency, and Moral Incommensurability Do commitments to the idea of a shared humanity, to human dignity, to cross-cultural universal moral principles, and to cross-cultural standards of justice rest upon assumptions and values that unavoidably denigrate, or that disturbingly undermine respect for, cultural pluralism, that is, the wide array of human institutions and practices in the world?16 Are they imperialistic either explicitly, to justify Europe’s political, military, and commercial subjugation of the non-European world, or implicitly, by indicating a rank ordering of superior and inferior peoples, which could

then be used to justify a more indirect, quasi-imperial ‘civilizing’ process? The aforementioned commitments are sometimes collectively gathered under the term ‘Enlightenment universalism’ and, as we have seen, they are sometimes considered to constitute the core of ‘the

Enlightenment project’. I have suggested already that such assertions mask and distort a

complex reality. In this case, they obscure the multiplicity of universalisms across eighteenth-century European political thought, each with distinct foundational claims, varying relationships to conceptualizations of human diversity and to humanity (which themselves differ from thinker to thinker, and even from text to text), and different political orientations toward the nature and limits of state power in theory and in practice. These philosophical sensibilities and approaches can yield remarkably dif ferent political arguments toward foreign peoples, international justice, and imperialism. Thus, rather than ask whether ‘the Enlightenment project’ and ‘Enlightenment universalism’ are

compatible with an appreciation of cultural pluralism or whether they are at bottom imperializing ideologies, it is more constructive to pose more precise and historically accurate versions of such questions with regard to particular texts and thinkers. In this book, I have studied a distinctive variant of Enlightenment writings against empire, one which includes the philosophical and political arguments of Diderot, Kant, and Herder. While there is no such thing as ‘Enlightenment universalism’ as such, let alone a larger ‘Enlightenment project’, there is nonetheless an identifiable set of philosophical and political arguments, assumptions, and tendencies about the relationship between universal and pluralistic concepts that animates the strand of Enlightenment political thought under study here. With this in mind, one can more meaningfully ask what the relationship is between universalism, pluralism, and incommensurability in such political philosophies, and how precisely they yield anti-imperialist political commitments. Answers to these more circumscribed questions can be given by better understanding the core elements of Diderot’s, Kant’s, and Herder’s political philosophies, and how they differ from earlier (and, indeed, from many later) understandings and judgements of empire. Immanuel Kant remarks pointedly in Toward Perpetual Peace that the Europeans who landed and eventually settled in the New World often denied indigenous peoples any moral status. When America, the Negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, and so forth were discovered, they were, to them [to Europeans], countries belonging to no one [die keinem angeh¨orten], since they counted the

inhabitants as nothing. (8:358, emphasis added) What philosophical concepts and arguments were necessary for New World peoples to be counted finally as something and especially to be considered as equals, as they were eventually in some crucial respects, by anti-imperialist political thinkers in the Enlightenment era? In this section, I focus on what I have taken in this book to be the philosophically most robust strand of Enlightenment anti-imperialist political thought.17 Despite the many differences in the ethnographic sources that Diderot, Kant, and Herder consulted, the philosophical languages that these thinkers employed, and the particular concepts they drew upon to attack European empires, their anti-imperialist arguments intriguingly overlap in important respects. Thus, in this section, I identify and elucidate the family resemblances that exist among their philosophical arguments and rhetorical strategies, and discuss the underlying assumptions, ideas, and intellec tual dispositions that make their version of anti-imperialist political thinking conceptually possible. In contrast to what is effectively the premiss of the kinds of familiar questions asked at the opening of this section, the commitments of Diderot, Kant, and Herder to moral universalism, cultural diversity, partial incommensurability, and the delegitimization of empire are not

fundamentally in tension but rather reinforce one another. Overall, there are three principal philosophical sources of Enlightenment anti-imperialism. The first and most basic idea is that human beings deserve some modicum of moral and political respect simply because of the fact that they are

human. This humanistic moral principle alone, however, was far from sufficient for engendering an anti-imperialist politics. The whole modern tradition of natural right and social contract theory held this view in some form. Moreover, Amerindians in particular were explicitly described by such thinkers as the pure, natural humans of the state of nature. Yet much of this tradition of modern political thought, from Grotius onward, was either agnostic about imperialism or lent philosophical support to European empires. Not every understanding of what it means fundamentally to be a human fosters the philosophical materials necessary to build a more inclusive and pluralistic political theory that could serve as the basis of anti-imperialist arguments. Indeed, as I will argue, some understandings of humanity that are manifestly egalitarian can nevertheless impede such a development.

Second, therefore, these anti-imperialist arguments rested upon the view that human beings are fundamentally cultural beings. Diderot, Kant, and Herder all contend that the category of the human is necessarily marked by cultural difference; in this view, humanity is cultural agency. This thicker, particularized view of the human subject, paradoxically, helped to

engender a more inclusive and meaningful moral universalism. Third, a fairly robust account of moral incommensurability and relativity was also necessary for the rise of anti-imperialist political thought. The anti-imperialist arguments offered by Diderot, Kant, and Herder all partly rest upon the view that peoples as a whole are incommensurable. From this perspective, entire peoples cannot be judged as superior or inferior along a universal scale of value. Moreover, in distinct but closely related ways, these thinkers argue that our cultural freedom produces a wide variety of

individual and collective practices and beliefs that are incommensurable, given their view that many practices and beliefs lie outside the bounds of a categorical judgement or universal standard. When these three conceptual developments were brought together, the strand of Enlightenment anti-imperialist political theory that I have identified became philosophically possible. I want to reiterate here that this framework is not meant to elucidate all of the anti-imperialist arguments that one can find in the philosophical writings of the Enlightenment era. Moreover, the distinc tive intellectual dispositions, personal idiosyncrasies, and domestic political commitments of Enlightenment-era thinkers significantly shaped their particular arguments on the issue of empire. Still, as I will

show, these three philosophical ideas play a crucial role in enabling the development of a rich strand of anti-imperialist political theory in the late eighteenth century. In discussing the development of a more inclusive and anti-imperialist political theory, my focus in this section (as it has been generally in this book) is on Europeans’ political attitudes toward non-Europeans. Many thinkers in non-European societies clearly operated with similarly self-centred conceptions, but my emphasis throughout is on Europeans’ intellectual responses to the fact of cultural difference and imperial politics, not with non-European peoples’ understandings of each other or of their accounts of European peoples. Nor do I examine here the variety of intra-European distinctions between allegedly superior and inferior groups, those, for instance, involving linguistic, geographical, class, religious, and gender differences, which of course historically also legitimated differential treatment within European societies. Thus, I do not intend to argue that Enlightenment anti-imperialist political philosophies are inclusive as such, for their underlying principles do not necessarily (and, in the eighteenth century, they manifestly did not) support egalitarian arguments against every form of exclusion. As I have noted, the first idea that enables Enlightenment anti-imperialism— first both historically and analytically—is that foreigners are human beings and, consequently, that

they deserve moral respect, however understood. The development, in other words, of some variant of a humanistic moral universalism ensured that the shared humanity of both Europeans and non-Europeans would be acknowledged and given some due. The philosophical and political legacy with which Enlightenment anti-imperialist thinkers struggled, as they themselves understood, was one of exclusion. As they often noted, ethical principles of respect and reciprocity had been limited almost always to (some) members of one’s own tribe, polis, nation, religion, or civilization. Accordingly, the distinction between one’s own society, however defined, and the barbaroi (others, foreigners), whether justified outright or tacitly assumed, influenced not only the anthropological conceptions of, and popular understandings about, foreign peoples, but also legitimated the often brutally differential treatment of various groups. It is along these lines that Kant expresses dismay, in a lecture on moral philosophy, at what he calls the “error that the [ancient] Greeks displayed, in that they evinced no goodwill towards extranei [outsiders, or foreigners], but included them all, rather, sub voce hostes _ barbari [under the name of enemies, or barbarians]”. (27:674) In the long history of imperial exploits, actions that in at least some contexts might have provoked outrage in one’s own land not only gained legitimacy on foreign soil but were deemed praiseworthy, noble, and even morally obligatory abroad. While European imperialists in the New World, writes Diderot, “faithfully observe their own laws, they will violate the rights of other nations in order to increase their power. That is what the Romans did.”18 Enlightenment anti-imperialists recognized that such Janus-faced practices constituted the very core of imperial activity from the empires of the ancient world to the imperial conquests and commercial voyages of their day. The fact of difference itself lay at the heart of such inconsistent behaviour from Europeans’ initial encounters with Amerindians onward, as Diderot notes: “[t]he Spaniard, the first to be thrown up by the waves onto the shores of the New World, thought he had no duty to people who did not share his colour, customs, or religion.” 19 Not wanting to single out the Spanish, Diderot suggests further that the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Danes all followed in precisely the same spirit of exclusion and injustice. From an anthropological viewpoint, such discoveries of non-European peoples no doubt played a role in Europeans’ changing conceptions of humanity. From Herodotus onward, of course, travel narratives played a central role in contemplating what it might mean to be, in some fundamental sense, a human being. Given that theorizations of human nature relate, in complicated ways, to changing understandings of the range and characteristics of human societies, institutions, and practices, the European discovery of ‘new’ lands and peoples accordingly generated further, and at times more complex, theorizations of humanity.20 Moreover, from the sixteenth century onward, thinkers were particularly keen to consult and appropriate the latest ethnographic reports. In part, the heightened interest no doubt complemented, and may in part have resulted from, what is often described as the intellectual revolution in ‘natural philosophy’ and the resulting emphasis on experimentation, empirical study, and inductive reasoning in fields such as astronomy, but also (especially from the mid-seventeenth century onward) in the study of human anatomy, physiology, and psychology. Although many of Hume’s contemporaries did not share his hope of introducing “the experimental method” to moral philosophy, there was nonetheless a widespread presumption that an understanding of the human condition needed to take account, in some manner, of the growing anthropological literature that detailed the vast range of human experiences, customs, and practices throughout the globe.21 This turn toward what Georges Gusdorf has called ‘human science’, however, requires a stable referent for what counts as ‘human’ while also upsetting the stability of the term by focusing attention increasingly on human difference.22 In this sense, the attempt at identifying the most salient features of humanity was often an erratic and inherently conflicted task, as John Locke argued it would have to be, given the very nature of our self-knowledge.

The slave represents the infra-human – not the non-human. Included as only partly human the status of the slave has historically been contested by appeals to universal human community. As with Uncle Tom’s Cabin – the fact that this type of political activity simultaneously contained negative effects for our understanding of the slave doesn’t mean it should be rejected. GILROY 9 [Paul, Anthony Giddens Prf. of Social Theory @ London School of Economics ‘9 Race and the Right to be Human p. 13-15 //liam ]

The structure of sentimental feeling articulated by Harriet Beecher Stowe was instrumental in the formation of a trans-national moral collectivity and in winning recognition of the suffering humanity of the slave whom it was no longer possible to dismiss as a brute. Through her voice and chosen genre, distinctive patterns of “heteropathic”

identification appear to have leaked not only into Europe but further afield as well. Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to compose a cosmopolitan chapter in the moral history of our world. Is all of that potential for political action and pedagogy to be damned now because campus anti-humanism doesn’t approve of the dubious aesthetic and moral registers in which an un-exotic otherness was initially made intelligible? The scale of the historical and interpretative problems posed by the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin can only be glimpsed here. George Bullen, keeper of books at the British Museum compiled a bibliographic note included in the repackaged 1879 edition. He revealed that almost three decades after publication, Stowe’s novel had been translated into numerous languages including Dutch, Bengali, Farsi, Japanese, Magyar and Mandarin. Fourteen editions had been sold in the German language during the first year of publication and a year later, seventeen editions in French and a further six in Portuguese had also appeared. In Russia, the book had been recommended as a primer in the struggle against serfdom and was duly banned. The first book to sell more than a million copies in the US, the publication of Stowe’s novel was a world

historic event. Though it cemented deeply problematic conceptions of slave passivity, redemptive suffering and indeed of racial type, it was also instrumental in spreading notions of black dignity and ontological depth as well as the anti-racist variety of universal humanism that interests me. This combination merits recognition as a potent factor in the circulation of a version of human rights that racial hierarchy could not qualify or interrupt. The example of Stowe draws attention to issues which would reappear through the nineteenth century as part of struggles to defend indigenous peoples, to improve the moral and juridical standards of colonial government and to reform the immorality and brutality of Europe’s imperial order. This activity was not always altruistically motivated. How those themes developed in the period after slavery is evident from the para-academic work of campaigners like Harriet Colenso, Ida B. Wells, Roger

Casement and E.D. Morel. The constellation of writings produced by these critical commentators on racism, justice and humanity needs to be reconstructed in far greater detail than is possible here. They can nonetheless be seen to comprise a tradition of reflection on and opposition to racial hierarchy that, even now, has the power, not only to disturb and amend the official genealogy provided for Human Rights but also to re-work it

entirely around the tropes of racial difference. Allied with parallel insights drawn from struggles against colonial power, these interventions contribute to a counterhistory of the contemporary conundrum of rights and their tactical deployment. This neglected work remains significant because debate in this field is increasingly reduced to an unproductive quarrel between jurists who are confident that the world can be transformed by a better set of rules and sceptics who can identify the limits of rights talk, but are almost always disinterested in racism and its metaphysical capacities. Thinkers like Wells and Morel were alive to what we now call a deconstructive approach. They identified problems with rights-talk and saw the way that racial difference mediated the relationship of that lofty rhetoric to brutal reality. They grasped the limits of rights-oriented institutional life empirically and saw how rights-claims entered into the battle to extend citizenship. But, their vivid sense of the power of racism meant that the luxury of any casual anti-humanism could

not be entertained. They wished to sustain the human in human rights and

to differentiate their own universalistic aspirations from the race-coded and exclusionary humanisms which spoke grandly about all humanity but made whiteness into the prerequisite for recognition.

Their alternative required keeping the critique of race and racism dynamic and demanding nothing less than the opening of both national- and world-citizenship to formerly infrahuman beings like the negro. Grimké, Wells and the rest appealed against racism and injustice in humanity’s name. Their commentaries might even represent the quickening of the new humanism of which Frantz Fanon would speak years

later. The movement these commentators created and mobilized persisted further into the twentieth century when new causes and opportunities were found that could repeat and amplify its critique of racialized political cultures and terroristic governmental administration. 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.

Radical humanism takes up the burden and the ambiguity of humanity. Identification with common humanity across lines of oppression opens up possibilities for everyday political virtue.GILROY 9 [Paul, Anthony Giddens Prf. of Social Theory @ London School of Economics Race and the Right to be Human p. 20-23 //liam ]

Arendt and Agamben are linked by their apparent distaste for analyzing racism and by their complex and critical relations to the idea of the human. This combination of positions can facilitate hostility to the project of human rights which is then dismissed for its inability to face the political and strategic processes from which all rights derive and a related refusal to address the analytical shortcomings that arise from the dependence of human rights on an expansion of the rule of law—which can incidentally be shown to be fully compatible with colonial crimes23.

Histories of colonial power and genealogies of racial statecraft can

help to explain both of these problems and to break the impasse into which the analysis of human rights has fallen. This is another reason why anti-racism remains important. It does not argue naively for a world without hierarchy but practically for a world free of that particular hierarchy which has accomplished untold wrongs. The possibility that abstract nakedness was not so much a cipher of insubstantial humanity but a sign of racial hierarchy in operation arises from the work of concentration camp survivors. Jean Améry recognized his own experience through a reading of Fanon. Primo Levi, his fellow Auschwitz inmate and interlocutor, who interpreted the lager’s brutal exercises in racial formation as conducted for the benefit of their perpetrators, suggested that racism’s capacity to reconcile rationality and irrationality was expressed in the dominance of outrage over economic profit. Both men saw infrahuman victims made to perform the subordination that race theory required and anticipated but which their bodies did not spontaneously disclose. Inspired by Levi, by the philosophical writings of Jean Améry, and various other observers of and commentators on the pathologies of European civilisation, we should aim to answer the corrosive allure of absolute sameness and purity just as they did, with a historical and moral commitment to the political, ethical and

educational potential of human shame. Though being ashamed may sometimes appear to overlap with sentimentality or even to be its result, they are different. Excessive sentimentality blocks shame’s productivity, its slow, humble path towards ordinary virtue. Shame arises where identification is complicated by a sense of responsibility.

Sentimentalism offers the pleasures of identification in the absence of a feeling of responsible attachment. Améry was an eloquent proponent of what he called a radical humanism. Through discovering his Jewishness under the impact of somebody’s fist but more especially as a result of having been tortured by the Nazis, he acquired a great interest in a politics of dignity which could answer the governmental actions that brought

racial hierarchy to dismal life. Perhaps for that very reason, he found through his post-war

reading of Fanon, that “the lived experience of the black man . . . corresponded in many respects to my own formative and indelible experience as a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp. . .”. He continued: “I too suffered repressive violence without buffering or mitigating mediation. The world of the concentration camp too was a Manichaean one: virtue was housed in the SS blocks, profligacy, stupidity, malignance and laziness in the inmates’ barracks. Our gaze onto the SS-city was one of ‘envy’ and ‘lust’ as well. As with the colonized Fanon, each of us fantasized at least once a day of taking the place of the oppressor. In the concentration camp too, just as in the native city, envy ahistorically transformed itself into aggression against fellow inmates with whom fought over a bowl of soup while the whip of the oppressor lashed at

us with no need to conceal its force and power.”24 With Levi and Fanon, Améry shared a commitment to extracting humanistic perspectives from the extremity he had survived in the lager. In a famous [1964] essay exploring his experiences at the hands of the Gestapo, he insisted that torture was “the essence”25 of the Third Reich and in making that case, shows how these issues should become important again in comprehending and criticising the brutal, permissive conduct of “the war on terror”.

2NC O/V

The affirmative’s afro-pessimism undermines humanity’s universalism and prevents the possibility of change

A modern approach to racism requires a rejection of social isolationism

This mandates an approach which acknowledges intersectionality and universalism- that’s Gilroy and Dash

Their critique of whiteness undermines the role that anti-imperialist movements, feminism in the Civil War have had in combating racism- that’s Muthu

Unproductive skepticism has to be replaced with a cosmopolitanism history- this is not naïve, but accepts that even flawed systems can be net forces for good- that’s Gilroy

Ahistorical

( ) They assume that anti-black animus arises from nothingness but its caught up in a broader web of historical power relationships like Islamophobia and nativismCharoenying 8 [Timothy, citing Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Prof of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley, Islamophobia & Anti-Blackness: A Genealogical Approach, http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-anti-blackness-genealogical-approach //liam]

The year 1492 marked a major turning point in the trajectory of Western Civilization. Elementary age children are taught this as the year Columbus famously crossed the Atlantic. An equally significant event that year, was the Spanish conquest of al-Andalus–a Moorish province on the southern Iberian peninsula established eight

centuries earlier–and more importantly, the last major Muslim stronghold on the European continent. Critical race scholars have argued that these two events would not only shift the geopolitical balance of power from the Orient to the Occident, but fundamentally alter conceptions about religious and racial identity.¶ According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, of the University of California, Berkeley, the expulsion of the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age of imperial relations between

Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion throughout the known world. The “discovery” of “godless” natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas and Sepúlveda in 1550 on the nature of the human soul. Such a geopolitical and philosophical shift, Maldonado-Torres

argues, would lead to a Eurocentric, re-categorization of humanity based upon religous—and ultimately racial—differences. Maldonado-Torres has proposed that

anti-black racism is not simply an extension of some historical bias against blacks, but rather, is an amalgam of old-world Islamophobia linked to the history of the Iberian peninsula, and to the notion of souless beings embodied in popular conceptions about the indigenous natives of the Americas.¶ These beliefs would contribute to an ideological basis for, and justification of, colonial conquests in the name of cultural and religious conversion, as well as pave the way for the enslavement and human trafficking of sub-Saharan Africans.

( ) Their nihilism turns the case – greatest comparative threat Miah quoting West in 94 [Malik Miah, Cornel West's Race Matters, May-June, http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3079 //liam]

In the chapter, “Nihilism in Black America,” West observes “The liberal/conservative discussion conceals the most basic issue now facing Black America: the nihilistic threat to its very existence. This threat is not simply a matter of relative economic deprivation and political

powerlessness -- though economic well-being and political clout are requisites for meaningful Black progress. It is primarily a question of speaking to the profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair so widespread in Black America.” (12-13)¶ “Nihilism,” he continues, “is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine ... it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying

meaningless, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness.” (14)¶

“Nihilism is not new in Black America. . . . In fact,” West explains,”the major enemy of Black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic Threat -- that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression

stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle.” (14-15)

Link – Social Death

The affirmative’s choice to frame the nature of oppression through the rhetorical and ideological frame of “social death” entrenches pessimism and despair Brown 09 [Vincent Brown is Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, DECEMBER 2009 http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf //liam]

Slavery and Social Death was widely reviewed and lavishly praised for its erudition and conceptual rigor. As a result of its success, social death has become a handy general definition of slavery, for many historians and non-

historians alike. But it is often forgotten that the concept of social death is a distillation from Patterson’s breathtaking survey—a theoretical abstraction that is meant not to describe the lived experiences of the enslaved so much as to reduce them to a least common denominator that could reveal the essence of slavery in an ideal-type slave, shorn of meaningful heritage. As a concept, it is what Frederick Cooper has called an “agentless abstraction” that provides a neat cultural logic but ultimately does little to illuminate the social and political experience of enslavement and the struggles that produce historic transformations. Indeed, it is difficult to use such a distillation to explain the actual behavior of slaves, and yet in much of the scholarship that followed in the wake of Slavery and Social Death, Patterson’s abstract distillates have been used to explain the existential condition of the enslaved. Having emerged from the discipline

of sociology, “social death” fit comfortably within a scholarly tradition that had generally been more alert to deviations in patterns of black life from prevailing social norms than to the worldviews, strategies, and social tactics of people in black communities. Together with Patterson’s work on the distortions wrought by slavery on black

families, “social death” reflected sociology’s abiding concern with “social pathology”; the “pathological condition” of twentieth-century black life could be seen as an outcome of the damage that black people had suffered during slavery.University of Chicago professor Robert Park, the grand-pe`re of the social pathologists, set the terms in 1919: “the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament.” 8 Patterson’s distillation also conformed to the nomothetic imperative of social science, which has traditionally aimed to discover universal laws of operation that would be true regardless of time and place, making the synchronic study of social phenomena more tempting than more descriptive studies of historical transformation. Slavery and Social Death took shape during a period when largely synchronic studies of antebellum slavery in the United States dominated the scholarship on human bondage, and Patterson’s expansive view was meant to situate U.S. slavery in a broad context rather than to discuss changes as the institution developed through time. Thus one might see “social death” as an obsolete product of its time and tradition, an academic artifact with limited purchase for contemporary scholarship, were it not for the concept’s reemergence in some important new studies of slavery. 9 WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED AS AMONG themost onerous of social institutions, slavery has much to tell us about the way

human beings react to oppression. At the same time, the extreme nature of the institution naturally encourages a pessimistic view of the capacity for collective agency among subjugated people. As a result, trends in the study of slavery, as with the study of dominancemore generally, often divide between works that emphasize the overwhelming power of the institution and scholarship that focuses on the resistant efforts of the enslaved. In turn, this division frames a problem in the general understanding of political life, especially for the descendants of the powerless. It might even

be said that these kinds of studies form different and opposing genres—

hopeful stories of heroic subalterns versus anatomies of doom—that compete for ascendance.

In recent years, if the invocation of Patterson’s “social death” is any indication, the pendulum seems to have swung decidedly toward despair.

( ) Their methodology is flawed—Their focus on social death disempowers social agency and pushes us away from political activism. We should recognize that we live in a world where culture creates opportunities for us to find empowerment and we should reject the notion that oppression is form of social deathBrandom 10 [Eric Brandom Brown v Agamben V. Brown, 'Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery', The American Historical Review, 114, (2009), pp 1231-1249. http://ebrandom.blogspot.com/2009/12/brown-v-agamben.html //liam]

This essay is most straightforwardly a corrective to what Brown sees as the misuse (overuse) of Orlando Patterson’s

categorical definition of slavery as social death. According to Brown, historians have often taken what Patterson meant as an ideal type definition to be a description of reality itself. Historians have long rejected, however, the basic result of such a

definition: that it would strip slaves of agency. Manifestly, historians have pointed out, slaves had agency. One need look no further than the continuous rebellions and occasional revolutions to emerge from new world slavery to see this. Brown’s real goal, though, is

deeper than this. In step with his historical work in The Reaper’s Garden, Brown wants to retell the story of slavery from the perspective of what we might call the micro-politics, or cultural politics, of everyday life. Brown argues that what he calls mortuary politics, conflict and negotiation over death, burial, and associated rituals, are of the greatest importance. One might make

this argument in many contexts, but Caribbean slavery is a privileged field. Increasingly,

it the worldview forged in the 18th century experience of slavery and revolution has come to be recognized as central to modernity as such (European, Atlantic, or even if you like, Capitalist). Mortuary politics is found to be central to the world of slavery, to the movement of the Haitian Revolution, and thus to modernity. One effect of Brown’s argument, or rather one consequence of the argument that he wants to make, is a firm and empirically-oriented rejection of Giorgio Agamben. Brown deals with this in a few paragraphs explaining the limits of an Agambenian perspective

such as that taken in Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic. Agamben’s notion of bare life, for

Brown, is piggybacked into the historical study of slavery as a sort of compliment to and intensification of Pattersonian social death. Brown

doesn’t exactly want to re-open old debates about agency (vs structure!), but he does want to argue that it is plainly wrong to see Caribbean slaves as without culture, in the sense of without resources or community. He cites William Sewell’s recent definition of culture, commenting, “practices of meaning are better seen as tools to be used than as possessions to be lost.” There are several somewhat separable issues here. First, there is the methodological question of how one should think about culture and agency. In this, I simply agree with Brown. I prefer to treat culture (or, qua intellectual historian, unit ideas) as a bundle of tools to be manipulated—tools that empower, but also limit, channel, and react upon, those that wield them. Then there is the more empirical question of the admissibility and utility of the notion of ‘social death’ in the study of slave systems, say specifically in the Caribbean. Not having read all the relevant texts, I defer with enthusiasm to Brown. What I have read leads me to believe that he is entirely correct.

( ) Their methodology of constructing any form of barrier in life as “social death” precludes liberation and makes greater manipulation and oppression inevitableMuhwati 05 [Itai Muhwati Department of African Languages and Literature, University of Zimbabwe http://ir.uz.ac.zw:8080/jspui/bitstream/10646/515/1/Muhwati-Mass-Neurosis.pdf //liam]

The physical wreckage and spiritual paralysis that is by definition an expression of this image, leads to an agonising realisation that, in life’s vicissitudes, and life’s race of race survival, African people remain undeveloped and fledgling stutters. The images of characters in these novels whose titles are vapid project Africans as victims of collective inertia, wallowing in cultural and historical amnesia

and disintegrating in irretrievable mentacide. As a result, in terms of agency and mobility, the African race remains glued on the starting line, quite overwhelmed by the seemingly insurmountable hurdles in the race of life. Through the choice of titles, most of the writers seem to have adopted a modality that inordinately projects social death and a host of other social sicknesses as new forms of social identity in the contemporary dispensation. While their absolutisation of mass neurosis, closure and entrapment might be said to

be a reflection of the state of the nation in the post independence period, it is also estimable that such images of social sickness, paralysis and mass neurosis can be manipulated by Africa’s anthropological detractors in their justification of a static and back pedalling African race, particularly along the evolutionary spectrum, which is presented as a universal

standard of valuation. The paper also puts forth argument that, the adoption of an axiological paradigm that legitimises closure and race entrapment nullifies any prospects towards racial salvation. It is an act of defining the African race as doomed. Such a definition which trivialises the African existential trajectory pays homage to the subversive labels that Europe has generously donated to Africa. Such labels include Third World; Underdeveloped; Dark Continent; Poor majority, cultural other and many more. These are designations that bespeak helplessness and mass neurosis.

The rhetorical frame they choose in framing life as death makes disempowerment inevitable and risks actual extinctionMuhwati 05 [Itai Muhwati Department of African Languages and Literature, University of Zimbabwe http://ir.uz.ac.zw:8080/jspui/bitstream/10646/515/1/Muhwati-Mass-Neurosis.pdf //liam]

As natural speakers of African languages, there is need for African people to be careful of not using the natural gift that language is to disempower themselves. When language is recklessly used, it can become one of the subtle forms of ideological and pedagogical disempowerment. Language constitutes one of the oldest and effective forms of technology that humanity has always deployed for the purposes of transcendence. For

that reason, the language or discourse that a people adopt and adapt can enhance or 5 negate survival. Henry Paget (1997: 15) explores the African possibilities

of visualising themselves as finite sites of agency. He advises us that: It is the fate of this capacity for agency that is crucial for our attitudes toward existence. Through its sense of agency, an individual or group makes an estimate of its chances for successful self-assertion or strategic intervention vis-à-vis its environment. Success or failure in such undertakings are [sic] important determinants of our attitudes.

Totalizing/ Nihilism Bad

( ) Reject their totalizing understandings of race – only by abandoning essentialism can we construct new understandings of blackness in the world and challenge the nihilism threatening productive movements. Bell Hooks 90 [“POSTMODERN BLACKNESS”, Postmodern Culture vol.1 http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html //liam]

It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery

over" must not simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially

elites, and white critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory and practice. From a different standpoint Robert Storr makes a similar critique in the global

issue of Art in America when he asserts: To be sure, much postmodernist critical inquiry has centered precisely on the issues of "difference" and "otherness." On the purely theoretical plane the exploration of these concepts has produced some important results, but in the absence of any sustained research into what artists of color and others outside the mainstream

might be up to, such discussions become rootless instead of radical. Endless second guessing about the latent imperialism of intruding upon other cultures only compounded matters, preventing or excusing these theorists from investigating what black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists were actually doing. Without adequate concrete knowledge of and contact with the non-white "other," white theorists may move in discursive theoretical directions

that are threatening to and potentially disruptive of that critical practice which would support radical liberation struggle. The postmodern critique of "identity," though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial

domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. Many of us are struggling to find new strategies of resistance. We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival even as we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. I am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of "identity" as one

example. Postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply appropriate the experience of "otherness" in order to enhance its discourse or to be radically chic should not separate the "politics of difference" from the politics of racism. To take racism seriously one must consider the plight of underclass people of color, a vast majority of whom are black. For African-Americans our collective condition prior to the advent of postmodernism and perhaps more tragically expressed under current postmodern conditions has been and is characterized by

continued displacement, profound alienation and despair. Writing about blacks and postmodernism, Cornel West describes our collective plight: There is increasing class division and differentiation, creating on the one hand a significant black middle-class, highly anxiety- ridden , insecure, willing to be

co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be, concerned with racism to the degree that it poses constraints on upward social mobility; and, on the other, a vast and growing black underclass, an underclass that embodies a kind of walking nihilism of pervasive drug addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive homicide, and an

exponential rise in suicide. Now because of the deindustrialization, we also have a devastated black industrial working class. We are talking here about tremendous hopelessness. This hopelessness creates longing for insight and strategies for change that can renew spirits and reconstruct grounds for collective black liberation struggle. The overall impact of the

postmodern condition is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of

deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those

sensibilities which are shared across the boundaries of class, gender, and race, and which could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy--ties that would promote recognition of common commitments and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition. "Yearning" is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice. Specifically in relation to the postmodernist deconstruction of "master" narratives, the yearning that wells in the hearts and minds of those whom such narratives have silenced is the longing for critical voice. It is no accident that "rap" has usurped the primary position of

R&B music among young black folks as the most desired sound, or that it began as a form of "testimony" for the underclass. It has enabled underclass black youth to develop a critical voice, as a group of young black men told me, a "common literacy." Rap projects a critical voice, explaining, demanding, urging. Working with this insight in his essay "Putting the Pop

Back into Postmodernism," Lawrence Grossberg comments: The postmodern sensibility appropriates practices as boasts that announce their own--and consequently our own--existence, like a rap song boasting of the imaginary (or real--it makes no difference) accomplishments of the rapper. They offer forms of empowerment not only in the face of nihilism but precisely through the forms of nihilism itself: an empowering nihilism, a moment of positivity through the production and structuring of affective relations. Considering that it is as a subject that one comes to voice, then the postmodernist focus on the critique of identity appears, at first glance, to threaten and close down the possibility that this discourse and practice will allow those who have suffered the crippling effects of colonization and domination to gain or regain a hearing. Even if this sense of threat and the fear it evokes are based on a

misunderstanding of the postmodernist political project, they nevertheless shape responses. It never surprises me when black folk respond to the critique of essentialism, especially

when it denies the validity of identity politics, by saying "yeah, it's easy to give up identity, when you got one." Though an apt and oftentimes appropriate comeback, this does not

really intervene in the discourse in a way that alters and transforms. We should indeed suspicious of postmodern critiques of the "subject" when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time. Criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that

open up our understanding of African-American experience. The critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with

reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and

mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency. Employing a critique of essentialism allows African-Americans to acknowledge the way in which class

mobility has altered collective black experience so that racism does not necessarily have the same impact on our lives. Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy. This discourse created the idea of the "primitive" and promoted the notion of an "authentic" experience, seeing as

"natural" those expressions of black life which conformed to a pre-existing pattern or stereotype. Abandoning essentialist notions would be a serious challenge to racism. Contemporary African- American resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonization that continually opposes reinscribing notions of "authentic" black identity. This critique should not be made synonymous with the dismissal of the struggle of oppressed and exploited

peoples to make ourselves subjects. Nor should it deny that in certain circumstances that experience affords us a privileged critical location from which to speak. This is

not a reinscription of modernist master narratives of authority which privilege some voices by denying voice to others. Part of our struggle for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct self and identity that are oppositional and liberatory. The unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part of many African-Americans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of African-Americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that

experience. An adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of "the authority of experience."

There is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black "essence" and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle. When black folks critique essentialism, we are empowered to recognize multiple experiences of black identity that are the lived conditions which make diverse

cultural productions possible. When this diversity is ignored, it is easy to see black folks as falling into two categories--nationalist or assimilationist, black-identified or white-identified. Coming to terms with the impact of postmodernism for black experience, particularly as it changes our sense of identity, means that we must and can rearticulate the basis for collective bonding. Given the various crises facing African-Americans (economic, spiritual, escalating racial violence, etc.) we are compelled by circumstance to reassess our relationship to popular

culture and resistance struggle. Many of us are as reluctant to face this task as many non-black postmodern thinkers who focus theoretically on the issue of "difference" are to

confront the issue of race and racism.

Supremacy K

1NC

( ) Voting aff destroys creativity – it merely replaces white supremacy. Their ideal form of debate is the same kind of stagnant, rotting, unreflexive image of thought they criticize. Jeanes ‘5 (Emma L. Jeanes, Lecturer, University of Exeter and Christian De Cock, Professor of Management, Swansea University, “MAKING THE FAMILIAR STRANGE: A DELEUZIAN PERSPECTIVE ON CREATIVITY,” http://www.iacat.com/revista/recrearte/recrearte03/Familiar_Strange.pdf, 2005, p. 4-8)

This process of becoming, the creation of what is not yet, is achieved through extending the virtual; thinking in new, perhaps previously unimagined, modes of

thinking. For Deleuze, the concept of difference – thinking differently, becoming different, and the creation of difference – is key to maximising the potential of life. The concept enables us to move beyond that which we know and experience and think how this might be

extended. It provokes us, dislodges us from our ways of thinking. It creates whole new lines of thinking; new possibilities. This is thinking that reforms itself over and over again, eternally; thinking that is not defined by an image it creates of itself (Colebrook, 2002). “Thinking is always experiencing, experimenting, not interpreting but experimenting, and what we experience, experiment with, is always actuality, what’s coming into being, what’s new, what’s taking shape” (Deleuze, 1995:106). Deleuze argues that what is typically ignored is the power of the ‘virtual’ in favour of a

focus on the actual world. The virtual is a potentiality of becoming, a power to become. But the actual world is limited in its future possibilities by what is already given. The actual world, therefore, evolves through the unfolding of given possibilities towards a given end. In the virtual world, however, there is the power to become in unforeseen ways, unlimited by the actual world. The virtual is real, though not actual, but virtualities may become actualised in the present. Deleuze advocated ‘actualization’ over ‘realization’. The process of realization is guided by resemblance and limitation. The real is thought to be in the image of the possible it realizes; the possible simply has reality added to it, but there is no difference. Furthermore since not all possibilities can be realised, there is also a process of limitation. However for the virtual to become actual it must create its own terms of actualisation; with no

preformed order this is a process of creative evolution. What would be necessary for the creative organization of the actual… would be an enlarging, inclusive movement oriented toward the future capable of producing a new unity… In these terms, the organization of the actual would have to be a movement from perception to a new ‘recollection’ that would be a future memory (a sort of futur antérieur or future perfect in the grammatical sense) as a common

point of real organization” (Hardt, 1993: 20-21). Central to the philosophy of Deleuze are the notions of ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’. ‘Transcendence’ is that which lies outside; it is an ‘exteriority’ upon which our

thinking relies. It appears as something we can know or reveal or interpret. ‘Truth’ would be a form of

transcendence: we imagine that there is some form of truth ‘out there’ awaiting discovery or interpretation. Immanence , on the other hand, is the thought that produces the ground. Deleuze refers to ‘planes of immanence’: plateaus from which further thinking occurs; the assumptions and distinctions from which we think which constitutes the ‘outside’ of

thought and which creates the exterior – the world we know – which in turn creates planes of transcendence. For Deleuze, even our

subjectivity is a form of transcendence. We have created an “image of thought” (Deleuze, 1994:131) which is accepted as

common sense, the taken-for-granted and the foundation for opinion. For Deleuze transcendence is ultimately an

illusion: it is a creation of the planes of immanence. He therefore aims to expose the ‘illusion’ of

transcendence, to demonstrate that the transcendent image is merely an invention. Paradoxically, this also exhibits the power of the inventive process – that thinking can be so powerful as to enslave itself to images of a transcendent ‘outside’ (Colebrook, 2002:71). Like Foucault (1972), Deleuze (with Guattari) explores historically situated illusions of transcendence – most notably in the context of the history of philosophy where ‘planes of transcendence’ have created grounds for thinking (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). Philosophy, for Deleuze, gives ‘consistency’ to chaos, and allows us to think the immanent difference that produces transcendence (Colebrook, 2002). But it is never a full return to the first level of absolute ‘deterritorialization’, before transcendence. By deterritorialization Deleuze refers to the freeing of a possibility from its origins, its original territory. In contrast, territorialization refers to the manner by which we organise (particularly language) such that it remains constrained by this territory. Remaining territorialized naturally limits future possibilities to what is already given, to the constraints of the ordering of language: “In Deleuze’s view, language is charged with power relations. The object of language is not communication, but the inculcation of mots d’ordre-‘slogans,’ ‘watchwords,’ but also literally ‘words of order,’ the dominant, orthodox ways of classifying, organizing, and explaining the world. Far from being a mere collection of ideological signifiers, language is a mode of action, the various mots d’ordre of a culture being enforced through regular patterns of practice, ‘collective

assemblages of enunciation,’ or ‘regimes of signs’” (Bogue, 2004: 71). So philosophers have to create, and recreate concepts that give

‘consistency’ to this chaos – but in doing so they have to constantly reopen their thinking to the outside without allowing the plane of immanence (the assumptions, distinctions, ‘images’) to act as a foundation, to ‘territorialize’. Philosophy, therefore, is practical: “Thinking’s never just a theoretical matter. It has to do with vital problems. To do with life itself.”

(Deleuze, 1995: 105). And the notion of immanence is key to Deleuze’s philosophy; it is the essence of philosophy. “Thinking experience as an

open and immanent whole acknowledges that each new event of experience will transform what experience is, thereby precluding in principle any final or closed ground for experience. Immanence is, then, for Deleuze

the only true philosophy. If we allow thought to accept some transcendent foundation – such as

reason, God, truth or human nature – then we have stopped thinking. And if immanence is philosophy for Deleuze it is also an ethics: not allowing experience to be enslaved by any single image that would elevate itself above others.” (Smith, 2003: 79; see also Nietzsche, 1976: 451). The question, therefore, is how to avoid this grounding of our thinking that would otherwise prevent us from thinking creatively.

( ) This both turns and solves the case better because good and bad are not binary. They wrongly think it’s a zero-sum power struggle between white and blacks, a fight between two sides – the police and the policed. The struggle of 21st century politics is not a struggle oriented around race; rather, it is the very concept of race which has come to inhibit and constrain radical politics. The affirmative’s deployment of the concept of race as the organizational focus of political struggle is a smokescreen which obscures the dynamics of oppression – the very deployment of race as a concept itself is the lynchpin of racialized oppression. Darder and Torress 4 (Antonia Darder, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo Torress, Associate prof of latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race: Racism after multiculturalism, p. 1-2)

Over a century ago, W E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk proclaimed one of his most cited dictums: “The problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the

color line” (1989, 10). In this book we echo his sentiment, but with a radical twist. The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of “ race ” —an ideology that has served well to successfully obscure and disguise class interests behind the smokescreen of multiculturalism , diversity, difference, and more recently, whiteness. Whether the terms of analysis are “race,” “racial identity,” “race consciousness,” or “political race,” the category of “race” and its many derivatives function as the lynchpin of racism, which “forbids its objects to be other than members of a race” (Fields 2001, 49). As Barbara Fields has noted with respect to African Americans, Afro-Americans themselves have fought

successively for different ways of naming themselves as people. . . . Each name, once accepted into the general public vocabulary, has simply become a variant word for Afro Americans’ race. A sense of peoplehood,

nationhood, or comradeship in struggle may be available to others; but, for persons of African descent, all reduces to race, a

life sentence for them and their issue in perpetuity. (50) 1 To radically shift directions and speak “against race,” as Paul

Gilroy (2000) suggests, or “after race” as we attempt to do here, is to uncompromisingly refuse to accept or legitimate any longer the perpetual racialized demarcations of “raced ” (Guinier and Torres 2002) or “problem” (Du Bois 1989)

populations. Our intention is to contest the notion that the color of a person’s skin, and all it has historically come to signify within the sociological, political, or popular imagination, should continue to function as such. We seek to shatter dubious claims that essentialize the responses of populations, whether they exist as objects or subjects of racism; and by so doing, acknowledge the complexity of the world in which

we negotiate our daily existence today. To be clear we are not arguing in the tradition of the color-blind conservatives or political pundits who would have us believe that the structures and practices that have formidably embedded racism as a way of life for centuries in the United States and around the world have been undone and that the problem of racism has been ameliorated. Our position, in fact, is diametrically opposed to this argument. Instead, the political force of our analysis is

anchored in the centrality of “race” as an ideology and racism as a powerful, structuring, hegemonic force in the world today. We argue that we must disconnect from “race” as it has been constructed in the past, and contend fully with the impact of “race” as ideology on the lives of all people—but most importantly on the lives of those who have been enslaved, colonized, or marked for genocide in the course of world history.

( ) However, the problem isn’t that the police are winning this fight – the problem is that we conceive of debate as a fight at all. The reason we can even have a concept of “supremacy” in the first place is because debate at all accepts the ability to be governed by a single image of thought.MacDonald ‘9 (Michael MacDonald, Postdoctoral Fellow @ the University of Alberta, “Deleuze and the Wild”, http://halfsharpmusic.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/deleuze-and-the-wild/)

And this reaction is the creation of difference, or hierachy, and of the subject itself, “We do not feel,

experience or know any becoming but becoming-reactive” {Deleuze, 1962/1983 #20} 64. But becoming reactive is not the

negation of creativity. Creativity is expressed in the negotiation unleashed by becoming-reactive. The act of becoming therefore is always in relation to something else. Since the community and the environment are all outside of the subject, and since the subject is defined by their reaction to what is outside, then it is unnecessary and even misleading to suggest that there is a special set of negotiations between people and objects. Everything is an object to the mind and the mind’s negotiations and creative reactions with all of these objects affect the individual. Therefore the natural world, people, art, ideas are all particles that are

synthesized in the establishment of the subject and subjects are synthesized into community. Deleuze used Nietzsche’s thought to replace the binary good/bad with an alternative. Deleuze said that everything is already reactive. But even in

reaction there is, what Nietzsche called a will to power being expressed. The will is not Hobbes’ General Will. It is not a transcendental expression of community or humanity that motivates and activates the community through the individual. The will, according to Deleuze, is not merely the desire for power or the need for self aggrandizement. The will is not something so simple and selfish. The will to power is the, “genetic element of force” 53. And the force is a response in reaction. Reaction therefore is more than simple response. Reaction has two possibilities. Reaction, which defines the subject, defines the subject’s relationships as well. The will to power, says Nietszche is not without morality. But it is not the morality of the Church or the State. Nietzsche claims that he has invented a new conception of the will. A will that does not finds its essence outside of itself but in the relationship between self and the world. The relationship may take two forms. It must either

be reaction as subservience or reaction as creation. In either case creativity remains the constant. The will is the expression of creativity. The will to power is creativity. Nietzsche, through Deleuze, is a philosopher of creativity. There is no God as a metaphysical engine. Nietzsche taught that “god is dead”. But it is not the death of something concrete. Not even of something divine. But it is the death of exteriority.

Replaced by an inner creativity that is no less theistic, monotheistic and polytheistic. God has been replaced by creativity and being

creative. There is no longer a need for a metaphysical driver if creativity itself is the engine of all desire. The desire to create is the will to power. Creativity itself is not the act of the arts or the intuition. Creativity is the act of thought. Thought is

creativity. Thought is the basic experience of life. Through Delezue Nietzsche states that, “ the will to power is essentially creative and giving…

power is something inexpressible in the will (85). This is the role Nietzsche plays for Deleuze. Through him Deleuze is able to find a way to ground french deconstruction in the Spinoza-Nitzscheian critical heritage. Deleuze claims that Nietzsche’s genealogy is a critical but ultimately creative

discourse. Morality is dependent, not upon socially constituted rules and norms but in the evaluation of creativity. The will to power is expressed. Creativity is expressed by everyone. But everyone does not express creativity equally or, to use moral terminology,

in an equally upstanding way. The good is the creative and the joyful and the bad is the creative that is bounded and without freedom. Creativity that is reactive-active or reactive-reactive. A reactive-active creativity occurs in critique, “Critique is destruction as joy, the aggression of the creator. A creator of values cannot be distinguished from a destroyer, from a criminal or from a critic: a critic of established values, reactive values and baseness” (87). But Deleuze opens himself to criticism here. He claimed to avoid the role of judge. But through Nietzsche he established a criterion to judge value. But to do so he tore down class, community, tradition, and even revolution and replaced it all with a morality of creativity. Ranciere suggested that this philosophy runs into a dead end. Zizek is troubled because Deleuze attempts to always dissolve the contradiction to never allow the ultimate moment of pure

negativity. But Deleuze does this to avoid the dialectic. The judge is the dialectic. The will to power, creativity, does away with the need for the judge. There is no need to choose between becoming a or becoming b. In the reactive-active many options are created, a multiplicity. The multiplicity is the expression of creativity and the choice is the creativity in reaction. Choices are inventions and inventions are creations. Deleuze used Nietzsche to dissolve the subject:object binary, to establish a creative

deconstruction called genealogy, and to deny the binary creating dialectic. The good is defined by free creativity. Free

creativity can be described in another way. Nietzsche’s good genealogy has a lot in common with composting. The breaking down of items to create from their debris a fertile ground from which new life can spring. Composting is life affirming and destructive. Intellectual composting, the act of destroying to affirm life, is a more active genealogy. Deleuze would prefer composting. It is a creative, life affirming act that demonstrates immanence. If Deleuze had been born in America instead of France his orientation may have been different. If genealogy is translated through deconstruction to composting then Deleuze may have more of a connection with contemporary ecology than one may think. Free creativity is the wild.

( ) Voting isn’t between contents, that is, to choose white supremacy or another form of supremacy, it’s between modes – whether to choose an identity at all or to refuse that any identity should govern debate. Voting aff just installs them as the new cops of the community, “forcing us to perform,” or “forcing us to look at our social location” and arresting those who don’t comply through the judge’s ballot.

( ) There is also no coherent way for non-blacks to participate in their movement because they can’t just ‘take off’ their knapsack of privileges. This perpetuates exclusions and guarantees the failure of their movement.McWhorter 5 (Ladelle McWhorter, University of Richmond, “Where do white people come from? A Foucaultian critique of Whiteness Studies,” Philosophy Social Criticism 2005 31: 533)

It is true then that, as the Whiteness Studies theorists so often say , whiteness is a norm . But the assertion by itself, no matter how

often repeated, does very little to further analysis. Placing race – and of course whiteness – in the context of the development of biopower gives a much clearer picture of what it means to say whiteness is a norm and indicates some important directions for further study. Once that context is supplied, the work of historians like Allen, Roediger, and Saxton can help

explain why it is whiteness (rather than Saxonness, for example) that functions as the racial norm in the USA. Like Whiteness Studies theorists, Foucault meant for his work to have political effects, to disrupt power formations and make new configurations possible. Looking back on the publication of Discipline and Punish, he had this to say to an interviewer: When the book came out, different readers – in particular, correctional officers, social

workers, and so on – delivered this peculiar judgment: ‘The book is paralyzing. It may contain some correct observations, but even so it has clear limits, because it impedes us; it prevents us from going on with our activity.’ My reply is that this very reaction proves that the work was successful, that it functioned just as I intended. It shows that people read it as an experience that changed them, that prevented them from always being the same or from having the same relation with things, with others, that they had before reading it. (Foucault, 2000: 245–6) Unable to continue with ‘business as usual’, people are forced to think critically and make deliberate choices. Power relays are disrupted, which at least opens the possibility that

power networks will be realigned and come to function in different ways. Effects like this are what Whiteness Studies theorists aim for as well. They hope their work will bring white people up short, make it difficult for them to continue to function unthinkingly within a white supremacist social system, and make it possible for them to imagine and create different ways of living. Whiteness Studies is less effective at this kind of political intervention

than Foucault’s work is, however, and far less effective than it might yet be if it took Foucault’s analytics of power and account of normalization seriously. The problem lies, I believe, in Whiteness theorists’ failure to critique the conception of power that they have inherited from traditional Western political theory . By holding on to a conception of power that insists

upon the primacy of a sovereign subject and uncritically deploys economic metaphors of possession and distribution, Whiteness Studies impedes its own efforts to account for the political production of racial subjects and works against its own explicitly stated agenda, i.e., dethroning white subjectivity. I will spend the rest of this essay showing

how the conception of power that Foucault critiques still operates in Whiteness Studies. As good students of Omi and Winant, Whiteness Studies theorists believe that racism operates much of the time without the consent or even the knowledge of white subjects . But they still take white subjects to be responsible for racism; they still believe that racism originates in subjectivity, not in structures or institutions or practices. This belief is implicit in their search for a psychological account of

racism’s persistence. The account offered in virtually every Whiteness Studies theorist’s work can be summed up in two words: white privilege. The story goes that white people exercise power not so much by exercising their capacity to harm non-white people but by exercising the privileges that hundreds of years of racism have put in place for them. They are in fact deploying racist power, but they do not see it as such because to them it seems that they are simply claiming for themselves the goods to which they are entitled, and they have a deep investment in being able to

continue to do so. Across the very different social analyses that Whiteness Studies theorists put

forth and across their very pronounced disagreements over political strategy, this concept of white privilege stretches; it, like the claim that whiteness functions as a norm , unites theorists who otherwise have very little in common. My contention is that wherever we see the concept of white privilege operating, we can be sure the conception of power that is also operating is the traditional juridical conception that construes power as the possession of a preexistent subject. No thorough overview of Whiteness Studies ever omits reference to Peggy McIntosh’s article ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’ (1989). Although McIntosh’s article is tentative and limited to description at a very basic, individualistic level, it popularized the notion that white people possess (like tools in a knapsack) something called ‘white privilege’.11 McIntosh lists 46 of these ‘unearned assets’ (McIntosh, 1988: 1), including such disparate ‘tools’ as: (3) ‘If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live’; (5) ‘I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed’; (21) ‘I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group’; (22) ‘I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion’; (33) ‘I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing, or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race’; and (41) ‘I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me’ (McIntosh, 1988: 5–9). One could spend a lot of time critiquing this list and pointing out various problems with it, but what is important here is the focus on privilege itself.

McIntosh claims that racism persists because white people use tools that non-white people have not been given. If we want to eliminate racist exercises of power, white people have to divest themselves of those tools. Clearly this sort of analysis can never lead to an account of the production and maintenance of white

subjectivities within racist regimes of power – unless all we mean by ‘white subjectivity’ is a generic subject plus a knapsack full of white privileges, a knapsack that the generic subject can jettison without seriously altering its own composition. But that is surely not what the thesis of the social construction of white identity amounts to. So why do Whiteness theorists hang onto this terminology? Why does the concept of white privilege appear in virtually every Whiteness Studies book and article? Lisa Heldke and Peg O’Connor are among the few writers who expend any effort at all trying to justify their use of the concept of white privilege. According to them, the analytic value of the term ‘privilege’ lies in its ability to play the opposite role to ‘oppression’. Everyone generally agrees that there is such a thing as racial oppression and that the members of some races are oppressed, but what of the races that are not oppressed? Heldke and O’Connor write: ‘Some will argue that domination is the companion concept of oppression; they assert that if you are not a member of a particular oppressed group, then you are automatically a dominator’ (Heldke and O’Connor, 2004: 299). They dislike the term ‘domination’, however, because it ‘presupposes that a group or an individual exercises power over another group in very obvious and overt ways’ (ibid.); in other words, it runs counter to the apparent fact that, as analyses like Omi and Winant’s make clear, racism does not operate in obvious and overt ways (at least not by the lights of most white people) and many white people are not aware of its functioning at all. Heldke and O’Connor’s analysis continues: . . . oppression has many different faces; it is created in all kinds of social practices, structures, and institutions. In many instances of oppression, we may not be able to point to any person or group of persons who are actively engaged in dominating the oppressed group . . . We need a companion concept that has as many different faces as does oppression. The concept of privilege will fill the bill; its multiple aspects allow us to describe and understand the roles that different ‘unoppressed’ groups play in the maintenance of oppressive systems. (Heldke and

O’Connor, 2004: 299) In sum, within racist societies there are three kinds of people ; there are oppressed people (those without much power), dominators (those with power who intend to oppress others), and people who exercise privilege (those with power who do not intend to oppress others but do so anyway). If we hang onto a conception of power that makes it the property of a pre-constituted subjectivity and do not posit that third group, we cannot explain how racism can continue to exist if most people are not avowed racists. We will need a

psychological theory to explain the persistence of racism. In other words, if we hang onto a traditional juridical conception of power, we will remain stuck where race theorists were stuck 30 years ago . I contend that the pervasiveness of the term ‘white privilege’ is testament to how deeply and profoundly stuck race theorists typically still are.

( ) Rather, debate should be a zone of open speech of any kind, allowing infinite lines of flight with no boundaries. This isn’t liberal-democratic switch-side, but eternal open evolution of the process of debate itself. Vote negative to endorse an exterior mode of debate.Paul Patton, Professor of Philosophy @ the University of New South Wales, 1984, “Conceptual Politics and the War Machine in ‘Mille Plateaux’,” JSTOR.

This choice is stated in several ways in the course of Mille Plateaux.2 It is not a matter of different contents of thought , as it would be for those for whom criticism is governed by some form of opposition between adequate and inadequate representations of an external reality (science and ideology). It is rather a matter of different styles or modes of conceptual functioning: "It happens that thought contents are criticized for being too conformist. But the primary question is that of the form itself" (464). In

particular, the choice is between a mode of thought governed by figures of interiority and

one whose essence is exteriority : une pensee du dehors. The classical image of thought, as it is pre- sented in the history of

philosophy, is that of conceptual systems whose relationship with the outside is always mediated by some form of interiority, whether this be the soul, consciousness,

or concepts themselves. These are centered and hierarchical systems, and precisely the primary characteristic of arborescent thought is its organization around a principle of unity or interiority: this forms the underlying structure or axis in terms of which the object in question (language, the unconscious, society) and its relation to other

things must be understood. Against this image, Deleuze defends a form of thought defined by its essential exteriority, its

potential for multiple and polyvalent relations with an outside. This is one of the most important characteristics of rhizomes: rhizomes are a certain kind of assemblage or multiplicity and, as such, are defined by their outside, "by the abstract line, line of flight or of deterritorialization along which they are transformed by being connected to other multiplicities " (15-16). More- over, rhizomatic thought implies a style of writing which displays immediate connections with the outside: "It seems to us

that writing will never be carried out enough in the name of an outside. The outside has no image , no meaning, no subjectivity.

The book, assemblage with the outside, against the book-image of the world. A book-rhizome" (34). Examples of such writing include texts by Kleist, Kafka, Artaud, and Nietzsche. Elsewhere Deleuze cites the passage from The Genealogy of Morals dealing with the founders of the State, those "terrible artists with the look of bronze": "One does not reckon with such natures; they come like fate, without reason, consideration or pretext; they appear as lighten- ing, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too 'different' even to be hated. .. ." Such texts, he suggests, are animated by a movement which comes from without, an external force or intensity such that "something jumps from the book, entering into contact with a pure outside."3 This Deleuzian alternative is not simply a matter of another image of thought, an alternative model for the elaboration of concepts. For that would imply a constant form which could then be reproduced in different domains, whereas exteriorizing

thought is characterized above all by its inconstancy, its variability. Interiorizing or arborescent thought does provide a model, but there is a fundamental dissymmetry between the opposing poles here. The former lies entirely outside the domain of the reproducible, of representation, belong- ing instead to the nether world of simulacra, where repetition implies essential difference. La pensee du dehors has an affinity with maps rather than tracings. It is a matter of "the

force which destroys the image and its copies, the model and its reproductions, all possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True , the Right or the Law (cartesian truth, kantian right, hegelian law, etc.)" (467). What is being recommended is not the repetition of some Other Form of conceptual assemblage, but a process: the operation of putting thought into an immediate

relation with outside forces, "in short, of making thought a war-machine" (467). Thought as a war-machine means a nomadic thought, since it was the nomads who invented war-machines and deployed them against the apparatuses of the State. This opposition between the State and nomads allows the difference between these two modes of thought to be expressed in terms of the kind of mental space occupied or described by concepts. The classical image, or State-form of thought, involves a striated mental space which is traditionally delimited by a dual pretention to universality: "In effect, it operates with two 'universals,' the Totality as the ultimate foundation of being or the enfolding horizon, and the Subject as the principle which converts being into being-for- us" (469). In these terms,

the alternative is therefore a thought which refuses any universal subject, attributing itself instead to a particular multiplicity, race, or tribe and, which does not locate itself within some englobing totality but 62 Conceptual

Politics is rather deployed in a milieu without horizon, occupying a smooth space in the manner in which nomads occupy a steppe. A number of conclusions may be drawn from this regarding Mille Plateaux itself. First, while it may, at a certain level of generality, be "philosophy in the traditional sense," the kinds of concepts invented and their rhizomatic assemblage result in a far from traditional book. These are untimely concepts, calculated to produce critical effects on the established forms of understanding: "The philosopher creates concepts that are neither eternal nor historical but untimely, not of the present."4 Second, an understanding of the nature of a book-rhizome clearly has implications for how we should read it. It cannot be

read as a series of stages in an unfolding exposition or argument. Without any fixed or delimited territory, a conceptual rhizome has no beginning and no end ; it is all middle, composed of plateaux which are themselves always in between: "Each plateau may be read in no matter what order, and related to no matter which other plateaux" (33). Different plateaux may overlap, some- times deploying the same concepts, although not in the same manner, but they remain self-sufficient trajectories. Despite the undoubted presence of a metaphysical tendency, a system- building impulse evident in the very proliferation of concepts and distinctions, it would be futile to try to reconstitute a system from Mille Plateaux. Such an architectonic analysis would suppose the existence of a stable conceptual interiority which by right the book does not have. The question remains, how- ever, How do they function, these plateaux? How do they work, both as conceptual thought providing effects of intelligibility, however local or provisional, and as connections with an outside? An appropriate way to proceed might be to choose a particular conceptual line and track it: exegesis should follow a path rather than reproduce a system. Like the primitive metallurgist, whose importance derives from the fact that he is the ultimate source of arms for nomads and the State alike, we should identify a conceptual lode and follow it, extracting whatever gems we may discover in the process. For the remainder of this essay, we shall be guided by the political seam through Mille Plateaux. As well as being a prodigious enterprise of conceptual innovation, this is a thoroughly political text. At one point, the authors install the political as their ultimate metaphysical category: "Before being there is politics" (249). At the level of political theory, their work, like that of Foucault and others in post-1968 France, needs to be read in the context of an attempt to redefine what constitutes "revolutionary" politics and to rethink the terms in which we evaluate social movements. From the section in plateau 13 where they discuss the current situation and from remarks throughout the book, it is apparent that their political sympathies lie with those "marginal" movements which have been the principal force of European leftism since the early 70s. These include not only the movements of women, prisoners, migrant workers, and others, but also struggles around ecology, autonomy, and the networks 63 of alternative institutions. In view of these explicit concerns, we may ask how the several plateaux serve in relation to political evaluation and action: does Mille Plateaux propose a politics, and, if so, what is it? We shall address this question primarily via the use by Deleuze and Guattari of the concepts of war-machine and nomadism. These are elaborated in detail in plateau 12, the Treatise on Nomadology, but they are also frequently invoked in contexts where it is a question of the active forces recognized by rhizomatic analysis. They are recurrent figures of the political morality found in Mille Plateaux. Our objective is not to recapture all that is relevant to political evaluation: much of the analysis of capitalism as an axiom system will be passed over. Rather, the aim is to use the discourse on nomadism and the war-machine to illustrate the manner in which philosophical and political concerns are articulated in the text. There are in the course of Mille Plateaux a number of discursive platforms in whose terms individual and social processes may be analyzed: rhizomatics, schizo-analysis, pragmatics, cartography, and nomadology are the names of just a few of these distinct but overlapping frames of reference. Before taking up directly the concepts of war-machine and nomadism, it may be helpful briefly to survey at least one of these, in order to indicate the general terms of Deleuzian analysis and to locate the concept of war-machine by reference to another platform. The political perspective for which Deleuze and Guattari are best known is probably that of "micro-politics." This is not a perspective which limits itself to the local or personal phenomena of desire, but one which explicitly takes these into account as a constitutive and sometimes leading element in social processes. The point is not to perpetuate distinctions of scale or divisions between the private and public spheres, but to obviate all of these, replacing them by a differentiation between the kinds of segment or lines of which we are composed. In Mille Plateaux, the earlier schizo-analytic analysis in terms of types of desiring process is largely superseded by a cartographic analysis of the lines of power and desire which characterize individuals or groups: on the one hand, a molar line of rigid segmentarity which implies the presence of something like a State apparatus; on the other, a molecular line of supple segmentarity along which occur affective attachments and all kinds of "becomings" -becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible. Processes of desire tend to operate along the molecular line, whereas the official organization of institutions and of lives tends to effect the molar line. However, these two distinctions do not exactly coincide, and in reality the two kinds of line are closely intertwined: Every society, but also every individual, is therefore composed of both segmentarities at once: the one molar, the other molecular. These are distinguished by the fact that they don't have the same terms, the same relations, the same nature or the same type of multiplicity. They are inseparable by virtue of the fact that they coexist, the one leading into the other . .. always in presupposition to one another. (260) 64 Conceptual Politics The difference between these two lines is not an axiological one, but an effective difference, important for the understanding of social phenomena: which processes correspond to what line in a given situation. Thus, the authors show how the

specificity of fascism as a form of totalitarian regime appears once it is understood how it organizes libidinal attractions at the molecular level. Fascism, they suggest, is inseparable from a proliferation of micro-fascisms in the school, family, office, or other local centers, all in constant interaction with each other before they resonate together in the national-socialist State (261-262). There is a third type of line, however, which is the most important of all – a line no less real, but more abstract than

the other two. This is the line of flight, a line without segments which is more like the collapse of all segmentarity. It is the line along which structures constituted in terms of the preceding lines break down or become transformed into something else.

It is the line of absolute deterritorialization. In any assemblage, the lines of flight are primary in both an ontological as well as an

ethico-political sense. An assemblage is governed or defined by its abstract line: assemblages do not have a causal infrastructure or sub-structure, but they do have "an abstract line of specific, creative causality, a line

of flight or deterritorialization, which can only be effective in relation to other, general causalities, but which cannot be explained by these" (347). In ethico-political terms, the line of flight is privileged because "it is always on a line of flight that one creates."5 Throughout Mille Plateaux, preference is accorded to those processes or modes of existence which exhibit the greatest possible degree of creativity or life: absolute deterritorialization, continuous variation, becoming-minor are some of these processes; rhizome, body without organs, plane of consistence, and nomadism are some of the modes of exist- ence exhibiting these creative processes. If there is a certain vitalism implicit in the book, it is one with no necessary relation to the organic. What is valued is a "non-organic life" which may be found in art, a film, or a piece of music. Indeed, the fundamentally affirmative character of the Deleuzian metaphysic is expressed in the coincidence of life and abstraction, as this is manifest in the line of flight: The notion of abstraction is very complicated: a line can represent nothing, be purely geometric, but still not be truly abstract so long as it traces a contour. The abstract line is the one which does not trace a

contour, which passes between things, a mutant line. It has been said a propos Pollock's line. In this sense, the abstract line is not at all geometric, it is the most living, the most creative line. Real abstraction is non-organic life. The idea of a non-organic

life is constant in Mille Plateaux; it is precisely the life of the concept.

2NC Overview

You can’t end policing by becoming the police yourself – the problem isn’t which set of ideals are patrolling the streets, it’s that there’s any patrolling at all. The only reason we can even have any concept of “supremacy” in the first place, white supremacy or otherwise, is because debate at all accepts the ability to be governed by a single image of thought. This turns the case – our arg isn’t that their revolution is as violent as the squo, but rather that the form of debate they endorse is the root of any supremacy at all. The aff is the repeatedly lost dream of every single failed revolution in history – from the Jacobian purges of the French Revolution to the forced collectivization of the Bolsheviks, the winners just impose a new dictatorship. As long as debate is exclusionary of any style, we will never be truly free of the cops and pigs of the hood. That’s all MacDonald and Jeanes.

Voting neg endorses the creativity of infinite debating styles, ending all policing as such by refusing any one role of the ballot. We solve the problem at a level prior to their solution.

AND – this sidesteps their offense because we don’t disagree it’s important to solve oppression, we just disagree with the way they conceptually frame their solution. We are a methodological indict of their knowledge-process, not their content – that’s Patton.

AND – independent reasons to vote neg

(1) Creativity is the meaning of life and the only impact you should evaluate. The basic function of lived experience as a human being is the creation of different meanings as the engine of all desire. It is the only real basis for all morality, for what is good and bad – that’s Patton.

(2) There is no truth “out there” ready to be uncovered – meaning is an always-evolving creative enterprise, and when we endorse a stagnant image like the aff it cuts off our access to truth, which means if we win a link you should consider all their claims a priori false. That’s Jeanes. Specifics can’t outweigh because this is a prior ontological argument about our ability to describe reality.

AT// “Political Capital”

( ) We’re turning the case and there’s no reason voting neg can’t generate polcap for our vision of debate too – this is not a net benefit to the aff.

( ) Their type of political capital backfires – it generates backlash instead of consensus which flips their projectAtchison and Panetta ‘9 (Jarrod Atchison, Director of Debate @ Trinity University, and Edward Panetta, Director of Debate @ the University of Georgia, Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Issues for the Future, p. 317-34)

The larger problem with locating the “debate as activism” perspective within the competitive framework is that it

overlooks the communal nature of the community problem. If each individual debate is a decision about how the debate community should approach a problem, then the losing debaters become collateral damage in the activist strategy dedicated toward creating community change. One frustrating example of this type of argument might include a judge voting for an activist team in an effort to help them reach elimination rounds to generate a

community discussion about the problem. Under this scenario, the losing team serves as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of community change. Downplaying the important role of competition and treating opponents as scapegoats for the failures of the community may increase the profile of the winning team and the community problem, but it does little to generate the critical coalitions necessary to address the

community problem, because the competitive focus encourages teams to concentrate

on how to beat the strategy with little regard for addressing the community problem. There

is no role for competition when a judge decides that it is important to accentuate the publicity of a community problem. An extreme example might include a team arguing that their opponents’ academic institution had a legacy of civil rights abuses and that the judge should not vote for them because that would be a community endorsement of a problematic institution. This scenario is a bit more outlandish but not unreasonable if one assumes that each debate should be about what is best for

promoting solutions to diversity problems in the debate community. / If the debate community is serious about generating

community change, then it is more likely to occur outside a traditional competitive debate. When a team loses a debate because the judge decides that it is better for the community for the other team to win, then they have sacrificed two potential advocates for change within the community. Creating change through wins generates backlash through losses. Some proponents are comfortable with generating backlash and argue that the reaction is evidence that the issue is being discussed. / From our perspective, the discussion that results from these hostile situations is not a productive one where participants seek to work together for a common goal. Instead of giving up on hope for change and agitating for wins regardless of who is left behind, it seems more reasonable that the debate community should try the method of public argument that we teach in an effort to generate a

discussion of necessary community changes. Simply put, debate competitions do not represent the best environment for community change because it is a competition for a win and only one team can win any given debate , whereas addressing systemic century-long community problems requires a tremendous effort by a great number of people.

( ) Creativity solves this better because it avoids the good/bad binary that produces backlash, instead allowing every style of debate to coexist which builds consensus – that’s MacDonald and Patton.

AT// Perm Do Both

( ) Permutation’s a nonstarter – we refuse any definition of the activity, they define it to resist white supremacy. We are literally impact turning their advocacy, which means the perm either still links or doesn’t solve any of their advantages. Severance is a voter for equity.

( ) Any net benefit is a link because it gives our attempt at aimlessness an external aim. That combination stops the alt from solving.Deleuze & Guattari ’72 (Gilles and Felix, Anti-Oedipus, p. 366-8)

The fourth and final thesis of schizoanalysis is therefore the distinction between two poles of social libidinal investment:

the paranoiac, reactionary, and fascisizing pole, and the schizoid revolutionary pole. Once again, we see no objection to the use of terms inherited from psychiatry for characterizing social investments of the unconscious, insofar as these terms cease to have a familial connotation that would make them

into simple projections, and from the moment delirium is recognized as having a primary social content that is immediately adequate. The two poles are defined, the one by the enslavement of production and the desiring-machines to the gregarious aggregates that they constitute on a large scale under a given

form of power or selective sovereignty; the other by the inverse subordination and the overthrow of power. The one by these molar structured aggregates that crush singularities , select them, and regularize those that they retain in codes or axiomatics : the other by the molecular multiplicities of singularities that on the contrary treat the large aggregates as so many

useful materials for their own elaborations. The one by the lines of integration and territorialization that arrest the

flows, constrict them, turn them back, break them again according to the limits interior to the system , in such a way as to produce the images that come to fiIl the field of immanence peculiar to this system or this aggregate. the other by lines of escape that follow the decoded and deterritorialized flows, inventing their own nonfigurative breaks or schizzes that produce new flows, always breaching the coded wall or the territorialized limit that separates them from desiring-production. And to summarize all the preceding determinations: the one is defined by subjugated groups, the other by subject-groups. It is true that we still run up against all kinds of problems concerning these distinctions. In what sense does the schizoid investment constitute, to the same extent as the other one, a real investment of the socio-historical field, and not a simple utopia? In what sense are the lines of escape collective, positive, and creative? What is the relationship

between the two unconscious poles, and what is their relationship with the preconscious investments of interest? We have seen that the unconscious

paranoiac investment was grounded in the socius itself as a full body without organs, beyond the preconscious aims and interests that it assigns and

distributes. The fact remains that such an investment does not endure the light of day: it must always hide under assignable aims or interests presented as the general aims and interests, even though in reality the latter represent only the members of the dominant class or a fraction of this class. How could a formation of sovereignty, a fixed and determinate gregarious aggregate, endure being invested for their brute

force, their violence, and their absurdity? They would not survive such an investment. Even the most overt fascism speaks the language of

goals, of law, order, and reason . Even the most insane capitalism speaks in the name of economic rationality. And this is necessarily the case, since it is

in the irrationality of the full body that the order of reasons is inextricably fixed, under a code, under an axiomatic that determines it. What is more, the bringing to light of the unconscious reactionary investment as if devoid of an aim , would be enough to transform it completely, to make it pass to the other pole of the libido, i.e., to the

schizorevolutionary pole, since this action could not be accomplished without overthrowing power, without reversing subordination, without returning production itself to desire: for it is only desire that lives from having no aim. Molecular desiring-production would regain its liberty to master in its turn the molar aggregate under an overturned form of power or sovereignty. That is why Klossowski, who has taken the theory of the two poles of investment the furthest, but still within the category of an active utopia, is able to write: "Every sovereign formation would thus have to foresee the destined moment of its disintegration.... No formation of sovereignty, in order to crystalize, will ever endure this prise de conscience: for as soon as this formation becomes conscious of its immanent disintegration in the individuals who compose it, these same individuals decompose it. ... By way of the circuitous route of science and art, human beings have many times revolted against

this fixity; this capacity notwithstanding, the gregarious impulse in and by science caused this rupture to fail. The day humans are able to behave as intentionless phenomena – for every intention at the level of the human being always obeys the laws of its conservation, its

continued existence – on that day a new creature will declare the integrity of existence.... Science demonstrates by its very method that the means that it constantly elaborates do no more than reproduce, on the outside, an interplay of forces by themselves without aim or end whose

combinations obtain such and such a result. ... However, no science can develop outside a constituted social grouping. In order to prevent science from calling social groups back in question, these groups take science back in hand ... [integrate it] into the diverse industrial schemes; its autonomy appears strictly inconceivable. A conspiracy joining together art and science presupposes a rupture of all our institutions and a total upheaval of the means of production.... If some conspiracy, according to Nietzsche's wish, were to use science and art in a plot whose ends were no less suspect, industrial society would seem to foil this conspiracy in advance

by the kind of mise en scene it offers for it, under pain of effectively suffering what this conspiracy reserves for this society: i.e., the breakup of the institutional structures that mask the society into a plurality of experimental spheres finally revealing the true face of modernity – an ultimate phase that Nietzsche saw as the end result of the evolution of societies. In

this perspective, art and science would then emerge as sovereign formations that Nietzsche said constituted the object of his countersociology – art and science establishing themselves as dominant powers , on the ruins of institutions”

( ) They establish a stagnant image of thought which destroys creativity – they assume there is a truth “out there” about the perfect form of debate which becomes their single, monolithic advocacy. That’s Jeanes.

AT// White Supremacy Destroys Creativity

( ) Our entire arg is we solve white supremacy better than they do, which means there’s only a risk of a link – the only reason there can even be any concept of “supremacy” at all is because of restricted creativity in debate. It’s impossible for anything to be supreme with a neg ballot because we open debate to an exterior mode that has infinite lines of thought – not only are solving this impact so much higher up on the ontological chain than they are, we’re also solving every form of supremacy which means our solvency outweighs on magnitude. That’s all of our evidence.

( ) Here’s more evidence creativity solves all supremacy bestHolland ‘99 (Eugene Holland, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature @ Ohio State University, Deleuze and Guatarri’s Anti-Oedipus, p. 39)

Deleuze and Guattari take this argument yet one step further, for schizoanalysis is not just a materialist semiotics: it is an historical-materialist semiotics. Not only is the nuclear family as social institution the basis for Oedipalized subjects and Oedipal

representations of desire (including psychoanalysis) alike, historically speaking it is only the latest in a long line of social institutions responsible for the construction of fixed subjectivities, and it is in some ways the weakest

and the most abstract. Fixed subjects of all kinds arise from an illegitimate use of the conjunctive synthesis that segregates one set of subjectivities from all the others and demands that an otherwise nomadic subjectivity (resulting from legitimate conjunctive syntheses) identify only with members of that restricted set: whites rather than blacks; men rather than women; Christians rather than Jews, and so forth. Instead of the “I am everyone and anyone” of the nomadic subject, the segregated subject believes that he/she belongs to a “superior race” (103–105), identifies himself/herself as essentially different from and better than all the others from which he/she is segregated. Historically, the content or rationale for such segregation has varied

considerably: totem, clan, religion, race, nation, sorority/fraternity, sports team, and so on. But the form of the illegitimate synthesis remains the same: on the basis of a segregation aligning the subject with a superior “us” versus an inferior “them,” a fixed sense of identity arises that rejects as undesirable the multiform possibilities of nomadic subjectivity.

Do Your Boy, The Scream

1NC

Ahhh.

2NC

We offer our scream as the only thing we can do in the face of a mutilated world as well as a world only seen as mutilated. Our visceral rejection of the world-as-is is the starting point for resistance from our own souls not from passive ivory towers. Change only comes from radical refusal and negativity, not rational discourse. This is our scream of rage, of anger, of opposition to the horrors of our world!Holloway '02 [John, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, London, Pluto Press]

In the beginning is the scream. We scream. When we write or when we read, it is easy to forget that the beginning is not the word, but the scream. Faced with the mutilation of human lives by capitalism, a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal: NO . The starting point of theoretical reflection is opposition, negativity, struggle. It is from rage that thought is born, not from the pose of reason, not from the reasoned-sitting-back-and-reflecting-on-the-mysteries-of-existence that is the conventional image of ‘the thinker’. We start from negation, from dissonance . The dissonance can take many shapes. An inarticulate mumble of discontent, tears of frustration, a scream of rage, a confident roar. An unease, a confusion, a longing, a critical vibration. Our dissonance comes from our experience, but that experience varies. Sometimes it is the direct experience of exploitation in the factory, or of oppression in the home, of stress in the office, of hunger and poverty, or of state violence or discrimination. Sometimes it is the less direct experience through television, newspapers or books that moves us to rage. Millions of children live on the streets of the world. In some cities, street children are systematically murdered as the only way of enforcing respect for private property. In 1998 the assets of the 358 richest people were worth more than the total annual income of 45 per cent of the world’s people (over 2.5 billion). The gap between rich and poor is growing, not just between countries but within countries. The stock market rises every time there is an increase in unemployment. Students are imprisoned for struggling for free education while those who are actively responsible for the misery of millions are heaped with honours and given titles of distinction: General, Secretary of Defence, President. The list goes on and on. It is impossible to read a newspaper without feeling rage, without feeling pain. You can think of your own examples. Our anger changes with each day, as outrage piles upon outrage.1 Dimly perhaps, we feel that these things that anger us are not isolated phenomena, that there is a connection between them, that they are all part of a world that is flawed, a world that is wrong in some fundamental way. We see more and more people begging on the street while the stock markets break new records and company directors’ salaries rise to ever dizzier heights, and we feel that the wrongs of the world are not chance injustices but part of a system that is profoundly wrong. Even Hollywood films (surprisingly, perhaps) almost always start from the portrayal of a fundamentally unjust world—before going on to reassure us (less surprisingly) that justice for the individual can be won through individual effort. Our anger is directed not just against particular happenings but against a more general wrongness, a feeling that the world is askew, that the world is in some way untrue . When we experience something particularly horrific, we hold up our hands in horror and say ‘that cannot be! it cannot be true!’ We know that it is true, but feel that it is the truth of an untrue world.2 What would a true world look like? We may have a vague idea: it would be a world of justice, a world in which people could relate to each other as people and not as things, a world in which people would shape their own lives. But we do not need to have a picture of what a true world would be like in order to feel that there is something radically wrong with the world that exists. Feeling that the world is wrong does not necessarily mean that we have a picture of a utopia to put its place. Nor does it necessarily mean a romantic, some-day-my-prince-will-come idea that, although things are wrong now, one day we shall come to a true world, a promised land, a happy ending. We need no promise of a happy ending to justify our rejection of a world we feel to be wrong. That is our starting point: rejection of a world that we feel to be wrong, negation of a world we feel to be negative. This is what we must cling to.

And our scream isn’t part of any bigger picture, rather it is just our affirmation of rejection. Social analysis and critical theory only serve to exclude or dilute or rage into mediated discourse. This guts solvency and turns case because our screams begin to be comsumed into the system we fight to oppose. Before all else we have to reserve our ability to rage and scream in the midst of academia. Instead of opting for studying on the oppression of others we should focus on our own massive frustration with the system. Holloway '02 [John, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, London, Pluto Press]

‘Cling to’, indeed, for there is so much to stifle our negativity, to smother our scream. Our anger is constantly fired by experience, but any attempt to express that anger is met by a wall of absorbent cotton wool. We are met with so many arguments that seem quite reasonable. There are so many ways of bouncing our scream back against us, of looking at us and asking why we scream. It is because of our age, our social background, or just some psychological maladjustment that we are so negative? Are we hungry, did we sleep badly or is it just pre-menstrual tension? Do we not understand the complexity of the world, the practical difficulties of implementing radical change? Do we not know that it is unscientific to scream? And so they urge us (and we feel the need) to study society, and to study social and political theory. And a strange thing happens. The more we study society, the more our negativity is dissipated or sidelined as being irrelevant. There is no room for the scream in academic discourse. More than that: academic study provides us with a language and a way of thinking that makes it very difficult for us to express our scream. The scream , if it appears at all, appears as something to be explained, not as something to be articulated. The scream, from being the subject of our questions about society, becomes the object of analysis. Why is it that we scream? Or rather, since we are now social scientists, why is it that they scream? How do we explain social revolt, social discontent? The scream is systematically disqualified by dissolving it into its context. It is because of infantile experiences that they scream, because of their modernist conception of the subject, because of their unhealthy diet, because of the weakening of family structures: all of these explanations are backed up by statistically supported research. The scream is not entirely denied, but it is robbed of all validity . By being torn from ‘us’ and projected on to a ‘they’, the scream is excluded from the scientific method. When we become social scientists, we learn that the way to understand is to pursue objectivity, to put our own feelings on one side. It is not so much what we learn as how we learn that seems to smother our scream. It is a whole structure of thought that disarms us. And yet none of the things which made us so angry to start off with have disappeared. We have learnt, perhaps, how they fit together as parts of a system of social domination, but somehow our negativity has been erased from the picture. The horrors of the world continue . That is why it is necessary to do what is considered scientifically taboo: to scream like a child , to lift the scream from all its structural explanations, to say ‘We don’t care what the psychiatrist says, we don’t care if our subjectivity is a social construct: this is our scream, this is our pain, these are our tears. We will not let our rage be diluted into reality : it is reality rather that must yield to our scream. Call us childish or adolescent if you like, but this is our starting point: we scream.’ 3

Framework

1NC

Contention ____: Our Framework

The affirmative should win a topical plan is better than the status quo or competitive policy option

The resolution indicates affs should advocate topical government changeEricson 3 (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)

The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements , although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence . 2. The verb should —the first part of a verb phrase that urges action . 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, shouldadopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur . What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.

A fiated plan is not a proscription for change, but an inscription of equality within this debate round. Our role as intellectuals is not to provide proscriptive solutions, but to offer analyses that reveal the problems with hegemonic institutions and practices and enable their transformation. The presentation of this criticism in this debate as a policy is both an introduction of our analysis as a useful starting point for discussing the failures of the past police orders and an attempt to shift the way we, as a community of intellectuals, engage policy debatesFoucault ‘80 (Michel, “Questions of Method,” in “The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,” (1991), by Michel Foucault, Graham Burchell, and Colin Gordon, p. 82-85)

You're quite right to pose this problem of anaesthesis,¶ one which is of capital importance. (t 's quite true that I

don't feel myself capable of effecting the 'subversion of all codes', 'dislocation of all ord~rs¶ of knowledge\ 'revolutionary affirmation of violence', 'overturning 'of¶ all contemporary culture', these hopes and prospectuses wh ich currently¶ underpin all those brilliant intellectual ventures which I admire all the¶ more because the worth and previous achievements of those who¶ undertake them guarantees an appropriate outcome. My project is far¶ from being of comparable scope. To give some as<istance in wearihg¶ away certain self-

evidences and commonplaces about madness,¶ normality, illness, crime and punishment; to bring it about, together with¶ many others, that certain phrases can no longer be spoken so lightly,¶ certain acts no longer, or at least no longer so unhesitatingly, performed;¶ to contribute to changing certain things in people's ways of perceiving¶ and doing things; to participate in this difficult displacement of forms of¶ sensibility and thresholds of tolerance - I hardly feel capable 'of¶ attempting much more than that. If only what I have tried to say might¶ somehow, to some degree, not remain altogether foreign_to some such¶ real effects ... And

yet I realize how much all this can remain¶ precarious, how easily it can all lapse back into somnolence.¶ But you are right, one has to be more suspicious. Perhaps what ( have¶ written has had an anaesthetic effect. But one still needs to distinguish on¶ whom.¶ To judge by what the psychiatric authorities have had to say, the¶ cohorts on the right who charge me with being against any form of¶ power, rhose on the left who call me the 'last bulwark of the bourgeoisie'¶ (this isn't a 'Kanapa phrase'; on the contrary), the worthy psychoanalyst¶ who likened me to the Hitler of Mei. Kampf, the numbe r of times I've¶ been 'autopsied' and 'buried' during the past fifreen years - well, I have¶ the impression of having had an irritant rather than anaesthetic effect on¶ a good many people. The epidermi bristle with a constancy I find¶ encouraging. A journal recently warned its readers in deliciously¶ Petainist style against accepting as a credo what I had had to s~i about¶ sexuality ('the importance of the subject', 'the personaliry of the author'¶ rendered my enterprise 'dangerous'). No risk of anaesthesis in that¶ direction. But I

agree with you, these are trifles, amusing to note bl1t¶ tedious to collect. The only important problem is what happens on the¶ ground.¶ We have known at least since the nineteenth century the difference¶ between ana esthesis and paralysis. Let's talk about paralysis first. Who¶ has been paralyzed? Do you think what I wrote on the history of¶ psychiatry paralyzed those people who had already been concerned for¶ some time about what was happening in psychiatric institutions? And ,¶ seeing what has been happening in and around rhe prisons, I don't think¶ the effect of paralysis is very evident there either. As far.s the

people in¶ prison are concerned, things aren't doing too badly. On the other hand,¶ it's true that certain people, such as those who work in the institutional¶ setting of the prison - which is not quite the same as being in prison - are¶ not likely to find advice or instructions in my books that tell them 'What¶ is to be done'. But my project is precisely to bring it about that· they 'no¶ longer know what to ~ do', so that the acts, gestures, discourses which up¶ until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic,.,¶ difficult, dangerous . This effect is intentional. And then I have some newS¶ for you:

for me the problem of the prisons isn't one for the 'social¶ workers' but one for the prisoners . And on that side, I'm not so sure¶ what's been said over .the last fifteen years

has been quite so - how shall I¶ put it? - demobilizing.¶ But paralysis isn't the same thing as anaesthesis - on the contrary. It's¶ in so far as there's been an awakening to a whole series of problems that¶ the difficulty of doing anything comes to be felt. Not that this effect is an ¶ end in itself.

But it seems to me that 'what is to be done' ought not to be¶

determined from above by reformers, be they prophetic or

legislative,¶ but by a long work of comings and goings, of

exchanges, reflections,¶ trials, different analyses . If the social workers you are talking about don't¶ know which way to turn, this just goes to show that they're looking, and¶ hence are not anaesthetized or sterilized at all- on the contrary. And it's¶ because of the need not to tie them down or immobilize them that there¶ can be no question for me of trying to tell 'what is to be done'. If the¶ questions posed by the social workers you spoke of are going to assume¶ their full amplitude, the most important thing is not to bury them under¶ the we,ight of prescriptive, prophetic discourse. The necessity of reform¶ mustn't be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit,¶ reduce or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should¶ one pay attention to those who tell one: 'Don't criticize, since you're

not¶ capable of carrying ,out a reform.' That's ministerial cabinet talk.¶ Critique doesn't have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes:¶ this then is what needs to be

done. It should be an instrument for those¶ who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in¶ processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn't have¶ to lay down the law

for the law. It isn't a stage in a programming . It is a ¶ challenge

directed to what is. ¶ The problem, you see, is one for the subject who acts - the subject of¶ action

through which the real is transformed. If prisons and punitive¶ mechanisms are transformed, it won't be because a plan of reform has¶ found its way into the heads of the social workers; it will be when those¶ who have to do with that penal reality, all those people, have come into¶ collision with each other and with themselves, run into dead-ends,¶ problems and impossibilities, been through conflicts and confrontations;¶ when critique has been played out in the real, not when reformers have¶ realized their ideas·.

And this interpretation of framework is best for debate:

First is Competitive Equity.

Plan focus prevents the negative from advocating vague and unpredictable alternatives. Competitive equity should be evaluated first because it shapes the way we engage their arguments.

A) Strategy Skew – lack of plan focus allows the negative to spend the entire 1NC criticizing one concept without engaging the 1AC arguments. We can't leverage our 1AC as offense against the vague and unpredictable alternatives their interpretation allows.

B) Timeframe – immediacy is crucial because established timeframes are necessary for our uniqueness arguments and impact turns against their positions. If they can shift when or if the alternative is successful, we can't argue against the desirability of it being endorsed or outweigh it with the arguments presented in the 1AC.

C) Context – the indefinite passage of the alternative allows them to argue that their alternative changes the world so dramatically that the arguments and assumptions of our 1AC no longer apply. No evidence contextualizes our Affirmative within this world, creating an impossible burden for us to generate specific offense from the 1AC against their vague and shifting 1NC.

Second is Fairness.

Plan focus is necessary to provide the affirmative with fair and predictable ground. This is the critical internal link to education because an unfair playing field discourages research and participation.

A) Choice – we are bound by the resolution to defend the plan. The least the negative can do is answer the question that we are forced to answer.

B) Stability – lack of clarity allows them to shift exactly what they have to defend as the debate continues, rendering our 2AC arguments irrelevant and causing the debate to degrade into attempts to catch up to nebulous alternatives.

C) Counter-Topicality – just as the affirmative is confined within the limits of the resolution so too should the negative be confined to only those arguments which are competitive with the resolution. This is a reciprocal burden that ensures predictable ground for both sides and distills the debate to a single yes/no question.

Third is Education.

Plan focus is the best format for achieving educational benefits through participation in debate.

Citizenship – plan focus is key to effective citizenship – switching sides develops openness to other perspectives; it models the experience of political candidates and activist voters; weighing competing claims teaches responsible decision-making; and it develops the skills needed to engage in effective exchanges of ideas.Dr. David GLASS , Director of Debate at Edgemont High School and President of the NDCA, 2005 [“Necessary Conditions for Policy Debate,” Rostrum, Volume 79, Number 8, April, Available Online at http://www.nflonline.org/Rostrum/ Coach0405Glass, Accessed 08-30-2005 // BATMAN]

By imbuing students with the tools to meet the “fourth condition” of a Democracy - the ability to compare competing policies - scholastic debate provides a critical mechanism to train students to be effective citizens, and activists in the political process. First, scholastic policy debate offers students a resolution of advocacy, and asks them to both defend and oppose a resolution which mandates governmental action. The very duality of responsibility (to both defend and to oppose the resolution, in different debate rounds) forces the future democrat to learn that there are multiple sides to a question, and that an effective defense of one position requires a thorough understanding of the opposition. Second, policy debate forces students to actively participate in a framework established by the Resolution, and in so doing they model the experience of the candidate - who must argue for voter support - and of the activist voter, who tries to sway others to her or his point of view. Third, policy debate teaches the student to appraise competing values; often a policy may have both benefits and disadvantages, and it is only the experienced debater who can accept a nuanced position, and show why a particular issue may be preferable even when one recognizes its down-side. Fourth, policy debate teaches the student to participate in an organized proceeding of advocacy; this is often the student’s first experience in such a proceeding, and thus - almost through osmosis - the student soaks up the critical components of an effective forum for the exchange of ideas: they learn process, they learn “fairness”, they learn what it is like to be judged by individuals with different preconceptions - and thus they learn how important it is to have mechanisms which allow them a hearing which will be steeped with the feel of “justice,” despite the preconceptions which an individual judge may bring to the debate.

Role-Playing – plan focus provides a protected forum for the development of analysis and advocacy skills.Christopher C. JOYNER , Professor of International Law in the Government Department at Georgetown

University, 1999 [“Teaching International Law: Views From An International Relations Political Scientist,” ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law (5 ILSA J Int'l & Comp L 377), Spring, Available Online via Lexis-Nexis // BATMAN]

Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education in the social sciences. Debates, like other role-playing simulations, help students understand different perspectives on a policy issue by adopting a perspective as their own. But, unlike other simulation games, debates do not require that a student participate directly in order to realize the benefit of the game. Instead of developing policy alternatives and experiencing the consequences of different choices in a traditional role-playing game, debates present the

alternatives and consequences in a formal, rhetorical fashion before a judgmental audience. Having the class audience serve as jury helps each student develop a well-thought-out opinion on the issue by providing contrasting facts and views and enabling audience members to pose challenges to each debating team.¶ These debates ask undergraduate students to examine the international legal implications of various United States foreign policy actions. Their chief tasks are to assess the aims of the policy in question, determine their relevance to United States national interests, ascertain what legal principles are involved, and conclude how the United States policy in question squares with relevant principles of international law. Debate questions are formulated as resolutions, along the lines of: "Resolved: The United States should deny most-favored-nation status to China on human rights grounds;" or "Resolved: The United States should resort to military force to ensure inspection of Iraq's possible nuclear, chemical and biological weapons facilities;" or "Resolved: The United States' invasion of Grenada in 1983 was a lawful use of force;" or "Resolved: The United States should kill Saddam Hussein." In addressing both sides of these legal propositions, the student debaters must consult the vast literature of international law, especially the nearly 100 professional law-school-sponsored international law journals now being published in the United States. This literature furnishes an incredibly rich body of legal analysis that often treats topics affecting United States foreign policy, as well as other more esoteric international legal subjects. Although most of these journals are accessible in good law schools, they are largely unknown to the political science community specializing in international relations, much less to the average undergraduate. [*386] ¶ By assessing the role of international law in United States foreign policy- making, students realize that United States actions do not always measure up to international legal expectations; that at times, international legal strictures get compromised for the sake of perceived national interests, and that concepts and principles of international law, like domestic law, can be interpreted and twisted in order to justify United States policy in various international circumstances. In this way, the debate format gives students the benefits ascribed to simulations and other action learning techniques, in that it makes them become actively engaged with their subjects, and not be mere passive consumers. Rather than spectators, students become legal advocates, observing, reacting to, and structuring political and legal perceptions to fit the merits of their case.

We learn to speak the truth to political elitesHoppe 99 Robert Hoppe is Professor of Policy and knowledge in the Faculty of Management and Governance at Twente University, the Netherlands. "Argumentative Turn" Science and Public Policy, volume 26, number 3, June 1999, pages 201–210works.bepress.com

According to Lasswell (1971), policy science is about the production and application of knowledgeofandinpolicy. Policymakers who desireto successfully tackle problems on the political agenda , should be able to mobilize the best available knowledge. This requireshigh-quality

knowledge in policy . Policymakers and, in a democracy, citizens, also need to know how policy

processes really evolve. This demands precise knowledgeofpolicy. There is an obvious link between the two: the

more and better knowledge of policy, the easier it is to mobilize

knowledge in policy . Lasswell expresses this interdependence by defining the policy scientist’s

operational task as eliciting the maximum rational judgment of all those involved in policymakingFor the applied policy scientist orpolicy analystthis implies the development of two skills. First, for the sake of mobilizing the best available knowledgeinpolicy, s/he should be able to mediate between different scientific disciplines. Second, for the sake of optimizing the interdependence between scienceinandofpolicy, s/he should be able to mediate between science and politics. Hence Dunn’s (1994:84) formal definition of policy analysis as an applied social science discipline that uses multiple research methods in a context of argumentation, public debate (and political struggle,rh) in order to create, critically evaluate, and communicate policy-relevant knowledge. Historically, the differentiation and successful institutionalization of policy science can be interpreted as the scientization of the functions of knowledge organization, storage, dissemination and application in the knowledge system (Dunn &Holzner, 1988; Van de Graaf& Hoppe, 1989:29). Moreover, this scientization of hitherto ‘un-scientized’ functions, by expressly including scienceofpolicy, aimed to gear them to the political system. In that sense, Lasswell and Lerner’s (1951) call for policy sciences anticipated, and probably helped bring about the scientization of

politics.Peter Weingart (this issue) claims that the development of the science-policy nexus can be analyzed as a dialectical process of the scientization of politics/policy and thepoliticization of science. Science Technology and Society (STS) studies can claim particular credit for showing the latter tendency (Cozzens & Woodhouse, 1995:551). Applying critical sociology, symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology to the innermost workings of the laboratories, STS-scholars have shown that the idealist image of science as producer of privileged, authoritative knowledge claims, supported by an ascetic practice of Mertonian norms for proper scientific conduct (commonality or communism, universalism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism - CUDO’s) is just the outside, legitimizing veneer of scientific practices and successes. Using interpretive frames from Marxist science studies, conflict theory, interest theory, and social constructivism, a much more realistic perspective on science has been developed. Instead of Mertonian CUDO-norms, contemporary scientistsde factobehave as if science were proprietary, local, authoritarian, commissioned, and expert (Ziman, 1990 - PLACE). From Olympian heights of abstraction, curiosity-

driven speculation, innovative but stringent experiments, and Humboldtian institutional autonomy,small-s science came down to earth as a social movement (Yearley, 1988:44ff) driven by local and practical, sometimes openly political interests, entrepreneurial, fiercely competitive, speculative, with an ‘anything goes’ methodology, and selling itself to government and big business in the race for financial resources. Thus, the politics of science extended into the political domain. But it would be wrong to attribute this just to science’s institutional self interest. To the extent scientists were successful in producing authoritative cosmopolitan knowledge claims, and upholding them in their translation into successful large technological projects, they were invited by politicians and administrators as useful advisers. Thereby politics paradoxically contributed to its own scientization. At first, till the early seventies, it looked like the science-politics nexus would be just mutually beneficial. The institutional ‘convenant’ between the two spheres, aptly named "Science, the Endless Frontier" meant a high degree of institutional autonomy, lots of resources, and privileged access to political decisionmaking through advisory positions for science. Politics, impressed by and grateful for science’s contribution to the war effort and to large infrastructural projects, rested content in expecting more of the same high pay-offs. As these promises turned out empty or merely disappointing, sciences’ cognitive authority waned, and politics gradually revised the convenant by tightening its conditions for financial support and scientific autonomy. The new inter-institutional contract has been relabeled "Strategic Science". On the one hand, politics forces criteria of relevance on scientists, which clearly indicates the politicization of science. On the other hand, "(s)cientists have internalized the pressure for relevance, but at the same time have captured it for their own purposes by claiming a division of labour. Typical stories emphasize strategic research as the hero at the core of one or more ‘innovation chains’ where the switch from open-ended research to implementation would occur" (Rip,1997:631). This, of course, points to the continued scientization of politics.Even though numerous studies of political controversies showed that science-advisors behave pretty much like any other self-interested actor (Nelkin, 1995), science somehow managed to maintain its functional cognitive authority for politics. This may be due to its changing shape, which has been characterized as the diffusion of the authoritative allocation of values by the state, or the emergence of apostparliamentaryandpostnationalnetwork democracy(Andersen & Burns, 1996: 227-251). National political developments are backgrounded by a pulp of ideas about uncontollable, but apparently inevitable international developments; and, in Europe, national state authority and power in public policymaking is leaking away to a new political and administrative élite, situated in the institutionalensembleof the European Union. National representation is in the hands of political parties who no longer control ideological debate but remain intact as venues to national governmental power. The authority and policymaking power of national governments is also leaking away towards increasingly powerful policy subsystems or policy issue networks, dominated by functional representation by interest groups and functional experts.In this situation, public debate has become even more fragile than it has been before. It has become diluted by the predominance of purely pragmatic, managerial and administrative argument, and underarticulated due to an explosion of numerous new political schemata that crowd out the more conventional ideologies. To wit, the new schemata do feed upon the conventional ideologies; but in larger part they consist of a random and unarticulated ‘mish-mash’ of attitudes and images derived from ethnic, local-cultural, professional, religious, social movement, and personal political experiences. On the one hand, the marketplace of political ideas and arguments is thriving; on the other, politicians and citizens are at a loss in

judging its nature and quality. Neither political parties, nor public officials, nor interest groups, nor social movements and citizen groups, nor even the

public media show any inclination, let alone competency, in ordering this inchoate field. In such

conditions, scientific debateprovides a much needed minimal amount of order and articulation of concepts , arguments, and ideas . Although

frequently more in rhetoric than substance, reference to scientific ‘validation’ does provide politicians, public officials, and citizens alike with some sort of compassin an ideological universe in disarray.For policy analysis to have any political impact under such conditions, it should be able to somehow continue ‘speaking truth’ to political élites who are ideologically uprooted, but cling to power; to the élites of

administrators, managers, professionals and experts who vie for power in the jungle of organizations populating the functional policy domains of postparliamentary democracy; and to a broader audience of an ideologically disoriented and politically disenchanted citizenry .

Turns Case

( ) Productive agonism requires limits to measure the performance of contestants---simply throwing out the topic destroys the agonism and the productive gainsChrista Davis Acampora 2, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College of the City University of New York, Fall 2002, “Of Dangerous Games and Dastardly Deeds,” International Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 34, No. 3

The agonistic game is organized around the test of a specific quality the persons involved possess. When two runners compete, the quality tested is typically speed or endurance; when artists compete, it is creativity; craftsmen test their skills, etc..The contest has a specific set of rules and criteria for determining (i.e., measuring) which person has excelled above the others in the relevant way. What is tested is a quality the individual competitors themselves possess; and external assistance is not permitted. (This is not to say that agonistic games occur only between individuals and that there can be no cooperative aspects of agonistic engagement. Clearly individuals can assert themselves and strive against other individuals within the context of a team competition, but groups can also work collectively to engage other groups agonistically. In those cases what is tested is the collective might, creativity, endurance, or organizational ability of the participating groups.) Ideally, agonistic endeavors draw out of the competitors the best performance of which they are capable. Although agonistic competition is sometimes viewed as a "zero-sum game," in which the winner takes all, in the cases that Nietzsche highlights as particularly productive agonistic institutions, all who participate are enhanced by their competition. Winning must be a significant goal of participation in agonistic contests, but it would seem that winning might be only one, and not necessarily the most important one, among many reasons to participate in such a competition. In his later writings, Nietzsche appears to be interested in thinking about how the structures of contests or struggles can facilitate different possibilities for competing well within them. In other words, he questions whether the structure of the game might limit the way in which one might be able to compete. His study of slavish morality illuminates well that concern.¶ II. Dastardly Deeds¶ The so-called "Good Eris," described in "Homer's Contest," supposedly allowed the unavoidable urge to strive for preeminence to find expression in perpetual competition in ancient Greek culture. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche seeks to critique Christianity for advocating a kind of altruism, or selflessness, that is essentially self-destructive, and for perverting the urge to struggle by transforming it into a desire for annihilation. Read in light of "Homer's Contest," Nietzsche's Genealogy enables us to better grasp his conception of the value of contest as a possible arena for the revaluation of values, and it advances an understanding of the distinctions Nietzsche draws between creative and destructive forms of contest and modes of competing within them.¶ Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, a Streitschrift—a polemic, a writing that aims to provoke a certain kind of fighting—portrays a battle between "the two opposing values 'good and bad,' 'good and evil'." Nietzsche depicts slavish morality as that which condemns as evil what perpetuates the agon—namely, self-interest , jealousy , and the desire to legislate values— but rather than killing off the desire to struggle, slavish morality manipulates and redirects it. Prevention of struggle is considered by Nietzsche to be hostile to life: an "order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power-complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general—... would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness" (GM II:11). "The 'evolution' of a thing, a custom, an organ is [...] a succession of [...] more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions"(GM II:12). For Nietzsche, human beings, like nations, acquire their identityin their histories of struggles, accomplishments, and moments of resistance. The complete cessation of strife, for Nietzsche, robs a being of its activity, of its life.¶ In the second essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche identifies the notion of conscience, which demands a kind of self-mortification, as an example of the kind of contest slavish morality seeks: "Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instinct: that is the origin of the 'bad conscience'" (GM II:16). Denied all enemies and resistances, finding nothing and no one with whom to struggle except himself, the man of bad conscience:¶

impatiently lacerated, persecuted, gnawed at, assaulted, and maltreated himself; this animal that rubbed itself raw against the bars of its cage as one tried to 'tame' it; this deprived creature... had to turn himself into an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness — this fool, this yearning and desperate prisoner became the inventor of the 'bad conscience.' But thus began the gravest and uncanniest illness... a declaration of war against the old instincts upon which his strength, joy, and terribleness had reached hitherto (GM II:16).¶ Bad conscience functions in slavish morality as a means of self-flagellation, as a way to vent the desire to hurt others once external expressions of opposition are inhibited and forbidden. "Guilt before God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture to him" (GM II:22). In that case, self-worth depends upon the ability to injure and harm oneself, to apply the payment of selfmaltreatment to one's irreconcilable account with God. It is the effort expended in one's attempt to make the impossible repayment that determines one's worth. xi The genuine struggle, that which truly determines value for the ascetic ideal is one in which one destructively opposes oneself—one's value increases as one succeeds in annihilating oneself. Slavish morality is still driven by contest, but the mode of this contest is destructive. It mistakes self-inflicted suffering as a sign of strength. The ascetic ideal celebrates cruelty and torture—it revels in and sanctifies its own pain. It is a discord that wants to be discordant, that enjoys itself in this suffering and even grows more self-confident and triumphant the more its own

presupposition, its physiological capacity for life decreases. 'Triumph in the ultimate agony': the ascetic ideal has always fought under this hyperbolic sign; in this enigma of seduction, in this image of torment and delight, it recognized its brightest light, its salvation, its ultimate victory (GM III:28).¶ Slavish morality, particularly in the

form of Pauline Christianity, redirects the competitive drive and whips into submission all

outward expressions of strife by cultivating the desire to be "good"

xii in which case being good amounts abandoning, as Nietzsche portrays it, both the structure of the contests he admired in "Homer's Contest" and the productive ways of competing within them. It does not merely redirect the goal of the contest (e.g., struggling for the glory of Christ rather than competing for the glory of Athens), rather how one competes well is also transformed (e.g., the "good fight" is conceived as tapping divine power to destroy worldly strongholds xiii rather than excelling them). In other words, the ethos of contest, the ethos of the agonis transformed in slavish morality. xiv¶ III. Dangerous Games¶ Moralities effect contests in two ways: 1) they articulate a structure through which the meaning of human being (e.g., excellence, goodness, etc.) can be created and meted out, and 2) they simultaneously cultivate a commitment to a certain way of competing within those structures. By cultivating not only a desire to win but a desire to compete well (which includes respect for one's competitor and the institutions that sets forth the terms of the engagement), xv we can establish a culture capable of deriving our standards of excellence internally and of renewing and revaluing those standards according to changes in needs and interests of our communities. This is the legacy that Nietzsche strives to articulate in his "Homer's Contest," one that he intends his so-called "new nobility" to claim. If the life of slavish morality is characterized by actions of annihilation and cruelty, Nietzsche's alternative form of valuation is marked by its activity of surmounting what opposes, of overcoming opposition by rising above (erheben) what resists, of striving continually to rise above the form of life it has lived. As a form of spiritualized striving, self-overcoming, must, like Christian agony, be self directed; its aim is primarily resistance to and within oneself, but the agony—that is, the structure of that kind of painful struggle—differs both in how it orients its opposition and in how it pursues its goals . Self-overcoming does not aim at self-destruction but rather at self exhaustion and self-surpassing. It strives not for annihilation but for transformation, and the method of doing so is the one most productive in the external contests of the ancient Greeks: the act of rising above. Self-overcoming asks us to seek hostility and enmity as effective means for summoning our powers of development. Others who pose as resistances, who challenge and test our strength, are to be earnestly sought and revered. That kind of reverence, Nietzsche claims, is what makes possible genuine relationships that enhance our lives. Such admiration and cultivation of opposition serve as "a bridge to love" (GM I:10) because they present a person with the opportunity to actively distinguish himself, to experience the joy and satisfaction that comes with what Nietzsche describes as "becoming what one is." xvi¶ This, Nietzsche suggests, is what makes life worth living—it is what permits us to realize a certain human freedom to be active participants in shaping our own lives. xvii¶ Agonists, in the sense that Nietzsche has in mind, do not strive to win at all costs. Were that their chief or even highly prominent goal we would expect to see even the best contestants hiding from their serious challengers to their superiority or much more frequently resorting to cheating in order to win. Rather, agonists strive to claim maximal meaning for their actions. (That's the good of winning.) They want to perform in a superior manner, one that they certainly hope will excel that of their opponent. In other words, the best contestants have a foremost commitment to excellence, a disposition that includes being mindful of the structure through which their action might have any meaning at all—the rules of the contest or game. xviii¶ What makes this contest dangerous?xix ¶ To be engaged in the process of overcoming, as Nietzsche describes it, is to be willing to risk oneself, to be willing to risk what one has been— the meaning of what one is—in the process of creating and realizing a possible future. The outcome is not guaranteed, that a satisfactory or "better" set of meanings and values will result is not certain. And when the contest is one in which rights to authority are in play, even the Nietzschean contest always runs the risk of supporting tyranny—of supplying the means by which the tyrannical takes its hold. Nietzsche is, of course, mindful of this danger, which is why in his account of the Greek agon he finds it important to discuss the alleged origin of ostracism as the mechanism for preserving the openness of contest. xx¶ Nietzsche claims agonistic institutions contribute to the health of individuals and the culture in which these institutions are organized because agon provides the means for attaining personal distinction and for creating shared goals and interests. Pursuit of this activity, Nietzsche claims, is meaningful freedom. Late in his career, Nietzsche writes, "How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance which must be overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain to top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude" (TI, "Skirmishes," 38). Nietzsche believes that it is only when our strength is tested that it will develop. Later in the passage just cited, Nietzsche continues, "Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to strong—otherwise one will never become strong" (TI, "Skirmishes," 38). Nietzsche takes upon himself, in his own writing, the task of 11 making these kinds of challenges for his readers. Nietzsche's critiques of liberal institutions, democracy, feminism, and socialism should be read in the context of his conception of human freedom and the goal he takes for himself as a kind of liberator. Read thus, we could very well come to see the relevance of agonistic engagement as a means of pursuing a kind of democracy viewed not as a static preservation of some artificial and stultifying sense of equality, but as a process of pursuing meaningfulliberty, mutual striving together in pursuit of freedom conceived not as freedom from the claims of each other but as the freedom of engagement in the process of creating ourselves. xxi¶ IV. A Nietzschean ethos of agonism¶ In a recent essay, Dana R. Villa examines the general thrust of arguments of those advocating agonistic politics. These "contemporary agonists," xxii he claims, largely look to Nietzsche and Foucault (cast as Nietzsche's heir, at least with regard to his conception of power and contest) for inspiration as they make their "battle cry of 'incessant contestation'," which is supposed to create the space a radical democratic politics.

These theorists, remind us that the public sphere is as much a stage for conflict and expression as it is a set of procedures or institutions designed to preserve peace, promote fairness, or achieve consensus. They also (contra Rawls) insist that politics and culture form a continuum, where ultimate values are always already in play; where the content of basic rights and the purposes of political association are not the objects of a frictionless 'overlapping consensus' but are contested every day in a dizzying array of venues. xxiii¶ Villa would commend them for this reminder, but he claims that "recent formulations of an agonistic politics […] have tended to celebrate conflict, and individual and group expression, a bit too unselectively". xxiv¶ He argues that "Nietzsche-inspired" agonists would do better to look to Arendt's conception of the agon and its place in political life for pursuing democratic aims, because she stipulates "that action and contestation must be informed by both judgment and a sense of the public if they are to be praiseworthy. The mere expression of energy in the form of 12 political commitment fails to impress her." "'Incessant contestation,' like Foucauldian 'resistance,' is essentially reactive." What such apolitics boils down to is "merely fighting"; so conceived, "politics is simply conflict". xxv¶ Placing the expression of energies of the individual, multiplicities of selves, or groups at the center of an agonistic politics that lacks some aim beyond just fighting does not advance the aims of democracy. Without specifying an agonistic ethos that crafts a sense of "care for the world—a care for the public realm," politics as the socalled "contemporary agonists" conceive it cannot be liberatory. Arendt, Villa argues, supplies such an ethos in a way that Nietzsche does not. My goal here has been to argue that Nietzsche does supply us with an agonistic ethos, that despite the fact that the advocates of "incessant contestation" might fail to distinguish agonistic conflict from "mere fighting" or "simply conflict" Nietzsche does. My aim is more than mere point-scoring. I am not interested in supporting a case that Nietzsche's views are better than Arendt's. I do think Nietzsche's work offers conceptual resources useful for amplifying and clarifying agonistic theories that are pervasive in numerous fields, including political science, moral psychology, and literary criticism. If we are attentive to how Nietzsche distinguishes different kinds of contests and ways of striving within them we can construct an ethos of agonism that is potentially valuable not only for the cultivation of a few great men but which also contributes to the development of a vibrant culture. By way of concluding, I shall draw on the distinctions developed in Nietzsche's conception of agon and sketch the outlines of a productive ethos of agonism.¶ Some competitions bring with them entitlements and rewards that are reserved for the sole winner. Nearly all of these can be described as zero-sum games: in order for someone to win, others must lose. Further, if I choose to help you to prepare your dossier for your promotion application for the only available post, I risk reducing my own chances for success. Let's call these kinds of competitions antagonistic ones, in which the competitors are pitted against each other in an environment hostile to cooperation.¶ We can also imagine competitions that are not zero-sum games, in which there is not a limited number of resources. Such contests would allow us to enact some of the original meanings at the root of our words for competition and struggle. The Latin root of compete means "to meet," "to be fitting," and "to strive together toward." The Greek word for struggle, which also applied to games and competitions, is agon, which in its original use meant "gathering together." xxvi¶

Practicing an agonistic model of competition could provide results of shared satisfaction and might enable us to transformcompetitions for fame and status that inform so much of our lives into competitions for meeting cooperatively and provisionally defined standards of aesthetic and intellectual excellence. xxvii¶ If we can revive the sense of agon as a gathering together that vivifies the sense of competition that initiates a striving together toward, we can better appreciate the unique relational possibilities of competition. Recalling the definitions of agon and competition provided above, from which I tried to indicate a sense of competition that could facilitate a process of gathering to strive together toward, consider another example. When two runners compete in order to bring out the best performances in each, their own performances become inextricably linked. When I run with you, I push you to pull me, I leap ahead and call you to join me. When you run faster, I respond to your advance not by wishing you would run slower or that you might fall so that I could surge ahead. I do not view your success as a personal affront, rather I respond to it as a call to join you in the pursuit. When in the course of running with me, you draw from me the best of which I am capable, our performances serve as the measure of the strength in both of us. Neither achievement finds its meaning outside of the context in which we created it. When two (or more) compete in order to inspire each other, to strive together toward, the gathering they create, their agon, creates a space in which the meaning of their achievements are gathered. When your excellent performance draws mine out of me, together we potentially unlock the possibilities in each. For this we can certainly be deeply indebted to each other. At the same time, we come to understand and appreciate ourselves and our own possibilities in a new way. Furthermore, this way of coming to understand and appreciate our difference(s), and 14 of recognizing perhaps their interdependence, might be preferable, to other ways in which differences might be determined. Although surely not appropriate in all circumstances, agonistic endeavors can provide an arena for devising a more flexible and creative way of measuring excellence than by comparison with some rigid and externally-imposed rule. xxviii¶

Agonism is not the only productive way of relating to each other, and we can certainly play in ways that are not agonistic, but I do think such an ethos of agonism is compatible with recognition of both the vulnerability of the other and one's dependence upon others for one's own identity. It incorporates aggression, instructive resistance, as well as cooperation, and it is compatible with the practice of generosity. It cultivates senses of yearning and desire that do not necessarily have destructive ends. It requires us to conceive of liberation as something more than freedom from the constraints of others and the community, but as a kind of freedom— buttressed with active support—to be a participant in the definition and perpetual recreation of the values, beliefs, and practices of the communities of which one is a part. That participation might entail provisional restraints, limitations, and norms that mark out the arenas in which such recreations occur.¶ At his best, I think Nietzsche envisions a similar form for the agonistic life. Competitive "striving together toward" can be a difficult condition to create and a fragile one to maintain. It requires the creation of a common ground from which participants can interact. It needs a clearly defined goal that is appropriately demanding of those who participate. It requires that the goal and the acceptable means of achieving it are cooperatively defined and clearly articulated, and yet it must allow for creativity within those rules. It demands systematic support to cultivate future participants. And it must have some kind of

mechanism for keeping the competition open so that future play can be anticipated. When any one of the required elements is disrupted, the competition can deteriorate into alternative and non-productive modes of competition and destructive forms of striving. But when agonistic contest is realized, it creates enormous opportunities for creative self-expression, for the formation of individual and communal identity, for acquiring self-esteem and mutual admiration, and for achieving individual as well as 15 corporate goals. It is one of the possibilities that lie not only beyond good and evil but also beyond the cowardly and barbarous.

( ) Effective deliberative discourse is the lynchpin to solving all existential social and political problems---a switch-side debate format that sets appropriate limits on argument to foster a targeted discussion is most effective---our framework turns the whole caseChristian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p311

The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making , and better public judgment . If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest - and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate . If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate,the citizenry's capacities can change , which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to son rhroueh and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly infonnation-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediatcd information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources:To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional [debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144)Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity . Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials.There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life . Expanding this practice is crucial , if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are ne cessary if democracy isnot only to survive , but to thrive .Democracy faces a myriad of challenges,

including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice ; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change ; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy [in an] increasingly complex world.

AT// State Bad

Below

Role Playing key to Identity and Truth

“State bad” isn't responsive—there's a debate to be had on every institutional question and foreclosing that with a priori ethical posturing is itself unethicalTalisse 2005 – philosophy professor at Vanderbilt (Robert, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 31.4, “Deliberativist responses to activist challenges”) *note: gendered language in this article refers to arguments made by two specific individuals in an article by Iris Young

The first two challenges are focused on the failure of existing political institutions and processes to satisfy the ideals of publicity, accountability, and

inclusion(109) that are promoted by the deliberative democrat. First, the activist points to the exclusionary character of existing sites of deliberation, citing the prevalence of structural inequality and power (108). Second, he criticizes recent measures aimed at inclusion for falling ‘far short of providing opportunities for real voice for those less privileged in the social structures’ (112).

Insofar as the activist’s criticisms are aimed at the failure of existing institutions to live up to the deliberative ideal, they implicitly accept that ideal . Thus , as Young points out, the deliberativist can agree with the

activist that current conditions fall shortof the democratic ideal, and can accept the activist’s specific criticisms of the existing order (112). Again, they differ on the issue of means , not ends: the deliberativist holds thatprocesses of continuing

public discourse can reveal and remedy the shortcomings of existing institutions and practices whereas the activist doubts that rational discussion can persuade powerful social agentsto adopt a more inclusive and democratic mode of politics

(112). The deliberativist may further argue that even if the activist’s suspicionsregarding the efficacy of political deliberation are granted, these suspicions are not in themselves sufficient grounds for rejecting deliberative democracy. Though not ideal, deliberation may still be the best option available for democracy.

Debate role-play activates agency by emphasizing the mutually constitutive nature of truth and identityHanghoj 2008 – PhD,assistant professor, School of Education, University of Aarhus, also affiliated with the DanishResearch Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials, located at the Institute ofLiterature, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Denmark (Thorkild, http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf)

Thus, debate games require teachers to balance the centripetal/centrifugal forces of gaming and teaching, to be able to reconfigure their discursive authority, and to orchestrate the multiple voices of a dialogical game space in relation to particular goals. These Bakhtinian perspectives provide a valuable analytical framework for describing the discursive interplay between different practices and knowledge aspects when enacting (debate) game scenarios. In

addition to this, Bakhtin’sdialogical philosophy also offers an explanation of why debate games(and other game types) may be valuablewithin an educational context. One of

the central features of multi-player games is that players are expected to experience a

simultaneously real and imagined scenario both in relation to an insider’s

(participant) perspective and to an outsider’s (co-participant) perspective. According to

Bakhtin, the outsider’s perspective reflects a fundamental aspect of human understanding: In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding – in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even

really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and

because they are others (Bakhtin, 1986: 7). As the quote suggests, every person is influenced by others in an inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said

to be isolated. Thus, it is in the interaction with other voices that individuals are able to reach understanding and find their own voice . Bakhtin also refers to

the ontological process of finding a voice as “ideological becoming”, which

represents “the process of selectively assimilating the words of others” (Bakhtin, 1981: 341). Thus, by teaching and playing debate scenarios, it is possible to support students in their process of becoming not only themselves, but also in becoming articulate and responsive citizens in a democratic society.

Case

1NC

The core of Wilderson’s argument is based in

a. Antonio Negri’s marxism

b. psychoanalysis in film study

c. sextons concept of the libidinal economy based on unconscious drives Wilderson ’10 (Frank, Assoc prof of African American Studies – Cal-Irvine, Red, White, & Black, pp 7-8 ajones)

The aim of this book is to embark on a paradigmatic analysis of how dispossession is imagined at the intersection of (a) the most unflinching

meditations (metacommentaries) on political economy and libidinal economy, (e.g., Marxism, as in the work of Antonio Negri, and psychoanalysis, as in the work of Kaja Silverman), (b) the discourse of political common sense, and (c) the narrative and formal strategies of socially or politically engaged films. In other words, a paradigmatic analysis asks, What are the constituent elements of, and the assumptive logic regarding, dispossession which underwrite theoretical claims about political and libidinal economy; and how are those elements and assumptions manifest in both political common sense and in political cinema? Charles S. Maier argues that a metacommentary on political economy can be thought of as an "interrogation of economic doctrines to disclose their sociological and political premises in sum, [it] regards economic ideas and behavior not as frameworks for analysis, but as beliefs and actions that must

themselves be explained."7 Jared Sexton describes libidinal economy as "the economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification (their condensation and displacement), and the complex relationship between sexuality and the unconscious." Needless to say, libidinal economy functions variously across scales and is as "objective" as political economy. It is linked not only to forms of attraction,

affection, and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction, and the violence of lethal consumption. Sexton emphasizes that it is "the whole structure of psychic and emotional life," something more than, but inclusive of or traversed by, what Antonio Gramsci and other Marxists call a "structure of feeling"; it is "a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias

capable of both great mobility and tenacious fixation."8 This book interrogates the assumptive logic of metacommentaries on political and libidinal economy, and their articulations in film, through a subject whose structure of dispossession (the constituent elements of his or her loss and suffering) they cannot theorize: the Black, a subject who is always already positioned as Slave. The implications of my interrogation reach far beyond film studies, for these metacommentaries not only have the status of paradigmatic analyses, but their reasoning and assumptions permeate the private and quotidian of political common sense and buttress organizing and activism on the left.

a. the totalizing materialism of scholars like Negri is self contradictory and messianistic Quinby ’04 (Lee, Chair Distinguished Teaching in Humanities – Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Empire’s New Clothes, p. 233 ajones)

Demonstrating Empire’s millennial drift is a complicated undertaking, in no small part because of Hardt’s and Negri’s tendency to say one thing and yet do another. For example,

even though they explicitly claim a nonprophetic stance by stating that they can see

“only shadows of the figures that will animate our future” (205), much of what actually animates the book is its prophetic vision of the nature and role of the militant, the poor,

the nomad, the new barbarian, and the multitude. In place of specific and concrete

analysis—a hallmark of a genealogical approach—they stamp their theory with messianic categories that diminish rather than expand our understanding of productive and reproduc tive life. This contradiction is particularly noteworthy because Empire’s mil - lennialism is what makes it compelling. Millennial rhetoric stirs the imagination toward exhilarating poles of fear and hope, promising a culmi-nating and righteous telos to those who adhere to its tenets of belief. It is hard not to be drawn in. A second

interrelated contradiction arises from the fact that Hardt and Negri specifically reject transcendence, making numerous explicit claims for the immanence of their materialist approach, often drawing on Foucault to help make their case. In their opening pages, for example, they “rule out” the “idea that order is dictated by

a single power and a single center of rationality transcendent to global forces” (3). Nevertheless, their recurrent appeals to cer tain categories of thought cast their theoretical framework back into transcen dental molds integral to millennialism, which is both totalizing and abstractionist in its history and basic formulation.

b. Psychoanalytic film studies reintrench exclusion, conflate social structure with signification, and marginalize movementsSeiter 88 – PHD, Nenno Endowed Chair in Television Studies at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. ( Ellen “ Re-vision: the limits of psychoanalysis” from Jump Cut, A Review of Contemporary Media no. 33, Feb. 1988, pp. 59-61 http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC33folder/ReVisionReview.html ajones)

Our attention turns from the woman's gaze to the woman's voice in Kaja Silverman's "Disembodying the Female Voice." Her formal analysis of the sound/ image relation in terms of gender concentrates on the conspicuous absence of a female voice-over in classical cinema. This absence symptomizes the exclusion of the female subject from the production of discourse. Silverman's essay has implications for the practice of feminist filmmaking, and it invites the re-analysis of Hollywood films with attention to the construction of the soundtrack and to the way the films obsessively refer the female voice to the female body. Silverman discusses the use of the "disembodied" female voice-over in a number of films directed by women, finding Yvonne Rainer's JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN (1971) a powerful example of this formal strategy. The final essay in the volume, Teresa de Lauretis' "Now and Nowhere: Roeg's BAD TIMING" is the most indebted to discourse theory. In its choice of topic, it seems the most puzzling essay to find in a book on feminist film criticism. Nicholas Roeg's film BAD TIMING concerns the police investigation of a psychoanalyst who is suspected of attempting to murder and then raping his lover. De Lauretis' choice of this particular film seems to be a kind of worst-case exercise in proving Foucault's assertion that "the points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network." She also admires the director as auteur a great deal. I cannot summarize Dc Lauretis' complex argument here, but I would suggest her analysis is seriously limited by concentrating on a film such as BAD TIMING, which does not offer most women what it has offered de Lauretis. These four essays contribute many

original and stimulating ideas to feminist film criticism. The emphasis on theoretical perspectives derived from psychoanalysis, however, seriously limits their appeal to a wider feminist readership. Many feminist filmmakers and critics will certainly be troubled by the dearth of references to feminist theorists working outside of film or semiotics, and will be alienated by the frequency with which the names of the fathers appear here. Only Linda Williams' piece has the kind of skepticism about psychoanalysis that most feminists demand. When Mary Ann Doane cites Freud's case

study on masochism, "A Child Is Being Beaten," she comes dangerously close to offering Freud's reports on women patients as empirical evidence of the structures of the feminine unconscious. The influence of psychoanalysis can also be seen

in the choice of films to write about. Women's films and horror films contain a lot of vulgar Freudianism, which makes psychoanalytic approaches particularly inviting. Kaja Silverman discusses this work of many women filmmakers, such as Yvonne Rainer, whose films deal on an overt narrative level with

psychoanalytic principles. Silverman excludes other filmmakers whose work

has broader social implications, such as Michelle Citron. De Lauretis chooses a film that is literally about a psychoanalyst. Altogether they emphasize English-language and avant-garde cinema to the

exclusion of other kinds of film and fail to consider class and Finally, the theoretical perspectives employed in these four essays have reproduced the heterosexism of their model, psychoanalysis. Lesbianism is scarcely mentioned in any essay except B. Ruby Rich's "From Repressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: MAEDCHEN IN UNIFORM (reprinted from JUMP CUT, No. 24-

25. March, 1981). Lesbian filmmakers, writers and journals are consistently excluded from the historical overview in the introduction. Thus lesbianism is marginalized to one essay in the volume and one film in history (as something of the exotic past, Weimar Germany). In a book that purports to see "difference differently, revising the old apprehension of sexual difference and making it possible to multiply differences," this is inexcusable. B. Ruby Rich's article, along with Judith Mayne's "The Woman at the Keyhole: Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism" and Christine Gledhill's "Recent Developments in Feminist Film Criticism," are the broadest in scope and the most accessible articles in the book. While teaching feminist film courses at the University of Oregon for the past several years, I have found Rich's essay on MAEDCHEN IN UNIFORM to have a profound impact on students, opening up a wide range of critical issues and stimulating discussion throughout the course. The integration of textual analysis of the film with its production history and a sophisticated analysis of the film's social, cultural and political context make Rich's essay an exemplary piece of feminist film criticism. In "The Woman at the Keyhole," Judith Mayne relates feminist literary criticism to issues addressed in films made by and for women. Mayne discusses the relation between the film and the novel, and she examines both as meditations on the split between the public and the private spheres, arguing that we should consider voyeurism in this context. Mayne's overview includes women as writers of fiction, as critics, and as filmmakers. She places some of the critical questions raised by feminist film criticism in an historical perspective. Mayne defines feminism as "the attempt to theorize female experience into modes of resistance and action." Christine Gledhill reflects this concern in her extremely useful theoretical

summary and analysis, the first essay in the volume. Gledhill traces the ideas of Louis Althusser, Roland

Barthes and Jacques Lacan as they have been used by feminist film critics,

especially Pam Cook, Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey. This essay offers both a lucid explication of the theories

involved and a careful analysis of the way these theories have directed feminist film criticism away from understanding women in social practices other than cinema by "conflating the social structure of reality with its signification." These theories have also pulled feminist film criticism away from considering the "intersection of gender with class and racial differences among others" because they have adopted Lacan's theory of the subject with its attention to the constitutive force of language. Gledhill describes the entrapment that has resulted from these theoretical applications in this way:

"The unspoken remains unknown, and the speakable reproduces what we know — patriarchal reality." She calls for feminist critics to pay attention to what they have left out as they have emphasized the power of narrative structure, to pay attention to "the material conditions in which it functions for an audience." We must not privilege film discourse to the exclusion of all other discourses and practices, according to Gledhill, and we must attend to the interactions and contradictions among these.

The act of re-vision will involve an ongoing evaluation of the consequences of employing psychoanalysis, semiotics and structuralism as dominant theoretical paradigms. We will need to integrate a much broader spectrum of feminist thought in our work. We will need to listen to women of color, lesbians and working class women. And as teachers and critics we must keep in mind Adrienne Rich's words: "Our struggles can have meaning and our privileges — however precarious under patriarchy — can be justified only if they can help to change the lives of women whose gifts — and whose very being — continue to be thwarted and silenced."[1]

c. Sexton ignores other forms of racial opression, erases identity, and cherry picks evidence—reject his ideas Spickard 09 - University of California, Santa Barbara (Paul Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (review) American Studies - Volume 50, Number 1/2, Spring/Summer 2009, pp. 125-127 ajones)

One of the major developments in ethnic studies over the past two decades has been the idea (and sometimes the advocacy) of multiraciality. From a theoretical perspective, this has stemmed from a post-structuralist attempt to deconstruct the categories created by the European Enlightenment and its colonial enterprise around the world. From a personal perspective, it has been driven by the life experiences in the last half-century of a growing number of people who have and acknowledge mixed parentage. The leading figures in this scholarly movement are probably Maria Root and G. Reginald Daniel, but the writers are many and include figures as eminent as Gary Nash and Randall Kennedy. A small but dedicated group of writers has resisted this trend: chiefly Rainier Spencer, Jon Michael Spencer, and Lewis Gordon. They have raised no controversy, perhaps [End Page 125] because their books are not well written, and perhaps because their arguments do not make a great deal of sense. It is not that there is nothing wrong with the literature and the people movement surrounding multiraciality. Some writers and social activists do tend to wax rhapsodic about the glories of intermarriage and multiracial identity as social panacea. A couple of not-very-thoughtful activists (Charles Byrd and Susan Graham) have been coopted by the Gingrichian right (to be fair, one must point out that most multiracialists are on the left). And, most importantly, there is a tension between some Black intellectuals and the multiracial idea over the lingering fear that, for some people, adopting a multiracial identity is a dodge to avoid being Black. If so, that might tend to sap the strength of a

monoracially-defined movement for Black community empowerment. With Amalgamation Schemes, Jared Sexton is trying to stir up some controversy. He presents a facile, sophisticated, and theoretically informed intelligence, and he picks a fight from the start. His title suggests that the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very least

an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is angry and accusatory on every page. It is difficult to get to the grounds of his argument, because the cloud of invective is so thick, and because his writing is abstract, referential, and at key points vague. For Sexton (as for the Spencers and Gordon) race is about Blackness, in the United States and around the world. That is silly, for there are other racialized relationships. In the U.S., native peoples were racialized by European intruders in all the ways that Africans were, and more: they were nearly extinguished. To take just one example

from many around the world, Han Chinese have racialized Tibetans historically in all the ways (including slavery) that Whites have racialized Blacks and

Indians in the United States. So there is a problem with Sexton's concept of race as Blackness. There is also a problem with his insistence on monoraciality. For Sexton and the

others, one cannot be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever and only to be Black. I don't have a problem with that as a political choice, but to insist that it is the only possibility flies in the face of a great deal of human experience, and it ignores the history of how modern racial ideas emerged. Sexton does point out, as do many writers, the flawed tendencies in multiracial advocacy mentioned in the second paragraph above. But he imputes them to the whole movement and to the subject of

study, and that is not a fair assessment. The main problem is that Sexton argues from conclusion to evidence, rather than the other way around. That is, he begins with the conclusion that the multiracial idea is bad, retrograde, and must be resisted. And then he cherry-picks his evidence to fit his conclusion. He spends much of his time on weaker writers such as Gregory Stephens and Stephen Talty who have been tangential to the multiracial literature. When he addresses stronger figures like Daniel, Root, Nash, and Kennedy, he carefully selects his quotes to fit his argument, and misrepresents their

positions by doing so. Sexton also makes some pretty outrageous claims. He takes the fact that people who study multiracial identities are often studying aspects of family life (such as the shaping of a child's identity), and twists that to charge them with homophobia and nuclear family-ism. That is simply not accurate for any of the main writers in the field. The same is true for his argument by innuendo that scholars of multiraciality

somehow advocate mail-order bride services. And sometimes Sexton simply resorts to ad hominem attacks on the motives and personal lives of the writers themselves. It is a pretty tawdry exercise. That is unfortunate, because Sexton appears bright and might have written a much better book detailing his hesitations about some tendencies in the multiracial movement. He might even have opened up a new direction for productive study of racial commitment amid complexity. Sexton does make several observations that are worth thinking about, [End Page 126] and surely this intellectual movement, like any other, needs to think critically about itself. Sadly, this is not that book.

AND – Theres no basis for the unconscious model O’Brien & Jureidini, 2 (Gerard & Jon, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide & PhD (Flinders) is a child psychiatrist who has completed a doctorate in philosophy of mind, “Dispensing With the Dynamic Unconscious,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2, project muse ajones)

IT IS THE PRIMARY TENET of psychoanalysis that there is a subterranean region of our minds inhabited by mental entities—such as thoughts, feelings, and motives—that are actively prevented from entering consciousness because of their painful or otherwise unacceptable content.

These mental entities, in spite of being consciously inaccessible, are assumed to have a profound impact on our conscious mental life and behavior, and in so doing are thought to be responsible for many of the psychopathologies, both major and minor,

to which we are subject. This conjectured subterranean region of our minds is nowadays known as the dynamic unconscious, and there is no more important

explanatory concept in all of psychoanalytic theory. Yet, despite its importance to psychoanalytic

thought and practice, and despite almost a century of research effort since its first

systematic articulation, the dynamic unconscious is in deep trouble. The methodologic difficulties associated with theorizing about this putative mental underworld are legion (Grunbaum 1984), and recent years have seen a growing skepticism about the very notion of a dynamic unconscious and with it the whole apparatus of psychoanalysis (see, for example, Crews 1996). In the face of these difficulties, a number of proponents of psychoanalysis have turned to contemporary cognitive science for assistance (see, for example, Epstein 1994; Erdelyi 1985; Shevrin 1992; and Westen 1998). Their aim has been to show that psychoanalytic conjectures about the dynamic unconscious receive a great deal of support from the empirical evidence in favor of the cognitive unconscious. By variously integrating the dynamic unconscious with the cognitive unconscious (Epstein 1994) or extending the cognitive unconscious to cover psychical entities and processes traditionally associated with the dynamic [End Page 141] unconscious (Westen 1998), the hope is that the struggling psychoanalytic concept will be buttressed by its healthier

counterpart in cognitive science. It is our contention, however, that this hope is misplaced. Far from supporting the dynamic unconscious, recent work in the cognitive science suggests that the time has come to dispense with this concept altogether. We will defend this claim in two ways. First, we will argue that any attempt to shore up the dynamic unconscious with the cognitive unconscious is bound to fail, simply because the latter, as it is understood in contemporary cognitive science, is incompatible with the former as it is traditionally conceived by psychoanalytic theory. Second, we will show how

psychological phenomena traditionally cited as evidence for the operation of a dynamic unconscious can be accommodated more parsimoniously by other means. But before we do either of these things, and to set the scene for our subsequent discussion, we will offer a very brief recapitulation of the dynamic unconscious, especially as it was originally conceived by Sigmund Freud.

Agency Disad

a. Wilderson’s social death argument is too sweeping, denies Black agency, and cannot translate to politicsBÂ 11 (Dr. Saër Maty, Professor of Film – University of Portsmouth and Co-Editor – The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, “The US Decentred: From Black Social Death to Cultural Transformation”, Cultural Studies Review, 17(2), September, p. 385-387 ajones) —WILDERSON’S WHITE WATCH SEES RED ON BLACK: SOME WEAKNESSES A few pages into Red, White and Black, I

feared that it would just be a matter of time before Wilderson’s black ‐ as ‐ social ‐ death idea and multiple attacks on issues and scholars he disagrees with run (him) into (theoretical) trouble. This happens in chapter two, ‘The Narcissistic Slave’, where he critiques black film theorists and books. For example, Wilderson declares that Gladstone Yearwood’s Black Film as Signifying Practice (2000) ‘betrays a kind of conceptual anxiety with respect to the historical object of study— ... it clings, anxiously, to the film‐as‐text‐as‐legitimateobject of Black cinema.’ (62) He then quotes from Yearwood’s book to highlight ‘just how vague the aesthetic foundation of Yearwood’s attempt to construct a canon can be’. (63)

And yet Wilderson’s highlighting is problematic because it overlooks the ‘Diaspora’ or ‘African Diaspora’, a key component in Yearwood’s thesis that, crucially, neither navel‐gazes (that is, at the US or black America) nor pretends to properly engage

with black film. Furthermore, Wilderson separates the different waves of black film theory and approaches them, only, in terms of how a most recent one might challenge its precedent. Again, his approach is problematic because it does not mention or emphasise the inter ‐ connectivity of/in black film theory. As a case in point, Wilderson does not link Tommy Lott’s mobilisation of Third Cinema for black film theory to Yearwood’s idea of African Diaspora. (64) Additionally, of course, Wilderson seems unaware that Third Cinema itself has been fundamentally questioned since Lott’s 1990s’

theory of black film was formulated. Yet another consequence of ignoring the African Diaspora is that it exposes Wilderson’s corpus of films as unable to carry the weight of the transnational argument he attempts to advance. Here, beyond the US‐centricity or ‘social and political specificity of [his] filmography’, (95) I am talking about Wilderson’s choice of films. For example, Antwone Fisher (dir. Denzel Washington, 2002) is attacked unfairly for failing to acknowledge ‘a grid of captivity across spatial dimensions of the Black “body”, the Black “home”, and the Black “community”’ (111) while films like Alan and Albert Hughes’s Menace II Society (1993), overlooked, do acknowledge the same grid and, additionally, problematise Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (STEP) policing. The above examples

expose the fact of Wilderson’s dubious and questionable conclusions on black film. Red, White and Black is particularly undermined by Wilderson’s propensity for exaggeration and blinkeredness. In chapter nine, ‘“Savage” Negrophobia’, he writes: The philosophical anxiety of Skins is all too aware that through the Middle Passage, African culture became Black ‘style’ ... Blackness can be placed and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories, by whoever so chooses. Most important, there is nothing real Black people can do to either check or direct this process ... Anyone can say ‘nigger’ because anyone can be a ‘nigger’. (235)7 Similarly, in chapter ten, ‘A Crisis in the Commons’, Wilderson addresses the issue of ‘Black time’. Black is irredeemable, he argues, because, at no time in history had it been deemed, or deemed through the right historical moment and place. In other words, the black moment and place are not right because they are ‘the ship hold of the Middle Passage’: ‘the most coherent temporality ever deemed as Black time’ but also ‘the “moment” of no time at all on the map of no place at all’. (279) Not only does Pinho’s more mature analysis expose this point as preposterous (see below), I also wonder what Wilderson makes of the countless historians’ and sociologists’ works on slave ships, shipboard insurrections and/during the Middle Passage,8 or of groundbreaking jazz‐studies books on cross‐cultural dialogue like The Other

Side of Nowhere (2004). Nowhere has another side, but once Wilderson theorises blacks as socially and ontologically dead while dismissing jazz as ‘belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there for the taking’, (225) there seems to be no way back. It is therefore hardly surprising that

Wilderson ducks the need to provide a solution or alternative to both his sustained bashing of blacks and anti ‐ Blackness .9 Last but not least,

Red, White and Black ends like a badly plugged announcement of a

bad Hollywood film’s badly planned sequel: ‘How does one deconstruct life? Who would benefit from such an undertaking? The coffleapproaches with its answers in tow.’ (340)

b. Denying Agency is independently wrong – should be rejectedMahoney ’92 (MARTHA R. MAHONEY – Associate Professor, University of Miami School of Law. Southern California Law Review – University of Southern California – March, 1992 – “Exit: Power and the Idea of Leaving in Love, Work andthe Confirmation Hearings” 65 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1283 – lawrev; lexis ajones)

Once exit is defined as the appropriate response to abuse, then staying can be treated as evidence that abuse

never happened. If abuse is asserted, "failure" to exit must then be explained. When that "failure" becomes the point of inquiry, explanation in law and popular culture tends to emphasize victimization and implicitly deny agency in the person who has been harmed. Denying agency contradicts the self-understanding of most of our society, including many who share characteristics and experiences of oppression with the person who is being harmed. The conservative insistence that we are untrammeled actors plays on this sensibility, merging rejection of victimization with an ideology that denies oppression. The privatization of assaults on women makes it particularly difficult to identify a model of oppression and resistance, rather than one of victimization and inconsistent personal behavior.

Fatalism Disad

a. Wilderson’s ontology makes fatalism inevitable and offers no altBâ (teaches film at Portsmouth University (UK). He researches ‘race’, the ‘postcolonial’,  diaspora,  the  transnational  and  film  ‘genre’, 

African  and  Caribbean cinemas  and film festivals) 11(Saër Maty, The US Decentred, Cultural Studies Review, volume 17 number 2 September 2011 ajones)

In chapter nine, ‘“Savage” Negrophobia’, he writes: The philosophical anxiety of Skins is all too aware that through

the Middle Passage, African culture became Black ‘style’ ... Blackness can be placed and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories, by whoever

so chooses. Most important, there is nothing real Black people can do to either check or direct this process ... Anyone can say ‘nigger’ because anyone can be a ‘nigger’. (235)7 Similarly, in chapter ten, ‘A Crisis in the Commons’, Wilderson addresses the issue of ‘Black

time’. Black is irredeemable, he argues, because, at no time in history had it been deemed, or deemed through the right historical moment and place. In other words, the black moment and place are not right because they are ‘the ship hold of the Middle Passage’: ‘the most coherent temporality ever deemed as Black

time’ but also ‘the “moment” of no time at all on the map of no place at all’. (279) Not only does Pinho’s more mature analysis expose this point as preposterous (see

below), I also wonder what Wilderson makes of the countless historians’ and sociologists’ works on slave ships, shipboard insurrections and/during the Middle Passage,8 or of groundbreaking jazz ‐ studies books on cross ‐ cultural dialogue like The Other Side of Nowhere

(2004). Nowhere has another side, but once Wilderson theorises blacks as socially and ontologically dead while dismissing jazz as ‘belonging

nowhere and to no one, simply there for the taking’, (225) there seems to be no way back. It is therefore hardly surprising that Wilderson ducks the need to provide a solution or alternative to both his sustained bashing of blacks and anti‐

Blackness.9 Last but not least, Red, White and Black ends like a badly plugged announcement of a bad Hollywood film’s badly planned sequel: ‘How does one deconstruct life? Who would benefit from such an undertaking? The coffle approaches with its answers in tow.’ (340)

b. Turns their args – greatest comparative threat Miah quoting West in 94 (Malik Miah, Cornel West's Race Matters, May-June, http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3079 ajones)

In the chapter, “Nihilism in Black America,” West observes “The liberal/conservative discussion conceals the most basic issue now facing Black America: the nihilistic threat to its very existence. This threat is not simply a matter of relative economic deprivation and political powerlessness -- though economic well-being and political clout are requisites for meaningful Black progress. It is primarily a question of speaking to the profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair so widespread in Black America.” (12-13) “Nihilism,” he continues, “is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine ... it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaningless, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness.” (14)

“Nihilism is not new in Black America. . . . In fact,” West explains,”the major enemy of Black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the

nihilistic Threat -- that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle.” (14-15)

AND – Wilderson is too extreme in his opposition to reformism – his book does not offer much of a contemporary strategy.Graham ‘9 Dr. Shane Graham – Associate Professor of English at Utah State University. Review of Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, Cambridge, MA, South End Press, 2008, 501 pp. (pbk) 978-0-8960-8783-5 – Safundi: The Journal of South African and American StudiesVol. 10, No. 4, October 2009, 479–494 – via Taylor & Francis Online Database ajones)

Were you upset, offended, or outraged by Breyten Breytenbach's recent article in Harper's Magazine, in which he took Nelson Mandela to task for all the failings of the post-apartheid administrations? If you were bothered by

Breytenbach's piece, I would recommend avoiding Frank Wilderson's Incognegro. In it, the author

recalls declaring in 1989 that Madiba would be of greater service to the revolution dead than alive. Throughout the book he repeatedly rails against “Mandela's people” as agents for an accommodationist, neo-liberal agenda. He even recounts a speech he attended in 1994 by the newly elected state president, in which he stood up and grilled Mandela about plans for the Reconstruction and Development Program. This all culminated in 1995 with a phone call from a Mail & Guardian reporter who asked for a comment because “Nelson Mandela thinks you’re a threat to national security” (470). The book jacket declares that Wilderson is one of only two Americans ever to be a member of the African National Congress (ANC). An African American, he first visited South Africa in 1989 on a brief research expedition, during which he met the Tswana woman he would later marry. He settled more permanently in Johannesburg in 1991, where he was soon elected to the executive council of the local and sub-regional branches of the ANC. But even as he was holding aboveground positions in the newly unbanned liberation party, he was also working with an underground cell loyal to Chris Hani and Winnie Mandela, in defiance of Nelson Mandela's decision to disband Umkhonto we Sizwe and cease all covert operations. In this capacity, Wilderson “gathered information on [visiting] Americans and worked on psychological warfare, propaganda, disinformation, and general political analysis” (276). From his position as lecturer, first at Wits University and later at the Soweto campus of Vista University, he was charged with capturing “as much territory (real and imagined) of the university-industrial complex before the ANC came to power as possible” (143). Wilderson's perspective on the events of 1989–1996 is unique: he sees the seminal moments of South Africa's transition both as an insider (as an elected official in the ANC) and as an outsider who never fully gains the trust of the party's power structure. And whereas even a couple of years ago his condemnations of the “New South Africa” and its economic policies might have struck many middle-class South African readers as strident and delusional, the predictions he recalls making now seem undeniably prescient in light of the recent power shift within the ANC. After all, one wonders whether Jacob Zuma's demagoguery would have ever found political traction had Thabo Mbeki's wing of the party not succeeded in

prioritizing laissez-faire liberalism above material reparations for the poor. Had Wilderson been content to write a political memoir of his modest but interesting role in the South African transition, it would have been a slender but compelling, occasionally even gripping, book. Instead, Wilderson gives us a sprawling 500-page tome that attempts to serve not just as political memoir but

also as autobiography, therapeutic exercise, and character assassination against former colleagues, to whom he gives very thinly veiled pseudonyms. As an account of growing up black in the white United States, Incognegro offers a few engaging stories: he visited Fred Hampton's house in Chicago at age thirteen, soon after Hampton had been shot dead by police; and he took part in battles with the police and national

guard in Berkeley in 1969. Otherwise, though, the book's representation of the black experience in America covers familiar ground and adds little to our understanding of that experience beyond fresh layers of indignation and rage.

AND – Reject Wilderson’s call for absolutism – no movement is anti-establishment enough for himGraham ‘9 Dr. Shane Graham – Associate Professor of English at Utah State University. Review of Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, Cambridge, MA, South End Press, 2008, 501 pp. (pbk) 978-0-8960-8783-5 – Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, October 2009, 479–494 – via Taylor & Francis Online Database ajones)

The difficulty of reviewing a book such as this is that the author would no doubt respond to any criticism (of the book's tone, for instance, or of its clumsy, self-consciously postmodern structure,

which jumps randomly between time frames) by attacking the reviewer as a deluded quisling of the global capitalist establishment and “blah, blah, blah” (to quote Wilderson's own paraphrase of Mandela's response to his aforementioned question). In my pre-emptive self-defence, I can only emphasize again that it is this memoir's narcissism and self-indulgent tone that made it an

unpleasant read for me, not its politics. There is no doubt that the revolution let down a lot of people. But it was always going to let down Frank Wilderson because it seems that, for him, nothing can ever be pure enough.

2NC Overview

Multiple Das to Wilderson’s method

Three reasons his arguments are grounded in poor theory

1- His reliance on Negri’s Marxism is riddled with contradictions and relies on an unfeasible, messianic rescue from materialism- falls prey to totalizing methodology- that’s Quinby

2- Use of psychoanalytic film leads to further exclusion- marginalizes women, entrenches patriarchy, which destroys any hope for intersectional collaboration against oppression- that’s O’Brien

3- Adopts Sexton’s adversarial, Black-only ideology- deliberately ignores mixed causes of identity by relying on a sole race focus

This cherry picks historical examples of oppression and destroys any opportunities at building coalitions- turns case- that’s Spickard

Independently, Wilderson’s arguments destroy agency and lead to fatalism

They portray oppression as inevitable and deny the agency of transformative black movements

This leads to a loss of hope which is the single most effective way to undermine transformative struggles- that’s Ba and Micah

And finally the participation DA-

Wilderson is radical by the most liberal of standards

Rails against Mandela, labels prominent leaders as sellouts

This alienates almost every active movement- none are pure enough to meet Wilderson’s ideology

Creates impossible standards which abandon pragmatic reform

Extension – Method Indict

( ) His unverifiable generalizations are understandable because he relies of Lacanian and Marxist structuralism – We’ll quote Wilderson’s method sectionWilderson ’10 (Frank, Assoc prof of African American Studies – Cal-Irvine, Red, White, & Black, ajones) A Note on Method 23-24

Throughout this book I use White, Human, Master, Settler, and sometimes non-Black interchangeably to connote a paradigmatic entity that exists ontologically as a position of life in relation to the Black or Slave position, one of death. The Red, Indigenous, or "Savage" position exists liminally as half-death and half-life between the Slave (Black) and the Human (White, or non-Black). I capitalize the words Red, White, Black, Slave, Savage, and Human in order to assert their importance as ontological positions and to stress the value of theorizing power politically rather than culturally. I want to move from a politics of culture to a culture of politics (as I argue in chapter a). Capitalizing these words is consistent with my argument that the array of identities that they contain is important but inessential to an analysis of the paradigm of power in which they are positioned. Readers wedded to cultural

diversity and historical specificity may find such shorthand wanting. But those who may be put off by my pressing historical and cultural particularities - culled from history, sociology, and cultural studies, yet neither historical, sociological, nor, oddly enough, cultural - should bear in mind that there are precedents for such methods, two of which make cultural studies and much of

social science possible: the methods of Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan. Marx pressed the microcosm of the English manufacturer into the service of a project that sought to explain economic relationality on a global scale. Lacan's exemplary cartography was even smaller: a tiny room with not much more than a sofa and a chair, the room of the psychoanalytic encounter. As Jonathan Lee reminds us, at stake in Lacan's account of the psychoanalytic encounter is the realization of subjectivity itself, "the very being of the subject. "31 I argue that "Savage' Human, and Slave should be theorized in the way we theorize worker and capitalist as positions first and as identities second, or as we theorize capitalism as a paradigm rather than as an experience-that is, before they take on national origin or gendered specfficity Throughout the course of this book I argue that "Savage' Human, and Slave are more essential to our understanding of the truth of institutionality than the positions from political or libidinal economy. For in this trio we find the key to our world's creation as well as to its undoing. This argument, as it relates to political economy, continues in chapter i, "The Ruse of Analogy:' In chapter 2, "The Narcissistic Slave," I shift focus from political economy to libidinal economy before undertaking more concrete analyses of films in parts 2, 3, and 4. No one makes films and declares their own films "Human" while simultaneously asserting that other films (Red and Black) are not Human cinema. Civil society represents itself to itself as being infinitely inclusive, and its technologies of hegemony (including cinema) are mobilized to manufacture this assertion, not to dissent from it. In my quest to interrogate the bad faith of the civic "invitation;' I have chosen White cinema as the sine qua non of Human cinema. Films can be thought of as one of an ensemble of discursive practices mobilized by civil society to "invite:' or interpellate, Blacks to the same variety of social identities that other races are able to embody without contradiction, identities such as worker, soldier, immigrant, brother, sister, father, mother, and citizen. The bad faith of this invitation, this faux interpeLlation, can be discerned by deconstructing the way cinema's narrative strategies displace our consideration and understanding of the ontological status of Blacks (social death) onto a series of fanciful stories that are organized around conflicts which are the purview only of those who are not natally alienated, generally dishonored, or open to gratuitous violence, in other words, people who are White or colored but who are not Black. (I leave aside, for the moment, the liminality of the Native American position-oscillating as it does between the living and the dead.) Immigrant cinema of those who are not White would have sufficed as well; but, due to its exceptional capacity to escape racial markers, Whiteness is the most impeccable embodiment of what it means to be Human. As Richard Dyer writes, "Having no content, we [White people] can't see that we have anything that accounts for our position of privilege and power . . . . The equation of being white with being human secures a position of power:' He goes on to explain how "the privilege of being white... is not to be subjected to stereotyping in relation to one's whiteness. 'White people are stereotyped in terms of gender, nation, class, sexuality, ability and so on, but the overt point of such typification is gender, nation, etc. Whiteness generally colonises the stereotypical definition of all social categories other than those of race.' Unlike Dyer, I do not meditate on the representational power of Whiteness, "that it be made strange:' divested of its imperial capacity, and thus make way for representational practices in cinema and beyond that serve as aesthetic accompaniments for a more egalitarian civil society in which Whites and non-Whites could live in harmony. Laudable as that dream is, I do not share Dyer's assumption that we are all Human. Some of us are only part Human ("Savage") and some of us are Black (Slave). I find his argument that Whiteness possesses the easiest claim to Humanness to be productive. But whereas Dyer offers this argument as a lament for a social ill that needs to be corrected, I borrow it merely for its explanatory power-as a way into a paradigmatic analysis that clarifies structural relations of global antagonisms

and not as a step toward healing the wounds of social relations in civil society. Hence this book's interchangeable

deployment of White, Settler, and Master with-and to signify-Human. Again, like Lacan, who mobilizes the psychoanalytic encounter to make claims about the structure of relations writ large, and like Marx, who mobilizes the English manufacturer to make claims about the structure of economic relations writ large, I am mobilizing three races, four films, and one subcontinent to make equally generalizable claims and argue that the antagonism between Black and Human supercedes the "antagonism" between worker and capitalist in political economy, as well as the gendered "antagonism" in libidinal economy. To this end, this book takes stock of how socially engaged popular cinema participates in the systemic violence that constructs America as a "settler society" (Churchill) and "slave estate" (Spilers). Rather than privilege a politics of culture(s)-that is, rather than examine and accept the cultural gestures and declarations which the three groups under examination make about themselves-1 privilege a culture of politics: in other words, what I am concerned with is how White film, Black film, and Red film articulate and disavow the matrix of violence which constructs the three essential positions which in turn structure US. antagonisms.

( ) Wilderson is ahistorical-- he assumes that anti-black animus arises from nothingness but its caught up in a broader web of historical power relationships like Islamophobia and nativismCharoenying (citing Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Prof of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley) 8(Timothy, Islamophobia & Anti-Blackness: A Genealogical Approach, http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-anti-blackness-genealogical-approach)

The year 1492 marked a major  turning point in the trajectory of Western Civilization. Elementary age children are taught this as the year Columbus famously crossed the Atlantic. An equally significant event that year,

was the Spanish conquest of al-Andalus–a Moorish province on the southern Iberian peninsula established eight centuries earlier–and more importantly, the last major Muslim stronghold on the

European continent. Critical race scholars have argued that these two events would not only shift the geopolitical balance of power from the Orient to the Occident, but fundamentally alter conceptions about religious and racial identity. According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, of the University of California, Berkeley, the expulsion of the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age of imperial relations between Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion throughout the known world. The “discovery” of “godless” natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas and

Sepúlveda in 1550 on the nature of the human soul. Such a geopolitical and philosophical shift, Maldonado-Torres argues, would lead to a Eurocentric, re-categorization of humanity based upon religous—and ultimately racial—differences.

Maldonado-Torres has proposed that anti-black racism is not simply an extension of some historical bias against blacks, but rather, is an amalgam of old-world Islamophobia linked to the history of the Iberian peninsula, and to the notion of souless beings embodied in popular   conceptions about the indigenous natives of the Americas. These beliefs would contribute to an ideological basis for, and justification of, colonial conquests in the name of cultural and religious conversion, as well as pave the way for the enslavement and human trafficking of sub-Saharan Africans.

Extension – Psychoanalysis Bad

( ) Psychoanalysis is a closed system of assertion that doesn’t describe realityPerpich 5 (Dian Professor of PHILOSOPHY AT Vanderbilt “Figurative Language and the ‘Face’ in Levinas’s Philosophy” Philosophy and Rhetoric vol. 38:2)

Levinas’s hesitations about the value of psychoanalysis—indeed, what might be called his allergic reactions to

psychoanalysis—are similarly based. Psychoanalysis, he writes, “casts a basic suspicion on the most unimpeachable testimony of self-consciousness” (1987b, 32).

Psychological states in which the ego seems to have a “clear and distinct” grasp of itself

are reread by psychoanalysis as symbols for a “reality that is totally inaccessible” to the self and that is the expression of “a social reality or a historical influence totally distinct from its [the ego’s] own intention” (34). Moreover, all of the ego’s protests against the interpretations of analysis are themselves subject to further analysis, leaving no point exterior to the analysis: “I am as it were shut up in my

own portrait” (35). Psychoanalysis threatens an infinite regress of meaning, a recursive process that leads from one symbol to another, from one symptom to another with no end in sight and no way to break into or out of the chain of signifiers in the name of a

signified. “The real world is transformed into a poetic world, that is, into a world without beginning in which one thinks without knowing what one thinks” (35). Put less poetically, Levinas’s worry is that psychoanalysis furnishes us with no fixed point or firm footing from which to launch a critique and to break with social and historical determinations of the psyche in order to judge society and history and to call both to account. Indeed, his uncharacteristic allusion to “clear and distinct” ideas betrays his intention: to seek, against both religious and psychoanalytic participations, for a relationship in which the ego is an “absolute,” “irreducible” singularity, within a totality but still separate from it, that is, still capable of a relation with exteriority. To seek such a relation is, Levinas says, “to ask whether a living man [sic] does not have the power to judge the history in which he is engaged, that is, whether the thinker as an ego, over and beyond all that he does with what he possesses, creates and leaves, does not have the substance of a cynic” (35). The naked being who confronts me with his or her alterity, the naked being that I am myself and whose being “counts as such” is now naked not with an erotic nudity but with the nudity of a cynic who has thrown off the cloak of culture in order to present him- or herself directly and “in person” through “this chaste bit of skin with brow, nose, eyes, and mouth” (41). Levinas picks up the thread of this worry about psychoanalysis in “Ethics and Discourse,” the main section of “The Ego and the Totality.” To affirm humankind as a power to judge history, he claims, is to affirm rationalism and to reject “the merely poetic thought which thinks without knowing what it things, or thinks as one dreams” (40). The impetus for psychoanalysis is philosophical, Levinas admits; that is, it shares initially in this affirmation of rationalism insofar as it affirms the need for reflection and for going “underneath” or

getting behind unreflected consciousness and thought. However, if its impetus is philosophical, its issue is not insofar as the tools that it uses for reflection turn out to be “some fundamental, but elementary, fables ... which, incomprehensibly, would alone be unequivocal, alone not translate (or mask or symbolize) a reality more profound than themselves” (40).

Psychoanalysis returns one, then, to the irrationalism of myth and poetry rather than liberating one from them. It resubmerges one within the cultural and historical ethos and mythos in a way that seems to Levinas to permit no end to interpretation and thus no power to judge. He imagines psychoanalysis as a swirling phantasmagoria in which language is all dissimulation and deception. “One can find one’s bearings in all this phantasmagoria, one can inaugurate the work of criticism

only if one can begin with a fixed point. The fixed point cannot be some incontestable truth, a ‘certain’ statement that would always be sub ject to psychoanalysis; it can only be the absolute status of an interlocutor, a being, and not a truth about beings” (41). In this last claim, the fate of Heideggerian fundamental ontology that is an understanding

of Being rather than a relation to beings (or to a being, a face) is hitched to the fate of psychoanalysis and both linked to participation, the “nocturnal chaos” that threatens to drown the ego in the totality.

( ) This is non-falsifiable and fails – no support for generalizing from the particular Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05 (Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique ajones)

One of the functions of myth is to cut out what Trevor Pateman terms the "middle level" of analytical concepts, establishing a short-circuit between high-level generalizations and ultra-specific (pseudo-) concrete instances.  In Barthes's classic case of an image of a black soldier saluting the French flag, this individual action is implicitly connected to highly abstract concepts such as nationalism, without the mediation of the particularities of his situation.  (These particularities, if revealed, could undermine the myth.  Perhaps he enlisted for financial reasons,

or due to threats of violence).  Thus, while myths provide an analysis of sorts, their basic operation is anti-analytical: the analytical schema is fixed in advance, and the relationship between this schema and the instances it organizes is hierarchically ordered to the exclusive advantage of the former. 

This is precisely what happens in Lacanian analyses of specific political and cultural phenomena.  Žižek specifically advocates 'sweeping generalizations' and short-cuts between specific instances and high-level abstractions, evading the "middle level".  'The correct dialectical procedure... can be best described as a direct jump from the singular to the universal, bypassing the mid-level of particularity'. 

He wants a 'direct jump from the singular to the universal', without reference to particular contexts.

Extension – No Alt Bad

( ) Responsibility for actual alternative or failure is inev 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 ajones)

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.

There is a widespread tendency in the anarchist movement (and on the left in

general) to say that the question of how we are going to actually make a revolution is too distant and therefore too abstract to deal with now. Instead it is asserted that we should focus on practical projects or immediate struggles. But the practical projects or immediate struggles we decide to focus on are precisely what will determine if we ever move any

closer to making revolution. If we abdicate our responsibility to try to figure out what it will take to actually make revolution and to direct our current work accordingly we will be caught up in an endless succession of “practical projects and

immediate struggles” and when confronted with a potentially revolutionary situation we will be pushed to the side by more politically prepared forces (who undoubtedly we will accuse of “betraying” the revolution if they don’t shoot all of us). We will be carried by the tide of history instead of attempting to steer our own course. And by allowing this to happen again it will be we who have really betrayed the revolution. The net result of the refusal to deal with what it will actually take to make a revolution is that anarchism has become a sort of directionless but militant reformism. We are either building various “counter-institutions” that resemble nothing so much as grungier versions of the social

services administered by different churches; or we are throwing ourself into some largely reactive social struggle in which our actions are frequently bold and courageous, but from which we never build any sort of ongoing social movement (let alone a revolutionary organization).

AT// Antiblackness

( ) “anti-blackness” vs “whiteness studies” is a distinction without a difference. The effects and political mechanisms are indistinguishable Sullivan ‘1 - Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Penn State at University Park (Shannon “Living Across & Through Skins : Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism & Feminism”06/2001 p161-162 ajones)

This experiment demonstrates that pro-whiteness and anti-blackness can be distinguished psychologically. The different ways in which the egalitarian nonracist participants responded to the inadmissible confession in the case of white and black defendants shows that those participants were not biased against blackness, but were biased in favor of whiteness. However, in support of Ignatiev’s position against thinking of whiteness as

preserved, the experiment also demonstrates that the effects of pro-whiteness and anti-blackness disadvantage black people in equivalent ways. Even though the distinction between anti-blackness and pro-whiteness can be useful for distinguishing different types of psychological reactions to situations involving race, it does not mean that pro-whiteness does not have adverse effects on people of color. This is signi¤cant because the effects, not the mere psychology, of pro-whiteness are most relevant to racism and its elimination. As compared to a black defendant who made no incriminating confession, a black defendant who did make such a confession was treated fairly by the egalitarian white participants. Compared to a white defendant who made such a confession, the black defendant who confessed was not treated fairly by the white egalitarians. The white defendant received bene¤cial treatment that the black defendant did not, disadvantaging the black defendant in a signi¤cant way— solely because of the

defendant’s race. Even if one claims that the black defendant received justice while the white defendant received mercy, the verdicts are racist because they awarded special treatment to the white defendant because he or she was white. While the anti-outgroup bias of traditional racists and the proingroup bias of egalitarian nonracists do so in different ways, both unfairly discriminate based on race. Both pro-whiteness and anti-blackness attitudes are racist because they have racist effects.

( ) Wilderson is ahistorical – He assumes that anti-black animus arises from nothingness but its caught up in a broader web of historical power relationships like Islamophobia and nativismCharoenying (citing Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Prof of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley) 8(Timothy, Islamophobia & Anti-Blackness: A Genealogical Approach, http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-anti-blackness-genealogical-approach)

The year 1492 marked a major  turning point in the trajectory of Western Civilization. Elementary age children are taught this as the year Columbus famously crossed the Atlantic. An equally significant event that year,

was the Spanish conquest of al-Andalus–a Moorish province on the southern Iberian peninsula established eight centuries earlier–and more importantly, the last major Muslim stronghold on the

European continent. Critical race scholars have argued that these two events would not only shift the geopolitical balance of power from the Orient to the Occident, but fundamentally alter conceptions about religious and

racial identity. According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, of the University of California, Berkeley, the expulsion of the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age of imperial relations between Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion throughout the known world. The “discovery” of “godless” natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas and

Sepúlveda in 1550 on the nature of the human soul. Such a geopolitical and philosophical shift, Maldonado-Torres argues, would lead to a Eurocentric, re-categorization of humanity based upon religous—and ultimately racial—differences.

Maldonado-Torres has proposed that anti-black racism is not simply an extension of some historical bias against blacks, but rather, is an amalgam of old-world Islamophobia linked to the history of the Iberian peninsula, and to the notion of souless beings embodied in popular   conceptions about the indigenous natives of the Americas. These beliefs would contribute to an ideological basis for, and justification of, colonial conquests in the name of cultural and religious conversion, as well as pave the way for the enslavement and human trafficking of sub-Saharan Africans.

AT// Libidinal Economy

( ) Their claims to a libidinal economy are a sham. Historicizing slavery and capitalism through the lens of social death effaces the agency and lived experiences of the slave.Brown 2009 – professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)

Specters of the Atlantic is a compellingly sophisticated study of the relation between the epistemologies underwriting both modern slavery and modern capitalism, but the book’s discussion of the politics of anti-slavery is fundamentally incomplete. While Baucom brilliantly traces the development of “melancholy realism” as an oppositional discourse that ran counter to the logic of

slavery and finance capital, he has very little to say about the enslaved themselves. Social death, so well

suited to the tragic perspective, stands in for the experience of enslavement. While this heightens the reader’s sense of the way Atlantic slavery haunts the present, Baucom largely fails to acknowledge that the enslaved performed melancholy acts of accounting not unlike those that he shows to be a fundamental component of abolitionist and human rights discourses, or that those acts could be a basic element of slaves’ oppositional activities. In many ways, the effectiveness of his text depends upon the silence of slaves—it is easier to describe the continuity of structures of power when one downplays countervailing forces such as the political activity of the weak. So Baucom’s deep insights into the structural features of Atlantic slave trading and its afterlife come with a cost.

Without engagement with the politics of the enslaved, slavery’s history serves as an effective charge leveled against modernity and capitalism, but not as an uneven and evolving process of human interaction, and certainly not as a locus of conflict in which the enslaved sometimes won small but important victories.11

Wilderson Adheres to Patterson

( ) Wilderson adheres to PattersonBruker 2011 – Temple University (Malia, Review: RED, WHITE & BLACK: CINEMA AND THE STRUCTURE OF U.S. ANTAGONISMS, Journal of Film & Video; Winter2011, Vol. 63 Issue 4, p66-69)

Wilderson aligns himself with Afro-pessimists such as Hortense Spillers, Ronald Judy, David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Orlando Patterson, and Jared Sexton, whom he references throughout the book. In the lengthy and dense chapter “The Narcissistic Slave,” Wilderson builds heavily on the work of Franz Fanon to argue against the possibility of Lacan and Lacanian film theory to apply to black people. “Whereas Lacan was aware of how language ‘precedes and exceeds us,’ he did not have Fanon’s awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks” (76). Wilderson sees Lacan’s process of full speech for whites as contingent on the black Other as a frame of reference, “which remonumentalizes the (White) ego” and “is an accomplice to social stability, despite its claims to the contrary” (75). ¶ Patterson’s work is the foundation of the theory¶ Brown 2009 – professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)¶ Slavery and Social Death was widely reviewed and lavishly praised for its erudition and conceptual rigor. As a result of its

success, social death has become a handy general definition of slavery, for many historians and non-historians alike. But it is often forgotten that the concept of social death is a distillation from Patterson’s breathtaking survey—a theoretical abstraction that is meant not to describe the lived experiences of the enslaved so much as to reduce them to a least common denominator that could reveal the essence of

slavery in an ideal-type slave, shorn of meaningful heritage.6 As a concept, it is what Frederick Cooper has called an “agentless abstraction” that provides a neat cultural logic but ultimately does little to illuminate the social and political experience of enslavement and the struggles that produce historic transformations.7 Indeed, it is difficult to use such a distillation to explain the actual behavior of slaves, and yet in much of the scholarship that followed in the wake of Slavery and Social Death,

Patterson’s abstract distillates have been used to explain the existential condition of the enslaved. ¶