Tournament: Grapevine | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Claudia Taylor AP | Judge: Bukowsky, Brown, Stuckert
WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF A RACE WAR- The labelling of BLM protests and disorganized rioting and white nationalists like Dylan Roof confessing to "trying to start a race war." The 21st century wave of racialized white nationalist violence has solidified the race war and we need to fight back.
====Narratives of racial progress ignore the pre-established template for progress that’s inextricably tied to white humanity. Reforms are encapsulated within the order, fluctuating between waves and retreats with White Supremacy as the backdrop – the "theatre of racial nation-building with vacillating movements and subtitles: post-civil rights multiculturalism, resurgent white nationalism, post-racial liberalism, law-and-order, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror and the infrastructures of tolerance and repression are never finally separable"1. All prove inseparability from the race war.====
1Rodriguez 19 – Dylan Rodriguez, Dylan Rodríguez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2001), and earned two B.A. degrees and a Concentration degree from Cornell University (1995). "Insult/Internal Debate/Echo", Propter Nos Volume 3, 2019, pp. 129-130)Shreyas
Harney et. al. 18 – Stefano Harney, professor at Singapore Management University, Niccolò Cuppini and Mattia Frapporti, Department Member of Independent Researcher and Department Member of Universitá di Bologna, "Logistics Genealogies: a dialogue with Stefano Harney", September 2018, http://www.intotheblackbox.com/articoli/logistics-genealogies-a-dialogue-with-stefano-harney/, DOA: 11/15/2019)shreyas
Answer 1: Modern logistics is a commercial logistics, with all the multiple sources that feed what Cedric Robinson calls racial capitalism. And it’s a capitalist science. Even today’s military logistics is most commonly outsourced to commercial firms, who make huge profits off the logistics of contemporary permanent war. As a commercial logistics, as a capitalist science, it can be traced directly and emphatically to the Atlantic slave trade. The Atlantic slave trade was the birth of modern logistics, as it was also the birth of a new kind of war on the human species, and of racial capitalism, which amounts to saying the same thing. This trade entailed the first global movement of mass commodities, voluminous and grotesque. Moreover these humans were also perishable and volatile commodities that could ‘go missing’ and were hard ‘to extract’ requiring cdeomplex, even diabolical, logistical technologies, supported by finance, insurance, law, and of course state and extra state violence. Ian Baucom locates the origins of modern insurance in the Atlantic slave trade in his important work Spectres of the Altantic. We know from Sergio Bologna how much contemporary finance and logistics are entwined in today’s over-leveraged global shipping industry, but this was true of the Atlantic slave trade too, where speculative finance was already at work. The story of the Zong slave ship is central to Baucom’s account, and is also beautifully, unbearably rendered by M. NorbeSe Philip in her book-length poem Zong!, capturing what the birth of modern logistics did to any possible project of the human by bringing finance and logistics together in a devilish alliance over the commodity that really ‘could speak,’ the ‘thing’ that talks or is somehow in-touch, neither subject nor proper object, a massive, subterranean, ethereal, undercommon threat to the individuation of modern ‘Man’ emerging at the same time. But the Atlantic slave trade was also the birth of modern logistics because modern logistics is not just about how to transport large amounts of commodities or information or energy, nor even how to move these efficiently, but also about the sociopathic demand for access: topographical, jurisdictional, but as importantly bodily and social access. The nearly complete access that was imposed upon the African enslaved, upon the African continent, and upon the lands and indigenous peoples settled for plantations, this kind of access remains the ambition of logistics today, and it is for this reason that the slave trade remains so contemporary, that abolition as Jared Sexton rightly says is yet to come. And we might add this abolition requires the abolishment of logistics which in its flows created a people without standing anywhere. We act in abolition not for a ground to stand on but for groundations beyond standing. Modern logistics, with its warehousing and its containers is as much about controlling the flow as ensuring the flow, as much about the interface of movement of commodities and financialisation of commodities as it is about just getting goods somewhere. That interface is an opportunity for speculation and today the line itself, the supply line and the assembly line, their speed, efficiency and metrics are source of massive financial speculation. This is also the horrific legacy of the Atlantic slave trade, the containerisation of people, of the sociopathic access demanded to labour and sex, and the storage, in forts, in the hold. And even more murderously, the elimination of goods, of cargo, when the price falls, or considerations of finance as in the incident of the slave ship the Zong, in which 133 enslaved persons were thrown overboard for insurance purposes during a logistical operation. In short, this aggregated access allowed for the most evil calculations about the perishability of goods, the planned obsolesence of products, and the cost of replacement, in a word financial speculation on the supply line that was in the case of the African enslaved in the Atlantic trade often indistinguishable from the assembly line. Marx said the first thing the worker makes is himself. The slave was worker on the line and at the same time the supply coming off the line and into the line. The same concerns with speculation on the line, the line as a modulation of investment and exploitation of labour are still found today at Walmart or Starbuck’s, not so far from their origins, at least for the most part. As Susan Zieger reminds us in her study of ‘Box’ Brown and logistics – he was the slave who mailed himself in a box to ‘freedom’ from the slave-plantation South to the slave-dependent North in the United States – logistics incorporates loss in its logics. As Fred Moten and I say logistics tracks us because it assumes fugitivity. Indeed what is called surveillance might also be called preemptive logistics. It is possible that all we know of surveillance studies, including its most incisive work in black surveillance like Simone Browne’s, could also go under the name preemptive logistics, even predictive logistics, the anticipation not of resistance but of a kind of impenetrability even in the give. In other words, our entangled, indeterminate, undercommon, rub-up of curvy lines, kinks, loops, and crooked lines summon logistics. It reacts to our sumptuous tangle. Our entanglement requires them to draw up contingency plans which are plans to make our indeterminacy mere contingency, to account for what goes missing. Logistics is the science of loss, the science of their lost means, which is to say it will always be the white science and the science of being white. Logistics is the science of their loss, not ours, though we, and those closest to blackness in particular, suffer horrific losses from their loss.
Beller 2017 (Jonathan Beller – director of the Graduate Program in Media Studies, Pratt Institute, and the author of The Cinematic Mode of Production (2006) and The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (2017). "The Fourth Determination", e-flux Journal ~#85 – October 2017 – ERW)
Analogous to the land- and water-based commons that was planet earth, the cognitive-linguistic, the visual-poetic, and the imagination have undergone massive colonial expropriations, following immediately upon their separation and "liberation" from traditional ties to the body, and have entered directly into capitalist servitude. Bernard Stiegler refers to this phenomenon of cognitive collapse and short-termist thinking, organized by what he refers to as mnemotechnologies (technologies of memory that include print, cinema, and computation), as the "proletarianization of the senses." This follows upon and overlaps with the proletarianization of the masses by the long industrial revolution and the capture and unspeakable violation of designated bodies by the slave trade. These aggressive and oftentimes annihilating encroachments on corporality, the senses, and the linguistic commons, achieved by cybernetic means, are mediological and technical phenomena as much as they are sociopolitical ones. Put another way, the mediological and the technical have been sociopolitical all along—to such an extent that with the level of technical saturation present today, "the political" has been lost. The "loss of the political" is an acknowledgement of the subsumption of policies and programs by capitalized financial calculus that chains representation to the process of accumulation. What indeed can "political" mean in a world increasingly characterized by algorithmic governance and platform sovereignty, that is, where capitalist power is increasingly automated, and discursive and affective labor is posited as a mere subroutine of capitalized computational processes—as engines of value creation? What of the political when "politics" has become a subroutine of computational capital and its discourses and actions are a modality of value extraction? It is an old lesson but it still applies (and we can see it from Israel to Burma): if subalterns use the same media and therefore modes of value extraction as oppressors in their struggles, then politics is simply a war over who will get the spoils of exploitation. The expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic by capital reduces discursive production—including the discourse of politics—to the subroutine of an abstract machine. This "machine," though abstract, is nonetheless functional and material—we recognize it as the increasingly ubiquitous, increasingly networked computer or discrete state machine, but we must not see it as mere technology. The universal Turing machine, which when unified posits what I call the World Computer ("the invisible hand" codified as AI), has become the preeminent form of fixed capital. Machinic enslavement, whether to the assembly line, to the "media," or to the computer, is indeed enslavement by other means, though we must insist that many of the "older" methods of extraordinary servitude stubbornly persist and the pain, like the profit, remains unevenly distributed. Following a backlash, in August 2017 the popular "FaceApp" removed a series of racially themed filters it had issued. The app had allowed digital blackface, yellowface, brownface, and a Caucasian setting to be added to selfies. Inequality, now sedimented into institutions and machines as materialized abstractions and designed into apparatuses, operationalizes historically variegated injustice, to produce and reproduce a planetary culture that at bottom is founded upon racism, gender inequality, national and cultural codifications, modern slavery, and a near total dispossession for billions. Machines, too, must be understood as racial formations. Given the data-logical nature of financialized systems underpinning "cultural" expression and iterated in and as machines, it is no surprise that Facebook’s machine-learning algorithm "Deep Face" imaged the minimally recognizable human face as that of a white man. Converting social life and social history into digital information and digital machines facilitates the as yet un-transcendable program of quantification that runs parallel to social-historical processes of social differentiation for the purpose of accumulation. The social emerges not as an abstract idea, but as a concrete substrate of computation. Sociality is posited then programmed as a series of leveraged accumulation strategies operating above or below or explicitly in and through everyday consciousness. Public faces are forms of data visualization and, circulating as images, are both programs and programmable. Bodies become "necessary media" of machinic digital operations that require from us (us bodies) attention, cognition, neuro-power, virtuosity, and sheer survival. As the auto-enthnography that is critical theory in the West might indicate, the remainders—interiorities and isles of awareness that fall away from informatic throughput—are in large part melancholic, cynical, disaffected, and abject laments. The rise of actually existing digitality thus appears as inseparable from the development and intensification of capitalism, that is, of media technologies as media of capital, which is also to say as media for the leveraging of agency and representation, such that decisions are made hierarchically and systemically while many aspects of life become almost unrepresentable and thus also unknown and unknowable. The ordinary taxonomies of social history continue to index zones and inflection points of this total and in certain definitive respects totalitarian process of digital enclosure. Our situation is effectively one of platform totalitarianism in which (the social) metabolism itself is captured by a leveraged exchange with capital and our media and machines are not only social relations but racial formations. This leveraged exchange of metabolism for forms of currency at rates set by platform capitalism is managed by ambient and ubiquitous computation, an electro-mechanical network that is composed primarily of fixed capital. The skeins of accumulation by means of informatic uptake lay closely upon body, mind, and time, and what value is extracted are the products of these. Thought and feeling are rendered quantifiable, computable, and indeed programmable. However, it is always a mistake to imagine that the impact of technology flows only in one direction: technical form emerges in a dialectics of domination and struggle. The global, technical evolution in the scale and granularity of the metabolic capture of what was once called labor power and social cooperation—a capture that fragments and cellularizes populations as well as bodies, minds, and neural networks—is not without its emancipatory potentials, as a Benjamin or a Brecht might remind us were they alive today. "The bad new things" are built out of and in response to new forms of struggle, and as Antonio Negri has always emphasized, the innovations of capitalist techné come from below, from the ways that the oppressed outflank domination and persist in living. A survey machine for customer feedback on the "immigration experience"—as long as the feedback is expressed in the form of smiley or frowny emojis. Towards a Reclamation of Value How then to investigate the capture and neutralization of the political domain and its uncountable longings by media-interfaced Computational Capitalism? How to transform and reprogram the failing powers of analysis, sensibility, and action such that they may function beyond the horizon of capitalist control? Four main hypothesis can guide us: 1) Computational Capitalism is an ambient financial calculus of value extraction working through any and all media. 2) Computational Capitalism is a development of Racial Capitalism and is thus also Computational Colonialism: vectors of race, gender, nation, sexuality, and other forms of social difference have been configured by and as strategies of value extraction and, like "structural racism," have been sedimented into the operating systems and machine architectures of our machines. 3) The specter of revolution is everywhere visible if one knows how to see it. 4) For the first time in history a thoroughgoing revolution is possible that does not replicate the failed strategies of the radical break so tragically characteristic of twentieth-century revolutionary movements, but instead works to decolonize computation by transforming the money-form from within. I take it as axiomatic that the items telegraphically listed in the previous paragraph have become inseparable. What we thought of simply as computation is in fact computational capital—a supple and adaptive machine-mediated calculus on the social metabolism, one that can be gleaned through a deeper reflection on the notion of convergence. To illustrate aspects of convergence, we note that racialization and nationalization, along with regimes of gender, sexuality, borders, and incarceration, are part and parcel of the overall process of corporeal inscription, codification, and programmatic control endemic to digitization. Niche marketing and profiling are but two of the ways in which our bodies and practices are coded for capitalist and state-capitalist processing. One could add here the attempted subsumption of entire demographics under codifications indexed by "thug" and "terrorist." Historical codes, including but not limited to race, gender, nation, class, and sexuality, are inscribed on our bodies, read, written, and rewritten by informatic machines. This functionalization of social difference (representational, biometric), to say nothing of the branding and scarring of bodies that is both past and present at so many levels, serves both as a means and a medium of capitalization and value extraction and as a necessary substrate to the development of computation. Within and at the scenes of inscription, the code works us and we work the code—again with historically overdetermined statistical variance. This is how it is at both the micro and the macro levels of struggle and organization. IBM’s role in the Holocaust, to give but one example, must also be understood as the Holocaust’s role in IBM and in the development of Hollerith punch cards and computational architectures, including search engines. Sociality and global lifetimes themselves have become the conditions of possibility for what, writ large, is the totalitarian emergence of the World Computer. That is why no existing political discourse can approach this horizon because current concepts and the activities of thought itself are fully circumscribed by it—ideas themselves have become operators (media) fully functionalized by and in the matrix of information. Understanding the transformation of semiotic process by information functioning as a form of capital, we can take the general formula for capital M-C-M’ (where M is money, C is commodity and, M’ is a greater quantity of money) and rewrite it as M-I-C-I’-M’, where I is image and C is code. The commodity as a distributed social relation has, with computation, become both produced and distributed in nonlinear networked operations that, unlike the assembly line, depend upon digital forms of attention, cognition, images, and codes for full valorization. This dependence on transformed conditions of labor germane to the social factory is (now) true even of older forms of production (e.g., automobiles) inasmuch as they are also networked in the world of information, advertising, Instagram, and the like. The valuation of a commodity requires a calculus of the image that modifies code, as does any interaction that transfers rights and value to said commodity (what used to be called sales). Production, circulation, valuation are all mediated by image and code, and that mediation occurs on a global scale. As the Anthropocene and its derivative concepts might testify, little or nothing remains untouched by this process of computational capital that penetrates down to the level of atoms. Here I want to propose further that this formula can be further modified to read M-I-M’, where I is information. To put this modification simply, money becomes more money through the movement of discrete state machines, the motor force of which is ultimately the bios (what was once thought of as the human life-world) struggling to survive its informatic capture. Labor becomes informatic labor and, as I endeavor to show in The Message is Murder, M-I-M’ means less that the commodity is one form of information, and more that the domain of intelligibility known as "information" directly emerges in the footprint of the value-form. Data visualization by computational processes screen-interfaced with the bios is a fundamental condition of the current regime of accumulation sometimes called post-Fordism. In generating M’ from M, it also effects what Paolo Virno calls "the communism of capital." The programmable image as a worksite transforms and colonizes nearly all mental, sensual, and neuronal process while submitting them to interoperable regimes of background monetization. This financialization of everyday life, where everyone is forced to continuously throughput information in order to manage volatility and risk, facilitates a machinic enslavement profoundly enabled by and integrated with inherited forms of oppression. Navigating the matrix of capital-information is not an option, it is a matter of survival. Somewhere along the way, "consumer society" and "conspicuous consumption" became a semiotic game of survival. In the dominant order, these encodings are among the terms of wealth and power and only those who strive to organize in accord with a different order (or disorder) altogether have more than an inkling that there are better ways to be. We are dealing with the failure of revolutions, the overcoding of bodies and practices, and the absorption of political energy by strategies of accumulation. Computational capital names the integration of discrete state machines with fixed capital and sociality such that Marx’s "vast automaton" has become a global financialized socio-cybernetic system. "Politics" has been operationally reduced to a mere subroutine in the encroachment of this computationally integrated system on planetary life, and as Harney and Moten have pointedly underscored, "politics" and "policy" are today always on the side of the state—and the state is a state of capital.
Militant preservation is a mode of resistance that harnesses social energy against coercive policymaking. Refusing violence and endorsing modes of undercommons endurance with "the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you."3Militant Preservation is touch without any coercive endpoint of policy response just as a mode of understanding the interpersonality of violence and planning modes of endurance.
3Moten and Harney 13 ~Fred and Stefano, "The Undercommons", from Fantasy in the Hold~
~4~Harney and Moten 13 (Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. "The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study." (2013): 1. Pgs 87-91 (Stefano Harney is the Professor of Strategic Management Education at Singapore Management University., Fred Moten is the professor of Performance Studies at New York University and has taught previously at University of California, Riverside, Duke University, Brown University, and the University of Iowa)Elmer
For spec – orientations to politics matters first, debate is a site of planning which means our affirmation of a model of debate outweighs
Greer 18, G. H. "Who Needs the Undercommons? Refuge and Resistance in Public High Schools." Brock Education: A Journal of Educational Research and Practice 28.1 (2018): 5-18. (Concordia University (Canada), Art Education Department, Graduate Student.)Elmer
Planning While study in the undercommons is a sociality that provides refuge, joy, and resilience, planning is the ongoing process of resistance which protects study. In the terms of complexity theory, planning creates the conditions for study to emerge. Planning defends study, for example, by attending to methods, when economic forces are oriented toward outcomes. In such a case, study thrives in the fascination required to build a car from scratch but is extinguished by a production line. Planning may then take the form of activism against the process of de-skilling workers. Generally, study is in trouble where labour is detached from purpose, discovery, and agency; and planning poses resistance to such divisions. Resistance may take a passive form like absenteeism or an active form like student strikes; it is an ongoing social experiment. The subjects of difference who inhabit the undercommons initiate planning in support of further difference: "planning in the undercommons is not an activity, not fishing or dancing or teaching or loving, but the ceaseless experiment with the future presence of the forms of life that make such activities possible" (Harney and Moten, 2013, p. 74). Importantly, "~p~lanning is self-sufficiency at the social level, and it reproduces in its experiment not just what it needs, life, but what it wants, life in difference…" (p. 76). Planning resists the austerity of conformity. Difference may bring the concept of diversity to mind for social justice educators. There are a number of distinctions between the difference that propels planning in the undercommons and diversity as it is understood in the field of education. Social justice education organized around diversity involves "eliminating the injustice created when differences are sorted and ranked in a hierarchy that unequally confers power…" (Adams, Bell, Goodman, and Joshi, 2016, p. 3, emphasis in original). In this sense, equitable diversity is an end goal that is, significantly, often supported by the implementation of policy. Planning, on the other hand, is a process, rather than an outcome, that resists policy, as explained below. Planning appears distorted, if at all, from the commons where the rules are made: "Because from the perspective of policy it is too dark in there, in the black heart of the undercommons, to see" (Harney and Moten, 2013, p. 79). Planning may become invisible or appear criminal in the light. Historical examples of such distortions are plentiful. The Freedom Riders were planning in 1961, boarding buses into their own brutalization to desegregate the southern United States; in the light of curricular history, Freedom Riders disappear and are replaced by parliamentary motions. There was planning at the Stonewall Riots in June of 1969 when homeless queer kids led by trans women of colour revolted against police brutality; the political necessity of Stonewall disappears in the parade lights of Pride every year on its own anniversary. Planning made visible but distorted is apparent in current events in the criminalization of self-preservation: from immigration (Ackerman and Furman, 2013), to activism (Matthews and Cyril, 2017; Alonso, Barcena, and Gorostidi, 2013), to panhandling (Chesnay, 2013). Educators who wish to see the planning of the undercommons, or to make it visible to students, must research to discover the exclusions of curriculum. When we include stories like the Stonewall Riots or the Freedom Riders in our teaching, we offer a connection to students who see their lives reflected therein. Stories of resistance to injustice, particular to local contexts, are important educational resources. In addition to these, pedagogical models which support the development and scholastic direction, of planning skills among students include: problem-based learning (Walker, Leary, Hmelo-Silver, and Ertmer, 2015), choice-based art education (Douglas, and Jaquith, 2009), critical media literacy (Funk, Kellner, and Share, 2016), and anti-oppressive education (Kumashiro, 2000). Policy From the perspective of the undercommons, policy inevitably conflicts with the forms of study and planning described above. Policy is the instrument of efficiency; it seeks measurable, predictable outcomes. The immeasurable social experiments and emerging differences of planning and study cannot be reconciled with administrative control as exercised through policy. Policy from the perspective of the undercommons operates under three rules. First, it diagnoses planners as problematic and prescribes itself as the solution; "This is the first rule of policy. It fixes others" (Harney and Moten, 2013, p. 78). Second, policy requires the participation of planners in the fixing of themselves; "Participating in change is the second rule of policy." (Harney and Moten, 2013, p. 80). In this way, participantsimplicate themselvesin order to fulfill the third rule of policy: that "wrong participation" (Harney and Moten, 2013, p. 81) provokes all manner of crises. If there is no crisis then the participant is fixed and may be deputised in order to fix others. More commonly, any crisis at all proves that policy was right about the planners all along; and of course, they were bound to fail. The circular logic of policy as viewed from the undercommons reflects what Spade (2015) calls administrative violence. Spade (2015) details a story which I relate here to clarify the operations of policy. Bianca, a trans girl, was sent home from her high school in 1999 for wearing clothing that affirmed her gender. She was not allowed to return to her classes. Bianca’s parents called the school and received no response. Spade met Bianca in 2002 when she was homeless, unemployed, and attempting to leave an abusive relationship. Bianca had enrolled in a welfare work program but was outed as a trans woman by her male identification (ID). She was subsequently harassed and forced to quit, losing her income and making her ineligible for Medicaid. She became homeless, and because of her male ID she was barred from women’s shelters and fearful of further abuse at shelters for men. Without an address, medical benefits, or an income Bianca was unable to complete the process to correct her ID and could not afford the hormone treatments that allowed her to maintain a feminine appearance. Bianca’s ability to pass as a cisgender woman protected her on the street from further harassment by both the public and the police. In order to afford hormone injections, Bianca engaged in sex work. The injections were not regulated because they had to be obtained illegally which placed Bianca at increased risk of infection by HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases. Although Bianca’s story is not recent, the factors that contributed to her difficulties are relevant: transgender youth are still significantly over-represented in groups of early school leavers, homeless youth, and survivors of violence (Morton et al., 2018; Keuroghlian, Shtasel, and Bassuk, 2014). In the language of the undercommons Bianca planned to survive by expressing her gender, but this plan was subverted by school policy, causing her not to graduate and significantly reducing her prospects for employment. Following the first rule of policy according to the undercommons, Bianca’s school would not accept her attendance until she fixed her gender. Bianca then followed the second rule of policy and made attempts to become a participant. She tried to stay at shelters and enrolled in a social welfare work program. In each of these cases, she experienced the crisis of harassment. Following the third rule of policy, these crises were framed as the result of Bianca’s wrong participation: she did not have the right identification. For survival, Bianca must then become a fugitive by engaging in criminalized activity: sex work and the illegal procurement of hormones. In an educational context, considering policy, according to The Undercommons, pushes educators to ask how the rules in our schools create, rather than respond to, fugitivity among students. Fugitivity Being a fugitive according to The Undercommons means being marked as an outsider. Fugitivity happens to people when: first they act, and second policy outlaws those actions. But fugitivity must also be embraced. Those who refuse the rules of policy, as outlined above, become fugitive. Fugitives will not be fixed, refuse to participate, and deny responsibility for the crises that befall them. Fugitivity recognises systemic racism, classism, ableism, and cis/heteronormativity in the disallowance of demographic-specific behaviour. It is fugitive sociality that composes the undercommons in order to provide refuge and resistance. In high schools, the undercommons provides social refuge in the form of patient listening and covert smiles to: hat wearing, cell phone texting, hall running, affection displaying, fugitive students; and granola bar giving, grade fudging, student failing, smiling before Christmas, fugitive teachers. These now-fugitive activities are planning behaviours, they sustain study for those that commit them. These things have been happening since before policy determined that education is a predictable and measurable thing. Fugitive planners generate study with unforeseeable ends and immeasurable learning. Turning planners into fugitives has some effects: ease of administration and evaluation is one; the reinforcement of unjust hierarchies is another.
The race war is a uniqueness question that demands putting procedurals on hold to analyze how debate itself is complicit within violence.
Kelsie 19 – Amber Kelsie, University of Pittsburgh, Communication and Rhetoric, Graduate Student, "Blackened Debate at the End of the Word", Philosophy and Rhetoric, Volume 52, Number 1, 2019, pp. 63-70 (Article), Penn State University Press)Shreyas
We are haunted by the specter of civil war. Liberal and conservative politicians and commentators openly express anxiety about the possibility of outright hostilities and the "unravelling ~of ~ our national fabric" (Gambino 2017). Increasing polarization, identity politics that destroys persuasion, an atmosphere of conspiracy regarding the deep state or foreign puppet masters, apparent disenchantment with institutions, general mistrust in electoral politics, a gridlocked and weak congress, and open skirmishes between white nationalist and antifascists are put forth as signs of the end times (see, e.g., Blight 2017; Wright 2017; DeGroot 2018; Smith 2018). The looming crisis of the end of politics that everywhere drives the nostalgic desire for a return to a normalcy and civility invites us to rethink debate and to pose a different question that does not seek to redeem a past that never was and continues to come at too high a cost for the wretched of the earth. Rather than "make debate great again," I’d like to sit with the vertigo so as to consider debate’s (im)possible outside. Such a quest for a horizon that is before-after-immanent to the End (of politics or history or the world) will require that we rethink the spatiotemporal coordinates of the entire liberal project that secures the parameters of debate as the dialectical and agonistic contestation of the possible. My central interlocutor here will be blackness: that (non-)ontological constitutive outside of the modern grammar that is relegated to the realm of absolute necessity, negativity, incapacity, and pathology that subtends the political and the rhetorical. As that which is always already outside the World/History, blackness provides an anoriginary nonplace from which to think crisis and a politics of actualizing the impossible. Imminent civil war is an interesting but unsurprising anxiety; it is unsurprising because the U.S. Civil War informs so much of the popular narrative of the United States and its ethical position that confirms the progressive nature of time, and because liberal sovereignty was always a war waged against civil war.1 And it is interesting because the Greeks referred to civil war as "stasis." Today standing, state, and stability are also meanings of stasis, as it emerges from histemi. Stasis then doubles both as sovereignty and as sovereignty’s undoing and evokes a constant permanence of war even in peace. Stasis in rhetorical studies takes on the meaning of "issue" and serves as a hermeneutic for coming to consensus on the point of contention from which debate proceeds. Stasis here also means standing in the sense that there is some "ground" in the form of prior consensus on the nature of the disagreement.2 The somewhat paradoxical relationship between consensus and dissensus found in stasis speaks to a kind of disavowal of ungroundedness that precedes even the point from which to begin speaking. Must one have a presupposed potentiality for a common ground to be able to proceed in argument? Refusing this disavowal of groundlessness as it emerges in contemporary figurations of agonistic debate might enable us to more accurately think of rhetoric in its modern inflection as the presupposition of a ground as a war against its own void via antiblackness. The inversion of Clausewitz’s proposition is salient: rhetoric is the continuation of war by other means; rhetoric as a mode of war in an effort to ontologize itself against its groundless outside.3 The (im)possible is always at stake in debate since rhetoric regards the contingent as its necessary presupposition. According to Dilip Gaonkar, this "key, but largely unnoticed, assumption in contemporary rhetorical theory" finds its basis in Aristotle’s response to Plato’s charge of the unspecifiability of rhetoric (2004, 5). Instead of freeing us to reflect explicitly on the nature of contingency, Aristotle’s domestication of rhetoric by placing rhetoric within the domain of the "contingent, yet probable" has prompted most rhetorical scholars to forgo consideration of contingency in favor of the thematic of probability: doxa, constraints, norms, ideology. Contingency in these schemas tends to be considered as a property ascribed to statements, propositions, and rhetorical acts—to the ontic world that constitutes the context of the rhetor—rather than as a mode of the subject or the singular encounter that constitutes a rhetorical situation. The possibility of rhetorical dialectic, that exigency that provides the opportunity for agonistic argument that can be sublated into judgment, animates historical progress and places debate as the ground for civic life. In the liberal understanding of contemporary debate, contingency takes on an interior spatial dimension as the possible content through a disavowal of the contingency of debate’s outside that is rendered impossible. To say that debate is impossible is then to beckon to war on the horizon. It is to recognize the state of emergency as the end of the state of debate.
Sullivan 17 (Shannon Sullivan, Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy and Health Psychology at UNC Charlotte, "Setting Aside Hope: A Pragmatist Approach to Racial Justice", 2017)Shreyas recut Jay
IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, significant racial inequalities and anti-black violence continue to be rampant in the United States. Decades, even centuries, of political and legal struggle have deco lisle to change that fact. This chapter will argue that black Americans need new tactics and strategies for responding to the white class privilege and white supremacy that fundamentally structure the country.' They need to increase the number and type of tools in their racial justice toolkit, expanding beyond liberal faith in civil rights and white people's good intentions to cooperate with racial change. The political and legal work that black and other people of color (along with some white people) have done to eliminate antiblack racism isn't working. Pragmatists in particular need to be able to face up to that fact given that we value the practical work that ideas, concepts, and truths can do. Why then, as Calvin Warren pragmatically asks in the epigraph above, would we expect people fighting racism to keep doing the same thing? Why would anyone hope that the same failed actions and strategies would mm out any differentia the future? This kind of hope can function as a cruel optimism that "works" by keeping black people focused on the very thing that undercuts their flourishing (Warren 2015, 221). In line with Warren's concerns, I argue that black America' hope that political struggle can achieve racial justice tends to be a harmed emotion they should avoid. I maim my case in a pragmatist spirit that opposes Comet West's influential argument for black hope In contrast to West, I contend that pragmatists and others concerned about racial injustice would do better to draw on Derrick Bell's racial realism and Warren's blank nihilism to develop alternative strategies for addressing antiblack racism In related ways, Bell and Warren urge their readers to reckon with the permanence of racism and to give op hope that additional political struggle will eliminate it. After exploring their complementary accounts, I augment them with concrete evidence from the health sciences that black hope can be physically harmful to black people, weathering their bodies nod damaging their psychosomatic health such that they are less able to withstand the inequities of anti-black racism. I conclude by arguing for the advantages of reading Bell's and Warren's claims about the permanence of racism pragmatically, that is, by assessing the truth of their claims via their effects. The result m the working hypothesis that black people will have a much greater chance of developing new practices, habits, and strategies of flourishing in an anti-black world if they no longer hope that political struggle will eliminate racism.
~Sullivan Continues Later~
De facto white class privilege in the form of racial microaggressions contributes to people of color's "racial battle fatigue," which entails "the constant use or redirection of energy for coping against mundane racism which depletes psychological and physiological resources needed in other important, creative, and productive area of life" (Smith, Hung, and Franklin 2012, 40). Racial battle fatigue has been linked empirically to depression, tension, and generalized anxiety disorder in African Americans, and the stress associated with all of these psychological problems also contributes to physiological weathering that harms black health, contributing to high rates of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, pre-term birth rates, and infant mortality to name a few (Smith, Hung and Franklin 2012, 37, 40; D. Smith 2012). The effects of white racism literally get inside and help constitute the bodies of black people in harmful ways. They wear down the body's various systems by creating a high allostatic load via stressors that accumulate over time. The results are health problems such as disproportionately high rates of pre-term birth, infant mortality, cardio-vascular disease, diabetes, and accelerated physiological aging (Blitstein 2009). Racism hurts—literally—and it also kills in ways that am subtler but no less deadly than the lyncher's noose or the neighbors Met (Drexler 2007). These effects, moreover, can be transgenerational, physiologically passed onto subsequent generations through various epigenetic changes (Sullivan 2013).
Warren 11 Warren Waren University of Central Florida, Orlando, Using Monopoly to Introduce Concepts of Race and Ethnic Relations The Journal of Effective Teaching, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2011, 28-35 ~Shreyas~ recut Jay
Undergraduate students often enter our classrooms convinced that the battles of the Civil Rights Era solved the issue of race in America. They are generally unacquainted with the long history of race in the United States and almost universally underestimate the structural forces which carry racial disparities into their new century. As sociologists and teachers, it is our responsibility to tell that story and explain those forces. Our new challenge is: How do we teach students the extent of racism in America when, from their point of view, the problem of the color-line has been solved? One option is to use a game. Sociologists have used games or simulations to spark the sociological imagination (Dorn, 1989; Jessup, 2001; Fisher 2008), to stimulate critical thinking (Pence 2009), and to introduce social stratification (Ender, 2004; Waldner and Kinney, 1999). When students from relatively privileged backgrounds "experience" a temporary bout of unfairness in a simulated game, it creates the opportunity to change their perspective (Coghlan and Huggins, 2004; Haddad and Lieberman, 2002). The injustice of the situation, if directly connected to broader theory, can lessen a student’s social distance from marginalized groups. A game may help a student to understand some of the previously inexplicable attitudes and behaviors of actors on either side of a power relationship. Also, as this paper demonstrates, a properly constructed simulation can give the student a sense of the structural nature and lasting legacy of racial discrimination—a fuller sense of the "history and biography" of race in the United States (Mills, 1959). The great advantage of a game is that it is a completely controlled environment—there are no unexplained variables. In fairness to all the players, all rules are explicitly stated at the outset of game play and apply to all players equally (Waldner and Kinney, 1999). Ordinarily, in a competitive game this assumption of fairness supports an ideology of individualism. However, a pedagogical game is concerned with learning, not winning. In order to disentangle a complicated issue, the instructor may purposefully introduce inequality into an otherwise "just" world. Again, because all rules are explicit (even unfair ones), the problem exists in the game without confounding effects. This simplification allows students to easily focus on the nature and development of the problem. By extension, it is hoped that the game encourages students to reassess similar problems in the real world. Use of Pedagogical Games Dorn (1989) identifies multiple criteria for games or simulations to be effective in the classroom as pedagogical tools. He argues the games must: reflect reality; motivate students through "experience"; develop awareness of personal values through moral and ethical implications of the game; connect abstract concepts with concrete experiences; create a shared experience from which the students can draw; offer a form of debriefing to both address emotional issues and to connect theory to experiences. In the technique I describe below, I try to incorporate these ideas with Straus’ (1986) emphasis on simplicity for in-class games. In teaching and learning, the goal of simulation is the "experience" itself. Jessup (2001) argues that simulation should be the "experiential anchor for the elaboration of conceptual tools" (p.108). Therefore, this game is created to offer a chance for relatively privileged students to experience the unfairness of structural inequality. After temporary exposure to an analog of racial discrimination, students with no prior familiarity of racial discrimination will have a deeper understanding of the effects of racism on many levels. Pedagogical games are used to challenge our assumptions about how the world works (Waldner and Kinney, 1999). For example, the basic assumption of competitive games is fairness. This assumes that the world is fair (i.e., a meritocracy) and that individual effort or talent is the main factor in success (i.e., an ideology of individualism akin to Ross’ (1977) fundamental attribution error). In competitive games therefore, groups are treated equally and the best players win. But a pedagogical game may challenge the assumption of fairness directly by having structural inequality built into the game. The experience of a good player losing an unfair game creates cognitive dissonance—that cognitive dissonance is our teaching moment. I assume that students as game players can easily identify games that are "unfair" based on unequal outcomes for equivalent behavior. As a pedagogical tool, I want it to be relatively easy for them to spot the explicit rules which cause the inequality.
====Perm!====
Chambers-Letson 18. Joshua, Associate Professor in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, "After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life." NY: New York University Press, 2018
The weekend after your death, everyone converges at your apartment. I get the call, but wait a day to catch my bearings before catching a flight from Chicago to New York. A cab through the Village to your building where your doorman doesn’t stop us and we walk right in. When the elevator hits your floor, the familiar sound of a party pouring through the opening doors and into the empty space beside us where you used to be. I don’t know why it surprised me that it would be a party. Even though, or maybe because it belonged to your employer, your apartment was our party’s headquarters. It was something you stole back to give to those who didn’t have a home. Now, in the wake of your death, every room is full of people who are full with the loss of you. Someone puts a drink in my hand. This is just the first of an endless string of parties. Our party was the formation of a new communist party. The party: an organic entity, a living, breathing being, a gathering together of the multiple in the one, an obscure order, a whole which is not one, a many that is singular, a kind of provisional "we" at difference with itself from the inside out. The party, writes Fred Moten, "could be called the house party but don’t let that mislead you into thinking that house implies ownership; this house party is of and for the dispossessed, the ones who disavow possession, the ones who, in having been possessed of the spirit of dispossession, disrupt themselves." The party is as much a site of refuge as it is the site of revolutionary planning, but "even though the party is, and takes place in, and takes place as, a kind of refuge, refuge still indicates that those who take it are refugees and people tend not to want to have to live like that." The party, as refuge, is a place to catch one’s breath when you can’t breathe. It is a way of staying alive and of keeping each other alive. In your case, it was a way of sustaining your life after your death. And it was akin to what you called the punk rock commons or the "commons of the incommensurate." Our parties go on for days, for years. They would begin around ten a.m., when the hangover was starting to wear off and we’d roll from one gathering to the next: cocktails, a memorial, breakfast with drinks, lunch with drinks, a family dinner, an impromptu gathering at some one’s house, a joint on the balcony, a talk in the hallway. Repeat. After your first memorial, we pick up drinks to take to a friend’s apartment and converge with an endless flood of smiling faces smiling sometimes. They verge, fall, pull toward and apart from each other. All the wars are briefly suspended and for a few flickering moments, as Wallace Stevens might have said, "We collect ourselves, out of all the indifferences, into one thing." Though we were collected out of indifference by the shock of your death, we remain in difference from each other, which is to say that were not quite one thing but instead a singular being made up of the many, or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls being-singular-plural: "Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence." So rather than the coercive "we" that dominated the communist parties of historical communism, we became a "we" in difference from itself, gathered together in the wake of your death. I’ll be honest, I was kind of devastated. After your death I spent a lot of time trying to find you in the places you used to hide and especially the songs you used to listen to. The first thing I put on was the Germs (you loved Darby Crash) but that didn’t last long. I never shared your attachment to punk. Being manifestly uncool, my relationship to punk was pretty much Siouxsie Sioux, to whom I cathected around the age of twelve. There was something about her rejection of the domestic, suburban, and normal that made sense to teenage me—a queer black, brown, and blue boy adrift and alone in Northern Colorado. I don’t think you had strong feelings for Siouxsie one way or the other, but there is more than a passing resemblance between my teenage attachment to Siouxsie and yours to Crash. Both began as bad objects in their scenes: Crash in Los Angeles and Siouxsie in London. They were unlikely figures for two queer of color kids to identify with, least of all because both attempted (and failed) to appropriate (ironically or otherwise) the symbols of white supremacy by employing the swastika in their early acts. The swastika was something Siouxsie tried to atone for and that Crash refused to atone for and didn’t have time to do anyway because he, like you, died too young. Siouxsies name was itself an appropriation of the tribal name of the Sioux people, another chapter in the ongoing dispossession of the already dispossessed. We shouldn’t forget these transgressions, their unnerving entanglements with the violence of whiteness and white supremacy, but something about them nonetheless helped us sustain life in spite of the odds stacked against us. And the odds are stacked against queer teen agers of color in these United States. Darby’s and Siouxsie’s performances became the stage for what you described as the punk rock commons, "a being with, in which various disaffected, antisocial actants found networks of affiliation and belonging that allowed them to think and act otherwise, together, in a social field that was mostly interested in dismantling their desire for different relations within the social.’" In this punk essay, you cited Tavia Nyong’o, who argues that the word "punk" owes a debt to blackness, queerness, and the violent measures through which a phobic world responds to both. Siouxsie acknowledged a part of that debt when describing the queerness of the parties that gave birth to Londons early punk scene: It was a club for misfits, almost. Anyone that didn’t conform. There was male gays, female gays, bisexuals, non-sexuals, everything. No-one was criticized for their sexual preferences. The only thing that was looked down on was being plain boring, that reminded them of suburbia. Notice here how Siouxsie’s party resonates with the one described by Moten: "This is the party of the ones who are not self-possessed, the non-self-possessive anindividuals. This is the party of the ones in whom the trace of having been possessed keeps turning into this obsessive compulsive drive for the total disorder that is continually given in continually giving themselves away." Which is a way of saying that our party owes a debt to the black radical tradition as much as to the radical tradition of black and brown queer house parties on Chicago s South and West sides. Unlike Crash, Siouxsie survived the early 1980s and with her survival came the emergence of a new sound characterized by thick, textured melodies, lush orchestration, and heavily processed vocals. Some people described it as post-punk and others described it as goth, but everyone seemed to agree that it lingered in the darkness—perhaps an unacknowledged way of acknowledging her debt to blackness. Like blackness, Siouxsie’s darkness wasn’t merely negative space. Her dark ness was from the underside, the B-Side, the upside-down world of the normative, retrenched, dystopian, suburban, white, neoliberal hell that took hold in Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s United States. Siouxsie’s darkness was a pharmakon to the annihilating "light" cast by the shining city on the hill. It was dense, dark negation as the negation of the negation. Darkness, for the members of Siouxsie’s party, was a place where the freaks could gather, take cover, and keep each other alive as the "light" tried to burn them out of their holes and snuff them out of existence. If their party was increasingly imperiled by the normative regimes of social comportment demanded by Thatcher and Reagan, the 1986 song "Party’s Fall" tells the story of the breakdown and falling apart as a condition of possibility. In the song, the collapse of each party becomes the condition for the emergence of something new the next night: "Your parties fall around you Another night beckons to you Your parties fall around you Another night beckons to you" That the party falls apart only to come back another night is why, following Moten, "the party I’m announcing is serially announced." In "Party’s Fall" the present is always returning to itself, as Siouxsie points us toward a future in which the very thing that has fallen apart (the party) reconstitutes itself. Which is a good thing, it turns out, because the party is the one thing standing between the subject of her address and annihilating loneliness. About a year after your death, a friend and I are talking about you in a bar. He looks at his drink and says, "I used to be alone. And then I met him and I wasn’t alone. Now he’s gone and I’m alone again." The party is a way of ameliorating loneliness, and the endlessly renewable capacity to throw another party becomes Siouxsie’s condition for a practice of being with in which the misfit’s loneliness becomes the conditions for a relation of being together in difference and discord with other misfits that are lonely and (un)like her. I suspect that this is why we threw so many parties after you died. They were a way of bringing you back to us, of making us a little less alone again. Ours was not a political party, like The Communist Party. Political parties endure, but they often endure through coercion, violence, and force. Instead, I mean our communist party as a name for what Siouxsie describes as the endlessly renewable chain of events performed into being by a plurality of broken people who are trying to keep each other alive. For you. Crash’s performances were an antidote to (but not a denial of) loneliness. Loneliness is common, and it is often crushing for queers and trans people of color. But it can also be a condition for the emergence of queer sociality and the undercommons. While it would be easy to assume that your punk essays are about the white boys in them (Crash in particular), it would be more accurate to say that they are about the work to which queers of color put these performances while struggling to stay alive, get free, and open up other ways of being (and surviving) in the world together. "Through my deep friendships with other disaffected Cuban queer teens who rejected both Cuban exile culture and local mainstream gringo popular culture," you wrote in Cruising Utopia, "and through what I call the utopia critique function of punk rock, I was able to imagine a time and a place that was not yet there, a place where I tried to live."" Today, we place an emphasis on "tried." Near the end of Siouxsie’s song, she utters the phrase "maybe you’re alone," breathlessly as if it were an aside. But this is the kind of aside that matters so she repeats it again, supporting the voice with the fullness of a wail. As she sings this bridge to nowhere, you would have noticed that the lyrics reach melodic resolution, which has been otherwise absent in a song that lingers in the minor key. Siouxsies wail stretches across the lyric, her voice breaking on the word happiness : My happiness depends on knowing / this friend is never alone / on your own." I can’t help but imagine that as she begs her friend not to cry, applying her signature wail to the lyric and promising "a party on our own," that she’s singing to a much younger version of you or me or some other teenage queer and trans black and brown boy and girl perched on the precipice of self-obliteration. Her wanting for a commons (to be with and take care of a friend in need) is Siouxsie’s precondition for a life in happiness. It was yours as well. If I follow you, Siouxsie, and Moten in suggesting that the party has some kind of relationship to the making of the (under)commons, I am also following Nancy when he writes that it is death that gives birth to community. After all, our communist party was formed in the wake of your death. "It is death—but if one is permitted to say so it is not a tragic death, or else, if it is more accurate to say it this way, it is not mythic death, or death followed by a resurrection, or the death that plunges into a pure abyss; it is death as sharing and as exposure," he writes, "it is death as the unworking that unites us." Our party was born from your death. So in the wake of your death we threw parties to resurrect you. Though yours was a death without resurrection, performance and parties were a way of sustaining you, bringing you back, and keeping you alive. Your death was tragic, brutal in its suddenness. But in spite of what people might think, there was nothing mythic about it. It was mundane. You were another gay brown man dead before fifty. To say that queer and trans of color death is mundane is not to diminish their horror, but on the contrary to name the shocking fact of this kind of deaths everydayness. Trans and queer of color life is lived in constant and close proximity to death. "In any major North American city," writes Rinaldo Walcott, the numerous missing black women (presumed murdered), the many ‘missing’ and murdered trans-women, the violent verbal and physical conditions of black life often leading to the deaths of gay men, lesbian women, and trans people remain a significant component of how black life is lived in the constant intimacy of violence on the road to death. Death is not ahead of blackness as a future shared with others; death is our life, lived in the present." For similar reasons Christina Sharpe describes black life thus: "I want... to declare that we are Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, and to position us in the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, despite Black death." If I think of your death in relation to the forms of black life and death named by Walcott and Sharpe, it is not to suggest that they are commensurable. This would distract us from the way the history of black death in the Americas from the Middle Passage forward produces a present in which, as Walcott insists, "Black people die differently." But what I could see clearly in the wake of your departure is that black and brown queer and trans death, like the deaths of women of color, produced by different yet overlapping histories of colonialism, capital accumulation, white supremacy, and cis-heteropatriarchy, share something with each other not in spite of but because of their difference. I want to suggest that black and brown people’s emancipation from these conditions are mutually implicated, not in spite of but in relation to our incommensurability. What we share is that under such conditions, which are far beyond our ability to control them, survival can be hard. So, if I call your death mundane, it’s not to underplay the importance of your life. It’s only meant to serve as a bitter acknowledgment of the ubiquitous and disproportionate distribution of death toward queers, women, and trans people of color. Dying for different reasons, often dying before really living, but dying nonetheless. It can be as hard to survive as it is to live on in the wake of those who didn’t. But you taught me that performance is imbued with a weak power of resurrection, or at least the power to sustain some fragment of lost life in the presence of a collective present. Performance, you wrote, is what allows minoritarian subjects to "take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names—and in our names. And performance is also a way of drawing people together. Throwing parties was a way of resurrecting you and keeping you alive. Being with each other was a way of being with you. In the wake of your death we became common to each other. We became communists.
Gaines ‘1
~Jane, Colombia University. 2001. "Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era."~ Pat
It is the very circuitousness of psychoanalytic discourse that has made its poor reputation among black scholars, a discourse that Claudia Tate has talked about as its "irritating baggage that has made it virtually anathema to the black intellectual community." Here, then, is perhaps the best place to raise again the issue of the compatibility between psychoanalytic theory and the question of racial identity, an issue that has been raised with relative frequency in recent years without, however, producing definitive answers. The most compelling arguments against the use of psychoanalysis in African and African American studies are still essentially political ones since scholars have yet to mount the kind of campaign that either successfully disproves or seriously discredits this discourse. And psychoanalysis as a theory that has transcended the clinical studies upon which it was once based can neither exactly be disproven nor supplanted anyway. Still, following the feminist challenges to Freud that questioned a system that infantilized and pathologized women, black scholars want to know how the system that historically excluded blacks in its schema
could possibly have anything to contribute to the study of the people of the black diaspora. Reminding ourselves of Mary Ann Doane’s astute observation that psychoanalysis is a written "ethnography" of the white Western psyche, the question is how this white science can possibly comprehend societies so dramatically different from the one Freudians have studied with such obsessive thoroughness. So it would seem that scholars working on black culture will have different issues with Freud.
Moten and Harney 13 (Fred Moten, an American poet and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and professor of Performance Studies at New York University, Stefano Harney, Professor of Strategic Management Education at Singapore Management University and co-founder of the School for Study, "The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study", 2013. Jay
They need hope. They need vision. They need to have their sights lifted above the furtive plans and night launches of their despairing lives. They need vision. Because from the perspective of policy it is too dark in there, in the black heart of the undercommons, to see. You can hear something, can feel something present at its own making. But the deputies can bring hope, and hope can lift planners and their plans, the means of social reproduction, above ground into the light, out of the shadows, away from these dark senses. Deputies fix others, not in an imposition upon but in the imposition of selves, as objects of control and command, whether one is posited as being capable of selfhood or not. Whether they lack consciousness or politics, utopianism or common sense, hope has arrived. Having been brought to light and into their own new vision, planners will become participants. And participants will be taught to reject essence for contingency, as if planning and improvisation, flexibility and fixity, and complexity and simplicity, were opposed within an imposition there is no choice but to inhabit, as some exilic home where policy sequesters its own imagination, so they can be safe from one another. It is crucial that planners choose to participate. Policy is a mass effort. Intellectuals will write articles in the newspapers, philosophers will hold conferences on new utopias, bloggers will debate, and politicians will compromise here, where change is policy’s only constant. Participating in change is the second rule of policy. Now hope is an orientation toward this participation in change, this participation as change. Tis is the hope policy rolls like tear gas into the undercommons. Policy not only tries to impose this hope, but also enacts it. Those who dwell in policy do so not just by invoking contingency but by riding it, and so, in a sense, proving it. Those who dwell in policy are prepared. They are legible to change, liable to change, lendable to change. Policy is not so much a position as a disposition, a disposition toward display. Tis is why policy’s chief manifestation is governance.
The algorithmic drive for improvement hardens logistical control over bodies in a rush for productivity. That leads to land conflicts, ecocide, poverty, war and turns the aff.
Moten and Harney 17 (Fred Moten – Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Stefano Harney – Professor of Strategic Management Education at Singapore Management University. Edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin. "Improvement and Preservation Or, Usufruct and Use" Futures of Black Radicalism, pgs. 83-91, DOA: 7-4-2020, jzn) recut Jay
Exception is a categorization one grants oneself only at the price of imagining that it has been granted by an Other. To declare one'; exceptionalism is not a matter of exempting. or excluding. or excusing oneself, all of which are transitive. Exceptionalism imagines the intransitive and attributes action to Others and, more importantly. an originary kind of power to someone else. And it is here that we see how the pre-text Serequeberhan identifies is in fact pre-given in a double sense, it must be given but in order to be given it must also haw: been granted. there is no dialectic here. Rather we might say it is only the European who has ever been both master and slave. This is his drama, held in the body. and enacted in the world. He has to have. The exception will have been a power given by an Other to selves who, in taking it and its accompanying knowledge on, are supposed to have been provided. in this give and take, their own confirmation. But the pre-text is never truly grounded. never truly granted. never truly given. Europe is constantly disestablished by what it seeks to envelop. which, in and out of turn. envelops it. What surrounds the European even in his midst is the native informant Gayatri Spivak identifies as a creation text for a world of exception. against, but nonetheless within. the general antagonism of earthly anarrhythmia and displacement. The paradox of the pre-text is thus that being exceptional can no more be taken than it can be given and can no more be claimed than it can be granted. This simultaneity of being-master and being- slave is sovereignty's static, omnicidal decline. This is what it is to be chained to the struggle for freedom, a "rational" instrument run amok in place. as man's perpetually stilled motion. What does it mean to stand for improvement? Or worse, to stand for what busi- ness calls a "commitment to continuous improvement"? It means to stand for the brutal speciation of all. To take a stand for speciation is the beginning of a diabol- ical usufruct. Improvement comes to us by way of an innovation in land tenure, where individuated ownership; derived from increasing the lands productivity. is given in the perpetual. and thus arrested. becoming of exception': miniature. 'This is to say that from the outset. the ability to own-and that abillty's first deriv- ative, self-possession-is entwined with the ability to make more productive. in order to be improved. to be rendered more productive, land must be violently reduced to its productivity; which is the regulatory diminishment and manage- ment of earthly generativity. Speciation is this general reduction of the earth to 'productivity and submission of the earth to techniques of domination that isolate and enforce particular increases in and accelerations of productivity. In this regard. (necessarily European) man. in and as the exception. imposes speciation upon himself. in an operation that extracts and excepts himself from the earth in order to confirm his supposed dominion over it. And just as the earth must he forcefully speciated to he possessed. man must forcefully speciate himself in order to enact this kind of possession. This is to say that racialization is present in the very idea of dominion over the earth; in the very idea and enactment of the exception; in the very nuts and bolts of possession-by-improvement. Forms of racialization that both Michel Foucault and. especially and most vividly, Cedric Robinson identify in medieval Europe become usufructcd with modern posses- sion through improvement. Speciated humans are endlessly improved through the endless work they do on their endless way to becoming Man. This is the usufruct of man. in early modern England, establishing title to land by making it more productive meant eliminating biodiversity and isolating and breeding in species-barley or rye or pigs. Localized ecosystems were aggressively trans- formed so that monocultural productivity smothers anacultural generativity. The emergent relation between speciation and racialization is the very conception and conceptualization of the settler. Maintenance of that relation is his vigil and his eve. For the encloser. possession is established through improvement—this is true for the possession of land and for the possession of self. The Enlightenment is the universalization/globalization of the imperative to possess and its corol- lary, the imperative to improve. However. this productivity must always confront its contradictory impoverishment: the destruction of its biosphere and its estrangement in. if not from. entanglement. both of which combine to ensure the liquidation of the human differential that is already present in the very idea of man. the exception. To stand for such improvement is to invoke policy, which attributes depletion to the difference, which is to say the wealth, whose simulta- neous destruction and accumulation policy is meant to operationalize. This attri- bution of a supposedly essential lack. an inevitable and supposedly natural dimi- nution, is achieved alongside the imposition of possession-by-improvement. To make policy is to impose speciation upon everybody and everything. to inflict impoverishment in the name of improvement. to invoke the universal law of the usufruct of man. in this context. continuous improvement, as it emerged with decolonization and particularly with the defeat of national capitalism in the is the continuous crisis of speciation in the surround of the general antag- onism. This is the contradiction Robinson constantly invoked and analyzed with the kind of profound and solemn optimism that comes from being with, and being of service to, your friends.
Harney and Moten 13 (Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. "The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study." (2013): 1. Pgs 87-91 (Stefano Harney is the Professor of Strategic Management Education at Singapore Management University., Fred Moten is the professor of Performance Studies at New York University and has taught previously at University of California, Riverside, Duke University, Brown University, and the University of Iowa)Elmer
Never being on the right side of the Atlantic is an unsettled feeling, the feeling of a thing that unsettles with others. It’s a feeling, if you ride with it, that produces a certain distance from the settled, from those who determine themselves in space and time, who locate themselves in a determined history. To have been shipped is to have been moved by others, with others. It is to feel at home with the homeless, at ease with the fugitive, at peace with the pursued, at rest with the ones who consent not to be one. Outlawed, interdicted, intimate things of the hold, containerized contagion, logistics externalizes logic itself to reach you, but this is not enough to get at the social logics, the social poesis, running through logisticality. Because while certain abilities – to connect, to translate, to adapt, to travel – were forged in the experiment of hold, they were not the point. As David Rudder sings, "how we vote is not how we party." The hold’s terrible gift was to gather dispossessed feelings in common, to create a new feel in the undercommons. Previously, this kind of feel was only an exception, an aberration, a shaman, a witch, a seer, a poet amongst others, who felt through others, through other things. Previously, except in these instances, feeling was mine or it was ours. But in the hold, in the undercommons of a new feel, another kind of feeling became common. Tis form of feeling was not collective, not given to decision, not adhering or reattaching to settlement, nation, state, territory or historical story; nor was it repossessed by the group, which could not now feel as one, reunified in time and space. No, when Black Shadow sings "are you feelin’ the feelin?’’ he is asking about something else. He is asking about a way of feeling through others, a feel for feeling others feeling you. Tis is modernity’s insurgent feel, its inherited caress, its skin talk, tongue touch, breath speech, hand laugh. Tis is the feel that no individual can stand, and no state abide. This is the feel we might call hapticality. Hapticality, the touch of the undercommons, the interiority of sentiment, the feel that what is to come is here. Hapticality, the capacity to feel though others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you, this feel of the shipped is not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a piece of land, a totem. Or perhaps we could say these are now recomposed in the wake of the shipped. To feel others is unmediated, immediately social, amongst us, our thing, and even when we recompose religion, it comes from us, and even when we recompose race, we do it as race women and men. Refused these things, we first refuse them, in the contained, amongst the contained, lying together in the ship, the boxcar, the prison, the hostel. Skin, against epidermalisation, senses touching. Thrown together touching each other we were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed to produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home. Tough forced to touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed in that space of no space, though refused sentiment, history and home, we feel (for) each other. A feel, a sentiment with its own interiority, there on skin, soul no longer inside but there for all to hear, for all to move. Soul music is a medium of this interiority on the skin, its regret the lament for broken hapticality, its self-regulatory powers the invitation to build sentimentality together again, feeling each other again, how we party. This is our hapticality, our love. This is love for the shipped, love as the shipped. There’s a touch, a feel you want more of, which releases you. The closest Marx ever got to the general antagonism was when he said "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" but we have read this as the possession of ability and the possession of need. What if we thought of the experiment of the hold as the absolute fluidity, the informality, of this condition of need and ability? What if ability and need were in constant play and we found someone who dispossessed us so that this movement was our inheritance. Your love makes me strong, your love makes me weak. What if "the between the two," the lost desire, the articulation, was this rhythm, this inherited experiment of the shipped in the churning waters of flesh and expression that could grasp by letting go ability and need in constant recombination. If he moves me, sends me, sets me adrift in this way, amongst us in the undercommons. So long as she does this, she does not have to be.