Settler Colonial K

The 1ACs representations of sovereignty not only exclude indigenous modes of

sovereignty but also ignore the ways in which domination of the Indian paved the way to
modes of sovereignty. An understanding of settler colonialism is necessary to an
understanding of sovereign power.
Byrd 11 (Jodi A., citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and assistant professor of American Indian
studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbanandash;Champaign. The Transit of Empire:
Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, University of Minessota Press) AF

Both the bare life of the camps that Agamben identifies as the basis for sovereign power and the threshold
between bare life and homo sacer haunt the colonial imaginings of the United States. At its most basic level,
Agam- bens definition of the state of exception centers on his point that the fun damental localization
(Ortung), which does not limit itself to distinguish ing what is inside from what is outside but instead
traces a threshold (the state of exception) between the two, on the basis of which is outside and inside,
the normal situation and chaos, enter into those complex topological relations that make the validity of
the juridical order possible.6 In the context of the ongoing settler colonizing project of the United States, those thresholds and
chaotic systems, as I have argued throughout this book, depend upon the transit of Indianness to inscript
empire internally and externally. The one arena where postcolonial theory has made the most inroads into the emerging body of
critical theory addressing indigeneity has been in the evocation of hybridity, particularly as Homi K. Bhabha has defined it as the threshold in-
between, where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides.7 Most controversial, at least in American Indian literary
circles, is Elvira Pulitanos Toward a Native American Critical Theory. Pulitano valorizes hybridity in order to resist notions of reality, authenticity,
and essentialism as she eschews, according to Jace Weaver and Craig Womack, sovereignty, governance, and the pos sibility for Native American
literary nationalisms to emerge from the texts she critiques. Hybridity, as Pulitano uses it, depends upon an underlying colonialist assumption
that indigenous peoples and their cultural produc tions exist in primitive excess and gain validity only in the exchanges with Western literary
traditions. Within the legal discourses of indigenous sovereignty, however, hybrid ity, when understood as a process that creates a third space
within the co lonial dialectic, has proven a more fruitful site for articulating the potential usefulness of postcolonial theory to the development of
indigenous critical theories. Scholars such as Paul Meredith, Kevin Bruyneel, Jay T. Johnson, Robert A. Williams Jr., and Eric Cheyfitz argue that the
treaties between indigenous nations and the settler colonial nation-state, as well as the laws that emerged as a result, become the primary site
for postcolonial analysis because they represent the resistant dialogics of indigenous responses to state-sponsored colonialism that transformed
land into property, independence into dependency, foreign into domestic.9 This work, and especially Bruyneels The Third Space o f Sovereignty,
provides important insights into the negotiations between colonizer and colonized that, through the
efforts of indigenous leaders
to resist the encroaching United States, open a space between internal/external and foreign/domestic for
indigenous articulations of sovereignty. As a site of refusal, the third space of sovereignty, according to Bruyneel, offers a
productive location from which indigenous nations can assert political autonomy that is not dependent upon a settler society that continually
asserts its totalizing authority over lands, space, and time. In other words, the
third space offers a way for tribal sovereignty to
exist concurrently with U.S. state sovereignty and functions as an anti statist, postcolonial supplement
that disrupts the logics of colonial rule.10 Bruyneel claims that this productive space emerges out of indigenous resistances and
articulations of alternative governance strategies that remain in spite of the legal machinations of the occupying colonial nation-state. But as the
last two chapters demonstrated in the discussions of Hawai'i and the Cherokee Freedmen, even the third space of sovereignty can become a
colonial enactment that supersedes the desires of anti colonial resistances or is, in fact, produced by those resistances. As Bruy- neel suggests, his
articulation of the third space raises many directions for future research into alternatives to statist sovereignty. Foremost among them in this
book is: What happens to the third space of indigenous sovereignty when others are injected into it through a process of what Brian Masaru
Hayashi has identified as democratizing the enemy?11 The goal of this chapter, then, is threefold. The first is to identify, by returning to the
cultural and theoretical models of the 1980s and 1990s that were concerned with Los Angeles, multiculturalism, and postethnicity, the discursive
colo nialist traces of the transits of Indianness that haunt theorizations of race in the United States. Given the return of the ascendancy of
multicultural liberal democracy as the best hope for a postracial United States founded on principles of inclusion, it is necessary to understand
the affective de sires underpinning current ideas such as commonwealth and planetary conviviality.12 Understanding
the third space
of sovereignty as a perpetual motion of oscillation between the parallax gap of irreducible difference
between internal and external, I will consider how the transits of empire use removal, deferral, and
containment as processes of incorporation and assimilation.

The affs analysis of biopolitics fails to consider of the integral relation of settler colonialism.
Without this analysis settler colonialism in naturalized and is bound to repeat itself
Morgensen 2011 (Scoot, assistant professor of gender studies at Queens University in Kingston
Ontario, The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now, pg. 52-76, Settler Colonial
Studies, 1:1)ST

For more than five hundred years, Western law functioned as biopower in relation to ongoing practices
of European settler colonialism. Settler colonialism has conditioned not only Indigenous peoples and
their lands and the settler societies that occupy them, but all political, economic and cultural processes that
those societies touch. Settler colonialism directly informs past and present processes of European colonization, global
capitalism, liberal modernity and international governance. If settler colonialism is not theorized in accounts of these
formations, then its power remains naturalized in the world that we engage and in the theoretical
apparatuses with which we attempt to explain it. Settler colonialism can be denaturalized by theorizing
its constitution as biopower, as well as how it in turn conditions all modern modes of colonialism and
biopower. My argument critically shifts recent theories of the coloniality of biopower by centering settler colonialism in analysis.
Wolfe has observed in histories of the Americas that a settler colonial logic of elimination located Indigenous Americans relationally, yet
distinctly from Africans in the transatlantic slave trade or colonized indentured labor, thereby illuminating (as Mark Rifkin notes) the
peculiar status of Indigenous peoples within the biopolitics of settler colonialism. Western
law is troubled once European
subjects are redefined as settlers in relation to the Indigenous peoples, histories, and lands
incorporated by white settler nations. I argue that this tension is engaged productively by Agambens tracing of the state of
exception to homo sacer, and notably its derivation in Roman law from a thesis of consanguinity. I adapt this quality to illuminate why and how
Western law incorporates Indigenous peoples into the settler nation by simultaneously pursuing their
elimination. I further argue that these deeply historical processes ultimately enact biopower as a
persistent activity of settler states that were never decolonized and of the global regimes that extend and
naturalize their power. By the twentieth century amid a formal demise of colonial empires, putative decolonization of the global
South, and global capitalist recolonization the universalization of Western law as liberal governance was ensured by
the actions of settler states. A genealogy of the biopolitics of settler colonialism will explain that the
colonial era never ended because settler colonialism remains the naturalized activity projecting Western
law and its exception along global scales today. Theories of the biopolitical state, regimes of global
governance, and the war on terror will be insufficient unless they critically theorize settler colonialism as a
historical and present condition and method of all such power.

The alternative is to dethink and detach sovereignty from Western understandings of

power
Grande 2004 (Sandy, chair of education department at Connecticut College, "Red Pedagogy", 9/1/17,
Rowan and Littlefield Publishers Inc. Counterpoints, Vol. 356, pp. 31-57)

Just as the imperialist project of imperialism was political, intellectual, and spiritual, so too must be the
project of indigenous self-determination. Politically, indigenous peoples need to question whether
sovereignty and the quest for nationhood are indeed useful constructs for their respective communities:
Why should indigenous peoples choose models of thinking, organization, and development that were
used to destroy non-state societies? Intellectually, the question becomes whether a system of education initially designed to serve
the needs and interests of the nation-state can be reconstituted to meet the needs and desires of tribal peoples. Spiritually, as noted by d'Errico,
"the most pressing problem for Indigenous self-determination is 'the problem' of "the people" (d'Errico 1997). In other words, centuries
of
colonization have left indigenous peoples with a profound crisis of meaning, compelling us all to ask the
question: What does it mean to be a people, a tribe, a community? What does it mean to be indigenous?
To Be or Not to Be Sovereign Several scholars have questioned the appropriateness of the concept and aim of "sovereignty" for indigenous
peoples (Alfred 1999; Deloria and Lytle 1984; d'Errico 1997; Lyons 2000; Richardson and Villenas 2000; Cheyfitz 2003). Deloria and Lytle
(1984,15), for example, dismiss "self-government" as an idea that "originates in the minds of non-Indians" who have reduced traditional ways to
dust, or at least believe they have, and "now, wish to give, as a gift, a limited measure of local control and responsibility." Taiaiake Alfred (1999,
57) similarly maintains that even though the discourse has served as an "effective vehicle for indigenous critiques of the state's imposition of
control," sovereignty is an inappropriate goal because it implies a set of values and objectives that are "in direct opposition to those found in
traditional indigenous philosophies" (i.e., respect, harmony, autonomy, and peaceful coexistence). Specifically, Alfred argues that traditional
indigenous nations, which had "no absolute authority, no coercive enforcement of decisions, no hierarchy, and no separate ruling entity," stand
in sharp contrast to the dominant understanding of the state (Alfred 1999, 2). Therefore, some indigenous scholars argue that the retention of
sovereignty as the goal of indigenous politics signifies the ultimate concession to the forces of assimilation. In other words, by accepting the
"fiction of state sovereignty," Native communities negate their own power, determining that they will forever and only remain in a dependent
and reactionary position to the state (Alfred, 1999,59). And, within this hegemonic framework, progress toward social justice can Competing
Moral Visions 53 only be inadequate and marginal. "In fact," writes Alfred (1999, 57), "progress] will only be tolerated by the state to the extent
that it serves, or at least does not oppose" its own interests. He asks us to consider the issue of land claims as a case in point. While the pursuit of
land claims is viewed in liberalprogressive circles as "a step in the right direction," unless the colonialist structures undergirding such claims are
simultaneously dismantled, the resolution of such claims can be defined only by relations of domination. For instance: In Canada . . . the ongoing
definition of . . . "Aboriginal rights" by the Supreme Court . . . is widely seen as progress. Yet even with the legal recognition of collective rights to
certain subsistence activities within certain territories, indigenous people are still subject to state control . . . [and] must . . . meet statedefined
criteria for Aboriginal identity . . . to gain access to these legal rights. . . . [So] to what extent does the state-regulated "right" to food-fish
represent justice for people who have been fishing on their rivers and seas since time began? (Alfred, 1999, 58) As such, Alfred insists, "to argue
on behalf of indigenous nationhood within the dominant Western paradigm is self-defeating" (Alfred, 1999, 58). On the contrary, the task is
to detach and dethink the notion of sovereignty from its connection to Western understandings of power
and relationships and base it on indigenous notions of power. 33 Building upon Deloria's expressed need for Native
communities to "blend the inherent power of tradition with the skills required to manage the institutions of modern society," Alfred
suggests altering indigenous patterns of governance to achieve four basic goals (Alfred, 1999, 136): 1.
Structural reform: Legitimating Native governments by rejecting electoral politics and restructuring to
accommodate traditional decision making, consultation, and dispute resolution. This requires minimizing
dependency on non-Indian advisors by educating and training community members, enhancing capacities
of self-management. 2. Reintegration of Native languages: Insofar as language serves as a symbol and
source of nationhood, Native languages should be made the official language of their communities"the
one in which leaders speak, the processes of government are conducted, and the official versions of all
documentation are written." In order to achieve this objective, communities must make teaching the
Native language "a top priority." 3. Economic self-sufficiency: Movement toward this goal requires the
expansion of Native land bases and increased control over the "economic activities" within Indian
country. Additionally, communities must focus on 54 Chapter Two "business and technical education" as a
means of enhancing human resources. 3 Nation-to-nation relations with the state: "A political space must
be created for the exercise of self-determination. Native communities must reject the claimed authority
of the state, assert their right to govern their own territories and people, and act on that right as much as
their capacity to do so allows. Data collected by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development34 seems to support
the validity of Alfred's rubric. Contrary to whitestream models of economic development, the Harvard studies indicate that "resources" natural,
human, educational, or capitaldo not ensure success. Rather, successful
tribes are those that adopt a broad "nation-
building" approach. That is, they recognize "development" as primarily "a political problem," focusing
attention on building institutional foundations, strategic thinking, and informed action. Indeed, the most
successful tribes tend to be those that first assert sovereignty and then "back up their assertions of self-
governance with the ability to govern effectively" (Cornell and Kalt 1998, 195). Like Alfred, Stephen Cornell and Joseph P. Kalt
(1998) find that meaningful sovereignty is dependent upon the development of effective governing
institutions, that is, governments with stable institutions and policies, fair and effective processes of
dispute resolution, effective separation of politics from business management, a competent bureaucracy,
and cultural match.35 Among these criteria, the notion of "cultural match" is perhaps the most intriguing. It suggests that one of the most
important factors in Native governments' establishment of legitimacy and power is the degree to which they match the people's ideas of
authority and leadership whether those ideas are "traditional or not." Above all, Cornell and Kalt argue that successful nation-building is
dependent upon the "federal acknowledgment of tribal sovereignty as not only a legal but practical matter" (1998, 208). In other words, beyond
the typical legal and historical arguments for sovereignty, Cornell and Kalt insist that the most powerful argument for tribal sovereignty is "the
simple fact that it works" (1998, 209). They write: "Nothingelse has provided as promising a set of political conditions
for reservation economic development. Nothing else has produced the success stories and broken the
cycles of dependence on the federal system the way sovereignty, backed by capable tribal institutions,
has done" (Cornell and Kalt 1998, 209). Of course, fear of Native empowerment and autonomy is likely the very reason the federal
government continues to question and fetter sovereignty. From the vantage point of the whitestream, empowered "domestic dependent
nations" still equal a threat to democracy. Competing Moral Visions 55 From the vantage point of indigenous nations, however,
"sovereignty" remains a central lifeline.36 Sovereignty is critical if for no other reason than because,
simply stated, "people who believe they have little or no control over their destiny as a people" will
despair (Wunder 1996, 14). Building upon this notion, Thurman Lee Hester (2001) discusses sovereignty in terms of the
psychological construct of "locus of control." As a theory pertaining to individuals, the notion of "locus of
control" refers to one's perception of life's turns and events. Specifically, individuals with an "internal
locus of control" feel that they command outcomes in their lives (i.e., success and failure is a function of one's ability and
effort) and, as a result, demonstrate higher levels of self-esteem, self-efficacy, and general satisfaction
(Seligman 1990). Contrarily, those with an "external locus of control" do not feel that they determine outcomes in their lives and, as a result,
evidence low levels of self-esteem, self-efficacy, and life satisfaction. Additionally, "some
research suggests that what underlies
the internal locus of control is the concept of 'self as agent,'"37 that is, the degree to which is self-
determining is an effect of one's ability to realize themselves as a source of agency (McCombs 1991) Hester
employs the notion of locus of control to help explain the psychological state of Indian nations. He argues
that the cycles of despair and poverty impacting many nations are, in part, a function of their perceived
lack of agency. This perception is fed by the actuality that the sovereignty of Indian nations is indeed
externally controlled. As Hester notes, "the specter of federal control" always looms with the threat of "plenary power," hanging like a
perpetual cloud over all Indian nations. It is highly plausible that the constancy of this threat has the same impact on a nation that it does on an
individual, inviting despair, hopelessness, and self-destruction. As such, John Wunder (1997) implores that our examinations of U.S . Indian policy
should be guided by a vigilance for laws and policies that take control of Indian life out of their hands and, furthermore, that "directly harmful
policies should . . . be examined not only for their harm, but as further [cause] for an external locus of control among Native Americans" (Wunder
2001, 14). Theargument for sovereignty as a measure of insuring an internal locus of (tribal) control is
among the most persuasive. Especially for students and educators who must first believe in the future
stability of their nations, if they are to exercise agency on an individual level. Intellectual and Pedagogical Sovereignty
However the question of sovereignty is resolved politically, there will be significant implications on the intellectual lives of indigenous peoples,
particularly in terms of education. Lyons (2000, 452) views the history of colonization, in 56 Chapter Two part, as the manifestation of "rhetorical
imperialism," that is, "the ability of dominant powers to assert control of others by setting the terms of debate." He cites, for example,
Marshall's use of "rhetorical imperialism" in the Worcester v. Georgia opinion: "'[T]reaty' and 'nation' are
words of our own language, selected in our diplomatic and legislative proceedings . . . having each a
definite and well-understood meaning. We have applied them to Indians, as we have applied them to
other nations of the earth. They are applied to all in the same sense" (Lyons 2000,452). Indeed, throughout the history of federal Indian
law terms and definitions have continually changed over time. Indians have gone from "sovereigns" to "wards" and from
"nations" to "tribes," while the practice of treaty making has given way to one of agreements (Lyons 2000,
453). As each change served the needs of the nation-state, Lyons argues that "the erosion of Indian national sovereignty can
be credited in part to a rhetorically imperialist use of language by white powers" (2000, 453). Thus, just as
language was central to the colonialist project, it must be central to the project of decolonization. Indigenous scholar
Haunani-Kay Trask writes, "Thinking in one's own cultural referents leads to conceptualizing in one's own world view which, in turn, leads to
disagreement with and eventual opposition to the dominant ideology" (1993, 54). Thus, where a revolutionary critical pedagogy compels
students and educators to question how "knowledge is related historically, culturally and institutionally to the processes of production and
consumption," aRed pedagogy compels students to question how (whitestream) knowledge is related to the
processes of colonization. Furthermore, it asks how traditional indigenous knowledges can inform the
project of decolonization. In short, this implies a threefold process for education. Specifically, a Red
pedagogy necessitates: (1) the subjection of the processes of whitestream schooling to critical
pedagogical analyses; (2) the decoupling and dethinking of education from its Western, colonialist
contexts; and, (3) the institution of indigenous efforts to reground students and educators in traditional
knowledge and teachings. In short, a Red pedagogy aims to create awareness of what Trask terms
"disagreements," helping to foster discontent about the "inconsistencies between the world as it is and as
it should be" (Alfred 1999, 132). Though this process might state the obvious, it is important to recognize the value and significance of each
separate component. I wish to underscore that the project of decolonization demands students to acquire not only the
knowledge of "the oppressor" but also the skills to dismantle and negotiate the implications of such
knowledge. Concurrently, traditional perspectives on power, justice, and relationships are essential, both to
defend against further co-optation and to build intellectual solidaritya collectivity of indigenous
knowledge. In short, "the time has come for people who are from someplace Indian to take back the
discourse on Indians" (Alfred 1999,143). Competing Moral Visions 57 Spiritual Sovereignty Finally, it needs to be understood that
sovereignty is not a separatist discourse. On the contrary, it is a restorative process. As Warrior suggests, indigenous
peoples must learn to "withdraw without becoming separatists"; we must be "willing to reach out for the contradictions within our experience"
and open ourselves to "the pain and the joy of others" (Warrior 1995,124). This sentiment renders sovereignty a profoundly spiritual project
involving questions about who we are as a people. Indeed Deloria and Lytle (1984, 266) suggest that indigenous sovereignty will not be possible
until "Indians resolve for themselves a comfortable modern identity." This resolution will require indigenous peoples to engage the difficult
process of self-definition; to come to consensus on a set of criteria that defines what behaviors and beliefs constitute acceptable expressions of
their tribal heritage (Deloria and Lytle 1984, 254). While this process is necessarily deliberative it is not (as in revolutionary pedagogies) limited to
the processes of "conscientizaco."38 Rather, it will remain an inward- and outward-looking process, a process of reenchantment, of ensoulment,
that is both deeply spiritual and sincerely mindful. The guiding force in this process must be the tribe, the people, the
community; the perseverance of these entities and their connection to indigenous lands and sacred places
is what inherits "spirituality" and, in turn, the "sovereignty" of Native peoples. As Lyons notes, "rather than
representing an enclave, sovereignty . . . is the ability to assert oneself renewedin the presence of others. It is a people's right to rebuild its
demand to exist and present its gifts to the world . . . an adamant refusal to dissociate culture, identity, and power from the land" (Lyons 2000,
457). In other words, the vision of tribal stabilityof community stabilityrests in the desire and ability of indigenous peoples not only to listen
to each other but also to listen to the land. The question remains whether the ability to exercise spiritual sovereignty will continue to be fettered,
if not usurped, by the desires of a capitalist state intent on devouring the land.

The impact is the state of exception. The underlying acts of settler colonialism resulted in a
state of possession which serves as the site of sovereignty and states of exception,
perpetuating violences of the State.
Byrd 11 (Jodi A., citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and assistant professor of American Indian
studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbanandash;Champaign. The Transit of Empire:
Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, University of Minessota Press, pg. 22.) AF
Cooks expedition, according to Thomas, was not just a rational plan to fill spaces on a map, but also a
symptom of a state of enchantment.83 The voyage, as well as the man himself, existed between the state of enchantment and the
state of possession as a symptom and symptomatic contagion of that which served to first exalt the subjectivity of European nationalism and
then project it into lands emptied of any subjectivity except the will of the European imperialist. This idea of enchantment is informed by Sunera
Thobani, who explains that exaltation
thus endows ontological coherence and cohesion to the subject in its
nationality, grounding an abstract humanity into particular governable forms.84 As exalted subject within Western
historiography, Cooks presence inaugurates, according to Aileen Moreton-Robinson, the state of possession dependent
on British law to interpellate the exalted subject as the white possessing subject.85 This state of
possession, in which Cooks exalted subjectivity possesses land in the name of the British crown and
possesses whiteness as preemi nent ownership within the logics of capitalism, is the site of the dialectic of
sovereignty that functions similarly to Agambens state of exception where the statein contradistinction
to indigenous peoples own ontolo gies of relationship and powerenacts sovereignty as ontological
possession, delineating what is and is not possessed. As death omen and as dead man, Cook, in his state of
enchantment as well as his state of possession, exemplified the magical thinking of European imperialism
that sought to resurrect discovered lands into imperial ownership. The state of enchantment was
ultimately the rational plan to empty lands of presence via the discourses of terra nullius in order to refill
them with British imperial law.
On Case
 Method Indict
The aff may be a pre-requisite but it is not a complete politics their method of study
cannot defend or sustain itself which guarantees backlash and re-appropriation.
Ford 17 (Derek R., Prof of Education at DePauw University, PhD Syracuse, Studying like a
communist: Affect, the Party, and the educational limits to capitalism, Incorporating ACCESS, Volume
49, 2017 - Issue 5, Pages 452-461)//a-berg

Studying is, like the crowd event, a beautiful moment of encounter, the opening up of the possible, the breeding ground
of the new. While studying one is disindivuated, swaying between subjectification and desubjectification, between being this and being that.
The studier resists classification, preferring not to actualize any predicate. And like the crowd event, I contend,
studying isnt politics, it is only the occasion for politics, a necessary but insufficient educational logic
for the struggle against capitalist production relations and for the common. Without something more,
studying can retreat from impotentiality into impotence, and, on the other hand, it can be actualized into something
reactionary. To illustrate these possibilities, I will turn to two examples. The first example is of studying as hacking, when
one takes some thing or process, enters into and disrupts it. Hacking is an intervention that directs something toward other ends and uses,
detaching it from its attachments to other objects and processes, potentially opening it up to the unforeseen and unforeseeable. In this way,
hacking is atransgression and the hacker is an outlaw, one who literally lives by transgressing the lawful order that dictates propriety
(who can do what with what). Lewis and Friedrich (2016) bring up the Anonymous collective, which has repurposed websites
and servers to expose particular contradictions and injustices in the capitalist system (p. 244). Not only their
actions, but Anonymous very mode of organization is subversive in that anyone can join. Membership in the collective is not predicated upon
any particular identity or a commitment to a specific end. Anonymous are pirates who steal back private code for common use, and in this
sense open up the world of code to unanticipated mutations (ibid). One of Anonymous first major actions was a swarm attack on the Church
of Scientology for their efforts to censor online criticism of the Church. In addition to sending all-black faxes to their fax machines (to use up
ink), Anonymous members coordinated a Google bomb attack by linking scientology to a host of other words, like dangerous and cult, to
influence (redirect) any Google searches for scientology. Through
distributed denial-of-service attacks, in which multiple
computers attack the infrastructure of root nameservers, Anonymous hackers have shut down a host of
websites, from the Department of Justice (in response to the DoJs takedown of a file-sharing network) to the
International Association of Chiefs of Police (as part of a national day of action against police brutality). While hacking is
indeed a reappropriation of code and a repurposing of the networked infrastructure of contemporary capitalism, there is
nothing inherently revolutionary about hacking. For as many Anonymous actions that have supported
revolutionary political movements, there have been others that have arguably hindered such
movements. Consider Anonymous intervention in the Arab Spring uprisings as a case in point. Anonymous
sought to support the uprisings by attacking government websites and publicizing the private information of government officials who were
opposing or repressing the protests. Yet in addition to attacking the governments of Egypt and Tunisia, which were indeed repressing popular
revolts, Anonymous also attacked the government of Syria, which was battling a range of forces, including those associated with al-Qaeda and
its splinter group, Daesh, or the Islamic State in Syria. The situation in Syria was much different than in Egypt or Tunisia, as the government
retained popular support and immediately engaged in a series of serious reforms, including the drafting of an entirely new constitution (see
Glazebrook, 2013). Indeed, it could be said that in Syria, the government was the progressive force. Or consider a spin-off of
Anonymous, Ghost Squad, which shut down the official website of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan and the next week attacked the website of Black Lives Matter (before tweeting, All lives
matter!). Regardless of ones position on these issues, conflicts, nation-states, and so on, it is clear from these few examples that hacking
doesnt have a politics and that, as an act of studying, it is not inherently against capitalist production
relations. The second example that I turn to here is meant to illustrate the potential apolitical impotence of studying, and it brings us more
directly into conversation with Dean. In the last chapter of Lewis (2013) On Study, he turns to the early stages of the Occupy Wall
Street movement to articulate the im-potential political dimension to studying (p. 150). Lewis celebrates the
beginning stage of Occupy Wall Street as a form of collective, public studying, especially in its absence of concrete
demands. While the mainstream press and politicians were anxious to hear what the protesters were demanding so they could issue a
response accordingly, the occupation spent most of its time preferring not to commit to any one demand
over and above any other (p. 152). Rather than actualize political polemics and demands, articulating them into proposals that could
then be evaluated, occupiers produced a rupture within the received order of political struggle. The occupation actively resisted the
drive to achieve results and instead conducted an ongoing study of politics, suspending the pursuit of
measureable outcomes; engaging in protest as not protest. As a result, efforts to grade Occupy falter, for there
were no pre-established criteria with which to evaluate it. Occupy celebrated horizontalism,
leaderlessness, inclusivity, and the absence of hierarchical structures. Neither an undifferentiated mass nor an
agglomeration of individuals, the occupiers formed a state of exception where dichotomies and divisions were left idle, the homeless the
middle class, and a host of other intermediary grounds (including students) met in an atopic space and time to study the sublime art of
discussing across differences and living across class divisions. What emerged was precisely the question (and not the answer) of inclusion and
exclusion facing not only OWS but the contemporary learning society as such. (p. 159) This state of exception was exemplified in the slogan,
We are the 99%! The 99% was a kind of nonidentity, a totally generic yet absolutely irreducible singularity (p. 157), as Lewis puts it. We are
the 99%! took a quantity and transformed it into an indefinable quality, a way of grouping people without resorting to predicates and already-
established identities. Just precisely who the 99% were (or are), was never fully delineated, couldnt quite be accounted for. The question was
left open for collective study. Amajor problem with this ongoing collective study, however, is that there was
nothing to defend it or to sustain it. Capital and its state werent studying, but were rather gearing up
to unleash a wave of repression that would eventually undo the occupation. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund
has released several sets of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests that detail the dense network of
surveillance and repressive efforts that included offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the
Department of Homeland Security, the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve, universities and
colleges, major corporations, local police forces, and local governments, as well as the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the US Marshals Service (Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, 2012, 2016). In this case,
repression opened the door to reabsorption, as many Occupiers entered the non-profit industrial
complex, or even started their own business ventures to profit from their activism. Occupying and
hacking represent study as embryonic political praxis, the enactment of educational logics that are potentially antagonistic
to capitalist production relations and capitals logic of learning. Whereas capitalism demands that everythingeven that which opposes itbe
actualized so that it can be subsumed within its circuits of productivity, occupying and hacking interrupt this seemingly ceaseless process,
opening up the world and subjectivity to the possibility of being otherwise than. Studying is therefore, I proffer, the educational activity of the
crowd, a way to pedagogically bring forth the beautiful moment. This is a crucial element of struggle but, as Dean insists, it
isnt properly a politics; it is merely an opening for politics. Writing again explicitly about political movements, Dean
(2016) contends: The beautiful in-between of infinite potentiality cant last forever. People get tired. Some want a little
predictability, reliable food sources, shelter, and medical care. Others realize theyre doing all the work
The crowd isnt an alternative political arrangement; its the opening to a process of re-arrangement. (p.
142) The question, then, is how to seize upon this opening and carry it forward into a real revolutionary
movement. How, in other words, to make the encounter take hold, how to make it take off in a desirable direction? These are
questions that, while they should always be open to study, have to be answered, at least provisionally and contingently. Or else
the market and its advertising agencies will come knocking with an endless list of glossy, high-definition
answers. Or, alternatively, the state will come knocking down doors, guns drawn and handcuffs aplenty. The
encounter wont take hold and the possibility of the new will be foreclosed as the crowd is dispersed through redirection, exhaustion, or
repression.
 Piecemeal Resistance

Piecemeal resistance should be your goal --- agambens arguments lay a groundwork
for whats wrong with the status quo but arent helpful in determining what to do
about it --- simply using the state does not doom us
COLATRELLA, 09 (Steven, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, vol.9. no.1 Nothing Exceptional:
Against Agamben, University of Maryland University College, Europe, http://www.jceps.com/PDFs/09-1-
05.pdf)

Conclusion: State Transformation without State of Exception In failing to take into account the
expropriation of the slave, the enclosure of the commons, the expropriation of the peasantry and the
burning of the witch, the occupation of the colonizeds lands, the IMF Structural Adjustment Program and
the repression needed to impose it against resistance, hasnt Agamben also failed to provide his own
theoretical framework with the tools needed to explain the survival or death of the Jew in the Nazi camp,
his own paradigmatic example? If we find, as Isabella Clough-Marinaro has34, that the camps for Roma in Italy today are classic examples of homo sacer, right down to publicly exposed showers on concrete enclosures surrounded
by barbed wire, neednt we try to understand what these new horrors have to do with the rolling back of the welfare state in Europe?; with the attack on employment and wages?; with the intensified exploitation that includes that
of the undocumented immigrants and the public discourses demonizing them?; with the increased law and order regimes, campaigns against crime that criminalize the Roma, the undocumented and other minorities that have
allowed the Italian military to be deployed in the streets to keep an eye on the population; with the creation of such scapegoats to divide the working class exactly at such a time of attack on hard-won social gains?

Agamben, as Clough-Marinaro demonstrates, is indispensable to help analyze the camps in the first place, but I would argue that he is of nearly no
help at all to help us strategize about what to do about them, because he doesnt understand what any of it has to do with class relations, relations of
expropriation, exploitation and class struggle against these. And that means he cant understand what the latter has already accomplished and what it has yet to accomplish. To understand this, we need to

understand the welfare state itself as it has developed. To do that we need to understand democracy, which in turn requires us to think about

the state, as Agamben calls on us to do, but to do so in a way that goes beyond the drama of the state of
exception to include the historical accomplishments of the class struggle, particularly those other two categories, democracy and the welfare
state. While this is not the place to enter into a full discussion of these issues, which I address elsewhere35, a brief summary of my argument on democracy is useful to make clear my differences with Agambens approach. Modern
democracy is part of what Polanyi calls the double movement36 of expropriation and the establishment of the self-regulating market and the efforts by society to defend itself from this process. Modern democracy is born from
the English and French Revolutions37, from the anti-slavery movement in the US, and from the labor and socialist movements in Europe38. Mass democratic movements that have furthered this process have been fought either to
retard the separation of the people from the land and access to means of production and subsistence, or to provide new guarantees of meeting these needs and providing livelihood to those already expropriated and now

exploited. Put differently, the commitment of ordinary people to democracy comes from their need and desire to use
it to do something; democracy is an instrument of popular classes to defend and extend their interests. If,
as I have argued, citing various authors work to the point, the protection of individual rights, avoidance of becoming homo sacer, and

prevention of the state of exception required material foundations, those material foundations have, in
modern times, required political protection. The modern democratic class struggle, the establishment of democracy and its
extension, remain, along with defending or reestablishing control of subsistence and means of production directly in the hands of the people (the commons), the best means of
avoiding the fate that Agamben warns us about. This means that the too-facile dismissal of all legal,
democratic or constitutional protections, hard-won by generations of struggle, that appear in his
analysis that the state of exception is already unexceptional but rather the rule, disarms the very efforts
needed to protect us from the state power. The democratic movements have broken down the sterile and false separation between the oikos and the polis argued for by Hannah
Arendt40, and the similar separations between everyday life and social reproduction and public life, between zoe and bios. This is not by chance: slave plantations were private homes; the family enterprise studied by Marx was
considered virtually an extension of the owners household; the needs of working families for subsistence or health care, or the infant mortality rate, unwanted pregnancies and their impact on womens lives and the mortality rate
of women in childbirth were all considered private affairs, not public or political ones. It was the accomplishment of the modern workers and womens movements, of modern democracy, to change this state of affairs. Agamben
sneeringly dismisses, indeed scarily demonizes this accomplishment as biopolitics: What comes to light in order to be exposed apud Westminster is, once again, the body of homo sacer, which is to say, bare life. This is modern
democracys strength, and at the same time, its inner contradiction: modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political
conflict. And the root of modern democracys secret biopolitical calling lies here: he who will later appear as the bearer of rights, and according to a curious oxymoron, as the new sovereign subjectcan only be constituted as such
through the repetition of the sovereign exception and the isolation of corpus, bare life, in himself. If it is true that law needs a body in order to be in force, and if one can speak, in this sense, of laws desire to have a body,

Agamben provides us with some of the most facile and

democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to assume the care of this body.41 39

dangerous thinking, passing for profundity, imaginable: Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional
political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and their intelligibility and
enter into a zone of indistinction. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p.122. This statement, with the word capitalism replacing the phrase bare life could have
been written by an adherent of the Third Internationals Third Period, whose disastrous policies helped
bring about precisely the states of exception Nazi victories that Agamben is concerned about.
Agamben goes on to argue, incredibly, that the very right of habeas corpus by requiring the sheriff to exhibit
the body of the accused undermines the liberty of the accused, an interpretation unique in the
thousand-year history of habeas corpus rights whose defense has quite rightly underpinned many
oppositions to Bush administration tactics in the War on Terror, and whose history has recently been provided a
radical defense and materialist interpretation by Linebaugh already cited. The long process of democracy
compelling law to assume the care of the body instead is the accomplishment of centuries of struggles
by ordinary people precisely to move the state out of the business of killing and into the business of
providing health care and education. This is what led Ernest Gellner to state, while overstating the case, "At the base of the modern social order stands not the executioner but the
professor The monopoly of legitimate education is now more important, more central than the monopoly of legitimate violence.42 That the European social democratic welfare state coincided with the European Unions one
great accomplishment, the end of wars between the nation-states of Europe should give us pause for thought43. That the abolition of the death penalty followed these developments should make the relationship clear. What seals
the argument is that the revived militarism, political repression and demonization of unpopular minority groups in Europe follow upon the efforts directed by the EU Commission and signed on to by every EU member government
to privatize, liberalize markets, overcome workers resistance to flexible work organization, and impose neoliberal globalization44. The relationship between the democratic class struggle to defend subsistence and basic needs
and the defense of individual rights and limitation of state power should be clear. That it isnt should be attributed to an elitist, too-sophisticated by half approach to the state, democracy and class struggle that appears radical but

The movements for democracy, the class

in fact undermines the very foundations of democracy and social welfare by not making these struggles an integral part of its analysis.

and gender struggles that brought it about and have continued to try to extend it to more spheres of life
are, as Marx explained to the First International, not extensions of state power, but partial
transformations of the state from a police apparatus and killing machine for the ruling class into a set of
functions whose institutions and cadre now concern themselves with caring for the needs of societys
members, with all the contradictions and flaws that studies of the welfare state have demonstrated but with all its benefits too: However, the more enlightened part of the working class fully understands that the
future of its class, and, therefore, of mankind, altogether depends upon the formation of the rising working generation. They know that, before everything else, the children and juvenile workers must be

saved from the crushing effects of the present system. This can only be effected by converting social
reason into social force, and, under given circumstances, there exists no other method of doing so, than
through general laws, enforced by the power of the state. In enforcing such laws, the working class do
not fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them,
into their own agency. They effect by a general act what they would vainly attempt by a multitude of
isolated individual efforts. Let us look briefly at two examples in which states of exception were declared by democratically elected governments. In India, Indira Gandhis declaration of a
state of emergency, while arguably overdetermined, came at a particular period characterized by a large strike movement by workers and resistance to policies of her son Sanjay involving two forms of enclosure: slum clearance
expropriation of the poor from their housing and forced sterilization46. The latter explicitly meets Agambens criteria for biopolitics in a democracy leading to a state of exception though strangely he does not cite it as an
example to strengthen his argument. This omission is perhaps due to the fact that, despite Indira Gandhis government being characterized by some policies favorable to the lower castes and the rural poor at times, it can hardly be
seen as a welfare state or an example of social democracy. That is, its entry into biopolitical policies- the forced sterilization campaign was purely repressive and not also a form of care of the body or social needs. It wasnt

The end of the state of emergency came about through normal

democratic enough, in other words, to be demonized by Agamben.

democratic means, namely an election that threw Gandhi out of office. Agamben, we might point out,
has no theory to address the ending of states of exception. Marx, again speaking for the First Internationals General Council defined the Lincoln
administration as, the only example on record in which the Government fought for the peoples liberty, against a section of its own citizens.47 Agamben, quite reasonably lists Lincolns suspension of Habeas Corpus during the
Civil War as one of the historic states of exception declared by western liberal democracies that he sees as a precursor to todays menaces. He is right, but in fact this goes to the heart of my argument against his approach. Three
questions can be asked here: was the declaration of a state of emergency, as it were, or to be more precise, the use of exceptional measures, in the actual and not just declared defense of the interests of the popular classes and
democracy rather than subversive of these? Was there a real emergency, in the sense that there was a plausible threat, not just to some lives and property say, but to the whole democratic order and survival of the society and of
the interests of the popular classes? And was the declaration temporary and withdrawn after a short time and when the emergency was over? I think that a plausible case can be made that the answer is yes to all three of these,
whereas in the case of say, the internment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II, which involved the expropriation of land and property from the victims, the answer would certainly be no to the first two. But isnt all this
just a social democratic argument, one that forgets the long history of proletarian attempts to establish direct democracy through the Paris Commune, the Soviets, the Workers Councils? Didnt Marx also argue that the working
class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.? Indeed, is this not why Negri and others have been drawn to a kind of photo-negative version of Schmitts state of exception
the revolutionary moment in which the proletariat or the multitude can rewrite both the material and the legal constitutions? The experience of recent and current movements and radical left governments in Latin America
challenges the idea that a state of exception is needed to carry out constitutional transformation. In Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and elsewhere, major changes are being carried out and new constitutions written48. These
experiences, despite great diversity in their proposals, debates and outcomes, as well as of course the national contexts in which they occur, have several common features. First, they involve an alliance between an elected
representative government and a mass movement that is itself quite diverse, but which is based on the working majority of the population; second they involve attempts to meld traditional representation using existing institutions
and various forms of direct democracy at the workplace, neighborhood, and municipality; third, the new constitutions result from a large-scale discussion with serious input and participation from the grassroots and associations of
all types; fourth, constitutional changes have been put to referenda votes, so it is the people, in an expression of Rousseaus General Will, that can approve changes in which they participated both at the level of their associations
and through representatives in drafting; fifth the changes affect the material constitution the distribution of property, the rights of people to land or subsistence or income, as well as the legal apparatus; sixth, these movements
typically involve movements of exactly those groups historically designated as homo sacer: the indigenous people of the continent. These movements and governments are certainly not without their contradictions, particularly
regarding the role of the executive and relationship of leader to movement. But it would be a mistake to deny the autonomy, now greater, now lesser, of the movements from the heads of government, even in Venezuela49. No
state of exception has been used to impose these changes; rather the only risks of a state of exception have come during the coup attempt by the opponents of President Chavez of Venezuela, with backing from the Bush
Administration, and the recent coup in Honduras, overthrowing President Zelaya. The mass democratic, proletarian movement that has opposed that coup testifies powerfully to the theses in this essay. Similarly, though in a very
different context, the mass occupation of the capital Bangkok by pro-democracy demonstrators in Thailand, largely farmers and urban workers, and the massacre they suffered at the hands of the military, the monarchy and the
elites they protect, under martial law, again suggests that the lines are increasingly clearly drawn between one set of class forces demanding democracy so as to use democratic government and their own organized movement to
meet the needs of the majority, and those who are willing to destroy civil liberties and democratic institutions if necessary, in order to impose and sustain neoliberal capitalist globalization and the inequalities it creates. Even the
examples from the region that do not easily fit this model, such as the Zapatista movement in Mexico and the radical democracy briefly created and crushed in Oaxaca have not been attempts at all or nothing insurrections, but
have seen themselves as part of larger processes needed to democratize Mexico. Can these approaches work where both traditional social democracy and the revolutionary tradition of direct democracy have failed to fully

The struggles of peoples who

transform the state from a machine for killing from a permanent state of exception into an instrument of the people to meet their needs under their control?

have resisted expropriation for 500 years deserve our patience as they work out how to deal with
conditions that Agamben has only interpreted for us. The point remains to change them.
Our strategic engagement within the law is the only way to end biopolitical control
Edkins 7 (Jenny Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, Whatever Politics, in
Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, Ed. Calarco and DeCaroli, 2007, p. 84)

What is crucial here is whether the

alternative Agamben proposes is radical enough. Does it entail a refusal of the machine, or merely a
reinstatement of it with a different "definition" of what it means to be human? In The Open, Agamben
does seem to reject Heidegger's problematic
separation of Dasein, as a being that can see the open, from the animal, poor in world, that cannot.45 Ultimately,

Agamben appears to be arguing that any negation of the machine cannot be accomplished on a
philosophical plane, but only in terms of practice. In the end, practice or human action, not philosophy, is what counts.
Ontology and philosophy are to be considered only to the extent that they are political operators and,
specifically, biopolitical weapons in the service of the anthropological machine of sovereignty. In order to try to stop the

biopolitical machine that produces bare life, what is needed is human action, "which once claimed for itself
the name of 'politics'" (SE, 88). It is because there is no necessary articulation "between violence and law,
between life and norm," that it is possible to attempt to interrupt or halt the machine, to "loosen what has been
artificially and violently linked" (SE, 87). This opens a space for a return not to some "lost original state" but to
human praxis and political action (SE, 88).