1NC

Framework
Interpretation and violation: the affirmative should defend the desirability of
USFG action as per the resolution.
“The USFG” is the government in Washington D.C.
Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2k [http://encarta.msn.com]

“The federal government of the United States is centered in Washington DC.”

Clash – We should aim for an interpretation that guarantees well-researched

clash and contestation. Preconditions for reciprocal debate shouldn’t be
trumped by social location.
Amanda ANDERSON, Andrew W. Mellon Professor for the Humanities at Brown University, 6
[“Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Spring 2006, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 281–290, Accessed through
Emory Libraries]

MY RECENT BOOK, The Way We Argue Now, has in a sense two theses. In the first place, the book makes the case for the
importance of debate and argument to any vital democratic or pluralistic intellectual culture. This
is in many ways an unexceptional position, but the premise of the book is that the claims of reasoned
argument are often trumped, within the current intellectual terrain, by appeals to cultural identity and what I
gather more broadly under the rubric of ethos, which includes cultural identity but also forms of ethical piety and
charismatic authority. In promoting argument as a universal practice keyed to a human capacity
for communicative reason, my book is a critique of relativism and identity politics, or the notion
that forms of cultural authenticity or group identity have a certain unquestioned legitimacy, one
that cannot or should not be subjected to the challenges of reason or principle, precisely because reason
and what is often called “false universalism” are, according to this pattern of thinking, always involved in forms
of exclusion, power, or domination. My book insists, by contrast, that argument is a form of respect,
that the ideals of democracy, whether conceived from a nationalist or an internationalist perspective, rely
fundamentally upon procedures of argumentation and debate in order to legitimate
themselves and to keep their central institutions vital. And the idea that one should be protected
from debate, that argument is somehow injurious to persons if it does not honor their desire to
have their basic beliefs and claims and solidarities accepted without challenge, is strenuously
opposed. As is the notion that any attempt to ask people to agree upon processes of reason-
giving argument is somehow necessarily to impose a coercive norm, one that will disable the
free expression and performance of identities, feelings, or solidarities. Disagreement is, by the terms of my
book, a form of respect, not a form of disrespect. And by disagreement, I don’t mean simply to say that we should
expect disagreement rather than agreement, which is a frequently voiced—if misconceived—criticism of Habermas. Of course we
should expect disagreement. My point is that we
should focus on the moment of dissatisfaction in the face
of disagreement—the internal dynamic in argument that imagines argument might be the
beginning of a process of persuasion and exchange that could end in agreement (or partial
agreement). For those who advocate reconciling ourselves to disagreements rather than arguing them out, by contrast, there is
a complacent—and in some versions, even celebratory—attitude toward fixed disagreement. Refusing these options, I make the
case for dissatisfied disagreement in the final chapter of the book and argue that people
should be willing to justify
their positions in dialogue with one another, especially if they hope to live together in a post-
traditional pluralist society.
One example of the trumping of argument by ethos is the form that was taken by the late stage of the Foucault/Habermas debate,
where an appeal to ethos—specifically, an appeal to Foucault’s style of ironic or negative critique, often seen as most in evidence in
the interviews, where he would playfully refuse labels or evade direct answers—was used to exemplify an alternative to the forms of
argument employed by Habermas and like-minded critics. (I should pause to say that I provide this example, and the framing
summary of the book that surrounds it, not to take up airtime through expansive self-reference, but because neither of my
respondents provided any contextualizing summary of the book’s central arguments, though one certainly gets an incremental sense
of the book’s claims from Bruce Robbins. Because I don’t assume that readers of this forum have necessarily read the book, and
because I believe that it is the obligation of forum participants to provide sufficient context for their remarks, I will perform this task
as economically as I can, with the recognition that it might have carried more weight if provided by a respondent rather than the
author.)

The Foucauldian counter-critique importantly emphasizes a relation between style and position,
but it obscures (1) the importance or value of the Habermasian critique and (2) the possibility that the
other side of the debate might have its own ethos to advocate, one that has precisely to do with
an ethos of argument, an ideal of reciprocal debate that involves taking distance on one’s pre-
given forms of identity or the norms of one’s community, both so as to talk across differences
and to articulate one’s claims in relation to shared and even universal ideals. And this leads to the
second thesis of the book, the insistence that an emphasis on ethos and character is interestingly present if not widely recognized in
contemporary theory, and one of the ways its vitality and existential pertinence makes itself felt (even despite the occurrence of the
kinds of unfair trumping moves I have mentioned). We often fail to notice this, because identity
has so uniformly come
to mean sociological, ascribed, or group identity—race, gender, class, nationality, ethnicity,
sexuality, and so forth. Instances of the move toward character and ethos include the later Foucault (for whom ethos is a
central concept), cosmopolitanism (whose aspiration it is to turn universalism into an ethos), and, more controversially,
proceduralist ethics and politics (with its emphasis on sincerity and civility). Another version of this attentiveness to ethos and
character appears in contemporary pragmatism, with its insistence on casualness of attitude, or insouciance in the face of
contingency—recommendations that get elevated into full-fledged exemplary personae in Richard Rorty’s notion of the “ironist” or
Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s portrait of the “postmodern skeptic.” These examples—and the larger claim they support—are meant to
defend theory as still living, despite the many reports of its demise, and in fact still interestingly and incessantly re-elaborating its
relation to practice. This second aspect of the project is at once descriptive, motivated by the notion that characterology within
theory is intrinsically interesting, and critical, in its attempt to identify how characterology
can itself be used to cover
or evade the claims of rational argument, as in appeals to charismatic authority or in what I identify as
narrow personifications of theory (pragmatism, in its insistence on insouciance in the face of contingency, is a prime
example of this second form). And as a complement to the critical agenda, there is a reconstructive
agenda as well, an attempt to recuperate liberalism and proceduralism, in part by advocating
the possibility, as I have suggested, of an ethos of argument.

Robbins, in his extraordinarily rich and challenging response, zeroes in immediately on a crucial issue: who is to say exactly
when argument is occurring or not, and what do we do when there is disagreement over the
fundamentals (the primary one being over what counts as proper reasoning)? Interestingly, Robbins approaches this
issue after first observing a certain tension in the book: on the one hand, The Way We Argue Now calls for
dialogue, debate, argument; on the other, its project is “potentially something a bit stricter, or
pushier: getting us all to agree on what should and should not count as true argument.” What this
point of entry into the larger issue reveals is a kind of blur that the book, I am now aware, invites. On the one hand, the
book anatomizes academic debates, and in doing so is quite “debaterly.” This can give the
impression that what I mean by argument is a very specific form unique to disciplinary
methodologies in higher education. But the book is not generally advocating a narrow practice
of formal and philosophical argumentation in the culture at large, however much its author may relish adherence
to the principle of non-contradiction in scholarly argument. I take pains to elaborate an ethos of argument that
is linked to democratic debate and the forms of dissent that constitutional patriotism allows and
even promotes. In this sense, while argument here is necessarily contextualized sociohistorically, the concept
is not merely academic. It is a practice seen as integral to specific political forms and institutions
in modern democracies, and to the more general activity of critique within modern societies—to the
tradition of the public sphere, to speak in broad terms. Additionally, insofar as argument impels one to
take distance on embedded customs, norms, and senses of given identity, it is a practice that at once
acknowledges identity, the need to understand the perspectives of others, and the shared
commitment to commonality and generality, to finding a way to live together under conditions of
difference.
More than this: the book also discusses at great length and from several different angles the issue that Robbins inexplicably claims I
entirely ignore: the question of disagreement about what counts as argument. In the opening essay, “Debatable Performances,” I
fault the proponents of communicative ethics for not having a broader understanding of public
expression, one that would include the disruptions of spectacle and performance. I return to and underscore this
point in my final chapter, where I espouse a democratic politics that can embrace and accommodate a
wide variety of expressions and modes. This is certainly a discussion of what counts as dialogue
and hence argument in the broad sense in which I mean it, and in fact I fully acknowledge that taking distance
from cultural norms and given identities can be advanced not only through critical reflection,
but through ironic critique and defamiliarizing performance as well. But I do insist—and this is where I take a
position on the fundamental disagreements that have arisen with respect to communicative ethics—that when they have
an effect, these other dimensions of experience do not remain unreflective, and insofar as they
do become reflective, they are contributing to the very form of reasoned analysis that their
champions sometimes imagine they must refuse in order to liberate other modes of being (the
affective, the narrative, the performative, the nonrational). If a narrative of human rights violation
is persuasive in court, or in the broader cultural public sphere, it is because it draws attention to a
violation of humanity that is condemned on principle; if a performance jolts people out of their
normative understandings of sexuality and gender, it prompts forms of understanding that can be
affirmed and communicated and also can be used to justify political positions and legislative
agendas.

Engagement – engagement with crucial public controversies builds bridges

between academic research, public debate, and policy design.
James TULLY Poli Sci @ Victoria (Canada) ‘8 Public Philosophy in a New Key Vol. 1 p. 3-11

Public Philosophy in a New Key is a new approach to the study of politics. The role of a public philosophy is to
address public affairs. This civic task can be done in many different ways. The type of public philosophy I practise
carries on this task by trying to enter into the dialogues with citizens engaged in struggles
against various forms of injustice and oppression. The aim is to establish pedagogical
relationships of reciprocal elucidation between academic research and the civic activities of
fellow citizens. The specific role of this public philosophy is to throw a critical light on the field of practices in
which civic struggles take place and the practices of civic freedom available to change them. It
does this by means of historical and critical studies of the field and the given theoretical forms
of representation of it. Reciprocally, this critical ethos learns from citizens and the successes and
failures of their civic activities how to improve the historical and critical studies and begin again.
In the studies that follow, I use the term 'citizen' to refer to a person who is subject to a relationship of
governance (that is to say, governed) and, simultaneously and primarily, is an active agent in the field of a
governance relationship. While this includes the official sense of 'citizen' as a recognised member
of a state, it is obviously broader and deeper, and more appropriate and effective for that reason.
By a 'relationship of governance', I refer not only to the official sense of the institutional
governments of states, but to the broad sense of any relationship of knowledge, power and
subjection that governs the conduct of those subject to it, from the local to the global. Governance relationships in this ordinary
sense range from the complex ways individuals and groups are governed in their producing and consuming activities to the ways
peoples and subalternised states are subject to global imperial relationships of inequality, dependency and exploitation. They
comprise the relationships of normativity, power and subjectivity in which humans find themselves constrained to recognise
themselves and each other, coordinate interaction, distribute goods, act on the environment and relate to the spiritual realm.
'Practices of civic freedom' comprise the vast repertoire of ways of citizens acting together on
the field of governance relationships and against the oppressive and unjust dimensions of them.
These range from ways of 'acting otherwise' within the space of governance relationships to contesting, negotiating, confronting and
seeking to transform them. The general aim of these diverse civic activities is to bring oppressive and unjust
governance relationships under the on-going shared authority of the citizenry subject to them;
namely, to civicise and democratise them from below. What is distinctively 'democratic' about
public philosophy in a new key is that it does not enter into dialogues with fellow citizens under
the horizon of a political theory that frames the exchange and places the theorist above the
demos. It rejects this traditional approach. Rather, it enters into the relationships of normativity and power
in which academic researchers and civic citizens find themselves, and it works historically and
critically on bringing them into the light of public scrutiny with the particular academic skills
available to the researchers. Every reflective and engaged citizen is a public philosopher in this
sense, and every academic public philosopher is a fellow citizen working within the same broad dialogue with his or her specific
skills. Studies in public philosophy are thus specific toolkits offered to civic activist and civic-
minded academics working on the pressing political problems of our times. I first developed this
approach in Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. By means of a series of historical studies, I argued that
constitutional democracies could respond to contemporary struggles over recognition by reconceiving constitutions as open to
continuing contestation and negotiation by those subject to them. This would be a transition from constitutional democracy (where
the constitution is conceived as founding and standing behind democratic activity) to democratic constitutionalism (where the
constitution and the democratic negotiation of it are conceived as equally basic). In the decade since it was published, I have come
to see that this approach can be improved and applied to a broader range of contemporary struggles: over diverse forms of
recognition, social justice, the environment and imperialism. These two volumes explore this complex landscape. Volume I, Part r
sets out this public philosophy, its employment of historical studies, its relation to contemporary political struggles and its
orientation to the civic freedom of citizens. Chapter r is a sketch of my approach, the tradition from which it derives, the
contemporary authors from whom I have learned this approach, and a contrast with the dominant theory-building approach.
Chapters 2 and 3 provide the groundwork of public philosophy through an interpretation and adaptation of the works of
Wittgenstein, Foucault and the Cambridge school. These chapters provide the methods that are employed in the case studies that
follow in both volumes. Volume I, Part 2 consists of three applications to the democratic struggles over the appropriate forms of
recognition of diverse, multicultural and multinational citizens in contemporary societies. Chapter 4 locates the approach relative to
trends in political philosophy over the last thirty years and sketches out the general field of relations of power and the freedom of
citizens that is studied in detail in the following chapters. Chapter 5 is a study of ways to democratise various types of contemporary
recognition struggles while generating appropriate civic bonds of solidarity among diverse citizens. Chapter 6 is a study of
democratic forms of recognition in political associations that are not only multicultural but also multinational, based on the work of
an international team of social scientists from the European Union and Canada. This is a comprehensive yet defeasible analysis of
the actual legal and political practices of democratic constitutionalism for multinational associations. Volume I, Part 3 consists of two
studies of the struggles of Indigenous peoples for recognition in modern states and under international law. The first sets out a
normative framework for the bi-civilisational negotiation of decolonisation and reconciliation of the rights of Indigenous peoples to
govern themselves in their own ways over their territories and the rights of states that have colonised them over the last half
millennium. It is based on my work for the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1991-5). Chapter 8 addresses the
prevailing discursive and practical obstacles to the negotiation of reconciliation proposed in Chapter 7 and the practices of freedom
available to Indigenous peoples and their supporters to overcome the obstacles and initiate negotiations. Chapter 9 concludes
Volume I, setting out this new approach to recognition and distribution struggles developed in the course of these studies and the
ways in which contemporary societies are beginning to adopt this democratic approach in their legal and political institutions. I show
how this approach represents a fundamental transformation of the manner in which struggles over recognition are standardly
conceptualised today in the dominant schools of thought. It recommends a transition from the orientation to discrete and dyadic
struggles for the just and definitive form of legal recognition in a state to multiple and interrelated negotiations over the always-
imperfect prevailing norms of mutual recognition of members of any form of association. This modest democratic approach has a
much better chance of bringing peace to the deeply diverse world of the twentyfirst century than the standard approaches. Volume
II applies public
philosophy in a new key to global politics. It consists of historical and critical studies of
global relationships of horrendous inequality, dependency, exploitation and environmental
damage, and of the corresponding practices of civic freedom of global and local citizens to
transform them into democratic relationships. The transition to Volume II does not only mark a broadening of the
field of public philosophy to the global. More emphasis is also placed on specific locales of civic struggles, the diversity of governance
relationships and the range of ways of acting otherwise in them, provincialising Eurocenrric traditions and bringing
in more non-Western voices and perspectives. Volume II, Part I consists of studies of global relationships and
practices of civic freedom available from the perspectives of the dominant schools of globalisation. Chapter I critically examines the
tradition of international relations' and global justice associated with Kant's theoty of a world federation of identical nation-states.
Chapter 2 examines the theories of globalisation, global governance and cosmopolitan democracy. Chapter 3 examines the activities
of environmental movements from the perspective of civic freedom and advances a democratic ethic of ecological politics. Chapter 4
is the most comprehensive. It is an immanent critique of the dominant and agonistic approaches to global justice and international
law. The critique leads step by step to the conclusion that only a more historical and contextual approach, related to the actual
practices of freedom on the ground, can illuminate the unequal global relationships and the possibilities for their transformation.
The conclusion I draw from these four studies is that these approaches, while illuminating and useful, are nevertheless limited and
inadequate because they overlook the historically persisting imperial character of the global relationships they analyse. This provides
the transition to Part 2. Volume II, Part 2 consists in studies of global relationships under the description of them as a network of
vastly unequal imperial relationships between the North and global South (the I20 former colonies that comprise the majority of the
world's population). The three chapters show how different aspects of the contemporary global order continue to be structured by
imperial relationships inherited from five hundred years of Western imperialism. These relationships survived decolonisation in the
twentieth century in a new phase of imperialism, standardly called post-colonial or informal imperialism. Chapter 5 sets out this
argument in historical detail and shows how each of the major approaches to globalisation and international relations overlooks the
imperial dimensions of the present in different ways and marginalises other approaches that study globalisation under the category
of imperialism. Even some of the approaches that claim to take into account informal imperialism misrepresent the contemporary
form of imperialism. With this disclosure of the field of globalisation as the continuation of Western imperialism by informal means
and through institutions of global governance, Chapter 6 turns to the networkisation and communications revolution of the last
twenty years. I show that this revolution, which is often portrayed as democratising globalisation, has been Janus-faced: helping
global citizens to organise effectively at the local and global levels, yet also helping institutions of global governance, multinational
corporations and the US military to network and govern informally the global relationships of inequality they inherited from the
period of colonial imperialism. Chapter 7 shows how the imperial spread of the modular form of modern, Western-style
constitutional nation-states and international law by colonisation, indirect rule and informal rule over the last three hundred years
has not freed the non-West from imperialism. Quite the opposite: it has been and continues to be the political, legal and economic
form in which relationships of inequality, dependency and exploitation have been extended and intensified around the world.
Volume II concludes by asking the crucial question: what
can citizens who are subject to these imperial
relationships (in both the North and global South) do to transform them into non-imperial,
democratic relationships by bringing them under their shared authority? The general answer is the
exercise of civic freedom by citizens in the North and global South and the exercise of academic research in
networks of reciprocal learning with these global/local citizen movements: namely, a new public philosophy for a de-
imperialising age. Chapter 8 takes the citizenry of the European Union as an example. I argue that European citizens are already
taking the lead in improvising new forms of democratising civic activities with respect to immigration, alternative economics and
relationships with the global South. Chapter 9 is the conclusion to Public Philosophy in a New Key. It draws together the strands of
argument throughout the two volumes and weaves them into a sketch of a new kind of local and global citizenship I call 'glocal'
citizenship. This mode of citizenship has the capacity to overcome the imperialism of the present
age and bring a democratic world into being from the local to the global. Since it is the conclusion to the
two volumes, I will provide a brief synopsis at the outset to give a preliminary indication of where the chapters lead. The first part of
the chapter summarises the imperial character of the present global order and the dominant modular form of citizenship (modern
citizenship) that has been spread by Western expansion. Far from offering a challenge to imperialism, it actually serves in a number
of ways to extend it, in both its national (civil) and its global (cosmopolitan) forms. The second part argues that there is another
mode of citizenship (diverse citizenship) that also developed historically in both the West and non-West. It provides the democratic
means to challenge and transform imperial relationships in both its local (civic) and local/global (glocal) forms. I set out the main
features of the traditions of diverse civic citizenship historically and conceptually, and then apply it to global struggles of de-
imperialisation and democratisation. It is a form of citizenship that is grounded in local civic practices yet extended globally by
democratic networks. The chapter thus brings together the three themes of the two volumes: public philosophy, practices of civic
freedom and the countless ways they work together to negotiate and transform oppressive relationships. This is not only possible
but what millions of citizens, nongovernmental organisations, networks and social movements are doing today. The chapter ends
with a view of Gandhi's life as a civic citizen contra imperialism; it stands as an exemplar of civic citizenship and engaged public
philosophy. There are many public philosophers from whom I have drawn inspiration. John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma
Goldmann, Antonio Gramsci, Sojourner Truth, Paulo Friere, Bertrand Russell, Maude Barlow, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Vandana
Shiva, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Iris Marion Young and Gandhi are exemplary. And, as I mentioned, every engaged and reflective
citizen is an inspirational public philosopher in this democratic sense. But I have always questioned why more political philosophers
and political theorists are not also public philosophers. What stops many of them from seeing their work as a discussion with their
fellow citizens as equals? I think the answer is that many tend to enter into a relationship with citizens under the horizon of a
political theory that sets them above the situated civic discourses of the societies in which they live. This presumptive elevation is
standardly based on four types of assumption. The first assumption is that there are causal processes of historical development
(globalisation) that act behind the backs of citizens and determine their field of activity. It is the role of the theorist of modernisation
to study these conditions of possibility of civic activity. The second is that there are universal normative principles that determine
how citizens ought to act. It is the role of the theorist of global justice to study these unchanging principles that prescribe the limits
of democracy. The third is that there are background norms and goods implicit within democratic practices that constrain and
enable the field of democratic activity of citizens in the foreground. It is the role of the interpretative and phenomenological
theorists to make these background conditions explicit. The fourth is that there are canonical institutional preconditions that provide
the foundations of democratic activity, and it is the role of political scientists to study these legal and political institutions. In each of
these four cases, the theorist is elevated above the demos by the assumption that there are background conditions of possibility of
democracy that are separate from democratic activity and it is his or her role to study them, not what takes places within them. In
the course of the studies in the two volumes, each
pillar of elite political theory falls to the ground. Each of
the four conditions of possibility is shown to be internally related to and reciprocally shaped by
the everyday activities of democratic citizens, not separate from and determinative of their field
of freedom. It is this revolutionary discovery that brings political philosophy 'down' into the world of the demos and renders
it a situated public philosophy in conversation with fellow citizens. Equally important, it enables us to see
that we are much freer and our problems more tractable than the grand theories of the four
pillars make it seem. For while we are still entangled in conditions that constrain and enable, and are
difficult to change, we are no longer entrapped in background conditions that determine the limits
of our foreground activities, for none is permanently off limits. I associate this revolutionary insight with the
late Richard Rorty (Volume I, Chapter 4). Others will associate it with other writers and their own experiences of human freedom
and agency where they were told it was impossible. I would like to say a few words about the phrase 'in a new key' . Just as a
jazz musician plays a composition in a new key relative to the classic performances of it, so too a
specific public philosopher plays the role in his or her own new style in relation to the classic
public philosophers in his or her field. The style of these studies is a new key in that it combines
historical studies and a reciprocal civic relationship in what I hope is a distinctive way. Jazz musicians play
in a new key in the course of improvising with other musicians and in dialogue with classic
performances and present audiences. Analogously, public philosophers improvise in dialogues with
contemporary theorists, the classics, engaged citizens and in response to the political problems
that confront and move them. This is the situated freedom of a public philosopher. I see the studies in these volumes as
improvisations in this sense.1 Finally, I would like to respond to a common objection to this style of public philosophy. Radical
critics often say, given the radical character of your particular public philosophy, why do you
engage in the 'mainstream' academic debates and use the conservative language of citizenship,
public philosophy, governance, democracy and civic freedom? Your work will be co-opted by the
mainstream you disagree with and alienated from the civic activists you hope to reach. You should
write in a language of radical politics. I acknowledge that my views are somewhat radical relative to much of the literature I discuss.
However, there are three reasons for the approach I take. Firstly, the
alternative language of radical politics often
involves a kind of self-marginalisation and an attitude of self-righteousness that I find
incompatible with a democratic ethos. Moreover, there are already many excellent public
philosophers, such as Chomsky, who write directly to civic activists and bypass the theoretical
debates, and they too write in the same plain and simple language of citizens, public goods and
freedom. Secondly, the economic, political and military elites and their ideologists have
inherited not only much of the earth and its resources but also many of its languages, including
the manipulable language of citizenship, democracy, civic goods and freedom. Yet, it is precisely
this ordinary language that the oppressed and exploited of the world have always used to
express their outrage at the injustices of the present and their hopes and dreams of another
world. Like Edward Said, I refuse to surrender it to our adversaries without a fight and abandon
the repository of the history of struggles from which we derive. 2 Moreover, the fall of the four pillars
of the ancien regime also brings down the fiction of an alternative, pure language of freedom
(radical or otherwise) that stands above the fray of politics and is impervious to unpredictable
redescription by one's fellow adversaries. Thirdly, I have deep respect for the elaborate Western and
non-Western traditions of critical political reflection, the great yet partial insights they can bring,
and the people who carry them on today in this public language. While I disagree with the
dominant theories that legitimate the status quo in these terms, engagement with them forces
dissenters like myself constantly to test our own views against them and, in so doing, to try to
move the academic debate in another direction. As we will see, I am far from the first or only one to take this
agonistic stance. Furthermore, is it not presumptuous to assume that these debates are alien and of no
interest to citizens? T he following chapters were written in conversations with engaged citizens. Academic debates
are not as far from and unrelated to the public debates as they are often portrayed from the
perspectives of the four pillars. They are a historically integral part of the complex field of practical
discourses on which public philosophy is inescapably thrown and in which it can find its voice
and make a distinctive difference. Except for the concluding chapter of Volume II, all chapters are based on works
published previously over the last eight years and then rewritten to bring them together in the sustained argument of these rwo
volumes. The concluding chapter of Volume II was written for the rwo volumes and to bring their themes together in a portrait of
global/local civic freedom and public philosophy contra imperialism.
 Cripistemology K
The affirmative’s affective method of “melancholy” relies on a process of
abstracting speech away from the body meaning their performance depends on
the existence of a universal human subject – turns the aff
St-Pierre 15 (Joshua St Pierre, PhD Student at the University of Alberta Department of
Philosophy, “Cripping Communication: Speech, Disability, and Exclusion in Liberal Humanist and
Posthumanist Discourse “ , March 31, 2015) DS

The liberal humanist assessment of speech exemplified by Carr, Dance, and Larson relies on an ambiguity
and slippage between the rational interior and embodied exterior. Speech is given in liberal
humanism as a mode of rationality, yet the body is also needed for the enactment of speech.
This duality raises troubling questions regarding the boundaries of reason and the self. Does
speech modulate from a form of rationality to a conditional act as it passes through the lips?
Where does the universal reason stop and contingent embodiment begin? While speech,
mediating the threshold between the public and private and the universal and accidental, can be
understood as the sine qua non of the liberal humanist subject, it simultaneously occupies an
ambiguous position. This ambiguity translates as a fundamental instability in the rational self’s
identity and boundary that can be detailed through the voice, chiastically hinging language and
the body. The voice is dually constituted by the phonological and the phonetic: the meaning
laden, immaterial aspect of the phoneme and its material, auditory support. While the existence of the
phonological depends upon the phonetic (however short-lived its existence), the logic of phonocentrism permeating
liberal humanism systematically obscures the phonetic as the trace of embodiment. “Requiring
the intervention of no determinate surface in the world, being produced in the world as pure
auto-affection, [the voice],” explains Derrida, “is a signifying substance completely at our disposition. For the voice meets no
obstacle to its emission in the world precisely because it is produced as pure auto-affection” (1973, p. 79). This dominant
tradition understands the phonetic, embodied aspect of the voice to be utterly passive and
invisible, and thus “the voice” comes from within, circumventing the body, and directly
expresses interiority. Yet, tying the signifier to the body, the voice is not so easily divorced from
its embodied source. Somewhat overstated by the dysfluent speaker, the phonetic aspect of the
voice often does not self-effacingly recede once the phonological function has been dutifully
carried out, but rather lingers and stretches, drawing attention to itself and threatening to
subvert its linguistic purpose. The voice of one who has cerebral palsy, for example, is decidedly
not at his/her complete disposition precisely because the body obtrudes its continuous emission
into the world. The conception of the voice as pure auto-affection can be maintained only by
abstracting speech from lived experience. I accordingly argue that the rational human materializes
himself through the voice precariously; the slippage is manifested both phonetically and
affectively
The affective performance of the 1AC comes at the cost of crip life, you should
ask yourself how the performance is ever accessible to the black person who
stutters.
St-Pierre 15 (Joshua St Pierre, PhD Student at the University of Alberta Department of
Philosophy, “Cripping Communication: Speech, Disability, and Exclusion in Liberal Humanist and
Posthumanist Discourse “ , March 31, 2015) DS

If to be truly human in liberal humanist discourse is to exercise autonomous reason, and if

speaking realizes oneself as a rational and social agent within the public sphere, then having a
voice has direct bearing on the universal citizen—so much so that I believe it possible to conceive of
what might be termed a “universal speaker.” Because speech plays a pivotal role in the realization
of the self as a rational agent, then if one is to speak, he/she must speak in a way that defends
the universality of autonomous reason against embodied and historical particularity. Furthermore,
the universal speaker, like the universal citizen, must be marked by impartiality. As stated by Young, “impartial reason aims to adopt
a point of view outside concrete situations of action, a transcendental ‘view from nowhere’ that carries the perspective, attributes,
character, and interests of no particular subject or set of subjects” (1990, p. 100). From
this façade of impartiality, it is
only a small step to judge who does and does not speak impartially and thereby qualifies as
rational and human. To speak as a truly rational agent requires that one speak from nowhere and everywhere, becoming an
invisible medium for communication. The universal speaker is a powerful homogenizing trope, for it
defines what type of speech production is natural, who gets the right to speak, what speech
needs to be taken seriously, and what speech gets to be heard at all. If one is to speak with agency or
efficacy, one must speak in the right way; hence the burden within this tradition is to find and retain the “right voice.” In Better Than
Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, for example, Carl Elliott (2004) notes
an anxiety in the struggle
of transgendered people to match gendered vocal norms, the accent-reduction clinics in the
American south, and the difficult adjustment of disabled speakers to voice synthesizers. At the
heart of liberal humanism’s claim to universality and equality, an ugly structure of exclusion of
those who are not “universal” shows itself, an exclusion that I argue results from the tension
between (a) the desire to conceive of oral communication as rational/universal and (b) the
embodied particularity of speech that threatens to undermine its universality. For while speech is
peddled as a rational, universal, and nonspatial medium within liberal humanism, the
particularity of embodied speech casts a threatening shadow over this claim. Returning to the example
of the stuttering voice, Marc Shell argues that having the “right voice” is a necessary sign of membership to
a particular group of persons. If you cannot speak, he wryly explains, you are likely not human. If you
can somewhat speak you may be human, and if you cannot speak in my particular way, you do
not belong to my tribe (2005, p. 50). For the stutterer, however, “all words are test words,
passwords, or catchphrases whereby one gains or loses social acceptance or credibility. . . . The
concern is not his inability to pronounce some word or phrase fast enough; it is one’s ability to
say any word fluently in any language” (2005, p. 51). Shell is quite clearly stating the boundary conditions of the unive
rsal speaker. However, just as the vocal markers of ethnic boundaries are contingent,
historical, and laden with colonial power, so can the supposed universality of rational human
speech be unraveled.
The aff is the reauthorization of the freak show, deconstruction can ONLY
operate at the levels of the symbolic and discursive and obfuscates the
materiality of the body
Hughes 09 (Bill Hughes, A respected academic in sociology and social policy, Professor Hughes
current research focus in the areas of disability, the body and social theory, care, gender,
“Wounded/monstrous/abject: a critique of the disabled body in the sociological imaginary” ,
Disability & Society, 24:4, 399-410, DOI: 10.1080/09687590902876144 DS

Most deconstructionists admit to nothing – or not much of substance – beyond the¶ discursive,
such that objects do not have any real or autonomous existence beyond¶ their construction in
language. This means, as Gergen (1994) put it, that constructionism¶ is ‘ontologically mute’ [sic]. Neither the ‘monstrous
bodies’ nor the ‘clean and¶ proper bodies’ that inhabit Shildrick’s work are carnal figures.
Shadows – not¶ monsters – haunt the pages of this brilliant book. Its subjects are lifeless, like
the¶ preserved scientific specimens in the teratological exhibitions that the author uses as¶ data
to illustrate some of her fascinating arguments. Vulnerability and monstrosity are¶ words rather
than conditions of existence. In particular, they are words used by the¶ ‘clean and proper’ not
only to register the presence of the alien other, but also – once¶ the hidden act of projection is
unmasked – provide a text that describes those very¶ non-disabled agents that authored the
accusations of monstrosity. It is a curious irony¶ that in the very historical moment when disabled people are making a
collective effort¶ to demonstrate their ontological validity that some forms of social theory (sometimes used to shed light on
disabled peoples lives) are built on an effort to make fiction out¶ of the ontological status of the subject. In this vein, Siebers (2001,
740) argued that¶ ‘social
constructionism either fails to account for the difficult physical realities
faced¶ by people with disabilities or presents their body in ways that are conventional,¶
conformist or unrecognisable to them’.¶ In a critique of the position that Shildrick adopted in an earlier book,
Howson¶ (2005, 88) argued that Shildrick’s ‘focus on sexual difference through embodiment,¶ ethics and discourse is pitched much
too abstractly to offer the kind of specificity¶ warranted by the valorisation of corporeality. As a result, it obscures what it seeks to¶
make visible – embodied specificity’. In Embodying the monster Shildrick tried to¶ valorise a specific form of corporeality, namely
that which is monstrous and vulnerable.¶ She appealed to femininity and disability as the primary source, not only of¶ resistance to
the masculine subject of modernity but also of the promise of a future of¶ bodily becoming – ennobled by Derrida’s monstrous
arrivant – in which hybrid, liminal¶ or boundary figures will destabilise and replace the (mythical) coherent, universal,¶ pre-
discursive, subject. Shildrick (2002, 122) hoped that in this new world in which¶ the fixed and the proper have no place, where
gender is undercut ‘as a foundational¶ category’ or repositioned ‘as a discursive construct always open to re-signification’¶ that the
feminine will not disappear but ‘rather re-emerge as the radically other’.¶ While there are clear problems common to post-structural
feminism in this argument,¶ including relativism and a tendency to take concepts ‘out of every conceivable context¶ of significant
use’ that turns them ‘into metaphysical entities that no longer respond¶ to any specific criteria of meaning’ (Moi 2005, vii), there is
also a specific problem¶ about disability as an issue and a subject position. Shildrick can envisage the reemergence¶ of new radical
forms of femininity even in a world devoid of any fixtures¶ or foundations, but disability as a subject position has no light
whatsoever to give it¶ shape or form. This is not a Utopian reference to the disappearance of disability qua¶ oppression, but an
oversight. Firstly, Embodying the monster, like Shildrick’s previous¶ book Leaky bodies and boundaries, is primarily about women.
Disability barely¶ registers as a subject position at all and is a shadow in the presence of the feminine¶ and the feminist philosophy
and ethics that mark its primary intellectual register.¶ Secondly, the
categories of monstrosity and vulnerability
have, in the text, no specific¶ meaning in relation to physical impairment or disability. This is
ironic, given that¶ disabled people, regardless of gender, are, in the course of everyday
interaction, much¶ more likely than women to be treated as if they are ‘ontologically flawed’
and to experience¶ the personal violation that such a negative reception embodies. Shildrick did¶
not discuss the violence done to disabled people by a great many of their non-disabled¶
counterparts who, all too often, fail to recognise the biological, psychological and¶ social
‘sisterhood’ between disabled and non-disabled people. Shildrick is more¶ concerned with
monstrosity at the level of language and representation and the way¶ that it can be used to
discursively disturb the normative, invulnerable, masculine¶ subject of modernity and to throw
mud at ‘his’ ‘clean and proper and body’. Some of¶ the mud sticks, and the text certainly
unsettles the epistemological authority of the¶ male subject, but it reveals little concrete about
being disabled or about how to use the¶ ontological question to enhance the cause of disabled
people.¶ Furthermore, it is important to make it clear that teratology cannot provide a major¶ point of intellectual access into
disability studies. The voyeuristic fascination with¶ monstrosity – common amongst enlightenment
philosophers like Diderot – sits uneasily¶ with the celebration of difference and is wed to a dialectic of lack (Braidotti 2002).¶ In
its occularcentricity it embraces the aesthetics of the low budget horror movie and¶ relies
crudely for its intellectual traction on the visual shock of extreme ‘cases’ of¶ bodily
‘malformation’. The teratological imagination admits as data only that which¶ can be classified
as extreme or exotic. It is, therefore, the epistemological equivalent¶ of the ‘freak show’, unable to
shed light, for example, on those many millions of¶ disabled people without visually apparent impairments who may attempt to live
their¶ lives by ‘passing as normal’ (Goffman 1978).

Reject the aff in favor of curricular cripistemologies where we embrace the

failure of crip students to be normate – to engage the cripistemolgical
pedagogy of education
Mitchell, Snyder, and Ware 14, (David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder, and Linda Ware,
David Mitchell is a Professor of English at the George Washington University and author. His
work primarily focuses on representations of disability in literary and filmic texts. Sharon L.
Snyder is a faculty member in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. With David T. Mitchell, she is the coauthor of Narrative
Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, and coeditor of The Body and Physical
Difference: Discourses of Disability; Eugenics in America, 1848–1945: A History of Disability in
Primary Sources; and The Encyclopedia of Disability. Dr. Ware is recognized internationally for
the development of interdisciplinary disability studies within education. Her research and
scholarship explores disability through a historical, cultural and structural lens. Her empirical
research is based in schools and in the community. Her theoretical work is informed by a social
political critique of disability., “[Every] Child Left Behind,” George Washington University /
Independent Scholar, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8.3 (2014), 295–313, ISSN
1757-6458 (print) 1757-6466 (online), AB)
Odysseus’s experiences on Phaeacia provide an historical example of the insights awaiting those who undertake pedagogical practices informed by
curricular cripistemologies. Curricular
cripistemologies involve the development of teaching pedagogies
that deviate from core teachings by foregrounding crip/ queer content as fortunate failure. This
pedagogical “incoherence” offers important social options for constructing alternative ethical
frameworks for living. An alternative ethical framework results in the creation of useable crip/
queer maps that, from a curricular cripistemological standpoint, are otherwise absent from
normative teaching approaches. One overarching goal of such content is to provide
opportunities for crip/queer embodiments to better speak to the political dilemmas of
contemporary experience. The pedagogy of curricular cripistemology depends upon the insights of human interdependency illustrated
in the examples above. It is neither a discourse of “specialness” wherein we learn to value disabled

people as “human” too, nor tolerate their incapacities when we discover them scraping out an
existence alongside others; nor do we find the value of disability guaranteed in overcoming
social barriers wherein crip/queer peoples’ incapacities are offset by the compensatory qualities
of an otherwise “extraordinary body” (Garland- Thomson 5). Nor do we discover disability as an
opportunity for political correctness wherein all bodies are valued for “diversity” in a relativistic
equation of multicultural differences. We witness this philosophical tendency even in disability studies, for example, in the
universalist cast of arguments that “everyone’s disabled” featured in Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson’s “embodied ontology” (27) and Lennard
Davis’s “dismodernism” (273). Relativistic valuations of difference often lead to a process explained by Lee Edelman as neoliberal normativity’s
“tenacious will to sameness by endlessly turning the Other into the image of itself” (59). Insteadof these various strategies for
culturally rehabilitating disabled people’s experiences into recognizable normativities, curricular
cripiste- mologies cultivate ways of realizing failure as an appropriate response to the finite
goals of inclusionism. For instance, curricular cripistemologies critically assess how communities place
limits on the facilitation of crip/queer people’s participation. Such forms of inclusionism often
result in false perceptions of absence as a “chosen” exile and a naturalized condition of non-
normative existence. While social spaces superficially appear open to all who wish to navigate
them, curricular cripistemologies unveil architectural, aesthetic, and moral spaces of inclusion
that, paradoxically, strictly police ways of being different for the bodies they include. Consequently,
there is no inclusionism that does not come replete with a strategy of making estranged bodies
better fit normative expectations. Paradoxically, then, curricular cripistemologies necessarily promote
failure of rehabilitative regimens as a worthy goal. One’s rehab is another’s resistance,
particularly when rehab requires classroom pull-outs to perform yet another battery of the
MMPI (diagnostic assessment tests). Curricular cripistemologies reject the form-fitting mold of neoliberal normativities as substantively under-
performing. Likewise, in the Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, Roderick A. Ferguson explores the impact of
educational diversity strategies of cultural incorporation in public schools. Ferguson identities late 1960s inclusionist practices as institutional ways of
robbing minority students of alternative insights while seeming to embrace them (190). Similarly, inclusionist
practices place
crip/queer bodies in the compromising position of making normative practices more desirable:
of course, they want to be like us, the story of institutional normalization goes, because our
ways naturally enshrine that which all human beings desire. In this sense, curricular
cripistemologies actively explore alternative modes of navigating the world as crip/queer
embodiments. In effect, cripistemological pedagogies actively leave behind the goal of arriving at
identities domesticated of their defining differences. Such approaches to the teaching mission force an encounter with
the often discomforting content of living interdependently with others.
 Faciality K
Phenomenological approaches to identity can only diagnose the status quo as it
is rather than escape it. Acceptance of the facialized position in relation to the
dominance of the White Man Face is always already a concession to power.
Saldanha 7 Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, Psychedelic
White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN,
pg. 194

My disagreement is not with Fanon’s and Martín Alcoff’s insistence on embodiment and emotion, but with their reliance
on a Hegelian notion of recognition to explain encounter. Because of this they tend to treat white and
nonwhite not only as a dyad, but as almost naturally opposed entities. There is, then, little attention paid to
the complicated processes whereby some racial formations become dominant, that is, how racial formations emerge
from material conditions and collective interactions, which greatly exceed the spatiality of self
versus other. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality is not based on an intersubjective dialectics enlarged to world-
historical scope. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari strongly distance themselves from phenomenology and psychoanalysis. First of all, for
them, it isn’t consciousness but an abstract machine of faciality that arranges bodies into relations
of power. And second, faciality constantly invents new faces to capture deviant bodies, multiplying
possible positions far beyond any binaries such as black/white (though binarization can be an important effect). That is
precisely its strength. There are thousands of encounters, thousands of trains. Deleuze and Guattari believe faciality’s
imperialism arose with institutional Christianity. Being imposed in lands populated by different
phenotypes, faciality became a matter of imperialist racialization. That faciality originated in
Renaissance humanism and depictions of Jesus seems a plausible if one-sided interpretation. It is less relevant than
Deleuze and Guattari’s unusual theory of contemporary racism: If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average
ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black
man, men in the second or third category. They are also inscribed on the [white] wall [of signification], distributed
by the [black] hole [of subjectivity]. They must be Christianized, in other words, facialized. European racism as
the white man’s claim has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other:

it is instead in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped as an “other.” Racism operates by the determination of
degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming
traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places
under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never
abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic . . .). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior,
there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. 5 For
Anjuna’s psy-trance parties, there were “no people on the outside.” Locals, domestic tourists, charter tourists, and beggars would
join the white Goa freaks on the dance floor, sometimes even in Nine Bar. In fact, as with the United Colors of Benetton, it will be
remembered that the rhetoric of PLUR demonstrated faciality’s inclusiveness— the parties were supposed to be open to all. But
immediately, the faciality machine would place all bodies in relation to the Goa freak standard, both spatiotemporally and
subjectively, measuring their acceptability through increasingly meticulous signs: sociochemical monitoring, scene savviness, chillum
circles, sexual attractiveness. Many nonfreaks felt uneasy being pigeonholed like this— especially domestic tourists, who would
retreat to the darker corners. The result was viscosity, bodies temporarily becoming impenetrable— more or less. It would seem to
me that to
understand the intricate hierarchies of racism, a framework that allows for gradual and
multidimensional deviances is preferable to a dialectical model. Faciality also explains why after
colonialism, with television and tourism, there is scarcely place left for any “dark others.” Everyone is
included; everyone is facialized. At the same time, Euro-American ways of life continue to spread, and White Man (Elvis
Presley, Sylvester Stallone, David Beckham) remains the global standard against which all other faces are forced to compete. What
this account of racism has in common with the Fanonian is that whiteness is the norm, even in our “post”-colonial era. Where it
differs, however, is that deviance
is based not on lack of recognition or negation or annihilation of the other,
but on subtle machinic differentiations and territorializations. The virtual structures behind racial
formations don’t look like formal logic (a/not-a); they continually differentiate as actual bodies
interact and aggregate. Racism, then, can’t be countered with a Hegelian sublation into the universal.

The alternative is an embrace of a tiny thousand races --- only by promoting the
infinitesimally degrees of qualities that are sued to distinguish races and people
within those races can we recognize and embrace multiplicity.
Saldanha 4[Saldanha, Arun. “Reontologising Race: the Machinic Geography of Phenotype.”
March 9, 2004. Brackets for Grammar]

Every time phenotype makes another machinic connection, there is a stutter. Every
time bodies are further entrenched in
segregat[ed]ion, however brutal, there [is] needs to be an affective investment of some sort. This is the ruptural
moment in which to intervene. Race should not be eliminated, but proliferated, its many energies directed
at multiplying racial differences so as to render them joyfully cacophonic. Many in American critical race theory also argue against a
utopian transcendence of race, taking from W E B Du Bois and pragmatism a reflexive, sometimes strategically nationalist attitude
towards racial embodiment (compare Outlaw, 1996; Shuford, 2001; Winant, 2004). What is needed is an affirmation of race's
creativity and virtuality: what race can be. Race need not be about order and oppression, it can be wild, far-from-equilibrium,
liberatory. It is not that everyone becomes completely Brownian (or brown!), completely similar, or completely unique. It is just that
white supremacism becomes strenuous as many populations start harbouring a similar economic, technological, cultural
productivity as whites do now, linking all sorts of bodies with all sorts of wealth and all sorts of ways of life. That is, race exists in its
true mode when it is no longer stifled by racism. ––The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of
the oppression it suffers; there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no domi- nant race; a race is defined not by its purity but
rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race'' (Deleuze
and Guattari, [1980] 1987, page 379). In ``A thousand tiny sexes'', Grosz (1994b) follows a well-known passage of Deleuze and
Guattari to argue for non-Hegelian, indeed protohuman feminism that utilises lines of flight of the gender assemblage to combat
heterosexist patriarchy. ––If we consider the great binary aggregates, such as the sexes or classes, it is evident that
they also cross over into molecular assemblages of a different nature, and that there is a double reciprocal
dependency between them. For the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in
the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes'' (Deleuze and
Guattari, [1980] 1987, page 213). Similarly, the molecularisation of race would consist in its breaking up into a
thousand tiny races. It is from here that cosmopolitanism should start: the pleasure, curiosity, and concern in
encountering a multiplicity of corporeal fragments outside of common-sense taxonomies. ––We walk the streets among hundreds of
people whose patterns of lips, breasts, and genital organs we divine; they seem to us equivalent and interchangeable. Then
something snares our attention: a dimple speckled with freckles on the cheek of a woman; a steel choker around the throat of a man
in a business suit; a gold ring in the punctured nipple on the hard chest of a deliveryman; a big raw fist in the delicate hand of a
schoolgirl; a live python coiled about the neck of a lean, lanky adolescent with coal-black skin. Signs of clandestine disorder in the
uniformed and coded crowds'' (Lingis, 2000, page 142). Machinism against racism builds upon a gradual, fragmented, and shifting
sense of corporeal difference, that of course extends far further than the street. Responsibility,
activism, and antiracist
policy will follow only from feeling and understanding the geographical differentials that exist
between many different kinds of bodies: between a Jew and a black soldier, between a woman in the Sahel and a woman
in Wall Street, between a Peruvian peasant and a Chinese journalist. A machinic politics of race takes into account the
real barriers to mobility and imagination that exist in different places; cosmopolitanism has to be invented,
not imposed. It may seem that machinism is as utopian and open ended as Gilroy's transcendent antiracism. It is not,
because it is empirical, immanent, and pragmatic. The machinic geography of phenotype shows
that racism differs from place to place, and cannot be overcome in any simple way. It shows that white
supremacy can subside only by changing the rules of education, or the financial sector, or the arms trade, or the
pharmaceutical industry, or whatever. For machinic politics, the cultural studies pre- occupations with apology, recognition,
politically correct language and reconsiliation, or else cultural hybridity, pastiche, and ambivalence, threaten to stand in the way of
really doing something about the global structures of racism. A
thousand tiny races can be made only if it is
acknowledged that racism is a material, inclusive series of events, a viscous geography which cannot be
`signified away'. Miscegenation, openness to strangers, exoticism in art, and experimentations with whiteness can certainly
help. But ultimately cosmpolitanism without critique and intervention remains complacent with its own comfortably mobile
position. In a word, ethics encompasses politics, and politics starts with convincing people of race's materiality.
 Case
The success of global capital and state strategies of power depend on the
disinterment of subjugated histories: the affirmative’s politics is precisely the
medium through which the academy as a unique site of counterinsurgent
edification develops the handbook for state and capital adaptation,
management and violent domination
Ferguson 2012 [Roderick, Professor of African American and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, p. 25-29]

In addition to being archivable elements for a transforming U.S. nationstate, social movements in the post-World War II era were
also crucial “documents” for that archiving apparatus known as contemporary global capitalism. In his classic essay “The Local and
the Global,” Stuart Hall locates the social movements that Omi, Winant, and Edgar discuss within the emergence of a new trajectory
for global capitalism. Specifically, Hall points to the ways in which the
emergence of various social movements
around race and feminism were part of the same historic moment in which global capital set its
sights on local difference. Global capital’s turn toward local difference was simultaneous with an epistemic turn toward
vernacular cultures as well. According to Hall, the emergence of contemporary globalization was simultaneous with the emergence
of anticolonial, black liberation, and feminist movements, the time when “the unspoken discovered that they had a history that they
could speak, that they had languages other than the languages of the master.”19 For Hall, liberatory movements were
both political and epistemological formations that attempted to simultaneously disinter and
reconstruct subjugated histories around race, gender, and nation. Unearthing and reinventing those
histories was also not unrelated or coincidental to global capital’s interest in local cultures and
differences. As the grip of the nation-state began to weaken because of the capitalist crisis and the internationalization of the
economy, the Western nation-state also suffered—as Hall implies—because of the social and epistemic crises brought about by
movements led to a large degree by students. Ironically, though, as those social movements advanced and reconceptualized local
culture and difference, bringing national culture to crisis, capital turned toward local culture and difference in the very moments
that national identity was being revised. Contemporary globalization attempted to feed on those local histories
and languages, producing flexible regimes of accumulation “founded on segmented markets, on
lifestyle and identity.”20 Hence, one of the ways in which capital mediated its split from a now
weakened and damaged nation-state was to work with and through the very local, vernacular, and
subjugated histories and differences that helped to bring the nation-state to crisis in the first
place. The beginnings of contemporary global capital represented the simultaneous management of difference and the
international as well. In the context of the United States and the relative collapse of a national culture that portrayed itself as
homogeneous, we can also see the ways in which the American nation-state used local differences to mediate the upheavals
brought about by the student movements. For instance, in Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formations in the United
States, the authors define the racial state in the moments after the various antiracist movements in terms of the state’s
institutionalization of certain parts of those movements, arguing that the “The racial state, in its turn, has been historically
constructed by racial movements; it consists of agencies and programs which are the institutionalized responses to racial
movements of the past.”21 The racial state for Omi and Winant is not simply the entity on which political demands are made. It is
also that political formation that receives its identity and contours from having archived the social movements. Building on the idea
that the racial state is the conglomerate of institutionalized responses to the sixties and seventies social movements, Omi and
Winant go on to argue that state institutions within the United States responded to political pressures of
antiracist movements by, in part, adopting policies of absorption.22 About absorption, they state: “Absorption
reflects the realization that many demands are greater threats to the racial order before they are
accepted than after they have been adopted in suitably moderate form.”23 What Omi and
Winant refer to as “absorption” we might understand as the gestures and routines of archival
power. Indeed, in its absorptive capacities, the state becomes a subarchive that “documents”
past struggles and thus achieves power through control of that broad assemblage of
“documents” known as “the student movements.” To speak through and with local culture
and difference and to absorb them, state and capital needed the assistance of the academy. In
point of fact, the academy was positioned prominently in this moment because of its historic task of representing national culture. In
the moment of the sixties— because of the student movements around race and gender—the U.S. academy would take on the
imperative of American literature. Put plainly, it would attempt to resolve the contradictions that govern and constitute the U.S.
nation-state. In the moment of the multinational firm’s emergence and capital’s explicit
engagement in local culture and difference, the academy would become the handbook on the
absorption and representation of those differences, the manual for state and capital’s
unprecedented deliberation. As such, the U.S. academy would become the model of archontic
power —using and assimilating texts to engage the problematic of “e pluribus unum.” In doing so,
U.S. higher education would become the capitol of archival power, training state and economy
in its methods of representation and regulation. Rather than the academy losing importance because of the attack
on national culture, the American academy and things academic would become the place where enfeebled
institutions might make sense of difference, its fortunes, and its disruptions.24 Things academic
would provide a new opportunity for power, one that would allow power to foster an entirely
new relation between academy, capital, and state. This new relation would revolve around the
very question promoted by the U.S. student movements, the question of minority difference—
how to understand it, how to negotiate it, how to promote it, and how to regulate it. This
question would inspire power to run a new archival errand. Put differently, we might say that the link
between the epistemological pressures brought about by social movements of the sixties and
seventies and the rise of global capital’s interest in local differences lies in the academy. The
entrance of local cultures and differences into epistemological representation would also inspire
and inform their entrance into law and commodification—into state and capital’s arenas of
representation. While this was the moment in which state and capital suffered a devastating rupture, this was also the period
in which those entities began to enjoy a new form of communicability with the academy. Through a reinvented discourse of
difference, power would inspire a new form of relationality between state, capital, and academy. The
academy—
transformed by insurgent modes of differences—would begin to educate state and capital into a
new type of awareness. The U.S. student movements would inspire power to focus its maneuvers around the keywords of
revolutionary upheavals—”minority autonomy,” “self-determination,” and “freedom.” In doing so, power would attempt to find
ways to make the articulation of difference consistent with power’s guidance rather than antagonistic to it. In their discussion of the
minority movements of the sixties, Omi and Winant argue: “In response to political pressure, state institutions adopt policies of
absorption and insulation. Absorption reflects the realization that many demands are greater threats to the racial order before they
are accepted than after they have been adopted in suitably moderate form.”25 We
might read their theorization of the
minority movements of the sixties as an example of the “economistic resource of an archive
which capitalizes everything, even that which ruins it or radically contests its power.”26 In the sixties
and thereafter, the archival propensities of power reached out to new horizons, attempting to
archive the presumably unarchivable components of antiracism, feminism, and so on. In doing so, power
would attempt to invest the radical aims of antiracist and feminist movements of the sixties and seventies
with another logic, capitalizing those movements and their ensigns, cataloging them in the very
institutions that those movements were contesting. In sum, relations of power would try to make
those movements and their demands into its reason for being.

Nihilism empowers violent conservatives like Trump – foresaking compromise

is the most dangerous, academic luxury.
Claudio 16, (assistant professor of development studies and southeast Asian studies at the
Ateneo de Manila University, Intellectuals have ushered the world into a dangerous age of
political nihilism, qz.com/721914/intellectuals-have-ushered-the-world-into-a-dangerous-age-
of-political-nihilism/)

On the surface, it would seem that intellectuals have nothing to do with the rise of global
illiberalism. The movements powering Brexit, Donald Trump and Third-World strongmen like Philippine
president Rodrigo Duterte all gleefully reject books, history and higher education in favor of railing
against common enemies like outsiders and globalization. And you’ll find few Trump supporters
among the largely left-wing American professoriate. Yet intellectuals are accountable for the
rise of these movements—albeit indirectly. Professors have offered stringent criticisms of neoliberal
society. But they have failed to offer the public viable alternatives. In this way, they have promoted a political
nihilism that has set the stage for new movements that reject liberal democratic principles of
tolerance and institutional reform. Intellectuals have a long history of critiquing liberalism, which relies on a
“philosophy of individual rights and (relatively) free markets.” Beginning in the 19th century, according to historian Francois Furet,
left-wing thinkers began to arrive at a consensus “that modern liberal democracy was threatening society with dissolution because it
atomized individuals, made them indifferent to public interest, weakened authority, and encouraged class hatred.” For most of the
20th century, anti-liberal intellectuals were able to come up with alternatives. Jean-Paul Sartre famously defended the Soviet Union
even when it became clear that Joseph Stalin was a mass murderer. French, American, Indian, and Filipino university radicals were
hopelessly enamored of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. The collapse of Communism changed all this. Some
leftist intellectuals began to find hope in small revolutionary guerrillas in the Third World, like Mexico’s
Subcomandante Marcos. Others fell back on pure critique. Academics are now mostly gadflies who
rarely offer strategies for political change. Those who do forward alternatives propose ones so
vague or divorced from reality that they might as well be proposing nothing. (The Duke University
professor of romance studies Michael Hardt, for example, thinks the evils of modern globalization are so pernicious that only
worldwide love is the answer.) Such
thinking promotes political hopelessness. It rejects gradual change
as cosmetic, while patronizing those who think otherwise. This nihilism easily spreads from the
classroom and academic journals to op-ed pages to Zuccotti Park, and eventually to the public at large.
For academic nihilists, the shorthand for the world’s evils is “neoliberalism.” The term is used to refer to a free market ideology that
forced globalization on people by reducing the power of governments. The more the term is used, however, the more it becomes a
vague designation for all global drudgery. Democratic politics in the age of neoliberalism, according to Harvard anthropologists Jean
and John Comaroff, is “something of a pyramid scheme: the more it is indulged, the more it is required.” They argue that our
belief that we can use laws and constitutional processes to defend our rights is a form of “fetishism” that
is ultimately “chimerical.” For the University of Chicago literary theorist Lauren Berlant, the democratic pursuit of
happiness amid neoliberalism is nothing but “cruel optimism.” The materialist things that people desire
are “actually an obstacle to your flourishing,” she writes. According to this logic, we are trapped by
our own ideologies. It is this logic that allows left-wing thinkers to implicitly side with British
nativists in their condemnation of the EU. The radical website Counterpunch, for example, describes
the EU as a “neoliberal prison.” It also views liberals seeking to reform the EU as “coopted by the
right wing and its goals—from the subversion of progressive economic ideals to neoliberalism, to the enthusiastic embrace of
neoconservative doctrine.” Across the Atlantic, Trump supporters are singing a similar tune. Speaking to a
black, gay, college-educated Trump supporter, Samantha Bee was told: “We’ve had these disasters in
neoconservatism and neoliberalism and I think that he [Trump] is an alternative to both those paths.” The
academic nihilists and the Trumpists are in agreement about a key issue: The system is
fundamentally broken, and liberals who believe in working patiently toward change are weak. For
the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “indifference” is the “the hallmark of political liberalism.” Since liberals
balance different interests and rights, Santos writes, they have no permanent friends or foes. He proposes that the world needs to
“revive the friend/foe dichotomy.” And in a profane way, it has: modern political movements pit Americans against Muslims, Britain
against Europe, a dictatorial government against criminals. Unfortunately, academic anti-liberalism is not confined to
the West. The Cornell political scientist Benedict Anderson once described liberal democracy in the Philippines as a “Cacique
Democracy,” dominated by feudal landlords and capitalist families. In this system, meaningful reform is difficult, since the country’s
political system is like a “well-run casino,” where tables are rigged in favor of oligarch bosses. Having
a nihilist streak
myself, I once echoed Anderson when I chastised Filipino nationalists for projecting “hope onto
spaces within an elite democracy.” Like Anderson, I offered no alternative. The alternative arrived
recently in the guise of the Duterte, the new president of the Philippines. Like Anderson and me,
Duterte complained about the impossibility of real change in a democracy dominated by elites
and oligarchs. But unlike us, he proposed a way out: a strong political leader who was willing to
kill to save the country from criminals and corrupt politicians. The spread of global illiberalism is unlikely to
end soon. As this crisis unfolds, we will need intellectuals who use their intellects for more than
simple negation—professors like the late New York University historian Tony Judt, who argued that European-style social
democracy could save global democracy. Failing that, we need academics who acknowledge that liberal
democracy, though slow and imperfect, enables a bare minimum of tolerance in a world beset
by xenophobia and hatred. For although academics have the luxury of imagining a completely
different world, the rest of us have to figure out what to do with the one we have.
2NC
 Faciality K
The affirmative’s focus on autonomy and identity serves to lock existence
within the normative organism and forecloses the actualization of non-being
and inorganic queer forces.
Claire Colebrook, 2009
“On the very possibility of queer theory” in “Deleuze and Queer Theory” edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, Edinburgh
University Press, p. 19-21

In political terms we can also distinguish iterative and positive repetition. For Butler, an individual does
not exist ex nihilo but can be a self only through an other which it repeats and modifies. So, for example, claiming to be a
queer subject might involve laying claim to certain normative practices – such as marriage and
gender – which would have the effect both of normalising the self by subjection to convention
and recognition. To a certain extent all politics is queer politics or the negotiation between the
degrees of repetition to which the self submits and the amount of deviation or difference
from normativity the self can effect. The queer is negative, defined as the difference from
those conditions of recognition and normativity which both enable and preclude autonomy.
Deleuze offers a quite different ontology and ethics of non-being. We are mistaken if we think of non-existence
as the failure, deviation or difference from the present and actual. We need to think of non-
being as positive, real and affirmative. Each existing, actualised individual is therefore the
actualisation of a non-being, which is better defined as ‘?-being’ or as a series of problems.
The queer self might be better thought of as a counteractualisation of the material repetitions
that make up ‘man’. We could see marriage in its current bourgeois normative and
heterosexual form as the solution to a certain problem or question: how the self forms its
gender, manages its desires and property, and organises its child-rearing. But the queer self
would repeat the problems that compose the self: counteractualising the present by drawing
on the pure past of the questions from which we have emerged. How might a self desire, what might count
as an object of one’s desire, what relations or events might the couplings of bodies produce and enable? Thus, whereas
Butler’s model of theory is to begin with the subject and then interrogate its conditions of
possibility in the tension between recognition and autonomy, Deleuze’s theory is one of positive
intuition. Here, we go beyond composed selves and problems to the affects and intensities from
which they are organized . For Butler a queer theory is one in which the conditions of being a subject are essentially queer
– one must claim to speak as a self, but can do so only through an other who is not oneself. At the same time, the condition for
being queer is being a subject: one must be recognised as having a claim to speak, be and exist. For Deleuze, the
conditions of theory require a going ‘beyond’ of the self and the organism. As long as we are
concerned with identity, with the repetition of who we are, we remain within constituted
matter and lived time. To think transcendentally we need to think the pure form of time and
difference, the pure intensities which each present repeats and actualises both in the present
and for all time. For Deleuze, then, the conditions of the queer and the conditions of the new are the same: to counter-
actualise the present, to repeat the intensities and encounters that have composed us, but not as they are for us. In quite
specific terms this requires a radical and distinct break from identity politics. As long as ethics
is defined as the maintenance of individuals as they are we restrict the potentiality of life to
one of its constituted forms. Only by thinking intensities beyond the human can we begin to
live ethically. Thus queer politics would involve neither recognition of the self, nor a refusal of
normativity, but the affirmation of the prepersonal. Rather than assessing political problems according to their
meaning and convention – or the relations that organise certain affects and desires – we need to think desires according to virtual
series, all the encounters that are potential or not yet actualised.

Liberal subject formation is predicated on the imperative uphold a peaceful

order that is enacted by the erasure of political difference through unending
war fought on the basis of justifying particular modes of life as normal.
Brad Evans, 2010

Evans is a Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds and Programme Director for
International Relations, “Foucault’s Legacy: Security, War, and Violence in the 21st Century,” Security Dialogue vol.41, no. 4, August
2010, pg. 422-424.

Imposing liberalism has often come at a price. That price has tended to be a continuous
recourse to war. While the militarism associated with liberal internationalization has already received scholarly attention (Howard, 2008),
Foucault was concerned more with the continuation of war once peace has been declared.4
Denouncing the illusion that ‘we are living in a world in which order and peace have been restored’ (Foucault, 2003: 53), he set out to

disrupt the neat distinctions between times of war/military exceptionalism and times of
peace/civic normality. War accordingly now appears to condition the type of peace that follows. None have been more ambitious in map-
ping out this war–peace continuum than Michael Dillon & Julian Reid (2009). Their ‘liberal war’ thesis provides a provocative insight into the lethality of
making live. Liberalism today, they argue, is underwritten by the unreserved righteousness of its mission.
Hence, while there may still be populations that exist beyond the liberal pale, it is now taken that

they should be included. With ‘liberal peace’ therefore predicated on the pacification/elimination
of all forms of political difference in order that liberalism might meet its own moral and political
objectives, the more peace is commanded, the more war is declared in order to achieve it: ‘In
proclaiming peace . . . liberals are nonetheless committed also to making war.’ This is the ‘martial
face of liberal power’ that, contrary to the familiar narrative, is ‘directly fuelled by the universal and pacific
ambitions for which liberalism is to be admired’ (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 2). Liberalism thus stands accused
here of universalizing war in its pursuit of peace: However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use
of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to

instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war in the pursuit of its own global project of emancipation,
the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal
peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 7). While Dillon & Reid’s
thesis only makes veiled reference to the onto- theological dimension, they are fully aware that its rule depends upon a certain religiosity in the sense
that war has now been turned into a veritable human crusade with only two possible outcomes: ‘endless war or the transformation of other societies
and cultures into liberal societies and cul- tures’ (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 5). Endless war is underwritten here by a new set of problems. Unlike

Clausewitzean confrontations, which at least provided the strategic comforts of clear

demarcations (them/us, war/peace, citizen/soldier, and so on), these wars no longer benefit
from the possibility of scoring outright victory, retreating, or achieving a lasting negotiated
peace by means of political compromise. Indeed, deprived of the prospect of defining enmity in
advance, war itself becomes just as complex, dynamic, adaptive and radically interconnected
as the world of which it is part. That is why ‘any such war to end war becomes a war without end. . . . The project of
removing war from the life of the species becomes a lethal and, in principle, continuous and
unending process’ (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 32). Duffield, building on from these concerns, takes this unending scenario a stage further to
suggest that since wars for humanity are inextricably bound to the global life-chance divide, it is now possible to write of a ‘Global

Civil War’ into which all life is openly recruited: Each crisis of global circulation . . . marks out a
terrain of global civil war, or rather a tableau of wars, which is fought on and between the
modalities of life itself. . . . What is at stake in this war is the West’s ability to contain and manage international poverty while maintaining
the ability of mass society to live and consume beyond its means (Duffield, 2008: 162). Setting out civil war in these terms inevitably marks an
important depar- ture. Not only does it illustrate how liberalism gains its mastery by posing fundamental questions
of life and death – that is, who is to live and who can be killed – disrupting the narrative that ordinarily takes
sovereignty to be the point of theoretical departure, civil war now appears to be driven by a
globally ambitious biopolitical imperative (see below). Liberals have continuously made reference to humanity in order to
justify their use of military force (Ignatieff, 2003). War, if there is to be one, must be for the unification of the species. This
humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favour. More recently it underwrites the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation, which has
become biopolitical (‘hearts and minds’) in everything but name (Kilcullen, 2009; Smith, 2006). While criticisms of these strategies have tended to focus
on the naive dangers associated with liberal idealism (see Gray, 2008), insufficient attention has been paid to the contested nature of all the tactics
deployed in the will to govern illiberal populations. Foucault returns here with renewed vigour. He understood that forms of war
have always been aligned with forms of life. Liberal wars are no exception. Fought in the name of
endangered humanity, humanity itself finds its most meaningful expression through the battles waged

in its name: At this point we can invert Clausewitz’s proposition and say that politics is the
continuation of war by other means. . . . While it is true that political power puts an end to war and establishes or attempts to
establish the reign of peace in civil society, it certainly does not do so in order to suspend the effects of power or to neutralize the disequilibrium
revealed in the last battle of war (Foucault, 2003: 15). What in other words occurs beneath the semblance of peace is far from politically settled:
political struggles, these clashes over and with power, these modifications of relations of force –
the shifting balances, the reversals – in a political system, all these things must be interpreted
as a continuation of war. And they are interpreted as so many episodes, fragmentations, and
displacements of the war itself. We are always writing the history of the same war, even when
we are writing the history of peace and its institutions (Foucault, 2003: 15). David Miliband (2009), without perhaps
knowing the full political and philo- sophical implications, appears to subscribe to the value of this approach, albeit for an altogether more committed
deployment: NATO was born in the shadow of the Cold War, but we have all had to change our thinking as our troops confront insurgents rather than
military machines like our own. The
mental models of 20th century mass warfare are not fit for 21st
century counterinsurgency. That is why my argument today has been about the centrality of politics. People like quoting Clausewitz
that warfare is the continuation of politics by other means. . . . We need politics to become the continuation of warfare by other means. Miliband’s
‘Foucauldian moment’ should not escape us. Inverting Clausewitz on a planetary scale – hence promoting the
collapse of all meaningful distinctions that once held together the fixed terms of Newtonian
space (i.e. inside/outside, friend/enemy, citizen/soldier, war/peace, and so forth), he firmly
locates the conflict among the world of peoples. With global war there- fore appearing to be an internal state of affairs,
vanquishing enemies can no longer be sanctioned for the mere defence of things. A new moment has arrived, in which the

destiny of humanity as a whole is being wagered on the success of humanity’s own political
strategies. No coincidence, then, that authors like David Kilcullen – a key architect in the formulation of
counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, argue for a global insurgency paradigm without too much

controversy. Viewed from the perspective of power, global insurgency is after all nothing more
than the advent of a global civil war fought for the biopolitical spoils of life. Giving primacy to counter-
insurgency, it foregrounds the problem of populations so that questions of security governance (i.e. population regulation) become central to the war
effort (RAND, 2008). Placing the managed recovery of maladjusted life into the heart of military strategies, it insists upon a joined-up response in which
sovereign/militaristic forms of ordering are matched by biopolitical/devel- opmental forms of progress (Bell & Evans, forthcoming). Demanding

in other words a planetary outlook, it collapses the local into the global so that life’s radical
interconnectivity implies that absolutely nothing can be left to chance. While liberals have therefore been at
pains to offer a more humane recovery to the overt failures of military excess in current theatres of operation, warfare has not in any

way been removed from the species. Instead, humanized in the name of local sensitivities, doing
what is necessary out of global species necessity now implies that war effectively takes place
by every means. Our understanding of civil war is invariably recast. Sovereignty has been the traditional starting point for any discussion of
civil war. While this is a well-established Eurocentric narrative, colonized peoples have never fully accepted the inevitability of the transfixed utopian
prolificacy upon which sovereign power increasingly became dependent. Neither have they been completely passive when confronted by colonialism’s
own brand of warfare by other means. Foucault was well aware of this his- tory. While Foucauldian scholars can therefore rightly argue that
alternative histories of the subjugated alone permit us to challenge the monopolization of
political terms – not least ‘civil war’ – for Foucault in particular there was something altogether
more important at stake: there is no obligation whatsoever to ensure that reality matches some
canonical theory. Despite what some scholars may insist, politically speaking there is nothing that is necessarily proper to the sovereign
method. It holds no distinct privilege. Our task is to use theory to help make sense of reality, not vice versa. While there is not the space here to engage
fully with the implications of our global civil war paradigm, it should be pointed out that since its biopolitical imperative removes the inevitability of
epiphenomenal tensions, nothing and nobody is necessarily dangerous simply because location dictates. With
enmity instead
depending upon the complex, adaptive, dynamic account of life itself, what becomes
dangerous emerges from within the liberal imaginary of threat. Violence accordingly can only be
sanctioned against those newly appointed enemies of humanity – a phrase that, immeasurably greater
than any juridical category, necessarily affords enmity an internal quality inherent to the species

complete, for the sake of planetary survival. Vital in other words to all human existence, doing what is
necessary out of global species necessity requires a new moral assay of life that, pitting the
universal against the particular, willingly commits violence against any ontological
commitment to political difference, even though universality itself is a shallow disguise for the
practice of destroying political adversaries through the contingency of particular encounters.
Necessary Violence Having established that the principal task set for biopolitical practitioners is to sort and adjudicate between the species, modern
societies reveal a distinct biopolitical aporia (an irresolvable political dilemma) in the sense that making life live – selecting out those ways of life that
are fittest by design – inevitably writes into that very script those lives that are retarded, backward, degenerate, wasteful and ultimately dangerous to
the social order (Bauman, 1991). Racism thus appears here to be a thoroughly modern phenomenon (Deleuze
& Guattari, 2002). This takes us to the heart of our concern with biopolitical rationalities. When ‘life itself’ becomes the principal

referent for political struggles, power necessarily concerns itself with those biological threats
to human existence (Palladino, 2008). That is to say, since life becomes the author of its own (un)making, the
biopolitical assay of life necessarily portrays a commitment to the supremacy of certain species
types: ‘a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to
define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a
threat to the biological heritage’ (Foucault, 2003: 61). Evidently, what is at stake here is no mere sovereign affair.
Epiphenomenal tensions aside, racial problems occupy a ‘permanent presence’ within the
political order (Foucault, 2003: 62). Biopolitically speaking, then, since it is precisely through the internalization of
threat – the constitution of the threat that is now from the dangerous ‘Others’ that exist within
– that societies reproduce at the level of life the ontological commitment to secure the subject,
since everybody is now possibly dangerous and nobody can be exempt, for political modernity
to function one always has to be capable of killing in order to go on living: Wars are no longer
waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the
existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter
in the name of life necessity; massacres have become vital. . . . The principle underlying the tactics of battle – that
one has to become capable of killing in order to go on living – has become the principle that defines the strategy of states (Foucault, 1990: 137). When
Foucault refers to ‘killing’, he is not simply referring to the vicious act of taking another life: ‘When
I say “killing”, I obviously do
not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing
someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political
death, expulsion, rejection and so on’ (Foucault, 2003: 256). Racism makes this process of elimination
possible, for it is only through the discourse and practice of racial (dis)qualification that one is
capable of introducing ‘a break in the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break
between what must live and what must die’ (Foucault, 2003: 255). While kill- ing does not need to be physically murderous,
that is not to suggest that we should lose sight of the very real forms of political violence that do take place in the name of species improvement. As
Deleuze (1999: 76) duly noted, when
notions of security are invoked in order to preserve the destiny of a
species, when the defence of society gives sanction to very real acts of violence that are
justified in terms of species necessity, that is when the capacity to legitimate murderous
political actions in all our names and for all our sakes becomes altogether more rational,
calculated, utilitarian, hence altogether more frightening: When a diagram of power abandons
the model of sovereignty in favour of a disciplinary model, when it becomes the ‘bio-power’ or
‘bio-politics’ of populations, controlling and administering life, it is indeed life that emerges as
the new object of power. At that point law increasingly renounces that symbol of sovereign privilege, the right to put someone to death,
but allows itself to produce all the more hecatombs and genocides: not by returning to the old law of killing, but on the contrary in the name of race,
precious space, conditions of life and the survival of a population that believes itself to be better than its enemy, which it now treats not as the juridical
enemy of the old sovereign but as a toxic or infectious agent, a sort of ‘biological danger’. Auschwitz
arguably represents the
most grotesque, shameful and hence meaningful example of necessary killing – the violence
that is sanctioned in the name of species necessity (see Agamben, 1995, 2005). Indeed, for Agamben, since one of
the most ‘essential characteristics’ of modern biopolitics is to constantly ‘redefine the
threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside’, it is
within those sites that ‘eliminate radically the people that are excluded’ that the biopolitical
racial imperative is exposed in its most brutal form (Agamben, 1995: 171). The camp can therefore be seen to be the
defining paradigm of the modern insomuch as it is a ‘space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any media- tion’
(Agamben, 1995: 179). While lacking Agamben’s intellectual sophistry, such a Schmittean-inspired approach to violence – that is, sovereignty as the
ability to declare a state of juridical exception – has certainly gained wide- spread academic currency in recent times. The field of international
relations, for instance, has been awash with works that have tried to theorize the ‘exceptional times’ in which we live (see, in particular, Devetak, 2007;
Kaldor, 2007). While some of the tactics deployed in the ‘Global War on Terror’ have undoubtedly lent credibility to these approaches, in terms of
understanding violence they are limited. Violence
is only rendered problematic here when it is associated with
some act of unmitigated geopolitical excess (e.g. the invasion of Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, use of
torture, and so forth). This is unfortunate. Precluding any critical evaluation of the contemporary
forms of violence that take place within the remit of humanitarian discourses and practices,
there is a categorical failure to address how necessary violence continues to be an essential
feature of the liberal encounter. Hence, with post-interventionary forms of violence no longer
appearing to be any cause for concern, the nature of the racial imperative that underwrites the
violence of contemporary liberal occupations is removed from the analytical arena.

Resentment Its a reactive force that locks the colonial object in an unending
circle of violence, makes antiracism and freedom impossible. One must affirm
life and the spirit of becoming to challenge resentment and the humanist values
which ground colonialism and racism.
Marriot 7 David, associate professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, Haunted Life: Visual culture and Black modernity, New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press, pg. 233-237
Fanon borrows this formulation from Nietzsche, in particular The Genealogy of Morals and The Will to Power. Nietzsche defines
"ressentiment" as developing in those "natures who are denied true reactions, those of deeds."!' Ressentiment psychology –
is distinguished by a consciousness of loss, by a failure
and this point is crucial both for Nietzsche and for Fanon's appropriation –
to integrate experiences of powerlessness, leaving this experience to remain in the memory as a
traumatic kernel, leading to an obsession with past racial injuries that poison the ability of the
self to function in the present or project an active future. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche defines
"Slave ethics are what] begins by saying no 110 to an "outsider," an "other," a non-self, and that no is its creative act.
This reversal of direction of the evaluating look, this invariable looking outward instead of inward, is a
fundamental feature of rancor. Slave ethics requires for its inception a sphere different from and
hostile to its own. Physiologically speaking, it requires an outside stimulus in order to act at all; all action is
reaction" (Nietzsche, The Birth, 170-171). The slave blames the other, or outsider, for his suffering, makes
him or her the symbol of evil and a phobic object. This response remains reactive. The slave does not act
on the basis of his or her sovereignty, but in opposition to the other's domination. Nietzsche argues that
ressentiment indicates a failure, not so much to accept responsibility for one's existence (Sartrean "bad faith"), but a
failure to affirm life as a spirit of becoming. Fanon terms it a slavish, reactive attitude toward the
future and the past. In this "pessimism of indignation" one assumes that one can do nothing
because one is wretched, and one blames someone else for one's wretchedness. This is why, in
Wretched of tlte Earth, Fanon argues that the first stages of spontaneous anticolonial violence are always reactive: "racism, hatred,
resentment," "the legitimate desire for vengeance," cannot sustain a war of liberation. 14 Such reactive
moments are linked to questions of time but in a negative sense, as examples of a reactive affirmation of history. It is precisely
because he recognizes racist historicity in these attitudes that Fanon's work is taken up with the problem of time and death. If the
limit set to black life is the significance conferred on presence by racism which voids all black life of value as life, with the result that
one cannot live it, racism also robs the black of his or her ability to live and so to die as a free subject. Spurned by history,
the attempts by blacks to reimmerse themselves in time have resulted in a turn toward allegory and myth.
These attempts are condemned because they restrict the life as lived to one held in abeyance, in suspension, a life
ossified either by its slavish reverence for the precolonial past or by its abject sacrificing of itself to the future to
come, the freedom always to come in eternity. Both attitudes are positings of finite being that refuse to tarry with death as the true
scandal of black historical experience and so become even less capable of resolving it. This is not to say that Fanon has lost faith in a
redemptive future, or that he wants to routinize and categorize such temporal ecstasies by representing death as life's categorical
commandment. Rather that, as in the letter to Tayeb, what matters is the life earned when it plunges into the inexplicable and
emerges from it; what matters is how we, like Orpheus, take up the cunning and creativity of ressentiment as a culture on the edge
of nothingness. Only by negotiating power and violence can we engage and reconfigure virtue for the modem polity (the "new
humanism" that emerges from the "tabula rasa" opened up by the colonized on the path toward revolution-a possibility
which is neither an end nor a beginning but an endless "tension of opening" between the twO).IS That is, death as
lawless violence is the predicament and possibility of who we are and might become, here, now, the tenses through which we
belong irreducibly to this time. This is also why Fanon rejects Sartrean, Hegelian, and other forms of determinate historicism, the
logic according to which everything that happens had to happen. Against dialectical logic – and its view that out of experience, no
matter how negative. something emerges – Fanon posits a black existential time in which what happened happens and keeps on
happening in ways that remain unforeseeable and unknowable but which nonetheless forces us to be responsible at the level of
ethics, politics, and will. Throughout Fanon's oeuvre, antihistoricism turns on the difficulty of naming and situating a black orphism
beyond identity and alterity, beyond loss and the annihilation of being. True anticolonial violence, if it is to go beyond such
Manichacism, must arrive at a teleological suspension of the ethical and so go beyond the spurious opposition between murder and
illegitimate right, or murder dressed up as political vengeance. Manichean violence is ressentiment, for liberation is not a higher
ethical law than murder and can only be justified in the pursuit of freedom, which is incommensurable with domination but
nevertheless implicated in its violence. Hence Fanon is not trying to ethically justify the violence of anticolonial war (as he is often
accused of doing), but trying to account for the use of violence in the revolutionary pursuit of freedom." Liberatory violence, in brief,
as one possible memory of the future; as one possible pathway through the unjust violences of the political world. Both the
conclusions to Black Skin, While Masks and Wretched of the Earth define that memory as the horizon of revolutionary hope and
politics. as a rupture of time without end but within time's workings. POl' this reason, I cannot accept Patrick Taylor's dircrnpuvc
opposition between Black Skin, White Masks as a work that ends with ethics over history, and Wretched of the Earth as a work that
moves from ethics to revolutionary history (Taylor. Narratives, 74-76). Such opposition misreads the conclusion to Black Skin, White
Masks, where Fanonwrites, "I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors" (230).
Antillean culture is a slave culture for Fanon, following Nietzsche, because its ressentiment
represents a cultural-
historico paralysis which has not yet become creative and so achieve that active forgetfulness of the past that
accompanies successful repression and defines a noble memory of the will. This peculiar anamnesis, which is the result of historically
distinct configurations of power, domination, and race war, reveals how, for Fanon, the traumas of cultural assimilation for the
colonial subject is already marked by historical forces and decisive events whose trauma cannot simply be dispelled by the time of
analysis or the methods of genealogy. 17 Slave ethics,
insofar as it is reactive and denies responsibility and
its ability to act, cannot achieve this cultural-historico transmutation. Through decolonization and violence
the colonized can break through the impasse of ressentiment and enter into history. The task for the colonized, Fanon implies, is to
risk the orphic "leap" into the "black hole" while also moving Out to the universal (199). One must move beyond the "absurd drama"
of colonialism dialectically. One must move to ethics from history because ethics is the affirmation of the radical transformation of
time, a decision to change both the meaning of the deathliness of black life and its sign of ressentiment. In the essay "West Indians
and Africans," Fanon writes, 'The task consists of removing the problem, puuing the contingent in its place, and leaving the
Martinican the choice of supreme values. One sees everything that could be said by envisaging this situation in accordance with the
Kierkegaardian stages. "18 These stages arc the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious, Fanon's turn to Kierkegaard is not, as Patrick
Taylor presents it, a move from ethics to history or, more accurately, inner morality to objective or ethical freedom. but a
recognition of how violence and law pervade each other, and of how ethics is an encounter with the violence of power and its
legitimation. The task is to move, not from values based on race to human values understood as transcending the old humanisms of
Europe, which formed the foundations of colonial racism, but to address the phantasmatic and racist underpinnings of value as such.
Fanon explicitly mentions Kierkegaard when discussing how law and violence remain implicated in the movement from ethics to
freedom in history. The slave's struggle for freedom cannot only be defined in ethical terms. On the other hand, it is naive to assume
that the decolonial world will exist beyond law and coercion. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon writes, "The former slave, who can
find in his memory no trace of the struggle for liberty or of that anguish of liberty of which Kierkegaard speaks, sits unmoved before
the young white man singing and dancing on the tightrope of existence" (22t). Because the slave has no memory of that "anguish of
liberty," the ethical and the historical condition of freedom remains unavowable. The slave remains a dumb witness to his own
violated singularity which he can neither comprehend, renounce nor test. Fanon says that "the
real leap consists in
introducing invention into existence" (229). One shows how the ethical is mediated by the promise and actuality of
such "invention" by becoming actively creative at the level of history. Acceptance of this coexistence does not "eliminate
... the ethical in oneself," but forces one to return to the ethical as the always potential encounter with the violence of the world as a
test of one's faith (Taylor, Narmtives, 76).

Static models of the world fail to encompass the free-flowing nature of forces -
enclosing our conditions of prosperity within linear states of existence.
Assemblage in contrast embraces the fluidity underpinning existence and
models “life” and “health” as descriptions of elements inorganic ability to be
interconnected and exist within a larger ecological webbing, enabling departure
from static beings in favor of the possibility within fluid becomings.
Leslie Dema, 2007

“’Inorganic, Yet Alive’: How Can Deleuze and Guattari Deal With the Accusation of Vitalism?”, Rhizomes - Cultural Studies in
Emerging Knowledge, ISSN 1555-9998, Issue 15.

[3] The best way to understand inorganic life is through Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the assemblage.
This concept is most thoroughly explained in the "Geology of Morals" chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. [4] For them the
"minimum real unit" of inorganic life "is not the word, the idea, the concept or the signifier, but
the assemblage." [5] Assemblages are the symbiotic or sympathetic co-functioning of
heterogeneous elements. They are formed through a rapport between partial objects that enter
into monstrous couplings, experimental alliances, unnatural participations, and rhizomatic
structures. [4] What does it mean to say that assemblages are the basic unit of inorganic life? Just as biologists once
spoke of life by appealing to organisms or species, Deleuze and Guattari wish to speak of life by
appealing to assemblages. Unfortunately this introduction is too brief a space in which to develop a proper exposition of
the rich concept of assemblages. I will offer a taste rather than a fully developed argument because, with all of their enthusiasm for
creating concepts and neologisms, Deleuze and Guattari have built their theory of inorganic life and assemblages upon a very
complicated system of their own invention. So, for example, theprocesses and parts that compose assemblages
are not 'like' organs. There is no equivalent to a heart that pumps blood or a chloroplast that
digests the sun. Instead, an assemblage is animated by coding and decoding,
deterritorializations, and lines of flight; it is composed through doubly-articulated connections between various strata; it
effectuates an abstract machine; its nonpersonal segments flow from a plane of consistency. There is a
rapport between parts, but no organs in the sense of parts subordinated to a whole. Wrought by
both actual and virtual dynamics, assembling is about the interruptions and connections of the flows of
the mechanosphere. There is no biosphere or noosphere, only the mechanosphere, which is to
say, the sphere of inorganic life. [5] Assembling involves no soul, no death, and no reproduction.
Assemblages do not produce more of their own kind; they do not belong to a kind; they are not sustained by an essence.
Assembled relations are infinitely more productive than conjugal relations. With organic life
reproduction arises from a single centre; DNA is passed on through conjugal coupling. But
organic reproduction runs into a puzzle when faced with sexual symbiosis; such is the case with
the orchid whose sexual organs are not directed to appeal to its own species, but to attract the
wasp, without which the orchid cannot reproduce. This forms the wasp-orchid assemblage
which operates via inorganic, rather than organic, life. Symbiosis is by no means limited to persistent and highly
specialized co-adaptations of two species; other assemblages may involve transgressions between different spheres. For example,
with ergonomics we see workers from the anthropomorphic strata involved with physical apparatuses such as chairs and keyboards
from the technological strata. Life
is diffused through symbiotic relations until it is no longer
recognizably linear and strictly organic: it is assembled inorganically. [6] Assembling is so simple. It
is the striking up of a rapport: "the assemblage is co-functioning, it is 'sympathy', symbiosis." [6] At least two parts find some basis of
attraction, a
method of working together, a shared stylistic technique. Assemblages are not alien or unusual structures;
they are types of interactive relationships with which we are already very familiar. [7] Among
friends, assemblages of sympathy form. Between you and your friend, what is there? Your friend has a
certain charm. She captures you with her "vital stammering," and this charm marks a "delicacy
of health." [7] Her own contingencies make her all the more alive, and the various subtle ways in which she is out of place turn
out to be opportunities for the two of you to meet. But where is your friend's charm? Is it found in her reactions to stories, her
slightly awkward gait, her insecurities, her attentiveness to others, or in the pride she feels regarding her own good taste? It is a
mistake to think of her charm as a tool of flattery or merely as a thing in her possession.
Charm "gives life a non-
personal power," it is what facilitates the rapport between the two of you; it is the formation of
assemblages that, as Deleuze and Guattari describe, involves an affirmation of chance: Charm is the source of life
just as style is the source of writing. Life is not your history—those who have no charm have no life, it is as though they are dead. But
the charm is not the person. It is what makes people be grasped as so many combinations and as so many unique chances from
which such a combination has been drawn. It is a throw of the dice which necessarily wins, since it affirms chance sufficiently instead
of detaching or mutilating chance or reducing it to probabilities. Thus through each fragile combination a power of life is affirmed
with a strength, an obstinacy, an unequalled persistence in the being. [8] Many are the ties that bind friends together, but not all
successfully assemble. Charm does not make you want to be 'like' your friend. Your friend's charm does not capture you through
identification; you donot want to imitate her mannerisms or step into her shoes. [8] Nor should we fall under the
false impression that sympathy is limited to human relations. There are certain methods that
are generalizable and applicable outside the social sphere. One such method is the logic of
becoming. When Deleuze and Guattari speak of A becoming B, its not a matter of A imitating or turning into B. Instead, it is a
matter of A becoming B at the very moment that B is itself taking a line of flight and becoming something else. When two
elements enter into a sympathetic becoming "it is not that the two are exchanged, for they are
not exchanged at all, but the one only becomes the other if the other becomes something yet
other, and if the terms disappear." [9] For example, Deleuze offers several memorable examples of sympathetic blocks
of becoming in which inorganic life unfolds: As Lewis Carroll says, it is when the smile is without a cat that man can effectively
become cat as soon as he smiles ... with Mozart's birds it is the man who becomes a bird, because the bird becomes music. Melville's
mariner becomes albatross when the albatross itself becomes extraordinary whiteness, pure vibration of white." [10] Never entirely
alive nor entirely dead, we always talk of health, the quality of life.
Assemblages do not die; they are most alive
when broken down; they live by continually breaking down. [11] Though it is possible that a line of escape
might turn into a line of death, the far more common threats are the various kinds of sickness and
destruction wreaked by excessive stratification or, alternatively, the lack of connectivity. Health
is not a mysterious force; it is a concrete and sympathetic struggling together; "we can only
assemble among assemblages." [12] Practical advice on becoming, or proliferating your desiring-machines, is offered by
Deleuze and Guattari in the terms of assembling: experiment with deterritorializing this bit; try to capture the substance
of expression from that strata; adopt a different speed into your abstract machine. According to
Deleuze and Guattari we engage with inorganic life at the level of assemblages, and the art of
living is the art of composing assemblages.
Our displacing of subjectivity enables the creation of spaces of queer identity –
these allow inhuman forces to come together into a cathartic gathering that is
necessary to found ethical ways of living.
Puar 10. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Women
& Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 19, No. 2, July 2009, pg. 168
Out of the numerous possibilities that ‘‘assemblage theory’’ offers, much of it has already begun to transform queer theory, from
Elizabeth Grosz’s crucial re-reading of the relations between bodies and prosthetics (which complicates not only the contours of
bodies in relation to forms of bodily discharge, but also complicates the relationships to objects, such as cell phones, cars,
wheelchairs, and the distinctions between them as capacity-enabling devices) (1994), to Donna Haraway’s cyborgs (1991), to
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘BwO’’ (Bodies without Organs – organs, loosely defined, rearranged against the presumed natural ordering
of bodily capacity) (1987). I
want to close by foregrounding the analytic power of conviviality that may
further complicate how subjects are positioned, underscoring instead more fluid relations
between capacity and debility. Conviviality, unlike notions of resistance, oppositionality,
subversion or transgression (facets of queer exceptionalism that unwittingly dovetail with
modern narratives of progress in modernity), foregrounds categories such as race, gender, and
sexuality as events – as encounters – rather than as entities or attributes of the subject.
Surrendering certain notions of revolution, identity politics, and social change – the ‘‘big
utopian picture’’ that Massumi complicates in the opening epigraph of this essay – conviviality instead always
entails an ‘‘experimental step.’’ Why the destabilization of the subject of identity and a turn to
affect matters is because affect – as a bodily matter – makes identity politics both possible and
yet impossible. In its conventional usage, conviviality means relating to, occupied with, or fond of
feasting, drinking, and good company – to be merry, festive, together at a table, with
companions and guests, and hence, to live with. As an attribute and function of assembling, however,
conviviality does not lead to a politics of the universal or inclusive common, nor an ethics of
individuatedness, rather the futurity enabled through the open materiality of bodies as a Place
to Meet. We could usefully invoke Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘‘encounter value’’ here, a ‘‘becoming
with’’ companionate (and I would also add, incompanionate) species, whereby actors are the
products of relating, not pre-formed before the encounter (2008, 16). Conviviality is an ethical
orientation that rewrites a Levinasian taking up of the ontology of the Other by arguing that there is no absolute
self or other,15 rather bodies that come together and dissipate through intensifications and
vulnerabilities, insistently rendering bare the instability of the divisions between capacity-
endowed and debility-laden bodies. These encounters are rarely comfortable mergers but
rather entail forms of eventness that could potentially unravel oneself but just as quickly be
recuperated through a restabilized self, so that the political transformation is invited, as Arun
Saldhana writes, through ‘‘letting yourself be destabilized by the radical alterity of the other, in
seeing his or her difference not as a threat but as a resource to question your own position in
the world’’ (2007, 118). Conviviality is thus open to its own dissolution and self-annihilation and less
interested in a mandate to reproduce its terms of creation or sustenance, recognizing that
political critique must be open to the possibility that it might disrupt and alter the conditions of
its own emergence such that it is no longer needed – an openness to something other than
what we might have hoped for. This is my alternative approach to Lee Edelman’s No Future, then,
one that is not driven by rejecting the figure of the child as the overdetermined outcome of ‘‘reproductive
futurism’’ (2004),16 but rather complicates the very terms of the regeneration of queer critique
itself. Thus the challenge before us is how to craft convivial political praxis that does not
demand a continual reinvestment in its form and content, its genesis or its outcome, the
literalism of its object nor the direction of its drive.
1NR
 Case
the aff is coextensive with U.S. domestic management of minority difference
and installs the ethos of U.S. expansionism into the heart of revolutionary
formations.
Ferguson 2012 [Roderick, Professor of African American and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, p. 20-25]

The motto and imperative “e pluribus unum” represents a logic that sits at the core of American government. In the national
debates of the time, race provided the overwhelming conditions by which the principle was tested and adjusted. Indeed, the
American Civil War symbolized a violent struggle over how to resolve a nation heterogeneous in terms of race, region, and ideology.
In the context of the nineteenth-century United States, the motto captures the fact that the American ethos was not simply defined
The American spirit
in terms of the abolition and expulsion of difference through slavery, genocidal wars, lynching, and rape.
was alsosecured in the question of how best to represent social differences and the communities
and people that presumablysymbolized those differences. As a motto and an edict, “e pluribus unum” connoted a
national struggle with difference in general and racial difference in particular. As Harris goes on to say, nineteenth-century literature
was the cultural form that addressed that motto directly and the racial conditions that contradicted it. It was the job of nineteenth-
century literature—and the work of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James—to
“reconcile the opposing interests of the one and the many.”5 Put simply, American literature was supposed to finish writing the
American nation-state by helping it resolve the paradox of the many and the one. In doing so, literature attempted to identify the
nation-state as a “writerly” formation, that is, one whose aim is to inscribe “the many” into the national body. As such, literature
worked to promote the archival functions of the American nation-state. In this regard, American culture would help to turn
American social institutions into archival economies. The nation’s reputation as a domain of resolution would only grow
internationally. As Eqbal Ahmad argues in “Political Culture and Foreign Policy,” the idea of the United States as a former colony that
threw off the yoke of its oppressors was so powerful in the Third World that “America served as an inspiration and an example.”6
The image as a place that resolved ideological and social differences persisted for national liberation movements in Africa and Asia
despite “more than a century of counter-revolutionary American interventions in the Third World.”7 The significance of the
UnitedStates’ reputation for settling conflicts over social and
ideological diversity would promote the emergence of neocolonial power relations in the post-World
War II moment and the rise of a mode of power built around minority recognition and legitimacy. To
this end, we may think of the 1950s and afterwards as historic moments in which power began to assume a new archival
significance. This was a period in which revolutions and liberation struggles throughout the world would test power’s archival
flexibility. As peoples in North America, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean were trying to secure a place, power would
work to place them. We get a glimpse at the archival tactics of power in Kwame Nkrumah’s description of the rise of neocolonial
formations. In Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, he writes, “Faced with the militant peoples of the ex-colonial
territories in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, imperialism simply switches tactics.”8 As Nkrumah argues, the
colonial apparatus would dispense with its paraphernalia and its representatives, ostensibly “‘giving’
independence to its former subjects, to be followed by ‘aid’ for theirdevelopment” (ibid.). But with
flags and officials gone, the colonial apparatus would begin to “[devise] innumerable ways to
accomplish objectives formerly achieved by naked colonialism” (ibid.). Hence, neocolonialism—or, as he puts
it, the very “modern [attempt] to perpetuate colonialism while at the same time talking about ‘freedom’”—was born
(ibid.). As former colonial modes of power transitioned into neocolonial ones, they achieved archival
heights, admitting recently held colonies into the domain of independence. The former colonies
were thus like documents gathered together into the library of modern nations. As such, these newly
minted nations were consigned to the location of sovereignty and coordinated according to the ideal
of freedom. Yet archiving those former colonies was also a kind of house arrest in which freedom
signified genres of subjugation and domiciliation. One of the ways in which this archontic power began
to domesticate demands for independence was through invitation rather than wholesale rejection. In
the context of neocolonialism, such invitations and acts of inclusion represented the mutation rather
than the annihilation of prior forms of power. As Nkrumah argues, “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State
which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic
system and thus its political policy is directed from outside” (ix). Neocolonialism would persuade by presumably conceding to the
efforts of self-determination by minoritized nations and peoples, by placing them within a presumably horizontal and modern
terrain. Hence, neocolonialism
was the moment in which the manifold strategies of conquest,
management, and regulation would take place within and through the outward appearance of
anticolonial independence and freedom. This was a form of power that had cultivated a solicitous rather than a
primarily dismissive manner. As the legendary nation that would admit new people under the banner of independence while
subjecting them to a new law whose borders would increase with every admittance, the United States would become—in
Nkrumah’s words—”foremost among the neo-colonialists” (239). The history and theorization of neocolonialism is important
inasmuch as it is one segment in a larger transformation of power—that is, power’s ability to incorporate formerly marginalized and
excluded subjects and societies, an ability signified through the extension of recognition and sovereignty for people who spent much
of their histories under colonial yokes. The
specific circumstances of neocolonialism are thus only a piece of
a more general mode of power that was developing in the days of independence. This mode would derive its
international character from its ability to select from insurgent practiceswhat it needed to carry
out its own hegemonic authority. A mode of power was
forming that would ingest various revolutionary formations and, in fact, build its strategies around
their dissection. The Management of Difference and the Management of the International A form
of power that would engage insurgency rather than run from it could only come from a context with a history like that of the United
States. In addition to being the legendary land of resolution, the United States for much of the world was the emblem of anticolonial
triumph. As Ahmad notes, “Americans had waged the first successful struggle against colonialism,” a fact that granted the United
States an “inexhaustible reservoir of goodwill” from colonized people.9 This image of the United States as a site of recognition for
national liberation struggles was part of the country’s archival economy and its promise to absorb marginalized constituencies. As a
nation-state, the United States proved adept at distributing recognition and legitimacy. As historian Greg Grandin argues, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s and 1940s seemingly represented the United States’ recognition of the
sovereign integrity of nations in Latin America,10 and during the 1960s the United States fashioned itself as the “anti-colonial power
in condemnation of British imperialism.”11 The United States’ status as the protector of national liberation and freedom was very
much at play during the Cold War era as well. As Mary Dudziak has famously shown, the federalgovernment’s support
of civil rights struggles within the country was part of its attempts to secure ideological and material status
as a global superpower.12 Through its support of civil rights, American democracy came to represent a
respect for and recognition of the international sovereignty of formerly subjugated
nations and the civil rights of domestic minorities. In its putative recognition of national liberation and civil rights,
the United States has had a very long history of representing anticolonial rights of sovereignty, a fact that made it fertile
ground for the rise of a mode of power organized around the absorption of heterogeneity. That mode
of power gained much of its inspiration and identity from the founding documents of the U.S. nation-state. As Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri argue, the genealogy of what we know and experience as contemporary globalization derives, in part, from the
principles of American federal government, namely, from the U.S. Constitution. According to them, the Constitution is imperial
because of the ways in which it designates social terrains as infinitely open and changeable, as items that can be forever reinvented
and rearticulated as parts of the American promise. Because of the imperial imperative of the U.S. Constitution, “The contemporary
idea of Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal U.S. constitutional project.”13 Inasmuch as the U.S.
constitutional project presumes and “[rearticulates] open spaces and [reinvents] incessantly diverse and singular relations,”14 it
incorporates a variety of social, national, and transnational formations. As such, the
constitutional project helped
to give birth to neocolonial formations and provided the juridical conditions for struggles around
race and gender in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In their discussion of the Fourteenth Amendment, for example,
Hardt and Negri argue that in addition to “[inaugurating] more than a century of judicial struggles over civil rights and African
American equality,” the amendment and the debate that occasioned it “[redefined] the space of the nation,” tying the debate over
slavery to the debates over new territories. As a clause that officially granted citizenship to former male slaves, the
Fourteenth
Amendment represented one of the first constitutional attempts to admit a marginalized
constituency into thelegal and ideological fabric of the nation, enrolling subjects differentiated by citizenship status,
corporeality, history, and language into a national body whose compatibility was dubious at best. Out of
the Fourteenth Amendment came a new ethical project for the American nation-state,
one thatwould try to administer difference for the expansion of national power and territory. In
their words, “The new nation could not but be the product of the political and cultural management of hybrid identities.”15 In
sum, the U.S. constitutional project
would give birth to twins—the modernidea of empire and the
modern idea of difference; under that ideological formation, the management of the
international would coextend with the management of diversity. As George Lipsitz has observed, a vast
range of social struggles has relied on the “social warrant” of the Fourteenth Amendment. Through it, immigrants and their children
would find “inclusion and religious liberty”; because of it, Asian Americans and Latinos would end “racist barriers against
immigration,” and with it, “women, workers, gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities” would challenge discrimination.16
Hence, many people credit the social movements around race and gender with finally ushering in the social warrants of the
Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, we may understand Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s classic observations in Racial Formations in
the United States within the context of the Fourteenth Amendment. They write: “The upsurge of racially based movements which
began in the 1950s was a contest over the social meaning of race…The racial minority movements were the first to expand the
concerns of politics to the social, to the terrain of everyday life.”17 Like Lipsitz, Omi and Winant also note the communicable nature
of certain political struggles: “New social movement politics would also prove ‘contagious,’ leading to the mobilization of other racial
minorities, as well as other groups whose concerns were principally social. As playwright David Edgar has noted, most of the new
social movements of the 1960s—student, feminist, and gay—drew upon the black struggle ‘as a central organizational fact or as a
defining political metaphor and inspiration.’”18 The Fourteenth Amendment would set the terms for participation within the nation
as well as the ideological and discursive parameters for struggles over equality. The amendment is one of the historical texts that
As
authorized subjects differentiated by race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, and ethnicity to contest their minoritized status.
an archival mechanism that worked to incorporate various political subjects, the amendment
helped to situate U.S. jurisprudence as one of the genealogicallandmarks for oppositional politics
within American society. Put simply, the Fourteenth Amendment inscribed itself on oppositional
maneuvers, threatening them with a domiciliation that could enlist them in power’s archive. If
the Fourteenth Amendment encouraged the expansion and management of the national
community and if that amendment became the grammar for future social struggles, then
our contemporary notions and practices of social justice and inclusion partly arise out of
and may often unwittingly foster that expansion and management. If power within the United States has
historically been based on the simultaneous management of the international and the socially heterogeneous, then it means that
minority politics within the United States have had to negotiate these various levels of management as well. The triumph of national
liberation and civil rights and the emergence of neocolonial social formations signified more than the ascendancy of the U.S. nation-
state. National liberation, civil rights, and neocolonialism should be understood as part of a larger social context that proclaimed the
command of a new mode of power, a mode that was composed of power’s new techniques of management, especially around
internationalism and minority difference, as well as its insinuation into political agency.