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***ANTI-BLACKNESS K: NCC’19****Quick Thank YouI wanted to thank the folks in varsity who opensource evidence. As a coach trying to help their novices learn everything there is to know about debate, and provide them with the tools to learn areas of the library that interest them, your opensource evidence made this file possible. I kept all the initials that were on those cards there so if you ever see a novices’ wiki page with your evidence, you can see the educational reach your scholarship has had for younger debaters in the community. Thank you so much. -Jackie LinksArms ControlArms control perpetuates techno-racism by appealing to selective technological determinism and racial reductionism – this makes pre-emptive arms build-up and war inevitable in the midst of endless negotiations, denial, and western ethnocentrismMathur 18 – Ritu: Assistant Professor, nominated twice for the Bernard Brodie Prize (2012 and 2014) for outstanding research contributions in the field of International Relations and security studies.Ritu Mathur, September 2018, “Techno-Racial dynamics of denial & difference in weapons control,” Asian Journal of Political Science, DOI: 10.1080/02185377.2018.1515640 // ~kwudjwa~ NCC Packet 2019This paper introduces the concept of ‘techno-racism’ to bring attention to the complex interplay of racial and technological considerations in the everyday practices of arms control and disarmament. In developing the concept of ‘techno racism’ this paper draws upon the writings of scholars such as Michael Adas (1989), Gabrielle Hecht (2012), Roh, Huang, and Niu (2015). The concept of techno-racism has to be historically grounded to encourage careful deliberation on practices of racial reductionism and technological determinism with regard to weapons. The deployment of technoracial discourses for political purposes can be traced from the late nineteenth century to the present with regard to weapons. The differences in weapons technology between different cultures is often reinforced with practices of racial reductionism constituting a contested hierarchy in the international order. The power of these technoracial discourses emphasizing and de-emphasizing racial reductionism and technological determinism subject to political considerations respectively has an effect on the outcome of intersecting dynamics of difference and dynamic of denial in practices of arms control and disarmament. A growing intensity of racial reductionism and technological determinism in discourses on difference and denial can generate destructive violence. It is therefore pertinent to pay attention to the growing circulation of these powerful discourses in contemporary practices of security. Thus empowered with this succinct understanding of the concept of techno-racism, this paper begins by first exploring the ‘dynamic of difference’ with help of other scholars in International Relations with particular emphasis on consideration of technology as a significant ‘criteria for comparison’ between the Orient and the Occident (Adas, 1989). This is followed by an exploration of the circulating ‘dynamic of denial’ of the Global South’s contribution towards weapons regulation and prohibition and the responsibility of the West to meet its obligations under the existing Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). These intersecting dynamics of difference and dynamic of denial then help set the stage for remembering Hiroshima as the ‘techno-racial line’ between the West and the Rest. This helps produce critical reflections on the possibilities and limits of nuclear exceptionalism and nuclear allergy in addressing the problem of weapons and the need for more alternative humanitarian discourses inclusive of the practices of Global South in weapons regulation and prohibition.Dynamic of difference In reimagining the West and articulating the problem of difference or heterology in international relations, scholars contend that ‘difference is marked and contained as international difference’ with the emergence of territorially bounded modern sovereign states that ‘defines the problem of difference principally as between and among states’ (Naeem & David, 2004). It is claimed that the insistence on the maintenance of order in the international system generates a ‘pervasive suspicion of difference’ as a source of disorder, degeneration and armed conflict. The ‘problem of difference emerges and intensifies under modern conditions of relative equality, often leading to the reassertion of (illicit or informal) forms of social hierarchy’ and the marking of others as inferior, dependent and threatening (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 23). The doubt and anxiety generated with the discovery of difference is to be contained by locating it ‘at some distance from the self’ and insisting on structural uniformity. These managerial exercises compound the problem of difference by their failure to account for the injuries suffered as a result of a violent and exploitative colonial practices of imperialism. Barkawi and Stanski (2012) further suggest that war among states is ‘a difference of opinion pursued through violent means’ (Barkawi & Stanski, 2012, pp. 2–3) It is the act of splitting of inside/outside that ‘deflect (s) our responses to difference in the direction of ‘putrefying hatred’ and constitutes the ‘political and ethical limits and possibilities of modern life’ (Naeem & David, 2004, pp. 44–45). These conditions of sovereign political community foster ‘ethically limited and tragic interactions of these separate states’ (Naeem & David, 2004, pp. 44–45). The tragic interactions during war entail ‘recognition as well as Othering’ through war propaganda (Porter, 2013). But such propaganda exercises are often undertaken as preliminary measures prior to the catalytic event that leads to the outbreak of actual war. This othering takes place through deployment of techno-racial stereotyping. It is differences in technology and race that are emphasized to produce stereotypes. John W. Dower (1986) argues that ‘portraits of the enemy’ are sketched through ‘gross simplification and reductionism’ generating two forms of stereotyping (Dower, 1986, p. 30). The ‘first kind of stereotyping could be summed up in the statement: You are the opposite of what you say you are and the opposite of us, not peaceful but warlike, not good but bad … In the second form of stereotyping, the formula ran like this: you are what you say you are, but that itself is reprehensible’ (Dower, 1986, p. 30). Postcolonial scholarship has probed at length into these cultural encounters to expose the psychology that accompanies techno-racial stereotypes of Orientalism and Occidentalism. A ‘dehumanizing picture of the West’ is painted through the prejudiced practices of Occidentalism (Buruma & Margalit, 2004). Practices of Occidentalism regard the West with ‘loathing’ as a ‘“machine civilization”, coldly rationalist, mechanical, without a soul’ (Buruma & Margalit, 2004, pp. 31, 21, 19). Occidentalism is often ‘seen as the expression of bitter resentment toward an offensive display of superiority by the West’ (Buruma & Margalit, 2004, p. 91). Yet there is also a desire for ‘Western knowledge for practical matters, such as weaponry’ (Buruma & Margalit, 2004, p. 39). An occidentalist exhibits awareness that it is only through practices of ‘development and modernization’ that it is possible to make any allowance for any possibility of regeneration and redemption of the Other (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 49). But ‘the problem of radical modernizers is how to modernize without becoming a mere clone of the West’ (Buruma & Margalit, 2004, p. 39). This resistance to becoming a clone of the West is because ‘the mind of the West in the eyes of the Occidentalists is a truncated mind, good for finding the best way to achieve a given goal, but utterly useless in finding the right way’ (Buruma& Margalit, 2004, p. 76). Buruma and Margalit assert that, ‘the mind of the West is often portrayed by Occidentalists’ as a: mind without a soul, efficient, like a calculator, but hopeless at doing what is humanly important. The mind of the West is capable of great economic success, to be sure, and of developing and promoting advanced technology, but cannot grasp the higher things in life, for it lacks spirituality and understanding of human suffering (Buruma& Margalit, 2004, p. 75). There is also an acute awareness that ‘the overt language of race … superseded by the new development of hierarchy of modernity’ does not conceal a ‘link’ that ‘could be inferred by the more privileged observer standing in the transatlantic world’ (Jones, 2010). In an effort to generate critical self- reflexivity on practices of Orientalism and Occidentalism there has been a proliferation of discourses on ‘strategic Orientalism’, ‘techno Orientalism’ and ‘military Orientalism’ as discussed below. Keith Krause and Andrew Latham (1998) argue that practices of ‘strategic orientalism’ constitute the ‘foundation of Western security culture’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, p. 41). They assert that strategic orientalism is premised on the ‘pervasive and axiomatic belief that the West (or occasionally the United States) as a civilization has a special role to play in global security affairs’’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, pp. 41, 37). This is based on ‘a reading of the politico-strategic objectives and purposes of Third World states that is informed more by Western fears and prejudices than by the realities of politics in these states’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, p. 38). The deep-rooted fear of the attacking Asian hordes and their ability to industrialize and develop sophisticated weapons reinforces twenty-first century concerns about the ‘Rising East’. This ‘phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo-or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse’ is understood as ‘techno-Orientalism’ (Roh et al., 2015, p. 2). Practices of techno-Orientalism driven by ‘imperial aspirations’ and ‘appetites of consumerist societies’ are ‘infused with the languages and codes of the technological and futuristic’ and in ‘digital spaces abound with reinscribed racial tropes and stereotypes; these are sites in which racialization is more likely reinforced than challenged’ (Roh et al., 2015, p. 14). Scholars developing the concept of techno-Orientalism observe its ‘growing prevalence in the Western cultural consciousness’ and suggest that the ‘US techno Orientalist imagination has its roots in the view of Asian body … as a form of expendable technology’ (Roh et al., 2015, pp. 7–11). Nevertheless they insist that the scope of techno-Orientalism is ‘expansive and bi-directional’ and ponder on the ‘danger that Asian and Asian American creators … might internalize techno Orientalist patterns and uncritically replicate the same dehumanizing model’ (Roh et al., 2015, pp. 3, 7). But unlike strategic Orientalism and techno-Orientalism, Military Orientalism is described as an exercise undertaken to investigate the mental baggage of Western consciousness accumulated from an interest in ‘non-Western warfare’ (Porter, 2013, pp. 16–17). The endeavor of military Orientalism is to unpack the ‘range of assumptions and myths through which Westerners gaze on the military East and engage in a critical dialogue with our own preconceptions’ (Porter, 2013, pp. 16–17). It encourages Westerners to voice their own ‘fears about themselves, their survival, identity and values, through different visions of non-Western warfare’ (Porter, 2013, p. 21). Military Orientalism issues a warning against reducing military history to a morality play (Porter, 2013, p. 75). But it is open to the idea that our common experiences of suffering can help cultivate a ‘source of critical self-reflection to perhaps nurture some understanding of the ‘intimacy of the relationship’ (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 187; Nandy, 1983). In investigating the intimacy of a relationship it might be possible to glean and ‘retrieve recessive images and practices’ that have been historically constituted through a network 4 of social relations and processes (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 191). These might present creative opportunities to move beyond ‘policing boundaries of self as an exclusive and homogenous space’ and instead ‘appreciate and claim the self that exists as part of the other beyond those boundaries’ (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 204). Porter insists on ‘the interactive and power-political nature of war, which has a culture of its own that can change all parties to a conflict’ (2013, p. 55). Porter claims that, ‘paradoxically, war can drive cultures closer together’ (2013, p. 33). This is because, ‘war … is not simply a clash of Others, made possible by an ignorant horror of difference. The warrior looks out at the enemy and sees men who are, in crucial respects, recognizably like himself’ (Porter, 2013, p. 34). He also argues that an engagement with, ‘the foreign “Other” can be treated as a superior model to inform self-examination’ (2013, p. 108). But this hopeful promise of Military Orientalism has not stemmed the tide of populist discourses deploying the dynamic of difference between ‘The West and the Rest’ in the aftermath of the Cold War to wage and perpetuate a global War on Terror. On the contrary it is possible to argue that there is deliberate and contingent deployment of a ‘decivilizing rhetoric that blends irrational, aggressive, rigid, paranoid and exceptionalist discourses to demonize Other-ness’ and give ‘unwarranted authority and autonomy’ to ‘militarist and imperialist discourses of national security’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 670). There is ‘sustained use of decivilizing imagery’ that ‘represents the United States as a virtuous nation reluctantly but legitimately fulfilling its divine mandate to use civilized reason and superior force’ vis-a vis ‘nuclear capable and aspiring nations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East’ depicted in a ‘racist, sexist language that reproduces colonial ideology. As such it rejects the authority and legitimacy of these nations as potential possessors of nuclear weapons and solidifies continued dominance by the United States of the nuclear strategic environment’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 685). The strength of these populist discourses reinforcing a dynamic of difference and denial is exhibited with the contemporary ‘malpractice’ of the Trump administration to not respect the nuclear deal negotiated with Iran (Kimball, 2018). Nuclear weapons have long been regarded as ‘a new technological deity’ and ‘a divinely offered gift that endorsed American exceptionalism and imbued its creators with God-like power and the mission to restore order and justice in a fallen world.’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 677). Gabrielle Hecht (2012) defines nuclear exceptionalism as ‘insistence on an essential nuclear difference – manifested in political claims, technological systems, cultural forms, institutional infrastructures, and scientific knowledge’ and insists ‘nuclear exceptionalism could be made, unmade, and remade’ as ‘for all efforts at making nuclear things exceptional, there were opposing attempts to render them banal’ (Hecht, pp. 6– 8). It is important to bear this in mind as this pernicious dynamic of difference and exceptionalism becomes even more acute with current US President Donald Trump’s everyday populist declarations. He is on record for stating that the US will be at the ‘top of the pack’ ‘until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes’ (Holland, 2017). In his recent visit to Poland ‘to summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization’ Trump (2017) claims ‘there are dire threats to our security and our way of life’ and argues, ‘the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.’ There is little doubt in his mind of the ‘triumph’ of the West (Holland, 2017). It is therefore helpful to pause in this tumultuous ‘history of the present’ and suggest that ‘every identity owes a debt to alterity’ (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 8). Thus it is interesting to observe how the existing literature on ‘dynamic of difference’ between Orientalism and Occidentalism has expanded its arsenal with a more complex conceptual apparatus of Strategic Orientalism, Techno Orientalism and Military Orientalism to helps us grasp the everyday practices of techno-racial dynamic of differences that cultivate and nurture techno-racial stereotypes. These stereotypes more often than not dictate modes of behavior that make the Other ‘a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed … an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only’ (Schmitt, 2007). It is this ‘dynamic of difference’ with its persistent desire to annihilate the Other, makes one wonder, whether it is not a complementary sub-text for an increasingly alarming and growing superstructure of a ‘dynamic of denial’ in weapons control? A dynamic of denial so petulant that it casts its shadow in celebrating the recent success of a Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty (2017). Dynamic of denial A landmark Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty was agreed upon by 122 countries on July 7, 2017. This significant agreement did not receive much coverage by the press in the US, leading Hugh Gusterson (2017) to question: ‘The nuclear weapons ban treaty (not) in the news?’ Gusterson further observes how the Washington Post ‘undercut the nuclear weapons ban story by shrinking it to postage stamp scale’ while ‘the New York Times story renders almost invisible the 122 countries, mostly from the Global South, that signed the treaty.’ He notes how ‘one hundred and twenty-two largely non-Western countries negotiated and signed the treaty, but almost all the talking in the New York Times is done by Americans and Europeans. If we want to know what those black and brown diplomats were thinking, we will have to look somewhere other than the New York Times.’ This taking to task by Gusterson of US mainstream newspapers that ‘marginalize certain stories or frames them in ways that neutralize and undercut them’ is not an unusual exercise. Scholars such as Dan Plesch (2016) and Chris Smith (1984) too have been writing to contend that within the discipline of International Relations and its leading academic journals there is a neglect of the contribution of Global South towards arms control and disarmament (Plesch, 2016, pp. 1203–1218; Smith, 1984, pp. 892– 910). To quote Dan Plesch (2016) there is ‘an intellectual gap in which the Global South’s role in setting the disarmament agenda and shaping UN-backed policy responses to disarmament issues have gone unnoticed’ (Plesch, p. 1204). Chris Smith (1984) observes, ‘Despite the numerous difficulties of ‘on-site’ disarmament research and activism, it does not follow that the Third World is a cultural or intellectual desert in the field of armament or disarmament’ (Smith, 1984, p. 908). An explanation for this neglect is grounded in myriad suggestions. Chris Smith (1984) argues, ‘the problem stems from an insufficient appreciation of the responsibility of the North for the shambolic state of affairs in the Third World’ (Smith, 1984, p. 895). He insists that the ‘the legacy of colonialism’ and practices of Cold War rivalry among the superpowers ‘conditioned the political and strategic environment in which the poorer nations of the world are expected to survive and develop’ (Smith, 1984, pp. 895, 902). Dan Plesch concurs to suggest, ‘the Global South experienced the military might of European colonial designs … the South experienced the damage and suffering caused by heavy weaponry’ (2016, p. 1209). He further notes how during the Cold War: Southern countries in this period are usually seen in terms of their affiliation with either Western or Eastern bloc. Following this logic, their role in the conduct of world politics merely reflected the interests of their affiliated blocs and not the pursuit of separate objectives, especially with regard to disarmament. (2016, p. 1205) It is further suggested that in a constant struggle to appear modern, ‘advanced military technology is inextricably bound up with images of national strength and nation-building’ and an ‘advanced defence posture is considered a definitive hallmark of modernity and development’ (Smith, 1984, p. 902). This has fostered a ‘patron-client relationship’ between the North and the South leading to transfer of arms and militarization of the South consolidating a ‘hierarchically organized system of states’ (Smith, 1984, p. 895). This is further augmented with Smith’s observation, Some of the stronger developing countries have attempted to build an indigenous armament production base to move away from dependency and reduce foreign exchange costs. But none to date have defined their needs in relation to what an indigenous capability can be expected to deliver. The result is a continuing demand for state-of-the art military technology, a failure to match the rate of technical change in the North, the growth of a capital intensive industry and an overall polarization of development or a reversion to dependency in the form of continuing licensed production (1984, p. 896). Despite this struggle for modernity and armament, Plesch insists that ‘the Global South sought to bring the North to the disarmament table’ (2016, p. 1209). He proceeds to argue: Indeed, from the outset the Global South developed its own conception of disarmament issues partly based on a sense of military vulnerability vis –a-vis the North; on a common understanding that their fate, in the event of a nuclear war, was intrinsically linked as none of them could have escaped the consequences of nuclear explosions … . this was notably reflected by the first Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) statement in 1961 and its emphasis on general and complete disarmament. (2016, p. 1206) These efforts appear to be stymied with persistent practices of ‘nuclearism’ and codification of ‘nuclearity’ in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (Hecht, 2009; Lifton & Falk, 1991). Bryan C. Taylor argues that ‘nuclearism’ as a ‘hegemonic condition’ ‘enabled hardline militarists to continue their call for modernizing the US nuclear arsenal and for resisting further arms control and reduction’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 685). For example, Matthew Kroenig (2013), argues that there is no evidence that reduction in the size of the US nuclear arsenal has slowed or reversed proliferation and suggests: Some advocates argue that many states signed the NPT only because it mandates cuts to existing nuclear arsenals, but in fact the NPT does not require cuts or disarmament. It simply requires all states to ‘pursue negotiations in good faith’ on measures relating to disarmament. So though the United States can by all means pursue negotiations, it should not come to a deal that further reduces its nuclear stockpile until the world has been made safe for disarmament---and that, unfortunately, will not happen anytime soon (Kroenig, 2013, pp. 46–47). Thus there is a strong denial that the ‘“NPT’s constitutionalism” was an attempt at reconciling the contrasting rights and obligations of the nuclear haves and have–nots’ (Mathur, 2016). This problem of trenchant nuclearism is compounded with contentious nuclearity’ to signal ‘how places, objects, or hazards get designated as “nuclear”’ and this designation carries ‘high stakes’ and a constant and escalating fear that ‘nuclearity might escape the control of the “rational North” (Hecht, 2012, pp. 3–4, 10). Gabrielle Hecht (2012) wonders what ‘global nuclear development meant for local communities in the so called third and fourth worlds’ (Hecht, p. ix)? He notes ‘how places, objects, or hazards get designated as “nuclear”--- has often been contentious’ and ‘in the Western imagination, Africa remains the “dark continent” mysterious and politically corrupt--- the perfect source for black-market nuclear goods’ (Hecht, 2012, p. 3). Thus, given these persistent practices of denial and nonchalance by the West towards their obligations under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), ‘the clandestine struggle for nuclear weapons technology … stems from the fact that every infringement and erosion of the NPT is met with a collective blast of anger from the international community’ rendering ‘the nuclear issue’ an ‘extremely emotive question in many Third World countries’ (Smith, 1984, p. 903). But despite the emotiveness of these issues, Plesch notes how, ‘Initiatives of the Global South in disarmament, if acknowledged at all, are pictured as background noise coming from a crowd being mildly dissatisfied about the status quo and whose expectations are to be managed rather than taken into account by the North’ (2016, p. 1205). This managerial cynicism is further reinforced by ‘the persistence of tensions and armed conflicts among countries in the Global South’ and their ‘pursuit of influence and security through accumulation of hard power’ including ‘covert WMD programs’ (Plesch, 2016, p. 1213). As developing countries like India, Pakistan, North Korea go nuclear their: rhetorical adoption and practical rejection of disarmament compromised credibility and led to the obvious charges of hypocrisy. What was meant to be a global disarmament effort led by the Global South in order to bring nuclear powers of the North to reverse their destructive course of action turned out to be a disarmament menu from which the nuclear powers in the South could pick and choose their favorite disarmament topic and disregard others’ (Plesch, 2016, pp. 1213–1214). Thus, claims of ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘nuclear apartheid’ are exchanged zealously and marginalization and neglect of the Global South’s contributions towards arms control and disarmament persist. In recent years a few studies have been undertaken to address this neglect (Abraham, 2006, 2010; Biswas, 2001; Beier, 2002; Stavrianakis, 2011; Mathur, 2016). Notable among them are the works of Itty Abraham (2006, 2010) and Biswas (2001) exploring India as a postcolonial state that resorts to science and secrecy in the making of the atomic bomb and the struggles of the global South in challenging the NPT respectively (Abraham, 1998; Biswas, 2014). But these particular historical and geographical trajectories are not enough to deny that this intellectual amnesia towards the contributions of the Global South in addressing the problem of weapons is dangerous. It is suggested that a ‘gradual drift towards an ethnocentric view of disarmament’ is taking root (Smith, 1984, 909).CooperationLeveraging international relations to resolve crises is complicit in the sovereignty of colonial anti-blackness – this relies on the fear of the unbounded futurity of race leading to endless productions of extinction and ethical contradictionsAgathangelou 16 – Anna: associate professor in polisci at York university Toronto and former fellow of the Program of Science, Technology and Society, J.F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard. NCC Packet 2019The convention of repetition (e.g. the Chinese are smarter than us; Obama is stupid) structure Trump’s talk and is supposed to embody a fluidity of progress in the creation and maintenance of the American exceptionalist ethos. However, any genre that does not take seriously the colonial and slavery, and not as ‘singular event[s]’ but rather as ‘singularit[ies] of antiblackness’ (Sharpe 2016: 106) accepts unthinkingly the practices of progress used to justify imperialist violence worldwide. This progressive and linearly punctuated narrative is part of an understanding of a particular configuration of power that we have come to understand as empire. In this way, particular figures – rapists, the other, the backward Muslim, the Pocahontas – came to matter in the US election. Simply stated, they are vital to the emergent notion of the ‘extinction’ of whiteness and the legitimate heirs of white imperialism. What do we do if racism/sexism fall out of time and no longer register as vital figurations of power in the contemporary formation of neo-liberalism? What happens to decolonial theory and decolonial studies around their temporal objects? In my view, writing of any kind, whether in world politics or IR, ought to aid in the critique of the genocidal drive of such propounded American bleached and masculinised exceptionalisms which evade the time(s) of the new transformed state whose re-distributional activities have become marginalised whereas its security and prosperity as well as its military arms have become strengthened. Jn this short conclusion, first, I argue that time is pivotal in our understanding of the co-production of the colonial and slavery and the global (i.e. a Kafkaesque ‘penal colony’). Cutting through the notion of the social contract as articulated and imagined by Hobbes, I read for a temporal boundedness that itself cannot be resolved without a Christian and religious arrival of heaven on earth (Agamben 2015). Second, I argue that a white destiny of whites, blacks and people of colour is itself a structuring event, demanding an endless deferral and a refusal of a history whose possibility depends on a racialised and slave contract. Such a history becomes possible by constantly orienting the subject of colour, the black thing or the flesh and its hieroglyphics (i.e. ‘lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures’) as Spillers (1987: 67) tells us, toward a post-racial future, all the while articulating blackness as genderless (i.e. the matter of no time upon which violence can happen with impunity).1 On the one hand, this flesh is ‘violently inscribed with’ and yet ‘left violently unthought by culture’ and outside history’s time. This violence ‘inscribed on flesh is relegated to a “lower level in the hierarchy of memories”’ (Danylevich 2016: 2). Those thus who are historically put outside time cannot make such teleological claims, especially in a colony with a peculiar juridico-techonological content, the penal apparatus, the ‘machine’ or ‘installation’ which is ‘so self-enclosed’ that no single part of it could possibly be altered (Kafka 1992 [1914]: 11). And yet, if it was really ‘so self-enclosed,’ surely it would not require the work we have seen over the past year; here, I am thinking of the apparently compulsive reiteration of the catch phrase ‘making America great again’ and ‘this is our last chance’. Third, I conclude by looking at the authors of the special issue and their interventions into a decolonial which is important for ‘fugitive justice’ (Best and Hartman 2005: 3), taking it to mean a rupture of the structuring events of teleological notions of genocide and violence as part of progress, including the ways neo-liberal policies are being built on sexism and racism that set as its limit the re-investment in the security, prosperity, and military arm of the state and the notion of redistribution for whites only. Time and temporality: the slave social contract Althusius, Spinoza, Locke, and, even more emphatically, Rousseau, commenced and continued to talk about a social contract among independent men, not a Hobbesian slave contract between men and a sovereign master. From contract among free men, all things might emerge, including basic law itself. For the first time, man seemed to be offered a prospect for jumping out of his evolutionary history. Man, in concert with his fellows, might change the very structure of social order. (Buchanan 1975: 147-8, cited in Wagner-Tsukamoto 2010: 291) In the above comment, Buchanan takes social conflict (the ‘Hobbesian jungle’, ‘Hobbesian anarchy’) as a way of opening up a conversation about the racialisation and genderisation of the social contract. Much of the conversation on Hobbesian jungle and Hobbesian anarchy itself is marked with certain inscriptions of a notion of time and a history that is a fiction systematically co-produced to keep certain lives secure and others not. For instance, keeping in place the plantation’s central position in the neo-liberal market requires a fictional notion of history that masks the ongoing violence (i.e. on black flesh as ‘zero degree’ and zero time of ‘social conceptualization that that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse’ (Spillers 1987: 67) as inherent to the metamorphoses of the Southern agricultural economies into industrialised ones. The transition of the Global North into the economic giant of the world required an equally fictional notion of history about the central position of the colonial within its midst and in the rest of the world. This evasion of the notion of time, the problematic mystification of time, and its antithesis to eternity are mutually enforced in the relationship between problems of knowledge and problems of social order. There are certain differences in how concerns about time are articulated and embodied in the concepts of the international, such as ‘state of nature’, ‘social contract’, ‘balance of power’, ‘containment,’ and ‘order’ (Agathangelou and Killian 2016: 7). A reading of IR scholarship as lacking the desire or as unable to theorise time naturalises or, better yet, evaporates into a narrative which is neither humane nor peaceful when it concerns global governance or reflexive modes of ‘scientific analysis’ (Hom 2013; Agathangelou and Killian 2016). But perhaps more important for thinking about the question of time and temporality in relation to the political are the various accounts of violence and sovereignty. Hobbes and Bull both grapple with time, but their understanding of time operates on distinct registers with different embodiments. Dominant readings of IR and dominant readings in world politics empty these registers in the name of articulating a social secular order (albeit theological) at the level of the functioning of the state and the operation of sovereign power considered to be at stake. In that sense, time seems sublated in a social articulated in macro-political terms, and the latter do not have time – they are forever eternal. But that is a function, we may argue, of the subject matter ‘world politics.’ It is impossible to write about Hobbes, for instance, or Bull’s idea of ‘order’ without considering macro-political questions of the notion of time inscribed on the idea of the sovereign power that itself does not simultaneously embody the progressive secular eschatologically connected to the Kingdom of God, in the ‘sense that the first has to disappear when the second is realised’ (Agamben 2015: 67). Both Hobbes and Bull are so concerned with this state and order that precipitates the end of time without ever making it part of the questioning. Of course, in a closer reading of Hobbes, let’s say, we see he is dealing with a foundational moment where questions of governance and political form are laid bare. Knowledge production, at this time, is directly related to questions of the political. This brings up not just the question of sovereign power, but crucial related questions of what constitutes the public and who has the right to the social slave contract. As Mills tells us the slave contract was what gave Europeans the right to enslave indigenous peoples as well as enslave Africans when this slavery contract was dying in Europe (1997: 24). Central questions include who gets to be the authoritative producer of knowledge, how so, when, and whose witnessing counts as credible. At a simple level, these questions can be answered in terms of a very English notion of class whose time is at the forefront of the body politic and, as feminists argue, of gender and sexuality, and as Fanon argues, race (Grosz 2005; Fanon 1967). But at a more conceptual level, what is at stake is whether a state of nature or a social slave contract or their forms of its structure is constituted at what time and with what possibilities beyond the eschatological. Hobbes’s idea of the public, then, is one that can imagine universal assent; we can even begin to re-think the question of time if we return to the paradox implicit in the Hobbesian theory of violence from which theorists like, for instance, Kant depart. In very schematic terms, we may say sovereign power comes into being in Hobbes as an ‘apparatus’ for protecting, conserving, improving, and extending life. Hobbes argues that the purpose of the contract is to neutralise the bellum omnium contra omnes and to establish peace. So doing, Hobbes believes, would institute the conditions under which life is no longer brutish, nasty, solitary, poor, and short, but flourishing. But the means to this end is the sovereign person’s standing and right to kill. For him, life prolongs and conserves itself by immunising itself, ultimately by admitting a survivable quotient of violent death into the legal and political order it founds. Life preserves itself, in short, by forming a representation of itself (the sovereign person) that, in turn, threatens it with its right to kill. For Hobbes, the right to self-preservation, as well as the security that is the Leviathan’s primary goal and justification ‘is also what precipitates the end of times’ (Agamben 2015: 69; Hobbes 1996 [1651]: 120). Hobbes also equates the state of nature with no time (and thereby no knowledge, no arts, no society etc.) in his pursuit of and collation of a single temporal referent. However, such an imaginary depends on the eradication or absorption of multiple imagined futures into one time (i.e. setting the time) so that conflicts emerging from such references can be and ought to be contained and controlled. Anxieties about the multiplicity of imagined and incommensurate (spiritual and religious) futures, fears about the threat of murders and so on, that may emerge from such incommensurable temporalities, along with the desire to solve this problem, push Hobbes to articulate an agreed upon theory of reading. This theory of reading or ‘the solution to the problem of knowledge’ (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 332) ought to understand this material and rhetorical anarchy of multiple imagined futures as a problem of the social order to be solved because connecting one’s imagination and desire to this multiplicity of futures generates conflict and threatens peace. Paradoxically, it is the co-production of the state through the force of a political time on its subjects and the elimination of those others who still position themselves in this multiplicity that generate the order of time. In an affective manner, Hobbes prepares the ground for a new time and a new political order using the Leviathan-State as his example of a firmly closed and controlled, explicitly political present. In this controlled present, sovereignty ‘provides for the conditions in which politics can happen at all, let alone peacefully’ (Ivison 2015, citing Williams in Martha Nausbaum 2003). We have to read this ‘first political question’ (Ivison 2015) as having been settled by Hobbes in his introduction of a temporal orientation through his exhaustive use of rhetorical modes to fabulate a theory of reading that again and again reads for an ‘a-sociality that exhausts itself in the struggle for survival’ (Nyquist 2013: 258), ranging from anaphoric rhetorical negation to ‘rigorous subtraction.’ His set of rhetorical tools enables him to take his experiment farther and recruit those who would invest resources for the creation of the co-constitution of such a contract with a social order whose primary political imagination is one that recognises time as one organised and ordered toward achieving the political end, the eschaton (i.e., the Kingdom of God on earth). Hobbes is hailed as pivotal in charting a thinking and in organising political action and scientific enterprise as a time question (i.e. the problematic of anarchy/order). Yet are we reading his work haphazardly (Agathangelou and Killian 2016: 8)? If so, what are the implications of easy readings and displacements of the nuanced experiments and fabulations that Hobbes undertakes? Does his utilising certain historical circumstances to invent certain notions of power inform and shape his reading of a certain possibility of history? Should we re-think the relation of our scientific enterprise, indeed literacy itself, as a question of time? Such co-productions of concepts and notions of time are politically implicated in the politics of colonial domination through enslavement and colonisation. As Walter Johnson points out: Western concepts like primitiveness, backwardness, and underdevelopment rank areas and people of the world on a seemingly naturalized timeline – their ‘present’ is our ‘past’ – and reframe the grubby real-time politics of colonial domination and exploitation as part of an orderly natural process of evolution toward modernity (Johnson 2000: 485). However, this political philosophy of modernity is riddled with contradictions. Its theological roots in a Judeo-Christian paradigm imagine a state precipitating the end of time, the eschaton, the arrival of a ‘messianic banquet,’ a freedom from the ‘bonds of law’ at the end of time for the Christians and whites ONLY. EnvironmentLiberal environmental reform bows to the hegemony of the ruling class over the partitioning of global ecology, reinforcing the legitimacy of overconsumption and dispossession that underscore neoliberal hegemonyFrazier 16 – Chelsea: Graduate Student at Northwestern Department of African American studies.Chelsea M. Frazier, Spring 2016, “Troubling ecology: Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, and black feminist interventions in environmentalism,” Journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, vol 2, no 1, University of Minnesota Press, *ableist language redacted* // ~kwudjwa~ NCC Packet 2019Delinking geography and power is a significant step toward reconfiguring our earth ethics, particularly as environmental studies frameworks have traditionally been informed by colonial European notions of "the political." (8) More specifically, I mean that environmental studies and activism has traditionally been aligned with mainstream political discourse in its emphasis on liberal reform as an ideal strategy for addressing its concerns. Sylvia Wynter reveals a key flaw in this line of reasoning. In her essay "Unsettling Coloniality," Wynter opens by asserting: [My] argument proposes that the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conceptions of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy, of the human species itself/ourselves. (9) Wynter argues that Western philosophy has constructed and continually reinforced the idea of Western Man as the measure of humanity. She also emphasizes that the securing of Western Man as an ethnoclass is fundamentally at odds with the securing of "the human species itself/ourselves." Elsewhere, Wynter has argued that our present master discipline of economics discursively functions as a secular priesthood of the U.S. nation-state's economic system. As well as, therefore, of the overall globally incorporated world-systemic capitalist economic order in its now neoliberal and neo-imperial, homo-oeconomicus bourgeois ruling-class configuration at a world-systemic level--of which the United States is still its superpower hegemon. (10) Here, Wynter explains that the United States and its role as global superpower facilitates the existence of a "world systemic capitalist economic order" based on neoliberal and neoimperial ethics. These ethics are rooted in and inextricably linked to the notion of Western Man as human. The kind of environmental studies or activism that tethers itself to a neoliberal, neoimperial ethics that sustains our present "world systemic capitalist economic order" can never retard [slow] or alleviate our struggles rooted in environmental degradation. If anything, by uncritically relying on traditional approaches to environmental rehabilitation and conservation via legislative reform, for example, many environmentalist activists and scholars reinforce the very system they claim to be fighting. Wynter outlines this conflict quite clearly as she argues: The correlated hypothesis here is that all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth's resources (20 percent of the world's peoples own 80 percent of its resources, consume two-thirds of its food, and are responsible for 75 percent of its ongoing pollution, with this leading to two billion of earth's peoples living relatively affluent lives while four billion still on the edge of hunger and immiseration, to the dynamic of overconsumption on the part of the rich techno-industrial North paralleled by that overpopulation on the part of the dispossessed poor, still partly agrarian worlds of the South)--these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle. (11) Following Wynter, I insist that "the West" itself--its divisions of space and its rigid notions of the human subject--are insufficient frameworks through which "global warming, severe climate change, and the sharply unequal distribution of the earth's resources" can be effectively addressed. We must consider these issues while concurrently addressing a central conflict from which these issues emerge: a fraught and delimited understanding of human subjectivity. In her effort to connect environmental struggles with a delimited understanding of human subjectivity, Jane Bennett questions the very necessity of an “environmentalist” stance [position] entirely. In her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Bennett ponders “whether environmentalism remains the best way to frame the problems, whether it is the most persuasive rubric for challenging the American equation of prosperity with wanton consumption, or for inducing more generally, the political will to create more sustainable political economies in or adjacent to global capitalism.”12 Bennett’s questions about the persuasiveness of environmentalism, coupled with Wynter’s critiques, implore me to consider Bennett’s alternative for framing these problems: vital materialism. According to Bennett, traditional environmental ethics are reliant on an abstraction of human bodies from their “passive environments” and leave little room for “animals, vegetables, or minerals” to be considered fully acknowledged political subjects. Furthermore, according to Bennett, a vital materialist stance is more useful than an environmental one because it (1) makes human and nonhuman relationality horizontal as opposed to vertical/hierarchical, and (2) insists on the vitality or aliveness of all matter—drawing out the ways in which humanity in its bacterial and mineral makeup is not as distinct from “everything else” as we would like to believe. Bennett’s vital materialism not only includes a far more nuanced understanding of our relationships to other forms of materiality but also aims at drawing out horizontalized connections to others—human and nonhuman. Given the history of racialized exclusion in mainstream environmental discourse, a horizontalized vital materialism seems to speak back to those inherent hierarchies that not only abstract human bodies from their “passive environments” but also agitate political structures and hierarchies “that have served repeatedly to relegate black subjects to the status of western modernity’s nonhuman other.”13 While Bennett’s interventions are incredibly useful, at second glance, her proposition does have problems that she herself anticipates. There are dangers in an approach that seeks to lessen the distinctness between “humanity” and “the rest of matter.” Despite her attempt to democratize all forms of materiality, Bennett’s vital materialist stance retains the potential of opening the floodgates for even more ruthless forms of instrumentalizing human beings. Bennett tries to address these dangers, emphasizing the idea that “if matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated.”14 Additionally, Bennett aims to demonstrate that vital materialism relies on an understanding that “all bodies become more than mere object, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief.”15 Given the extensive colonial and Middle Passage histories of the violent instrumentalization of black subjects who have struggled for centuries to be recognized as “human,” a restructuring of ecological ethics that retains the readied potential for further objectification is worrying at best and preposterous at worst. At the same time, given the messy (non) distinctions between so many different forms of materiality that Bennett highlights, it becomes difficult to completely dismiss her logic. Both Wynter and Bennett signal that a “new” environmental politics cannot come as a result of liberal reform or black inclusivity within extant mainstream political discourse but only after understandings of relational human subjectivity are deeply scrutinized and restructured. Moreover, because of the roots of all the “isms” that Wynter coherently reports for us, a truly “new” environmental politics would render our present world unrecognizable. This article is concerned with the work of imagining this other world and other relationalities between material forms. In the pages that follow, I examine the ways Octavia Butler and Wangechi Mutu effectively trouble ecology as they lead us away from the limitations of traditional environmental studies while offering transgressive visions that center black female subjectivity, challenge the (dis)connections between human and non-human entities, and initiate alternative notions of environmental/ecological ethics.Their ethics framing for natural disasters always leaves black people out of recovery – our space links prove that they justify producing black spaces that are more susceptible to disasterRoyles 17 – Dan: Assistant Professor in Department of History.Dan Royles, 9-23-2017, "Race, Necropower, and Natural Disasters – AAIHS," AAIHS, // ~kwudjwa~ NCC Packet 2019In the last month, Hurricanes Harvey and Irma devastated Texas and Florida, killing scores of people and leaving many more homeless. Residents in the Miami area also faced a mandatory evacuation order, although many were unable to escape?the storms. Those who lacked the resources to leave were?disproportionately Black.?They faced deadly flooding and days without power, which can itself be?deadly in South Florida’s late summer heat.?And then there are those in jails and prisons, for whom evacuation is not a matter of choice. Conditions in such facilities deteriorated rapidly after the storm, with?incarcerated people trapped in cells with standing water, and?urinating and defecating in plastic bags.?If the people in these facilities look at all like?prison populations nationwide,?they are disproportionately Black as well.In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, news outlets insisted that the storm “didn’t discriminate.” Historian of disaster Jacob Remes pushed back against this view of a dispassionate Mother Nature, pointing out that “even though the wind and rain draw no distinctions of race, class, or immigration status, the disasters they create often replicate and deepen social inequalities.”?But these storms don’t merely amplify aberrant parts of American society; rather, they expose the?racial violence?at its core.Political theory can help us to connect what we saw on the ground in Texas and Florida, and to understand those events in the context of the American?carceral state. Here Achille Mbembe’s?idea of necropower?provides a useful lens for viewing how the nature of state power and the power of nature intersect. Mbembe offers necropower—the “subjugation of life to the power of death”—as an elaboration on Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower, or the ways that governments regulate and manage the bodies of their citizens?en masse. According to Mbembe, Foucauldian biopower cannot accommodate key features of contemporary politics and warfare, particularly “the creation of?death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of?living dead.” This is not necessarily new as a feature of American society. Orlando Patterson?described slavery, on which the United States was built,?as an institution of “social death.” However, looking at these storms in the context of Mbembe’s theory both draws out the illiberal features of contemporary American society and highlights the possibility for climate change to exacerbate them.Mbembe finds necropower particularly at work in the colony and the?apartheid state. Here “biopower, the state of exception, and the state of siege,” linked together by race, are fundamental to the exercise of power, which manifests as “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is?disposable?and who is not.” I’ll take each element of Mbembe’s description in turn.In advance of Hurricane Irma, local law enforcement made clear that Black lives are indeed disposable. Grady Judd, the sheriff of Polk County in central Florida tweeted that officials would?arrest and incarcerate anyone with an outstanding warrant?who showed up at a shelter. This move was sure to discourage those with warrants?and their loved ones from seeking safety amid a potentially deadly storm. Given the heavy?policing of Black communities, African Americans would certainly be disproportionately represented among Polk County residents with outstanding warrants. Activist DiDi Delgado reads this as a thinly veiled attempt to?dissuade Black Floridians from using public shelters?at all.Relief and recovery efforts are failing Black Floridians as well. In Miami’s historically Black neighborhoods like Overtown,?residents are cash-strapped and struggling to find food, leaving residents to feel as though they have been forgotten in Irma’s aftermath. It would not be the first time—Miami’s Black residents were almost entirely excluded from recovery efforts following Hurricane Andrew.1?This is no accident. Overtown, once a vibrant center of Black culture and enterprise in the Magic City, was all but destroyed by?urban renewal and the construction of Interstate 95. That devastation, which resulted from the conscious choice of mid-century urban planners, made?Black residents more vulnerable to disaster?by destroying Black wealth and disrupting community life. Today, the privileged and powerful can literally overlook Overtown residents from the freeway that runs above the neighborhood. This is remarkably similar to what Mbembe calls “vertical sovereignty,” in which colonial occupation “operates through schemes of over- and underpasses, a separation of the airspace from the ground.” Black disposability is thus built into the city’s infrastructure.The second piece of Mbembe’s description is the state of exception, or the ability to declare oneself outside the rule of law as the defining feature of sovereignty. Police killings of African Americans suggest that law enforcement already occupies a state of exception with respect to Black life. The experience of federal prisoners during Harvey and Irma underscores this reality.Thousands of incarcerated people at federal facilities in Beaumont, Texas?were left in place to ensure the wrath of Hurricane Harvey?and the squalid conditions that followed.?The day before Irma struck South Florida,?over four thousand incarcerated people?within Miami-Dade Country’s evacuation area had not yet been moved. In an editorial for CNN, Van Jones and Jessica Jackson Sloan argued that this constituted?cruel and unusual punishment.?As evidence,?they pointed to local zoos’ robust evacuation plans, and appeals for the protection of abandoned and stray cats and dogs.Their argument assumes that readers view people in prison as human beings, and believe that their lives are at least as valuable as those of animals. This ignores the extent to which many Americans view criminal life as expendable, precisely because of its?association with Blackness. For example, Tyler Roysdon, a volunteer firefighter in Franklin Township, Ohio, was recently suspended for commenting on Facebook that “one dog is more important than a million ni****s.” According to Mbembe, such is the nature of life in the colony or on the frontier, where the law of “civilized” society, including respect for human rights, breaks down. Here “savage life?is just another form of?animal life, a horrifying experience, something alien beyond imagination or comprehension.” The perceived sub-humanity of the colonized—here, African Americans—renders them disposable, and empowers the state to do the disposing.The state of siege (or emergency) comes into play in two ways. On the one hand, natural disasters represent actual emergencies, in response to which governments may restrict the rights and movement of the citizenry, as with curfews implemented in Miami during and after Irma. Black residents who lack the means to evacuate will be disproportionately criminalized by such orders. Moreover,?news coverage of storms?and their aftermath create their own sense of emergency by focusing on looting, using frames that cultivate a sense of criminal emergency linked specifically to Blackness.During both Harvey and Irma, news outlets also fed viewers a steady diet of reports and images of looting, such as those of Black residents?carrying sneakers away from a Foot Locker in Fort Lauderdale.?Such images reinforce viewers’ ideas about Black criminality, and fuel the sense of a permanent, racialized state of siege. Some who tweeted images of looting in Miami also called for the suspension of the rule of law after the hurricane. A user bearing the name “Another Deplorable” opined, “LOOTERS SHOULD ALL BE SHOT ON SITE [sic], NO QUESTIONS ASKED.” Hence, natural disasters create their own states of emergency.Images of looting during and after the storms help to secure mass consent for heavy policing of Black communities, as well as the militarization of local police forces. These communities, who are the most affected by natural disasters, already lack the political capital and financial resources to make their neighborhoods more climate resilient. In addition, the harsh sentences that result from both racial policing and judicial bias are both materially devastating and rob poor people of a Constitutional tool that they do have to secure political change: the right to vote.?Texas restores felons’ voting rights only once they have completed parole or probation, whereas Floridians with a felony conviction must?individually apply for have their voting rights restored upon release.In this way, natural disasters like Harvey and Irma both reveal the ways that Black life is already subjected to violence in American society, and render it still more vulnerable. But it is also worth noting that storms like these represent the “new normal” of a warming planet and rising seas, which is sure to bring social and political dislocation. Incarceration has been proffered—indirectly or otherwise—as a solution to problems ranging from mental illness to drug use to poverty, so what happens when the most incarcerated country in the history of the world faces an apocalyptic wave of deadly storms, earthquakes, and wildfires? What will this mean for our collective political future? Along with “disaster capitalism,”?we will likely face the growing problem of?disaster carcerality?as well.FuturityTheir notions of futurity only recreate Black captivity Bliss 15 – doctoral candidate @ UC Irvine(James, Hope Against Hope: Queer Negativity, Black Feminist Theorizing, and Reproduction without Futurity, Mosiac Volume 48, Number 1) NCC Packet 2019In an earlier account of the affective structure of Black radicalism, Cornel West offers a formulation consonant with Morrison’s reading of her grandfather’s performance. For West, “black radicalism hopes against hope if only to hold out the dream of freedom in a never-never land […] in order to survive in the deplorable present” (10-11). This is Black radicalism as “survival and sustenance,” set in anticipatory opposition to his later, famous formulation of “Black nihilism” (10) in Race Matters. But what is crowded out in this mode of optimism, just as what is crowded out by queer futurity generally, is the possibility of there being something beautiful or generative or sustaining in the pessimistic and the negative. That is, we might undermine the logic that holds an “unreconstructed Black pessimism” and the violin as contradictory, we might close the gap between pessimism and possibility. And, further, embracing horror, embracing pessimism, might also create space for thinking beyond the nuclear family, for thinking a Black feminism that follows neither the father nor the mother, but that embraces the sorts of queer kinship networks that have always shaped Black life in the New World.9 Returning to Gumbs, “Blackness is already external to patriarchy, a haunting presence that the (white) patriarchal structures characterize as antithetical and destructive of the norms they were built to perpetuate.” Instead of the reproductive futurity Edelman finds at the site of the Child, we have “a Black, and therefore deviant, future” (“Speculative” 142). Here we might have something different than the optimists’ injunction to think something better of the world in the name of young people who, we are told, “can’t afford” pessimism.? At this point, we might make two interventions into this question of affordability. First, the figure of “young queer people of color” is insufficient for thinking the distinctions between Black queers and non-Black queers of colour. The move toward big-tent coalition politics undermines, in both theory and practice, the singularity of antiblackness—not anti-Black racism but, as articulated above, the negative possibility for the Human in both its universal and particular registers. Second, the queer [End Page 94] futurist argument is subtended by a “politics of scarcity at the level of subjectivity” that mischaracterizes the entire question of futurity (Desideri and Harney 169). The argument that young Black queers cannot “afford” pessimism “understand[s] current forms of being as inadequate, rather than over abundant” (170). This is to say that Edelman’s line of thought makes it possible to recognize the overwhelming overpresence of futures for those racialized and queer kids that Mu?oz claims “are not the sovereign princes of futurity.” What does it mean that the argument that futurity is a scarce resource relies so heavily on figures of Black queers who have been murdered? Mu?oz’s argument, for instance, summons three murdered Black lesbians to demonstrate that young queers of colour (we note the slippage from Black to “of color” in the argument) cannot abandon futurity-as-hope and hope-as-futurity. That is, focusing on the spectacle of state and state-sanctioned Black queer death obscures the structuring violences that accrue around Black queer survival.10? On this front, Gumbs’s readings of the figure of Audre Lorde are instructive in demonstrating the multiple ways that premature death is something other than the foreclosure of futurity as such. In her reading of “Preface,” Gumbs refers to the ways in which Lorde’s words continually appear and re-appear in feminist writings, at protests, and in other venues, constituting “a sacred repetition,” one way that Lorde “survives into the present” (“Speculative” 132). Elsewhere, Gumbs has written of Lorde’s multiple denied requests for medical leave while teaching at Hunter College, noting that “Black feminists are a trouble more useful as dead invocation than as live troublemakers, raising concerns in faculty meetings. And those institutions continue to make money and garner prestige off of their once affiliated now dead faculty members” (“Shape”). Access to the future as “sacred repetition” exists alongside access to the future as “dead invocation,” complicating the implicit collapse of optimism onto futurity at work in this politics of scarcity. Disentangling optimism from futurity is essential here. There are many ways of accessing and inhabiting the future, and the problem is not that young Black queers have no access to the future but that the future is, itself, structured by an antiblackness that shapes access to future(s) for all subjects. In her own reading of Edelman alongside Frantz Fanon, Keeling has observed that “from within the logics of reproductive futurity and colonial reality, a black future looks like no future at all” (578). How to recognize and how to embrace “a black future” is the very task precluded by the project of queer futurity, which evades antiblackness’ structuring violence in favour of spectacular acts of violence.National Space PolicyTheir investment in the costs and benefits of space policy leads to environmental injustice, clearing of indigenous populations, and the production of anti-black accumulation – this leads to constant protest that is framed as poor governance, endlessly deferring raceKlinger 19 – Julie: PhD, specializes in development, environment, and security politics in Latin America and China in comparative and global perspectiveJulie Michelle Klinger (2019): Environmental Geopolitics and Outer Space, Geopolitics, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2019.1590340 // ~kwudjwa~ NCC Packet 2019On Earth, the environmental geopolitics of outer space are inseparable from questions of environmental justice. Environmental (in)justice unfolds across multiple scales through concrete processes: localized and stratospheric emissions from space launches (Carlsen, Kenesova, and Batyrbekova 2007; Jones, Bekki, and Pyle 1995), the placement of outer space related infrastructure in national and global peripheries (Gorman 2007; Mitchell 2017; Redfield 2001), and the use of such infrastructure to advance or thwart environmental destruction (Da Costa 2001; Guzmán 2013; Parks 2012). Human engagement with outer space enlists industrial economies, global networks of infrastructure and expertise, and the generation and control of 11 information. All of these activities take place in specific sites and are subject to ongoing transformations in territorial governance practices. By locating infrastructures that are securitized, dangerous, and environmentally toxic in remote areas, the state or empire accomplishes two things. It consolidates power in far-flung territories while mitigating against liabilities and security threats that might arise from placing launch infrastructures closer to the metropole. In order to reduce environmental impacts, adequate resources, personnel, and expertise need to be assigned to the task of monitoring and mitigating the regional fallout of rocket launches (Hall et al. 2014). This may not be the case if the site in question has been deemed sacrificable by those with territorial control. Launches and Their Infrastructures Reaching outer space requires Earthly infrastructure, which means that space launches have concrete footprints that change according to developments in launch technologies. The placement of outer space related infrastructure on Earth is a question of environmental (in)justice. Which sites are chosen, who is expropriated, and which environments are impacted is subject to strategic geopolitical calculations, which, more often than not, employ classical geopolitical reasoning (Hickman and Dolman 2002; Ingold 2006; Meira Filho, Guimar?es Fortes, and Barcelos 2014; NDRI 2006). Launch sites are tightly controlled to reduce the risk of interference or failure, therefore situating launch sites in remote areas is often explained in terms of safety and security (Zapata and Murray 2008). No doubt this is important: rockets are composed of many tonnes of material and combustive fuel, so they must be launched in places where damage from routine as well as potentially catastrophic explosions can be contained. For humans to reach “the final frontier,” they must first find a frontier space on Earth that can be made into an empty space in which controlled explosions can be routine. Frontiers are seldom as empty as those aiming to conquer them would claim. Where they are not populated by people, they are filled with other sorts of meanings and life forms (Klinger 2017; Tsing 2005). Potential launch sites and testing ranges deemed by government authorities to be simultaneously remote, safe, and suitable to contain the risks of rocket launch must first be made empty of people, with prior land use regimes or territorial claims pushed beyond designated buffer zones (Gorman 2007; Mitchell 2017). Hence the placement of space infrastructure follows colonial geographies of extraction, sacrifice, and risk (Mitchell 2017; Redfield 2001). As Gorman (2007) put it: “because of their distance from the metropole, these places lend themselves to hosting prisons, detention camps, military installations, nuclear weapons, and nuclear waste. All of these establishments, including rocket ranges, have inspired reactions of protest.” These so-called ‘peripheral’ spaces are nevertheless central to their inhabitants and their neighbors, who question the logic of extraglobal conquest in the face of unresolved Earthly injustices. Consider, for example, the case of the launch site in Alc?ntara, Brazil, which has been well documented by Araújo and Filho (2006) and Mitchell (2017). Through a close examination of local, national, and international politics, these authors document how the government’s racialized approach to the subsistence communities displaced by space infrastructure deepened structural inequalities. Grassroots opposition to the launch site grew not out of an a priori ideological opposition of poor people to national progress in outer space, as some officials alleged, but rather resulted from the failure to account for the food insecurity generated by state resettlement projects. The resettlement schemes were themselves misinformed by impoverished notions of local livelihoods. Local claims against the deprivations caused by statesponsored space practices have deepened schisms between the military and civilian space programs at the federal government level. Through the lens of classical geopolitics, these structural inequalities scarcely register, with the result that the ‘crawling’ progress of Brazil’s space program is pathologized as poor management practices symptomatic of an inadequately implemented national development vision (Amaral 2010). Critical geopolitics helps deconstruct the nationalist performativity of such endeavors by considering the political and economic value placed on the spectacle of spaceflight (Boczkowska 2017; Macdonald 2008, 2010; Sage 2016). Feminist geopolitics draws our attention to the racialized and gendered dispossession advanced by the state, through the construction of space infrastructure and exercised through access to land. The fact that environmental and public health impacts were only considered by the authorities after years of mobilization by Black social movements, religious communities, and scholars highlights the ways in which inattention to the local in the pursuit of space power perpetuates environmental injustice, which in turn interrupts national plans for space progress. Rocket launches affect local and global environments through the construction of infrastructure, the exposure of local environments to toxic residues, and the dispersal of pollutants in land, air, and sea. Rockets are the only source of direct anthropogenic emissions sources in the stratosphere. Ozone-depleting substances (ODS) such as nitrous oxide, hydrogen chlorine, and aluminum oxide are emitted by rockets, and can destroy 105 ozone molecules before degrading (Voigt et al. 2013). The ozone layer prevents cancer and cataract-causing ultraviolet-b waves from reaching the Earth. As of 2013, rocket launches accounted for less than 1% of ODS emissions. As other ODS are phased out under the Montreal Protocol and the frequency of lower cost space launches increases, the proportion and quantity is likely to increase (Durrieu and Nelson 2013; Ross et al. 2009). Although affluent economies in the northern hemisphere are responsible for most ODS emissions (Polvani 2011; Rousseaux et al. 1999), the geography of exposure disproportionately affects an overall higher population in remote regions and in the southern hemisphere (Norval et al. 2011; Robinson and Erickson 2015; Thompson et al. 2011) because ozone depletion is most serious in regions where high altitude stratospheric clouds are most likely to form: above the polar regions and major mountain ranges (Carslaw et al. 1998; Perlwitz et al. 2008). This is an example of environmental injustice on a global scale, where the global south bears the environmental burden of actions predominately taken in the global north, rocket launches included. In the process, global power relations are reinscribed through the uneven distribution of harm to peripheral and southern bodies, mediated in this case through the redistribution of gases in the stratosphere that increase exposure to solar radiation. Coming closer to Earth, environmental geopolitics of outer space are manifest in the dispersal of particulate matter into ecosystems surrounding active launch sites. This is more than a strictly local environmental concern, because which spaces are subject to the hazards of launch sites involves careful calculations weighing financial cost, state power, and multifarious territorial interests. With each launch, surrounding areas are showered with toxins, heavy metals, and acids over a distance that varies widely with wind, weather, and precipitation patterns at the moment of lift-off.3 The most researched of these pollutants are hydrogen chloride, aluminum oxide, and various aerosolized heavy metals. Release of these pollutants from rocket launches results in localized regional acid rain (Madsen 1981), plant death, fish kills, and failed seed germination of native plants in launch sites (Marion, Black, and Zedler 1989; Schmalzer et al. 1992). These effects, and research on them, are mostly concentrated within one kilometer of the launch site. But they have been recorded several kilometers away under certain weather conditions (Schmalzer et al. 1998). Recent studies on the concentration of trace elements in wildlife in areas near NASA launch activities in Florida, USA, found that more than half of the adults and juvenile alligators had “greater than toxic levels” of trace elements in their liver (Horai et al. 2014). Both the subject, and the vague statement of findings, highlights the lack of research into the impacts on downstream human and non-human communities. In contrast to the precautions taken to protect workers in buildings adjacent to facilities where these technologies are developed (Bolch et al. 1990; Chrostowski, Gan, and Campbell 2010), much less consideration is given to communities within the dynamic pollutant shadow of rocket launches. In Kazakhstan, Russia, and China, researchers have begun examining the effects of the highly toxic liquid propellant, unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine 1which has been in use since the dawn of the space age. It has noted carcinogenic, mutagenic, convulsant, teratogenic, and embryotoxic effects (Carlsen, Kenesova, and Batyrbekova 2007), and it has been found to cause DNA damage and chromosomal aberrations in rodents living near the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (Kolumbayeva et al. 2014). Despite these known hazards, methods to detect UDMH at the trace concentrations at which toxic effects begin to manifest in humans do not yet exist (Kenessov, Bakaikina, and Ormanbekovna 2015), meaning that there is no knowledge of how this circulates in the environment, bioaccumulates up the food chain, or could potentially be sequestered through soil or plant filtration. The lack of technology or methodology to adequately track the dispersal of hazardous pollutants that have been used for decades in the surrounding environment illustrates another aspect of environmental injustice: the preference on the part of political and economic elites to create spaces of waste rather than allocate adequate resources to maintain safe and non-toxic environments.4 The hyper-local politics of basic livelihood security shape long-term access to outer space and space geopolitics at multiple scales. Attending to the local matters is important, not just because it sheds light on broader geopolitical processes, but because failing to do so leaves the substantive matters of human engagement with outer space entirely overlooked, at best. At worst, ignoring local environmental conditions recasts them as places to be “left behind,” casualties in a Darwinian race to the cosmos in which the poor have no place. Attending to the environmental geopolitics of outer space on Earth shows the co-production of Earth and space. Earthly environments and social relations are remade in our evolving relationship with outer space and reconceived alongside evolving deliberations on the prospects for human survival.Their national space policy is anti-black because the space industry excludes black people from going to space and only hires white senior executives to influence how the plan gets enacted. Bhorat 16 Ziyaad Bhorat is a South African media and entertainment junkie, technology futurist, and social justice advocate residing in Santa Monica, USA. He was one of the recipients of the Rhodes Scholarship for 2012. 11-17-2016, Will black people also be excluded from Mars? openDemocracy, , DOA: 9-13-2019 WAKE SHC NCC Packet 2019Ra has since come to represent many things, and one of the most important is the exclusion of black people from space. Born ‘Herman Poole Blount’ one spring in Birmingham, Alabama, Ra was an avant-garde jazz musician, poet, and Afro-futuristic philosopher. His work pioneered the field as a collection of ways in which black identity and cosmologies re-conceptualise both the future and the past by blending science with art into a new techno-cultural aesthetic. Somewhere in the early 20th century, Ra had a vision of himself as an interstellar visitor from Saturn on a mission of peace. Discarding the shackles of his birth name and former identity, he mantled himself in the likeness and headdresses of Ancient Egypt’s great Nubians. Ra then gathered his Arkestra of musical disciples to preach his musical gospel. Perhaps in protest at the institutional forces that kept black people off the moon, Ra’s 1973 album Space Is The Place firmly opened up the cosmos for all. With techno-funk jazz and mesmerising vocals, Space Is The Place offers an important glimpse of black imagination beyond Earth. A year later it was expressed visually in an 85-minute science-fiction film of the same title. In the film, Ra attempts to emancipate black identity from its self-imposed limits and those set by white agents and institutions. Ultimately, he uses the power of music to transport his community of free blacks to settle on a new planet. His biblical struggle to free people for a home in space anticipated the challenges of representation that face societies today as they move further into space. Today, there’s a risk that rivalry between different countries in the new space race will ignore the issues of extra-terrestrial diversity. Though the competition that governed relations between the US and USSR in the second half of the 20th century eventually gave way to increased cooperation, the tempo has changed again with the entry of players like China and Russia, and the evolving racial and political dynamics of the USA. Diversity is often lost sight of in the frantic struggle for national progress and competitive advantage. For example, though NASA has explicitly made a commitment to diversify its workforce, 77 per cent of its engineers, 85 per cent of its physical scientists, and 86 per cent of its senior executives are white. It’s therefore important to ask whether representation on Mars—and in the space industry more broadly—risks losing much of the Earth’s human plurality. The issue of racial diversity is exacerbated by the fact only a handful of other nations possess the capacity to launch people into space. This is where international bodies such as the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) could play a useful role by monitoring and overseeing future Martian exploration and space colonization. Building on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, they could lead the development of new space law and constitutionalism in order to balance progress with diversity. That still leaves the problem of under-representation in industry. Technology companies are notoriously deaf in this regard. In Silicon Valley, reliable data is hard to find, though leading reports indicate that amongst top companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon, minorities constitute at most 37 per cent of the workforce, and black workers never more than four per cent. InfoWorld executive editor Galen Gruman stresses how this pattern of representation owes itself to Silicon Valley’s inherent elitism, along with the implicit biases that go with it. Elitism operates to turn otherwise neutral policies into exclusionary practices. SpaceX, for example, is currently projecting the cost of its tickets to Mars at $200,000 each, a price that limits participation from minority groups who make up a disproportionately poor part of the population. Former employees have also accused SpaceX of racist policies. A spokesman for the company responded like this: “At SpaceX, we don’t care about your gender, race, ethnic background, sexual orientation, age or anything else of that nature—to succeed here, the only requirement is to work hard and produce outstanding results.” This type of post-racial, meritocratic thinking is symptomatic of Silicon Valley's elitism, and perhaps it’s too far ahead of its time—ironically echoing Sun Ra’s own disillusioned views in his later days. It has the danger of failing to recognise that formal equality is a necessary but insufficient step towards substantive equity in society. Companies like SpaceX and Amazon should not only make effective commitments to diversity in the workforce, but also develop plans to show how diversity will play into their extra-terrestrial ambitions. Doing so will help to avoid repeating the patterns of inequality on Earth that restrict representation to those who have been historically privileged. Fundamental to this process is the recognition that space is a potential destination for everyone. Contemporary Afro-futurist Denenge Akpem has attempted to spark this discussion through, “The MARS Project – Teaching Afro-futurism as Methodology of Liberation.” Akpem, a performance artist and sculptor who has taught at both the School of the Art Institute Chicago and Columbia College Chicago, invites her students to imagine the first mission to, and settlement of Mars through the lens of Afro-futurism and diversity. In contrast, Mars One, a private Dutch initiative to settle Mars by 2026, has raised eyebrows for seeming to select its astronauts using a format akin to reality TV. And while National Geographic’s upcoming docu-drama miniseries MARS features an internationally, racially and gender diverse crew in 2033 aboard the Daedalus, it’s noticeable that they are led by an all-American white male mission commander who will “be the first to walk on Mars”.The history of American space colonization starts with an insistent on racial violence, exploitation, and genocide. Their rhetoric of space colonization justifies unrelenting violence at the federal level such as moving away from government funded social programs which justifies a world in which only rich straight white males can benefit from the privatization and potential safe haven they know as space. This turns the case and proves they have a white washed view of history that undeniably erases violence sustained through the logics of racialized capitalism and antiblackness via the terms space and colonization.Haskins 18 Caroline Haskins, 08-14-2018, The racist language of space exploration, Outline,, DOA: 7-10-2019 WAKE SHC NCC Packet 2019On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence, head of the National Space Council, outlined plans for creating the “Space Force” that President Donald Trump envisions as a space-dedicated military branch, complete with space warfighters and weapons, by the year 2020. Back in June, Trump explained the Space Force by using the language of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision which ruled that racial segregation was constitutional, giving states and municipalities the authority to enact Jim Crow laws. "We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal, it is going to be something so important,” Trump said. He just as easily could have said, “The Space Force will be a branch of the military, like the Air Force,” but he did not. Trump is far from the first or only person to use the language of colonization to make a pro-space venture argument. Elon Musk famously describes his plans for a Martian settlement as a “colony,” and a long lineage of space pundits, politicians, and thinkers invoke the history of colonizers and colonization in order to frame the future of humanity in space. During a July 25 hearing of the Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness titled “Destination Mars – Putting American Boots on the Surface of the Red Planet,” subcommittee head, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said that he believes that the first trillionaire on earth will make their money from space exploration. “I don’t know who it will be, and I don’t know what they will discover, or what they will accomplish,” Cruz said. “But I think it is every bit as vast and promising a frontier as the New World was some centuries ago.” “You could argue that the effort to colonize space is likely to involve new forms of inequality: shifts in tax revenues and administrative priorities devoted to that,” said Michael Ralph, a professor of anthropology at NYU. “As opposed to [supporting] other social institutions that benefit people like health care, education, infrastructure.” Earning money in space is an exciting prospect for a far-right, pro-business, anti-regulation politician like Cruz, and he explicitly associated it with European countries having colonized the Americas. Starting in the late 1400s, Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal funded missions to the Americas in order to gather natural resources that would power up their economies. By stealing the land that made this resource extraction possible, colonizers used genocide, enslavement, biological weaponry, and warfare and that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of indigenous people living in the “New World.” The concept of race, and therefore racism, was invented as a way of justifying their violence and legitimizing a hierarchy of race-divided labor. Based off of what we know right now, the Moon and Mars are devoid of life, so this colonizing language is not actually putting other beings at risk. But, there is the risk that the same racist mythology used to justify violence and inequality on earth — such as the use of frontier, “cowboy” mythology to condone and promote the murder and displacement of indigenous people in the American West — will be used to justify missions to space. In a future where humans potentially do live on non-earth planets, that same racist mythology would carry through to who is allowed to exist on, and benefit from, extraterrestrial spaces. On Earth, and in the United States specifically, the ideal of a merit-based society has been used to justify race-blind hiring policies that fail to account for, say, the implicit bias against black or Asian-sounding names, or the legacy of segregation, which continues to make children of color more vulnerable to attending underfunded schools. Narratives of “law and order” have also been used to justify racial profiling and harsher prison sentences for people of color than for white people who commit the same crimes. Not nearly enough work has been done here on Earth to ensure that these structural inequalities wouldn’t carry through. “Those narratives do carry specific implications about how people living on other worlds might be structured,” Lucianne Walkowicz, the current Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress, told The Outline. Walkowicz organized the Decolonizing Mars Conference that took place on June 27 as well as a public follow-up event planned for September, to discuss how colonial language is shaping our potential future in space. “Space is not just built for nothing, it’s built for people.” When we think about humanity’s potential to exist on other planets, it’s important to consider who won’t have access to space, in part due to a total lack of concern over these issues by people who are able to access it. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos intends to make space a place for the rich to use for adventure leisure, and SpaceX/Tesla founder Elon Musk has proposed that a Martian “colony” can save a selection of humanity from the collapse of civilization in some World War III scenario. Granted, right now, these are just words from billionaires who want to excite the public about their business ventures. But they suggest that if the economically and socially vulnerable are priced out of a life-saving journey from Earth, it is a justifiable loss. “All of these things that are said off the cuff [by billionaires] have some implications that are concrete and count some people in, and some people out,” Walkowicz said. Part of that concern is fueled by the fact that Cruz and Pence have presented the path to settling space as one that will be privately funded, but lead by the U.S. government. In the Destination Mars subcommittee meeting, Cruz said, “At the end of the day, the commercial sector is going to be able to invest billions more in dollars in getting this job [of getting to Mars] done.” In his Thursday remarks regarding the Space Force, Pence also implied that celestial territories would be treated as private property (even though owning private property in space is explicitly illegal per the Outer Space Treaty, which the U.S. and dozens of other nations signed in 1967). “While other nations increasingly possess the capability to operate in space, not all of them share our commitment to freedom, to private property, and the rule of law,” Pence said. “So as we continue to carry American leadership in space, so also will we carry America’s commitment to freedom into this new frontier.” This approach to public-private partnerships directly mirrors colonist practices. For instance, the British East India Company violently colonized parts of India on behalf of the company, but over time, ownership of the stolen land shifted to Great Britain. While these risks feel a part of a far away future, in the present, idealizing colonization as a positive, replicable aspect of American history speaks to an unsettling indifference from leaders about the violent history of colonization. And by referencing historical events that victimized people of color, leaders paint a vision of the future in which people of color continue to be excluded, Walkowicz said that the social and economic legacy of colonization is ignored. By using narratives of adventurism and heroics, white Americans were able to convince other white Americans that they were not only entitled to steal and conquest land and persons, but that it was their destiny. Ralph said to The Outline that this mythology remains central to the way Americans conceptualize their history and culture. “Colonization is portrayed as a heroic conquest,” Ralph said. “These practices are framed as central to American identity, essential to governance, politics, and all major social institution. But not depicted as a colonizing that is one caused by violence, displacement, dispossession.” Even when people aren’t explicitly referring to settlements in space as “colonies,” they still use the rhetoric of colonizing the New World and the American frontier, which erases the stories of and violence against the people of color who lived and ranched in the region. But how did this language start being used in the first place? Presidents have also used frontierism and colonialism to get white citizens behind their agenda. When President John F. Kennedy announced his intention to bring Americans to the Moon in 1962, he paraphrased one of the earliest colonists on the North American continent. “William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage,” Kennedy said. Bradford was the governor of the Plymouth Bay Colony at the time of the Pequot War. In an overnight attack, British colonizers massacred four hundred soldiers, non-soldiers, and children. Bradford later described the act of genocide as a Christian victory. “...victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prays therof to God,” Bradford wrote, “who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.” Although Kennedy did not characterize his vision for the Moon as creating a “colony” specifically, the association he wanted to create is clear: The Moon is the next version of the New World, the next frontier for American conquest. In his speech, Kennedy continues that men like Bradford teach us that “man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred.” However, if “man” is a stand-in for “white colonizers,” “knowledge and progress” unabashedly brushes over the lives of indigenous persons and people of color that were lost in their quest to “explore.” It’s a profusely sanitized version of reality. “It’s fascinating that a term like ‘colonizing’ can be seen in neutral terms when it can’t exist without violence and dispossession,” Ralph said. It can’t exist without violence to establish a political hierarchy. Every colonial project is about managing populations, subjugating people, extracting resources.” But Kennedy was not the first person to use of colonizing language in the context of space. John Wilkins, one of the first people who ever theorized about humanity’s future in space, wrote “A Discourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet” back in 1638, where he argued that the Moon will be a place for human habitation in the future. Although it was a piece of science fiction theorization at the time, Wilkins justified his argument by saying that God created the Earth and stars for people to use in his honor. Colonizers are adventurers, Wilkins argues, whose ideals are worth replicating on other planets. “The invention of some other means for our convenience to the Moon cannot seem more incredible to us, than this did at first to them, to be discouraged in our hopes of the like success,” Wilkins wrote, admitting that any mission to the moon would be far in the future. “We have not now any [Sir Francis] Drake, or Columbus, to undertake this voyage, or any Daedalus to invent a convenience through the air.” Sir Francis Drake was a slave-trader, and of course, Christopher Columbus is responsible for the genocide of almost 3 million people on the island of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti). As space travel has become more technologically feasible, science-fiction writers have speculated about how a space society would actually function. Arthur C. Clarke envisioned that “colonial” would be a dirty word in space in his 1954 book Earthflight: “And to do [enter Solar politics], one had to go to Earth; as in the days of the Caesars, there was no alternative. Those who believed otherwise or pretended to — risked being tagged with the dreaded word ‘colonial.’” For Clarke, colonialism was equated with privilege in a space society, not because of racism and violence on Earth. Later in the novel, Clarke doesn’t hesitate to compare travelling between planets, and the nobility of doing so, with British colonizers travelling between continents in earlier centuries. Adilifu Nama, a professor of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University who has written about the representation of race in science fiction, said that science fiction movies and books during the 1950s and 1960s often included narratives of invasion from alien lifeforms directly alongside conceptualizations of existing in other worlds. These anxious science fiction narratives became popular during the Civil Rights Movement. “We had [an] invasion emerging [during the Civil Rights Movement] of black folks invading these once pristine white spaces: with public transportation, public schools, and eventually particular neighbourhoods and black folks having access to better, more upscale neighbourhoods,” Nama said. “So there is also this invasion society around racial purity, and the tensions of science fiction can be read not only as Cold War anxieties, but racial anxieties about the other.” Ralph said to The Outline that the Space Race of the 1950s and 60s shouldn’t be seen as purely a nationalist competition between the U.S. and Soviet Union: it was also a distraction from the Civil Rights Movement. “A lot of what we think of as the Space Race was the US and Russia competing as rivals for supremacy in space back in the 1950s, but also that movement was about civil rights and the struggle for justice for Americans,” Ralph said. “In a way, you could argue that space exploration has historically been used to shift public attention away from the struggle of social justice.” According to Walkowicz, that people dip into the violent, racist history of colonialism and gloss over their language using a sense of adventure provided by the American frontier is no coincidence. “The people for whom the American frontier myth were constructed, who were primarily white men, also now have the narrative of space,“ Walkowicz said. “And because tech is so incredibly non-diverse, and has been so slow to change even in those small ways in which it has, I think a lot of those narratives go unquestioned.” The people with the power to make a future in space possible, such as Trump, Pence, and Cruz, or the money to actually get us there, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are the same people who have and will always benefit from systemic racism and the potential economic glory from new economic ventures. Ralph noted that prioritizing space travel undermines funding for sustainable forms of energy like wind and solar, and efficient ways to construct affordable houses and schools. It also has direct economic implications for the people who rely on any number of federally-funded social programs in the U.S. “In Trump’s America, we have a lot of conservatives and even libertarians insisting there’s too much government spending on social programs, and yet Trump wants to use our federal funds to reinvigorate our space programs,” Ralph said. “Just like in the 1950s and 60s, [Trump] is using space exploration to cultivate nationalist sentiment and arguably shift questions away from questions of social justice and questions of inequality.”SSATheir territorialization of outer space as the new frontier characterized by “collective” memory operate imposes the grid of intelligibility onto Black flesh – a violent process of striation that seeks to spatially staticize black experience within society – our argument is that situational space awareness in the hands of their faux radical post-humanism is always a violent expansion of the project of modernity; we say rather than exist within the confines of those walls we should break through them construct entirely new spaces refusing to submit to the logic that coheres spatiality in the status quo – a radical embrace of Black onto-schizospatiality that refuses the worlds continually parasitic desire for order and confinement, Jones 16.Jones, Dalton Anthony. “Northern Hieroglyphics: Nomadic Blackness and Spatial Literacy.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, no. 29, 2016, pp. 1–1., doi:10.20415/rhiz/029.e01. //w4K3 nb NCC Packet 2019Running from the sun only to reach it in time for tomorrow, we navigate our way around a string of black holes with gravitational fields that are far more conductive than my one black body, a concentration of holes like me that deform time and space, warping the narrative of the American dream, drawing it into a vacuum that transforms it into a delirious hallucination that is as devoid of light as an abandoned Detroit street at night. One moment, we are a stone's throw from a city so hard and volatile it is named after a rock that makes fire, a city poisoning its children by the tens of thousands out of boredom and bureaucratic necessity, quenching their tiny thirst with a neurotoxic element known to create permanent brain damage in vertebrates since the Shang Dynasty of 1,500 BC. The next moment we barrel past the refugee camps of Toledo and Cleveland, following the outlines of a lake so eerie it blossoms with thickgreen algae every summer as the result of a phosphorous runoff that produces a liquid scum so noxious you cannot drink or even bath in it: cutting off the water supply to half a million people being just another of the "negative externalities" of factory farming and genetic modification. We see towns overshadowed by nuclear power plants, steaming concrete cylinders drawn tightly at the waist like Victorian women bound in corsets coughing, trying to breath, looming twin towers leaking a steady stream of tritium waste into the nature sanctuaries and public swimming holes that surround it. The magnetic pull into blackness along this drive is more harrowing than any narrative of nation or state can possibly fend off, too irrational to contain or sustain. I see a withering geography that is, as Katherine McKittrick describes it so well, as much demonic ground as fecund soil or safe haven for life.[2] [7] Precarity in the face of a predator as exotic and insufferable as Man forces one to hear with the eyes and see with the ears; to touch with the mouth and taste through the very pores of the skin. Evolution demands sensitivity to detail. More than a theoretical meditation on the "symbolism of architectural forms" or even an aesthetic rumination on the organic relationship between a structure and its social function, spatial literacy is a survival mechanism, an act of self-preservation more urgent for the endangered species than for those living at the top of the food chain. In the hands of cartography, the science of land and measurement, of record keeping and permanence, of engineering, of bridges and dams, of prisons and zoos and confinement, of surveillance and cameras and drones, spatial awareness is a weapon of social control: A tool of domination. Form and function are necessary correlates nowhere more so than in the face of extinction, l'art pour l'art being as useless as the wings of the Dodo Bird. Even the illicit "production of space," the discursive reclamation of the walls that confine us, is rendered fleeting, restricted and abstract under the conditions of late capital and global governance we encounter; under the morphing and intensifying expressions of modernity we are forced to navigate. We are fatally intimate with these highways and fences after all. We know what they are meant for and how they came to be. We know their wages and we know without being told that the backroads and shortcuts are no longer a viable option. So I listen carefully to what the surface of things has to say and I heed the advice I receive accordingly. We are always in proximity to danger and the land I am moving through is closing in around us like a noose drawing tighter and tighter with each passing day.ImpactOntologyAnti blackness outweighs and turns the case – it is the intersection of objective and subjective vertigo.Wilderson ‘3 [Frank Wilderson revolutionary, “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents,” NCC Packet 2019Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the sensation that one is not simply spinning in an otherwise stable environment, that one’s environment is perpetually unhinged stems from a relationship to violence that cannot be analogized. This is called objective vertigo, a life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation. This is structural as opposed to performative violence. Black subjectivity is a crossroads where vertigoes meet, the intersection of performative and structural violence. [4] Elsewhere I have argued that the Black is a sentient being though not a Human being. The Black’s and the Human’s disparate relationship to violence is at the heart of this failure of incorporation and analogy. The Human suffers contingent violence, violence that kicks in when s/he resists InTensions Journal Copyright ?2011 by York University (Toronto, Canada) Issue 5 (Fall/Winter 2011) ISSN# 1913-5874 Wilderson The Vengeance of Vertigo 4 (or is perceived to resist) the disciplinary discourse of capital and/or Oedipus. But Black peoples’ subsumption by violence is a paradigmatic necessity, not just a performative contingency. To be constituted by and disciplined by violence, to be gripped simultaneously by subjective and objective vertigo, is indicative of a political ontology which is radically different from the political ontology of a sentient being who is constituted by discourse and disciplined by violence when s/he breaks with the ruling discursive codes.vi When we begin to assess revolutionary armed struggle in this comparative context, we find that Human revolutionaries (workers, women, gays and lesbians, post-colonial subjects) suffer subjective vertigo when they meet the state’s disciplinary violence with the revolutionary violence of the subaltern; but they are spared objective vertigo. This is because the most disorienting aspects of their lives are induced by the struggles that arise from intra-Human conflicts over competing conceptual frameworks and disputed cognitive maps, such as the American Indian Movement’s demand for the return of Turtle Island vs. the U.S.’s desire to maintain territorial integrity, or the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional’s (FALN) demand for Puerto Rican independence vs. the U.S.’s desire to maintain Puerto Rico as a territory. But for the Black, as for the slave, there are no cognitive maps, no conceptual frameworks of suffering and dispossession which are analogic with the myriad maps and frameworks which explain the dispossession of Human subalterns. Blackness exists outside of categories of the minoritarian and the majoritarian subject because the positionality of blackness is not one of relation but rather one of non-relation in which slaveness has become an overdetermining mark on the body rendering Blackness outside of the logic that coheres the rest of the world, Barber 16 Daniel Colucciello Barber, assistant professor of philosophy and religious studies at Pace University, author of Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence (2014) and On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (2011). His work, which has appeared in various journals and volumes, is presently focused on the idea of conversion.World-Making and Grammatical Impasse, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 25, Numbers 1 & 2, Fall/Winter 2016, pp. 179-206 (Article), Published by Duke University Press, // nb NCC Packet 2019What would it mean to provide an antagonistic analysis of the world—of the analogy of analogies, or the analogical operation as such? An essential instance of such antagonistic analysis is provided by Frank B. Wilderson III, who attends to the specificity of blackness as it is positioned both within and without the world. To say that blackness is thusly positioned is to observe that blackness is not—as is often presumed within the inherited theoretical landscape—one subaltern or minoritarian position among others. Following Wilderson’s analysis, non-black minoritarian positions possess the capacity to oppose the discourse that dominates them through the invocation or reclamation of a term within that discourse; the field of discourse by which domination articulates itself is a field that can, at least in principle, be inhabited as a means for the articula- tion of opposition to such domination. For instance, the position of the proletarian may articulate opposition to capital through the term of labor, the position of the woman may articulate opposition to pa- triarchy through the term of gender, or the position of the colonized may articulate opposition to the colonizer through the term of land. However, as Wilderson argues, the position of blackness has no capac- ity to invoke such a term. What inheres in the position of blackness is not labor, gender, or land, but rather the mark of slaveness.8 It is along these lines that blackness is both within and without the world: it is within the world in the sense that the world does in fact position it; yet it is without the world because this very position- ing is marked by slaveness, which precludes the capacity—present even in subaltern positions—to (re-)claim worldly terms of relation. Domination over the aforementioned subaltern positions is articu- lated through the divisive (and asymmetrical) distribution of a none- theless common—or twice-appearing—term. This is to say that the domination of labor, gender, or land is not only established through, but also possibly opposed within, the field of divisive relationality; the gap that emerges between majoritarian and minoritarian ap- pearances of the same term provides a field within which both given domination and the possibility of opposition take place.9 Blackness, on the other hand, is positioned without the field of such possibility, without the capacity of such relation—without the world. Simply put, the position of blackness is without analogy. Such a point has been advanced by Wilderson in his argument against “the ruse of analogy” (r, 37), namely, the operation by which blackness, in order to articulate the suffering and demands of its position, draws upon—and thereby imagines itself as analogous to—minoritarian positions. The “ruse,” then, is the presumption that blackness is not without the world—that it is able to participate in the possibility set forth by the divisive relationality of labor, gender, or land. In fact, the same ruse is evident in the presumption that blackness participates in the possibility that is set forth by the divisive relationality of the hu- man. Due to “a disparate relationship to violence,” Wilderson argues, the position of blackness is not analogizable with that of the human: “the Black is a sentient being though not a Human being.”10 The world, I have argued, is the analogy that enables the (co- existent) operation of all analogical terms; any tension apparent be- tween analogical terms is resolved through the analogical possibility of the field of the world as such. One can say, along these lines, that analogy is how the world operates, or that “the world” is an adum- bration of the operation of analogy. To put it in this manner is to come to see how Wilderson’s analysis of the position of blackness as that which is without analogy is a matter of essential specificity. Such “withoutness”—without analogy, without the world—is specific to the position of blackness. Yet this specificity does not refer to a partic- ularity that relates (together with other particularities) to an overar- ching universality. On the contrary, it indexes a point that is without, and that thereby breaks, the total configuration—the (ensemble of possible) relations between particularities and universality—of the world.11 In other words, the articulation of antagonism toward the world—that is, of the antagonism that is essential—is inseparable from, bound to, the specification of blackness.12 Such essential specificity is what is at stake in Saidiya V. Hartman’s remark that blackness is positioned as the “unthought” or in Hort- ense J. Spillers’s invocation of a “zero degree of social conceptualiza- tion that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse.”13 Understood in this way, the position of blackness names a specificity that concerns the very essence of—or, more precisely, that is in essen- tial antagonism with—the world. It is not a part of the world that is excluded from the world, or that the world does not fully recognize. Much more essentially (though all the more specifically), the posi- tion of blackness indexes that which is denied participation in the world as such. It concerns an absence of recognizability, a denial of recognition that itself has no means of becoming recognized with- in the world. The withoutness specified according to the position of blackness thus entails the demand, following Wilderson, for “the end of the world” (r, 337). The relationship between subjects and action is defined by the sensory-motor schema where subjects are affected by events in the world (sensory) and then respond to those events (motor), but the middle passage represents the site of the sensory-motor break for African subjects. The SMB is the site of such an extreme affect that it strips subjectivity; the residual flesh from the affect of the middle passage was made into fungible black objects which is to be a seer, a sentient being that experiences the world but is not of the world, Barber 2 Daniel Colucciello Barber, assistant professor of philosophy and religious studies at Pace University, author of Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence (2014) and On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (2011). His work, which has appeared in various journals and volumes, is presently focused on the idea of conversion. World-Making and Grammatical Impasse, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 25, Numbers 1 & 2, Fall/Winter 2016, pp. 179-206 (Article), Published by Duke University Press, // nb NCC Packet 2019Deleuze, when he speaks of the sensory-motor break, refers to the lack of a capacity to establish and maintain a successful link between two moments: the first of these is the moment of being affected by the sen- sation of the world (the “sensory”), while the second of these is the moment of acting upon or moving within that world (the “motor”). The successful19 operation of the sensory-motor link is therefore evident insofar as the subject is able to remain active upon or within the world that affects it. In such a case, the affect caused by the sensation of the world is able to be integrated into a narrative of action or movement. On the other hand, the sensory-motor break concerns the encoun- ter with an affect that—due to its intensity—undoes the link between the subject and the world. This break disintegrates the narrative(s) by which action, or any form thereof, is imagined to be adequate to such affection. That which the subject senses in the world comes to affect the subject with an intensity that outstrips that subject’s capacity to act. The subject is unable to narrate its successful movement within the world by which it is affected; the world is too much for the ca- pacitation implied by action or movement. Consequently, to think of the world is not to think of a stage of action; it is rather to think of a power—overwhelming and perduring—that binds to inaction. Deleuze names this subject without action as “the seer” (c, 170). The absence of any form of action and the definition of thought as the seer are coeval: on one hand, it is because the subject cannot act or move that it finds itself bound to (a relatively passive) seeing; on the other, it is because the subject undergoes visions of immeasurable affective intensity that thought—positioned, in its inherited sense, at the site of the subject—is defined without action. Thought, as the seer, is stunned, paralyzed, or—following Deleuze’s mention of “a strange fossilization” (c, 169)—petrified. If the successful operation of the sensory-motor link emphasizes a transitive power, then insistence on the seer emphasizes an intransitive power. Such intransitivity lacks the capacity for action, but it is not a matter of withdrawal from reality. On the contrary, the capacity for action is revealed as inadequate to reality, as something that de- pends on a denial of reality, whereas intransitivity marks an intensi- fied encounter with such reality. One is a seer, without transit from sensation to action, because one is affected by reality in its essential intensity, its essential breaking.20 The inherited definition of the subject, or “man”—a name that I will, following Deleuze’s own terminology, henceforth use21—entails a basic capacitation. This capacity stems from a division between man and world. The notion that man has the capacity to act in response to such affection, to transform affection into movement within the world, requires the ultimate independence of man from the world. It is this division that grounds the sensory-motor link: although man is affected by the world, his independence enables him to convert affec- tion toward an action into or onto the world. The breaking of the sensory-motor link precludes man, and in do- ing so it precludes the ground for the possibility of another world. This is because the possibility of a world other than “this world” (c, 172)—where “this world” names the world that is sensed and that af- fects here and now—derives its ground from the independence of man.22 The division between this world and another world, or the transit from the former to the latter, is enabled by the division be- tween man and world: man, due to his division from (this) world, provides a space of action that can produce or discover a (new) world; the independence of man from world—the invocation of an actor that, while intertwined with and affected by the world, is not ultimately defined by this world—provides the ground for transit to another world. To adhere to the insistence of the sensory-motor break on the incapacitation of man, on the necessary dismantling of that which presumes to be independent from the world, is thereby to dis- mantle the ground of possibility. Root CauseCivil societies reliance on white supremacy is the basis for genocide, ontological violence based on the penal system, and the eradication of the non-white other. It is the root cause and outweighs all impacts.Rodriguez, summer 2008 (Dylan, Prof of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, “Race, Gender, and Immigration in the Globality of the U.S. Prison Regime” The Scholar and Feminist Online ) NCC Packet 2019White supremacist social, economic, and cultural formations organic to the United States—from racial chattel slavery and frontier genocide, to contemporary productions of neoliberalism and (domestic/undeclared) warfare—constitute the ongoing emergence of American technologies of human incarceration and punishment, although theoretical explanations of this entanglement vary widely. For the theoretical purposes of this essay, white supremacy may be understood as a logic of social organization that produces regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized "human" difference, enforced through coercions and violences that are structured by genocidal possibility (including physical extermination and curtailment of people's collective capacities to socially, culturally, or biologically reproduce).[5] As a historical vernacular and philosophical apparatus of domination, white supremacy is both based on, and constantly resurfacing, notions of the white (European and Euro-American) "human" vis-à-vis the rigorous production, penal discipline, and frequent social, political, and biological neutralization or extermination of the (non-white) sub- or non-human. To consider white supremacy as essential to American social formation (rather than an extremist deviation from it) facilitates a discussion of the modalities through which this material logic of violence overdetermines the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that compose American globality and constitute the common sense organic to its ordering. Here, I am less concerned with the broad question of how the U.S. prison apparatus marks an extension of this national racial genealogy, than I am with the specific concern of how the prison regime has come to constitute a qualitative carceral formation that globalizes U.S. white supremacy as a logic of social organization that produces regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized "human" difference. The globalization of white supremacy is fundamentally shaped by the mobilization of the U.S. prison, in historically unprecedented ways, as both a material arrangement of strategically localized bodily domination (the localities of what Julia Sudbury has called the "global prison industrial complex") and as a specific formation of violence that produces the U.S. prison regime as a modality of power relations. It is the technology of coercion crystallized in the institutionality of the U.S. prison (across its local variations) that expresses the constitutive logic of the current U.S. dominance in movements of hegemonic globalization. Perhaps most importantly, this is not a "coercion" that manifests uniformly (or even relatively evenly) across bodies, localities, and historical moments: it is, rather, a technology of carceral violence that draws from the essential historical components of white supremacy as a "substructure" (following Frantz Fanon's appropriation and deforming of the Marxist lexicon) of U.S. national formation, civil society building, and globality.Their root cause argument is backward - it mistakes blackness for personhood, when in reality the body is rendered as property – the plantation required the impossibility of black humanity to function. McKittrick 16Katherine McKittrick, associate professor at Queen’s University, Canada. Her work is interdisciplinary, attending to the links between epistemological narratives, liberations, and creative texts, and covering research in black studies, anticolonial studies, cultural geographies, and gender studies. “Rebellion/Invention/Groove” Small Axe, Volume 20, Number 1, March 2016 (No. 49), KB NCC Packet 2019Sylvia Wynter explores many layered and knotted plantation narratives in “Black Metamorphosis.” The monograph begins with a discussion of enslaved Africans who, following Middle Passage terrors, were forced to occupy and work violent plantation economies. The Middle Passage and plantation systems transformed—or, more specifically, converted—the enslaved into units of labor. The enslaved perceptively and conceptually became homogenous units of labor, planted in the New World not to inhabit (people, settle) the land but to mechanically produce monocrops and fuel the economic system (1–3). The plantation system, above all, sought profit. It follows that the enslaved units of labor, as owned property, were embedded in a system that benefited from, and calcified, their nonpersonhood and nonbeing; and it is precisely because they were planted in the New World not as “buyers and sellers” but as commodities that were “bought and sold” that black enslaved peoples in the New World were at once alienated from and implicated in the racial economy as nonbeings/nonconsumers/mechanized labor (232). Put differently, the plantation context required the impossibility of black humanity. At the same time, transatlantic slavery—the Middle Passage and plantation systems—totally cut off the enslaved from their former cultures and histories while normalizing a collective “mode of knowing” that sustained white supremacy and geographically codified racial differences (387). Indeed, the economic mechanization and negation of blackness was entwined with the geographic removal from the continent of Africa, geographic estrangement on arrival in the New World, and plantation geographies designed to simultaneously immobilize and mechanize black labor units. Imposed placelessness was accompanied by the negation of black humanity and an “alienated reality” (7). These same processes, we can conclude, humanized white colonial geographies as productive sites of settlement, belonging, and capital accumulation. Belonging and settlement and accumulation were thus entangled with dispossessed black labor units and entrenched, extrahumanly and not, the “nothing” of the enslaved and the “being” of the settler (146).Later in the manuscript Wynter rethinks her initial black labor-unit model to argue that the plantation economy must, in fact, be understood alongside the widespread assault on all aspects of black life. Calling into question and reworking Karl Marx’s “factory” hypothesis, and reading a series of black intellectual texts, Wynter identifies that practices of “nigger [black]-breaking” initiated the enslaved black population and the colonizing white population through acts of violence, as asymmetrically raced black nonbeings and raced white beings, through the colonization of consciousness: “nigger [black]-breaking reveals itself as an initiation rite in which the task of social inscription was at least as important as the task of economic extraction. … The plantation and the nigger-breaking model of exploitation reveals that the social order of production, in order to function, needs to establish fixed coefficients of social exchange, and that the strategy of the economic is a central means of establishing these fixed coefficients [End Page 82] of exchange” (590–91). In “Black Metamorphosis” Wynter shows that the unsettling workings of antiblack racism and violence grew out of and were sustained by a plantation system that geographically, economically, socially, and psychically produced the punished and punishable laboring black body (not the laboring black person) as necessary to antiblack socialization across racial identifications. What Wynter traces, then, are not only the historical plantocratic processes through which blackness becomes an absolute negative sign “in the mathematics of inequality” (214) but also how the interpellation of the self-as-free, in knotted slave-plantation-and-post-slave-plantation contexts, is produced within a normative bourgeois order of consciousness—propped up by a global political economy of race—that is antiblack.Slavery was, Wynter writes, “the first large-scale intensive attempt at the mechanization of human existence” (107; emphasis mine). The mechanization of the black labor-unit status was anchored to a range of antiblack practices (premature and preventable deaths, lashings, segregations, bindings, lynchings, cuttings, brandings, dismemberments, malnourishments, rapes, impoverishments, incarcerations, thrashings designed to break black into absolute negation) that expertly located black nonpersonhood and nonbeing within the fabric of, and therefore necessary to, collective social consciousness. In many ways, what can also be observed is what I consider to be one of Wynter’s more provocative insights: how practices of racism and narratives of antiblackness not only permeate how we collectively understand one another but also inform negative physiological and neurobiological responses to blackness.7 What Wynter offers in her unraveling of the plantation in “Black Metamorphosis” is how psychic and affective negative feelings about blackness—feelings that are so often experienced as though they are truthful and bioinstinctual—are implicit to a symbolic belief system of which antiblackness is constitutive (569). Antiblackness informs neurobiological and physiological drives, desires, and emotions—and negative feelings—because it underwrites a collective and normalized, racially coded, biocentric belief system wherein narratives of natural selection, and the dysselection of blackness, are cast as, and reflexly experienced as, commonsense. Social consciousness, then, across racial identifications, includes physiologically and neurobiologically feeling and sensing and knowing antiblackness as a normal way of life. Feeling normal is feeling, as if bioinstinctually, black-as-worthless. It is worth repeating that Wynter also identifies racist violence, emerging from plantation logics, as initiation; rites of passage mark entrance into, and therefore replicate and normalize a European-centered bourgeois social order (423). Importantly, then, the process of coming into and being accepted into the world relies on conceptions of—or, more brutally and dismally, acts of—racist violence that reinforce the physiological and neurobiological refusal of black humanity. [End Page 83]A2: UtilRepresentations of Mass Death are predicated on White Utilitarian Calculus that Sees the White Body as the only one the Counts. This Mode of Calculus perpetuates gratuitous violence against the black body by continuing the systematic devaluation of the black body. Wilderson’8 {Frank B; Professor at UC IRVINE and member of ANC; “Absence of subjective presence” Biko Lives; pg 97-98; Other sections are by Andile Mngxitama; Amanda Alexander and Nigel Gibson; Published by Palgrave Macmillan; July 8 2008}AvP NCC Packet 2019I am not saying that we welcomed the prophesy of our collective death. I am arguing that the threat of our collective death, a threat in response to the gesture of our collective our living will made us feel as though we were alive as though we possessed what in fact we could not posses, Human life as opposed to black life (which is always already “substitutively dead”, “a fatal way of being alive”)- we could die because we lived. It was as though we had penetrated three layers of absence in the libidinal economy; an economy that organizes the structure of reality in ways that were too often eschewed by south African Marxists and charterists more broadly in favor of the verifiable data of political economy; an economy that in many respects was at the center of steven biko’s meditations and the foundation of black consciousness. Like steven Biko before him, lewis Gordon also a close reader of frantz fanon reminds us of the serious pitfalls and limitations in excluding the evasive aspects of affect from interpretation of reality. Building on lewis gordon’s ontological schema of absence and presence that is a reconstruction and elaboration of fanon’s ontological arguments in Black skin White masks, I designate three layers of black absence subjective, cartographic and political, through which we might read the cheering that erupted as affective (rather than discursive) symptoms of an ontological discovery. The world cannot accommodate a blackened relation at the level of bodies subjectivity. Thus, Black “presence is a form of absence” for to see a black is to see the black an ontological frieze that waits for a gaze, rather than a living ontology moving with agency in the field of vision. The Black’s moment of recognition by the other is always already blackness upon which supplements are lavished- American, Caribbean, Xhosa, Zulu, etc. But the supplements are superfluous rather than substantive they don’t unblacken. As Gordon points out, there is something absent whenever blacks are present. The more present a black is the more absent is this something. And the more absent a black is, the more present is this something. Blackness, then, is the destruction of presence, for blacks seem to suck presence into themselves as a black hole, pretty much like the astrophysical phenomenon that bears that name.Alternative1NCThe alternative is unflinching paradigmatic analysis that calls for the end of civil society starting with a rejection of the affWilderson 2010 Frank, Associate Professor at UC Irvine’s Department of Drama and African American Studies (Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, ix-x, 54-9 || NDW)STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During the last years of apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and above-ground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period, I began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies and points of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu. .? [CONTINUES]? In the Introduction and chapter 1, we saw how the aporia between Black being and political ontology has existed since Arab and European enslavement of Africans. The crafting of questions through which one might arrive at an unflinching paradigmatic analysis of political ontology, a language that could express the structural and performative violence of Slave-making, is repeatedly thwarted. Humanist discourse, whose epistemological machinations provide our conceptual frameworks for thinking political ontology, is diverse and contrary. But for all its diversity and contrariness it is sutured by an implicit rhetorical consensus that violence accrues to the Human body as a result of transgressions, whether real or imagined, within the symbolic order. That is to say, Humanist discourse can only think a subject’s relation to violence as a contingency and not as a matrix that positions the subject. Put another way, Humanism has no theory of the Slave because it imagines a subject who has been either alienated in language or alienated from his or her cartographic and temporal capacities. 1 It cannot imagine an object who has been positioned by gratuitous violence and who has no car- tographic and temporal capacities to lose—a sentient being for whom recognition and incorporation is impossible. In short, political ontology, as imagined through Humanism, can only produce discourse that has as its foundation alienation and exploitation as a grammar of suffering, when what is needed (for the Black, who is always already a Slave) is an ensemble of ontological questions that has as its foundation accumulation and fungibility as a grammar of suffering. 2 A Culture of Politics The violence of the Middle Passage and the Slave estate, 3 technologies of accumulation and fungibility, recompose and reenact their horrors on each succeeding generation of Blacks. This violence is both gratuitous (not contingent on transgressions against the hegemony of civil society) and structural (positioning Blacks ontologically outside of Humanity and civil society). Simultaneously, it renders the ontological status of Humanity (life itself ) wholly dependent on civil society’s repetition compulsion: the frenzied and fragmented machinations through which civil society reenacts gratuitous violence on the Black— that civil society might know itself as the domain of Humans— generation after generation. Again, we need a new language of abstraction to explain this horror. The explanatory power of Humanist discourse is bankrupt in the face of the Black. It is inadequate and inessential to, as well as parasitic on, the ensemble of questions which the dead but sentient thing, the Black, struggles to articulate in a world of living subjects. My work on film, cultural theory, and political ontology is my attempt to contribute to this often fragmented and constantly assaulted quest to forge a language of abstraction with explanatory powers emphatic enough to embrace the Black, an accumulated and fungible object, in a Human world of exploited and alienated subjects. The imposition of Humanism’s assumptive logic has encumbered Black film studies to the extent that it is underwritten by the assumptive logic of White or non-Black film studies. This is a problem of cultural studies writ large. In this chapter, I want to illustrate briefly how we ? might break the theoretical impasse between, on the one hand, the assumptive logic of cultural studies and, on the other, the theoretical aphasia to which cultural studies is reduced when it encounters the (non)ontological status of the Black. I will do so not by launching a frontal attack against White film theory, in particular, or even cultural studies broadly speaking, but by interrogating Jacques Lacan— because Lacanian psychoanalysis is one of the twin pillars buttressing film theory and cultural studies. 4 Unfortunately, cultural studies that theorizes the interface between Blacks and Humans is hobbled in its attempts to (a) expose power relationships and (b) examine how relations of power influence and shape cultural practice. Cultural studies insists on a grammar of suffering which assumes that we are all positioned essentially by way of the symbolic order, what Lacan calls the wall of language— and as such our potential for stasis or change (our capacity for being oppressed or free) is overdetermined by our “universal” ability or inability to seize and wield discursive weapons. This idea corrupts the explanatory power of most socially engaged films and even the most radical line of political action because it produces a cinema and a politics that cannot account for the grammar of suffering of the Black— the Slave. To put it bluntly, the imaginative labor 5 of cinema, political action, and cultural studies are all afflicted with the same theoretical aphasia. They are speechless in the face of gratuitous violence. This theoretical aphasia is symptomatic of a debilitated ensemble of questions regarding political ontology. At its heart are two registers of imaginative labor. The first register is that of description, the rhetorical labor aimed at explaining the way relations of power are named, categorized, and explored. The second register can be characterized as prescription, the rhetorical labor predicated on the notion that everyone can be emancipated through some form of discursive, or symbolic, intervention. But emancipation through some form of discursive or symbolic intervention is wanting in the face of a subject position that is not a subject position— what Marx calls “a speaking implement” or what Ronald Judy calls “an interdiction against subjectivity.” In other words, the Black has sentient capacity but no relational capacity. As an accumulated and fungible object, rather than an exploited and alienated subject, the Black is openly vulnerable to the whims of the world, and so is his or her cultural “production.” What does it mean—what are the stakes—when the world can whimsically transpose one’s cultural gestures, the stuff of symbolic intervention, onto another worldly good, a commodity of style? Frantz Fanon echoes this question when he writes, “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.” He clarifies this assertion and alerts us to the stakes which the optimistic assumptions of film studies and cultural studies, the counterhegemonic promise of alternative cinema, and the emancipatory project of coalition politics cannot account for, when he writes: “Ontology— once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside— does not permit us to understand the being of the black.” 6 This presents a challenge to film production and to film studies given their cultivation and elaboration by the imaginative labor of cultural studies, underwritten by the assumptive logic of Humanism; because if everyone does not possess the dna of culture, that is, (a) time and space transformative capacity, (b) a relational status with other Humans through which one’s timeand space-transformative capacity is recognized and incorporated, and (c) a relation to violence that is contingent and not gratuitous, then how do we theorize a sentient being who is positioned not by the dna of culture but by the structure of gratuitous violence? How do we think outside of the conceptual framework of subalternity— that is, outside of the explanatory power of cultural studies— and think beyond the pale of emancipatory agency by way of symbolic intervention? I am calling for a different conceptual framework, predicated not on the subject-effect of cultural performance but on the structure of political ontology, a framework that allows us to substitute a culture of politics for a politics of culture. The value in this rests not simply in the way it would help us rethink cinema and performance, but in the way it can help us theorize what is at present only intuitive and anecdotal: the unbridgeable gap between Black being and Human life. To put a finer point on it, such a framework might enhance the explanatory power of theory, art, and politics by destroying and perhaps restructuring the ethical range of our current ensemble of questions. This has profound implications for nonBlack film studies, Black film studies, and African American studies writ large because they are currently entangled in a multicultural paradigm that takes an interest in an insufficiently critical comparative analysis— that is, a comparative analysis in pursuit of a coalition politics (if not in practice then at least as a theorizing metaphor) which, by its very nature, crowds out and forecloses the Slave’s grammar of suffering. The Dilemmas of Black Film Studies As the backlash to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements has set in, a small but growing coterie of Black theorists are returning to Fanon’s astonishing claim that “ontology— once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside— does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; but he must be black in relation to the white man.” 7 Though they do not form anything as ostentatious as a school of thought, and though their attitudes toward and acknowledgments of Fanon vary, the moniker Afro-pessimists neither infringes on their individual differences nor exaggerates their fidelity to a shared set of assumptions. It should be noted that of the Afro-pessimists— Hortense Spillers, Ronald Judy, David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Kara Keeling, Jared Sexton, Joy James, Lewis Gordon, George Yancey, and Orlando Patterson— only James and Patterson are social scientists. The rest come out of the Humanities. Fanon, of course, was a doctor of psychiatry. Reading them, and connecting the dots at the level of shared assumptions, rather than the content of their work or their prescriptive gestures (if any), it becomes clear that though their work holds the intellectual protocols of unconscious identification accountable to structural positionality, it does so in a way that enriches, rather than impoverishes, how we are able to theorize unconscious identification. That is to say that though meditations on unconscious identifications and preconscious interests may be their starting point (i.e., how to cure “hallucinatory whitening,” and how to think about the Black/nonBlack divide that is rapidly replacing the Black/White divide), 8 they are, in the first instance, theorists of structural positionality. 9 The Afro-pessimists are theorists of Black positionality who share Fanon’s insistence that, though Blacks are indeed sentient beings, the structure of the entire world’s semantic field— regardless of cultural and national discrepancies—“leaving” as Fanon would say, “existence by the wayside”—is sutured by anti-Black solidarity. Unlike the solution-oriented, interest-based, or hybridity-dependent scholarship so fashionable today, Afro-pessimism explores the meaning of Blackness not— in the first instance— as a variously and unconsciously interpellated identity or as a conscious social actor, but as a structural position of noncommunicability in the face of all other positions; this meaning is noncommuni-cable because, again, as a position, Blackness is predicated on modalities of accumulation and fungibility, not exploitation and alienation. Unfortunately, neither Black nor White film theory seems to have made this shift from exploitation and alienation as that which positions film theory’s “universal” cinematic subject to genocide, accumulation, and fungibility as modalities of gratuitous violence which positions the Slave. In this respect, film theory mystifies structural antagonisms and abets social and political stability. Even the bulk of Black film theory is predicated on an assumptive logic of exploitation and alienation, rather than accumulation and fungibility, when regarding the ontological status of the Black.The alternative is to vote negative to engage in an unflinching structural analysis of the ontological position of Blackness—the very possibility of ethics and freedom resides in a rejection of the affirmative’s the state Kokontis 2011 (Kate, PhD in Performance Studies from UC-Berkeley, “Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy and performativity in the American racial state,” accessed via Proquest- [SG])On one hand, she addresses the literal politics that the theological narratives espouse. There is a long tradition of deploying the Exodus narrative toward the pursuit of social reform. That is, instead of appealing to it in a way that focuses on the next world, “[t]hrough biblical typology, particularly uses of Exodus, African Americans elevated their common experiences to biblical drama and found resources to account for their circumstances and respond effectively to them. [...] Exodus history sustained hope and a sense of possibility in the face of insurmountable evil. The analogical uses of the story enabled a sense of agency and resistance in persistent moments of despair and disillusionment.”64 But even these efforts have – not exclusively, but often – relied on a particular iteration of the social gospel that presupposes a set of moral and institutional imperatives (for instance, the ideal of training racial, religious, sexual, social, or institutional “deviants” or outlyers to behave according to an ostensibly correct set of moral principles) that run counter to a radical critique of the underlying terms of the state and civil society which tend to ratify, naturalize, and invisibilize antiblackness and/or policies that adversely impact black people who are not part of the middle class, rather than to critique or subvert it. Hartman, on the other hand, does call for, and mount, a radical critique of the terms of the state and civil society: for her, they are inherently unethical rather than redeemable, having engendered centuries of black social death and historical unknowability, and thus any struggle toward freedom demands an unflinching critical analysis rather than an implicit or explicit ratification of these institutions and the terms on which they are predicated. But more fundamentally, she addresses the political implications of the assumptive logic of a theological teleology. I interpret Hartman to posit that there is a kind of freedom that can be predicated on not-knowing: if there is no predetermined future, there is no divine imperative that might encourage an investment in the moral prescriptions of a conservative social gospel: a toppled faith in the redemptive possibilities of the struggle has the potential to open the door to invention, speculation, refashioning, and cobbling together something from nothing, presence from absence. I interpret her to posit that a viable freedom dream necessitates the acknowledgment of loss and absence and the history of processes of dehumanizing antiblackness, the acknowledgement of the wound and its psychic, social, political, and ethical causes – as well as an acknowledgement of its persistence – rather than being deluded by tidy or optimistic but under-analyzed narratives of progress or redemption. Only then can any realistic stock be taken toward re-imagining the world and the possibilities and imperatives of a black freedom struggle. While Haley and Gates draw on narratives that say that the past, including its suffering, was meaningful, Hartman offers what might appear to be a much bleaker interpretation that insists that it is meaningless insofar as it is not folded into any sort of teleology. But in that is a kind of freedom/dream, because the subjects of her narrative are free from a predetermination of the terms on which liberation is possible, the structures around its enactment. What she calls for is a profound refashioning of the epistemology of the invisible, which is as fundamental a component of the black freedom struggle as is an epistemology of verifiable evidence of oppression. That is, she advocates the excavation of psychic structures and historical silences to replace an implicit or explicit faith in a divine logic in the (racial) order of things. Genealogy cannot connect with the unknown, so it becomes a ghost story, an excavation. The term might then be interpreted less as a means of accessing literal ancestors, and more as a process toward understanding. Hartman constructs, in her text, not a genealogy of anyone’s family, but a genealogy of the stranger, of the slave; a genealogy of loss, of the lost, of searching. Projects that make use of imaginative, performative, quasi-fictional or poetic devices can’t rest with not-knowing: the imaginative devices emerge, in fact, from attempts to piece together or construct/invent evidence from its lack. They all insist on the importance of knowing, whether because of some large-scale sense of collective responsibility, or because of personal yearning, or both. The imaginative devices don’t exist for the sake of being imaginative; they exist for the sake of survival. But in being imaginative, they allow for radical possibilities to emerge that literality forecloses. Part of what performance might offer the study of history is a) different keys to be able to fill in the gaps, that aren’t so heavily reliant upon explicit, legible empiricism, and b) not only permission for, but encouragement of what uncertainty can yield. Genealogy, broadly understood, is what furnishes evidence: it is the key to filling in blanks that are impossible to fill. One version of it is capable of being profoundly literal; of making reconstruction possible; it is used to fill in the blank that has been lost to us – whomever the ‘us’ is: the dispossessed, displaced, marginalized – providing an object to slip into a gaping negative space. This I would call genealogy as an object. A different version is used in order to understand the gaps, to underscore or illuminate the negative spaces and ask how they came to be, and filling in the context around the blank spaces, inheriting the loss, becomes the way to trace the relationship between the past, present, and future. This I would call genealogy as a process. What, then, is or could be critical or even radical in roots-seeking genealogy projects? There is something inherently conservative about nostalgia, according to most interpretations; but not if a notion of “radical nostalgia,” such as that offered by Peter Glazer, is pursued: such an enactment of notalgia engages in worldmaking and invention; the definition takes for granted that nostalgia is for worlds and times that never existed, and that therefore it is not conservative (i.e. about returning to an idealized past), but that it is creative and always seeking something new. Performative returns are inevitably projects of yearning, of wishing for a past that was imagined to be better than the present (which has devolved in some way) or a future that has promise and potential. The mythical Aztec homeland Aztla?n that was made popular during the Chicano Movement is a very elegant example: it is a wished-for, utopian space, acknowledged as being impossible to realize, but always animating the spirit of the concrete efforts of its adherents toward social justice and structural change (see Anaya and Lomeli? 1991). Hartman writes: “To believe, as I do, that the enslaved are our contemporaries is to understand that we share their aspirations and defeats, which isn’t to say that we are owed what they were due but rather to acknowledge that they accompany our every effort to fight against domination, to abolish the color line, and to imagine a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it wasn’t something that could ever be given to you. The kind of freedom that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back. [...] The demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with making good the promise of abolition, and this entails much more than the end of property in slaves. It requires the reconstruction of society, which is the only way to honor our debt to the dead. This is the intimacy of our age with theirs – an unfinished struggle. To what end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if not to incite the hopes of transforming the present?” (Hartman 2007, 269-270). But performative return is not necessarily critical, and part of what I demonstrate throughout this dissertation is how such projects are always more complicated than they seem; they work to challenge and bolster the racial state; they are in some ways radical and in others extremely conservative. And this question of criticality has precisely to do with normativity: do genealogical practices, the conclusions they draw and the worldmaking they do, work to undo or to reinscribe oppressive patterns, habits, worldviews, available roles of and categories for historically marginalized groups of people? All three of these projects attempt to re-write the terms of America, such that the circumstances of African-Americans are configured as being integral instead of outside the dominant narrative; constitutive rather than an aberration. But they waver between trying to write that as a narrative of progress, in which we have left slavery behind and have ascended to a space of constitutive normativity; and trying to underline the fundamental and unending nature of slavery – a kind of rejoinder to uncritical narratives that not only attends to the subjective space of social death that it has yielded but the possibilities and necessities of invention that have flourished in its wake. What they have in common is that they present the necessity of grappling with the past instead of ignoring it, allowing African-Americans’ movements and reinscriptions of migration to trouble the waters of complacency, forging a broader awareness of the fraught position they have historically occupied. Each contains kernels of great possibility for an inclusive vision of the future as well as more or less significant red flags. Hartman’s vision, however, seems to espouse a particularly liberating articulation of freedom, because it does not try to deny or occlude the presence or significance of ongoing disparity and loss: while Gates’ and Haley’s subjects and implied audience have already succeeded, gained access to civil society, and have implicitly ratified the fundamental terms on which it is predicated, Hartman’s are still struggling to make something from nothing; they have an urgency in attending to disparities, and no investment in a status quo that excludes or violates their well-being. What she claims or advocates is not a victimized stance, but rather a staunch activist one that is inflected by a rigorous and unflinching structural analysis, and a sensitive and equally rigorous understanding of desire, yearning, and the possibilities for reinvention and reconstruction that emerge when faced with profound absence and loss. 2NCOnly an unflinching and paradigmatic analysis of Blackness can overturn the American paradigm – it’s their burden to prove that Blackness is anything but an ontological voidWilderson 2010 (Frank, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, 10-11)Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on posting an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today’s Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching “claims successfully made on the State” have come to pass. But that would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on “solid” ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to “facts,” the “historical record,” and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science, history, and/or public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of “work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way: no slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a positionality against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews it coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy, but on one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.A2: GordonGordon’s theorization of black existentialism and phenomenology derives from a misreading of Fanon that ignores the role of psychoanalysis in Fanon’s psychopathology of race – Blackness doesn’t come about through encounter but through the white imaginaryMarriott, ‘18(David, Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, “Whither Fanon?”, Whither Fanon: Studies in the Blackness of Being, pp. 14-16, ZW) NCC Packet 2019Gordon’s third chapter opens with the need to contextualize racism in the sense of a perverse anonymity: Racism renders the individual anonymous even to himself. The very standpoint of consciousness, embodiment itself, is saturated with a strangeness that either locks the individual into the mechanism of things or sends him away and transforms him into an observer hovering over that very thing. Thus, to be seen in a racist way is an ironic way of not being seen through being seen. It is to be seen with overdetermined anonymity, which amounts, in effect, to invisibility. For to be seen in a typically human way is to be seen as a point of epistemological limitation; one’s subjectivity is called upon as a point of meaning. . . . The perversion of anonymity—overdetermination—seals off such affirmations [of reciprocal recognitions].40 A necessary corollary of this perverse anonymity (which determines Gordon’s project as a whole, of which he tries to situate Fanonism as a particular reading) is “alienated embodiment”: “like his identifiers, the Negro finds himself facing the objective alienation of his embodiment out there” (that is, in the racist world).41 I cannot here unpack all the implications of this deceptively simple picture. One, on which Gordon is insistent, is that this strangeness comes more or less violently—but always violently—from the outside which, just because the black is overdetermined from without, remains more or less a situation of objectification and denudation. But there are a number of reasons for resisting this way of looking at it. For a start, the way overdetermination is described in Black Skin, White Masks, it is clear that this “strangeness” is no longer describable as a question of encounter at all. As Fanon shows repeatedly in “The Negro and Psychopathology,” the feeling of estrangement is not simply a result of contact: “Frequently the negro who becomes abnormal [s’anormalise] has never had any relations with the White man. . . . Has there been a real traumatism [traumatisme effectif]? To all of this we have to answer: no.”42 Elsewhere Fanon refers to the singular experience of the self or ego being invaded and breached by the “unidentifiable and unassimilable.”43 Fanon goes on to suggest that this manifestation within of something that cannot, so to speak, be owned or possessed, seen or intuited, is of the order of a radical de-situating of the ego, that necessarily interrupts—evacuates, empties—the very possibility of transcendental reflection on the seer and the seen. Anonymity is essentially pervertible, then, not because one is enslaved to a black appearance, but because one is—wishfully, unconsciously—already a slave to the imago of whiteness and that this pervertibility is the condition (to be violently affirmed) of what it means to be a black subject. “In the Antilles,” Fanon suggests, “perception always occurs on the level of the imaginary. It is in white terms that one perceives one’s fellows.”44 To be black, then, is to be originally violated by a whiteness that comes from the inside out, and this anteriority necessarily follows from an intimacy that is already perverse. I think it would not be hard on the basis of these observations to show that the way overdetermination is determined here can already be read, with the help of Fanon’s work on psychoneuroses, as marked by a kind of intimacy that remains radically alien to the subject, a sort of self-interrupting that within in which the subject cannot reflect itself as a subject, a déclage that can never appear as such, never give itself to a phenomenology of seeing, but that nonetheless haunts both seer and the seen, an intimacy that also marks a crucial shift in Fanon’s relationship to phenomenology.45 Gordon especially struggles with this shift and, casting in his lot with the phenomenological tradition (which he clearly thinks according to Husserlian “reduction”), appeals to a notion of perversion (a point he shares with Sekyi-Out) that is marked in advance by its opposition to psychoanalysis. Perverse anonymity is, then, the concept that Gordon goes on to suggest defines the black existential attitude and, in the context of a later essay, the reason why Fanon turns away from psychoanalysis: although this schema has been quite common in reading Fanon, and consists in saying that “politics” is Fanonism’s true telos, Gordon’s argument is curious because, in opposing existentialism to psychoanalysis, and despite Fanon’s refusal to separate them, he has to remove what he calls psychoanalysis from what Fanon calls his psychopathology of race.46 Thus, psychoanalysis is reproached for its inability to think blacks as “perverse anonymous objects,” a failure that gets further reduced to saying that “Only the white, whether female or male, can be historically situated on the symbolic level,” partly no doubt because black existence is, from the start, understood to be never neurotically alienated, but alienated in so far as it is black.47 What is properly black is thus what is properly, perversely alienated and somehow beyond a psychoanalytical reading of language and culture. For Gordon, Fanon gives us the insight that blackness always means what it is—the black, and this singularizing typicality, operating what Gordon calls “below the symbolic,” dictates a number of consequences for Gordon’s understanding of the relations between psychoanalysis and phenomenology in Fanon’s works.48A2: Reform Plan debate doesn’t solve education and uniqueness overwhelms the link for any tradeoff argument, including their reform good claims on the line-by-line – we have too many plans now – what we need is a grammar to explain Black sufferingSexton 2010 (“African American Studies,” A Concise Companion to American Studies (Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies) pp 221-3) bhb NCC Packet 2019The latter task – the trenchant interrogation of racial blackness and/in the formulations of modernity and its leitmotif of freedom – was advanced immeasurably by Professors Lindon Barrett, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Ronald Judy, each in their own way. Yet, as Wilderson again makes plain in his Red, White, and Black (2009), the grand and anxious question of freedom is preceded, logically and ontologically, by a perhaps more confounding question: what does it mean to suffer? To address such a query sufficiently is to disregard the official impatience that envelopes it. Of course, this sentiment of expediency plays to an understandably popular urgency that emanates from the severity of everyday life for the vast majority of black people and the attendant status anxiety of the so-called new black middle class. However, black creative intellectuals have done less and less talking about our pain of late and probably a bit too much posturing about our plans. If anything, we have a surplus of plans! What we do not have is a language – much less a political culture – that adequately articulates both the variance and commonality of our positions and our predicaments. African American Studies is perhaps more inarticulate about the dimensions and details of black suffering today, in an era marked by transnationalism and multi-racialism, than it has been at any other historical juncture. I am speaking here of suffering in its fullest sense: not only as pain, which everyone experiences – say, the pain of alienation and exploitation – but also as that which blacks must bear, uniquely and singularly, that which we must stand and stand alone (see Sexton 2007). The proposal and invitation continues: The yield of this gathering will be to assemble leading scholars alongside emergent voices in the field of African American Studies in order to reflect critically upon the mutual implication of a proliferate and diverse racial formation with the living legacies of the black radical tradition in the age of American empire. The symposium seeks to depart from prevailing frameworks for comparative ethnic studies – that is, discerning how the respective experiences of blacks and other people of color are similar or dissimilar and what have been their historic interactions – to consider how the matrix of enslavement, which is to say the invention of “propertized human being” (Harris 1993), has not only shaped myriad forms of oppression and marginalization, but has compromised their modes of resistance and [their] claims to independence as well. If there is an overarching objective here, it is to properly illuminate what might be termed the obscurity of black suffering, to rescue it from the murky backwaters of persistent invisibility as well as the high-definition distortions of glaring and fascinated light. Proper illumination is a catchy byline, an instance of wishful thinking, if ever there was one. But can we not speak of it more charitably, perhaps as a stratagem? Or as a spur that exercises the limits of our thinking? In her ground-breaking Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman calls our attention to the ease with which scenes of spectacular violence against the black body – what she terms “inaugural moment[s] in the formation of the enslaved” – are reiterated in discourses both academic and popular, “the casualness,” she writes, “with which they are circulated, and the consequences of this routine display of the slave’s ravaged body”: Rather than inciting indignation, too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity – the oft-repeated or restored character of these accounts and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical language usually resorted to in describing these instances – and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering. [. . .] At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator. Only more obscene than the brutality unleashed at the whipping post is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and terrible. In light of this, how does one give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle or contend with narcissistic identification that obliterates the other or the prurience that too often is the response of such displays. (Hartman 1997: 4) To put it bluntly, how does one engage with black suffering at all without simply erasing it – refusing it, absorbing it, appropriating it – in the very same gesture? Hartman’s inventive response to what might appear, at first glance, to be a rhetorical question or a cruel joke (that is, making a case with evidence that is, strictly speaking, inadmissible) is to move away from the expected “invocations of the shocking and the terrible” and to look, alternately, at “scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned,” “the terror of the mundane and quotidian,” what she phrases appositely as “the diffusion of terror.” What she finds, if calling it a “finding” is not immediately to betray it, is the recapitulation – the repetition and summation – of this spectacular primal scene across the entirety of the social text of racial slavery and its aftermath. That is to say, it is never the case that this terror is not present. It saturates the field of encounter. It is ubiquitous and yet it is, perhaps for the same reason, barely discernible. One wonders thus: how might the discussion of this dispersed, ambient terror become any more compelling than that which is condensed and acute? The point being not that blacks enter the wrong evidence or pursue the wrong argument, but rather that they are disallowed from entering evidence or building arguments in the first place, barred, as it were, from bringing charges and levying claims of grievance or injury as such. Again, what does it mean to suffer, in this way? This “challenge,” as Hartman modestly calls it, of giving expression to the inexpressible is taken up again in Fred Moten’s remarkable text, In the Break. In fact, it is the discrepancy between subjection and objection that launches the accomplishment of a project opened and closed around the impossibility and the inevitability of “the resistance of the object” (Moten 2003: 1). That, at least, is how it sounds to me. What is disquieting and provocative in this exchange is what I take to be a certain turning away from the implications of Hartman’s precarious distinction between witness and spectator, a positional instability that is not mitigated by transpositions in the sonic register, nor, for that matter, in the performance arts more generally (Barrett 1999; Weheliye 2005). Following the interventions of David Marriott (2007) and Matt Richardson (2003), we cannot maintain that the dispossession of black personhood in the denial of black suffering is limited to the psychodynamics or narrative strategies of those who escape the badge of slavery. It is an intramural, indeed an intrapsychic, phenomenon as well. We learn from them that the collapse of boundary in the field of vision and its concept-metaphor in legal matters – seeing ourselves being seen, seeing ourselves as others, and seeing ourselves as others see ourselves – leads to a convolution that suggests the foreclosure of an uncompromised witness to the black, the intrusion of the position of a hostile, uncaring spectator preoccupying black subjectivity itself. We have always already looked at ourselves and looked on with the indifference, or the lust, that Hartman describes. Hence, the utopia of this permanent elsewhere turns out to be as much about our own unconscious commitment to the diffusion of terror as it is about the interest of the world in maintaining its status as dissembled or dissociated. Where, if anywhere, are we in the world, be it this one or that other that I’ve heard rumor is possible? I conclude my comments on African American Studies with an extended citation from Hortense Spillers, in part because the present essay is an attempt to come to terms with the field of inquiry her labor delineates. I quote at length from her masterful 1994 boundary 2 article, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date.” This critical homage to Harold Cruse on the silver anniversary of his magnum opus is also the presentation of what Spillers understatedly phrases “a few notes on the situation of the black creative intellectual today.” She writes: What is the work of the black creative intellectual, for all we know now? The short answer is that the black creative intellectual must get busy where he is. There is no other work, if he has defined an essential aspect of his personhood as the commitment to reading, writing, and teaching. From Howard University to Cornell; from Wilberforce to Berkeley, from Tuskegee to Harvard; the relational object does not change, and that, it seems to me, decides the main problem to be disposed of – how to take hold, at last, of the intellectual object of work in language. The black creative intellectual . . . embraces the black musician and his music as the most desirable model/object. While African-American music, across long centuries, offers the single form of cultural production that the life-world can “read” through thick and thin, and while so consistent a genius glimmers through the music that is seems ordained by divine authority its very self, the intellectual rightly grasps the figure of the musician for the wrong reasons: not often do we get the impression that the musical performer promotes his own ego over the music, or that he prefers it to the requirements, conventions, and history of practices that converge on the music; if that were not so, then little in this arena of activity would exhibit the staying power that our arts of performance have shown over the long haul . . . What they have in common in their considerable divergence of time, location, and calling is performative excellence, and it seems to me that this is the page of music from which the black creative intellectual must learn to read . . . The black creative intellectual does not make music, as it were, and should not try, be he can “play.” (Spillers 2003: 450–1) And play we must. If African American Studies can eschew the particularism of Afrocentrism and the comparativism of critical Black Studies, perhaps it can once again pose a genuine challenge – and an invitation – to the intertwined enterprises of postnational American Studies and postnational American politics. In a “post-black” era that all but declares as lost causes the field of African American Studies and the tradition of political struggle from which it arose, there is perhaps no better time to pursue this rearguard effort to its fullest, reaffirming the indispensability of “the study of Black life in [and beyond] the Western Hemisphere” and the “universal singularity” of the black freedom movement (Zizek 2008). If “black is a country” (Singh 2004), it is a stateless country, without birthright or territorial purchase; it is a feat of radical political imagination, the freedom dream of a blackened world in which all might become unmoored, forging, in struggle, a new people on a new earth.Perm AnswersMovements DAVoting affirmative makes the job of Black and Native movements that are actively undoing the status quo harderKing 17 (Tiffany Lethabo King, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State, PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland at College Park, Spring 2017, “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight,” Critical Ethnic Studies Volume 3 Number 1) gz NCC Packet 2019So what of Black and Native stakes in identity? If the primary concern for Black and Native studies is to interrogate and then destroy the structures and lineaments that make the human-as-man possible, then Black and Native people do not necessarily seek to inhabit the space of the human or identity as they currently exist. For example, if Black Lives Matter (BLM) is asking to be absorbed into the category of the human, then BLM’s version of the human does not yet exist. Further, if Black lives were to be absorbed into the category of the human, the social order and the scaffolding that upends and holds together the human would collapse. For example, if Black Lives Matter (as a variety of local chapters with their own unique politics) is actually making an appeal to be included within humanity—as an intelligible identity of the living—the request is also accompanied by a demand for the abolition of the police.In addition to the BLM movement and its various local chapters, the Black Youth Project, the Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee, and other voices of Black revolt are emerging from within and outside the movement and are calling for the abolition of the police state.48 If the human is to exist in Black form, then the police state must wither away.Reflecting on the Rodney King case and the initials N.H.I., Wynter effectively illustrates how the police state has the power to confer the identity of “human” or “no human.”49 If the goal of Black activists to abolish the police is achieved, the police state would no longer have the power to decide who was or who was not human.Further, if Native people were to be fully incorporated into the category of the human, then the United States would cease to exist. The nation-state (United States) that gives the “absolute” human (white “Americans”) excusive claims to the category of the human would have to be demolished. When the United States, as the practice of genocide itself, ceases to exist, then Native/Indigenous peoples can exist and identify as human. Rather than quibbling about “identity” itself, practices of Native refusal and decolonization and Black “skepticism/pessimism” and abolition argue that the U.S. police state can no longer determine the conditions of possibility for being considered human. Critical ethnic studies can continue to look to Black and Native resistance against state-sanctioned killing and genocide as the praxis and theory that shift the terms of contemporary discussions and contestations over identity.Affirmative AnswersFrameworkThe neg must rejoin the plan by proving there’s a unique opportunity cost—otherwise the alt’s not mutually exclusive with the plan—any other model for debate stunts its potential to realize Black liberationSplawinski, 16—University of Toronto (A., “The Internal Backlash of Contemporary Black Liberation,” Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, 2015-2016, dml) NCC Packet 2019However, as external pressures complicate activist progression on the social scale, internal conflicts threaten collective identity and the ability to define, organize, and move towards a collective goal. This can be internally demonstrated through the radical/moderate dichotomy, a distinction attempting to reconcile those activists who operate within, as opposed to outside, the traditional political system. However, this ignores the means, ability, and education people might have. Respecting diverse tactics used to reach a similar goal is not only ethical, but also strategic. Short-term goals amid long-term objectives leave room for old-school activists who contend we could live outside of the system we are in, as well as the novice who does not know another system is even a possibility. Political scientist Janet Conway articulates that respecting how other activists engage with issues does not necessarily mean one would choose the same, or even agree with the usefulness or ethics of such an action; “rather, it holds that everyone has the right and the responsibility to identify their own thresholds of legitimate protest and to make their own political, strategical, and ethical choices, while also allowing others to do so free from public criticism or censure.”8 A different tactic does not necessarily make it wrong. These internal activist-group interactions can be seen in the qualification of #BlackLivesMatter and other Black activists being cited as nothing more than a “liberal distraction” by other Black liberationists. The article “#BlackLivesMatter: Black Liberation or Black Liberal Distraction” by Halima Hatimy states that #BlackLivesMatter is composed of Western “Black petit bourgeoisie.”9 I agree that addressing global anti-Blackness is necessary, and that activists should be criticized for not addressing anti-Blackness in non-Western countries or not being proper allies to those in non-Western countries. However, the notion we can stretch criticism to a place where we can say all of this is in vain is unfair. According to Hatimy, an honest effort on the part of the #BLM movement would call for the abolition of oppressive, racist, and capitalistic structures, and demand full social and economic equality, rather than state-implemented reforms and deliberate moves to work in the system. However, framing the movement this way ignores the justifications one may have for advocating for reform as opposed to abolition—one group sees abolition as a plan while the other sees it as a goal. Perhaps, as Judith Butler describes in Critically Queer, there is a kind of “necessary error” occurring here. Butler argues we cannot create the terms that represent our liberation from nothing, and we are responsible for the terms carrying the pain of social injury. “[Y]et, neither of those terms are as a result any less necessary to work and rework within political discourse.”10 Perhaps, even in its faults, there is something uniquely necessary about #BlackLivesMatter and similar Black activist groups, and the multiplicity of tactics used within and outside of these groups. The #BlackLivesMatter movement does not state an end goal of police reformation. Instead, it defines one of its primary goals as “(re)building the Black liberation movement,” explaining that Black poverty and the disproportionate number of Black individuals in prisons are manifestations of state violence.11 Though it is misleading to articulate the movment’s goals as otherwise, counter-movements constituently question the credibility of #BlackLivesMatter by doing so. Ironically, it appears the radical and moderate activists often have the same goal—Black liberation—yet they’ve chosen to employ varied means to achieve that goal. Strategies of the #BlackLivesMatter movement are often critiqued, citing its discussions of privilege, reform of the prison industrial complex, reform of police practice, or meetings with politicians, as a sign of moderation.12 Critics contend if activists were indeed radical, as Hatimy’s article states, they would primarily call for abolition, not reform. However, this presupposes the activists are choosing reform as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Unlearning a Eurocentric Worldview Activists, like the general public, are inundated with regulations of Black bodies. This extends from the streets where victims of police brutality lifelessly lie, to the halls of the classroom where Black skin and Black hair are wholly unwelcome. Black girls have been kicked out of school for their natural hair, and dark-skinned women have been barred from entering spaces due to their complexion.13 Further, dark-skinned individuals face a high risk of sometimes violent consequences due to their complexion. Some of these consequences include having lower chances of obtaining employment than their light-skinned counterparts, and even being sentenced to 12 percent more time behind bars for the same crime as compared to light-skinned individuals.14 These legacies of colonialism, slavery, and Jim Crow compound alarming statistics that also demonstrate an increased likelihood of Black Americans being unarmed when killed by the police.15 The intersection of sexuality, race, and place— in addition to the historical contexts of slavery, colonialism, and systematic discrimination—impedes activists’ ability to “unlearn,” or envision ways of being that are outside of dominant or mainstream thinking. The process of unlearning requires activists to move away from the status quo, to see above the examples society presents them and apply a critical lens to their very being. Activists have to grapple with colorism’s impact on the sociopolitical world, and/or why African American English vernacular is framed with negative connotation, similarly to the dichotomy between “good” and “bad” hair, for that which is more straight and silky vis-à-vis curly and coarse. In doing so, activists not only undergo a journey of self-acceptance, but also make political decisions in the process, which are political acts rooted in one’s worth, rebuking Eurocentric consumerist ideals that dictate a “preferred” look, action, or being that confirms to the admissible politics of respectability.16 Activists enter and progress through the unlearning process in different ways. At these varied stages, then, it is troublesome for groups to cast one another aside because of differing perspectives, particularly in terms of methodology. Being at different places in the unlearning process is the reality, and activist groups must accept that as fact. The “Problematic” Identity The radical/moderate divide illustrates a larger problem in activist spaces: activists imposing the all-encompassing “problematic” identity onto one another. The power-hungry and ego-latent activist industrial complex employs a problematic identity on dissenters, casting anyone in the group aside who says or does something not in perfect alignment with their arbitrarily set standard of “activism,” or what may be deemed “appropriate” by the group. Though many groups aim to create safe spaces in order to respect a diverse set of voices and experiences, these groups simultaneously conduct, create, and assert “problematic” identities, which essentially rebuke dissenting opinions and differing viewpoints from the group’s intra-space. By silencing or discrediting dissent, the activity of activism is twisted into an unattainable mold an individual can perfect, rather than existing as a transformative activity that an individual strives to perfect. Through this frame, the internal backlasher’s viewpoints, strategies, and opinions are right, while those of the “problematic” activist are wrong. While the “internal backlasher” may purport him or herself as being open to a variety of lived experiences, eventually the “problematic” activist will not be able to reconcile their feelings with this assumed standard, and may even be qualified as being in the “wrong” phase of unlearning. While it seems contradictory for social movements to operate like quasi-political parties, employing a similar “agree-with-me-or-leave” rhetoric, this phenomenon may help explain why activists aligning with radical or moderate ideologies view their means (and only their means) as the best or safest way to proceed. Rather than critique an off-norm perspective for foundational validity, it is more productive for these groups to explore the rationale behind their choices and examine the reasoning of the dissent for both weaknesses and strengths. Labeling “problematic” that which is “different” dismisses the individual realities of each activist. Through this, the “internal backlashers” refuse to consider their collective goal could be achieved in a number of ways. Rather than assuming rigid value judgments, activists should acknowledge the comfort, safety, and value in the multiplicity of strategies as they may stimulate new ways to think about and exist in Black political spaces. The intellectual entrepreneurship in activist spaces is unlike any other. The need to harmonize ideas and reconcile lived experiences with the cause at hand can only occur when individuals feel safe to fully participate. However, there are scenarios wherein those who are labeled “problematic” face adverse consequences. In “Why This Radical Activist is Disillusioned by the Toxic Culture of the Left,” author Bailey Lamon cites after being termed problematic, or being called out, some activists she knew allegedly lost jobs, relationships, and friends.17 Some felt so alienated they avoid attending certain events or going to specific community spaces. The mental distress of the isolated individuals has even led to suicide. The fear and isolation produced in supposed “safe spaces” not only has adverse consequences, but also stunts the crux of activist activity—the process of unlearning. If not properly mitigated, this could ultimately stall the collective progress of the greater movement. The Impact of Fear There is a fear surrounding activist spaces that functions within the boundaries of the state. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, lawyer and legal scholar Michelle Alexander carefully describes the waves of reform that did not end racism, but rather merely changed its form. From slavery, through the Jim Crow era, and into the war on drugs and mass incarceration, Alexander explains racism has never left us; it has only become subtler.18 The anxiety of operating within traditional boundaries of institutional politics stems from the idea that perhaps by using purely conventional means, racism will, once again, only change its form—not its quantity or impact. The historical trend of Black activist spaces operating within the confines of the state (either by choice or by force), positions the state as an indicator of morality and success. Yet, when we consider what it means to use the state as an indicator of success, we are reminded the state’s supposed inclusiveness just slightly changes the color of the hierarchy—it does not necessarily reflect day-to-day occurrences on the ground. Clarence Lusane’s What Color is Hegemony? illustrates a version of this by dissecting the appointments of Condoleezza Rice as National Security Advisor and Colin Powell as Secretary of State during the second George W. Bush term. Their appointments raised questions about race relations and the state, as well as the active participation of Black Americans as “high-level functionaries operating within spheres in which they can agree but cannot fundamentally determine.”19 Being an active shareholder in the government’s plan to use economic and military means to ensure a rival power never emerges is worrying, especially when economic and military policy often intertwines with racist and xenophobic ideals. Operating within conventional activist tactics (such as voting) upholds state power, and calling for legislative reform may do the same. However, it is not fair to say these tactics must act in isolation, or that they will forever perpetuate the very systems against which Black activists are fighting. There are ways to simultaneously operate inside and outside of conventional means. For instance, despite being ridiculed as a “miscreant” and an example of “one of the sanctimonious and self-aggrandizing activists [that make] a career out of the Black Lives Matter protests,”20 DeRay McKesson, once at the forefront of unconventional activism, is now running for mayor of Baltimore. When questioned about his intentions, McKesson has said he is not a politician and that a multi-faceted approach to activism is necessary: “It will always be important that people continue to push on the system from the outside. It will also be important that people make the changes that we know are necessary on the inside.”21 We could consider he might be wrong; however, we must also consider he very well may be right. Perhaps a multi-pronged approach to Black activism won’t always be necessary, perhaps it is not the way of the future. Nevertheless, perhaps it is necessary right now. Conclusion Though the use of the radical/moderate dichotomy is necessary to explain the varied tactics employed by activist groups, respecting diverse strategies is sometimes more than ethical—it can be tactical. Demanding perfection via censorship or the constant threat of isolation is not social justice. My argument is not that one should be forced to align with positions for which they fundamentally disagree. However, if the goal is Black liberation, a diverse set of strategies—dependent on varying levels of comfort, ability, knowledge, access, and belief—it should not define alienation. Rather, it should be holistically viewed, with due benefits incurred from each. We should analyze the pros and cons of all tactics, while also exploring the reasons why we choose to use them. Such internal critique is necessary for the future and progress of the Black activist space. Contingency Goodracism is pervasive but not fixed – inward resignation fatalistically reinforces anti-blackness – political commitment is empirically effective and necessary to reverse historical failures and build more ethical relationships – even apparent “failures” pave the way for meaningful sociopolitical revolutionsGordon 17 (Lewis R. Gordon, Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, with affiliations in Judaic Studies and Caribbean, Latino/a, and Latin American Studies, at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Ph.D. from Yale “Thoughts on Afropessimism,” Critical Exchange on Afro pessimism in Contemporary Political Theory, December 2017, pages 1-8) NCC Packet 2019An ironic dimension of pessimism is that it is the other side of optimism. Oddly enough, both are connected to nihilism, which is, as Nietzsche (1968) showed, a decline of values during periods of social decay. It emerges when people no longer want to be responsible for their actions. Optimists expect intervention from beyond. Pessimists declare relief is not forthcoming. Neither takes responsibility for what is valued. The valuing, however, is what leads to the second, epistemic point. The presumption that what is at stake is what can be known to determine what can be done is the problem. If such knowledge were possible, the debate would be about who is reading the evidence correctly. Such judgment would be a priori – that is, prior to events actually unfolding. The future, unlike transcendental conditions such as language, signs, and reality, is, however, ex post facto: It is yet to come. Facing the future, the question isn’t what will be or how do we know what will be but instead the realization that whatever is done will be that on which the future will depend. Rejecting optimism and pessimism, there is a supervening alternative: political commitment. The appeal to political commitment is not only in stream with what French existentialists call l’intellectuel engage? (committed intellectual) but also reaches back through the history and existential situation of enslaved, racialized ancestors. Many were, in truth, an existential paradox: commitment to action without guarantees. The slave revolts, micro and macro acts of resistance, escapes, and returns help others do the same; the cultivated instability of plantations and other forms of enslavement, and countless other actions, were waged against a gauntlet of forces designed to eliminate any hope of success. The claim of colonialists and enslavers was that the future belonged to them, not to the enslaved and the indigenous. A result of more than 500 years of conquest and 300 years of enslavement was also a (white) rewriting of history in which African and First Nations’ agency was, at least at the level of scholarship, nearly erased. Yet there was resistance even in that realm, as Africana and First Nation intellectual history and scholarship attest. Such actions set the course for different kinds of struggle today. Such reflections occasion meditations on the concept of failure. Afropessimism, the existential critique suggests, suffers from a failure to understand failure. Consider Fanon’s notion of constructive failure, where what doesn’t initially work transforms conditions for something new to emerge. To understand this argument, one must rethink the philosophical anthropology at the heart of a specific line of Euromodern thought on what it means to be human. Atomistic and individual substance-based, this model, articulated by Hobbes, Locke, and many others, is of a non-relational being that thinks, acts, and moves along a course in which continued movement depends on not colliding with others. Under that model, the human being is a thing that enters a system that facilitates or obstructs its movement. An alternative model, shared by many groups across southern Africa, is a relational version of the human being as part of a larger system of meaning. Actions, from that perspective, are not about whether ‘‘I’’ succeed but instead about ‘‘our’’ story across time. As relational, it means that each human being is a constant negotiation of ongoing efforts to build relationships with others, which means no one actually enters a situation without establishing new situations of action and meaning. Instead of entering a game, their participation requires a different kind of project – especially where the ‘‘game’’ was premised on their exclusion. Thus, where the system or game repels initial participation, such repulsion is a shift in the grammar of how the system functions, especially its dependence on obsequious subjects. Shifted energy affords emergence of alternatives. Kinds cannot be known before the actions that birthed them. Abstract as this sounds, it has much historical support. Evelyn Simien (2016), in her insightful political study Historic Firsts, examines the new set of relations established by Shirley Chisholm’s and Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. There could be no Barack Obama without such important predecessors affecting the demographics of voter participation. Simien intentionally focused on the most mainstream example of political life to illustrate this point. Although no exemplar of radicalism, Obama’s ‘‘success’’ emerged from Chisholm and Jackson’s (and many others’) so-called ‘‘failure.’’ Beyond presidential electoral politics, there are numerous examples of how prior, radical so-called ‘‘failures’’ transformed relationships that facilitated other kinds of outcome. The trail goes back to the Haitian Revolution and back to every act of resistance from Nat Turner’s Rebellion in the USA, Sharpe’s in Jamaica, or Tula’s in Curac?ao and so many other efforts for social transformation to come. In existential terms, then, many ancestors of the African diaspora embodied what S?ren Kierkegaard (1983) calls an existential paradox. All the evidence around them suggested failure and the futility of hope. They first had to make a movement of infinite resignation – that is, resigning themselves to their situation. Yet they must simultaneously act against that situation. Kierkegaard called this seemingly contradictory phenomenon ‘‘faith,’’ but that concept relates more to a relationship with a transcendent, absolute being, which could only be established by a ‘‘leap,’’ as there are no mediations or bridge. Ironically, if Afropessimism appeals to transcendent intervention, it would collapse into faith. If, however, the argument rejects transcendent intervention and focuses on committed political action, of taking responsibility for a future that offers no guarantees, then the movement from infinite resignation becomes existential political action. At this point, the crucial meditation would be on politics and political action. An attitude of infinite resignation to the world without the leap of committed action would simply be pessimistic or nihilistic. Similarly, an attitude of hope or optimism about the future would lack infinite resignation. We see here the underlying failure of the two approaches. Yet ironically, there is a form of failure at failing in the pessimistic turn versus the optimistic one, since if focused exclusively on resignation as the goal, then the ‘‘act’’ of resignation would have been achieved, which, paradoxically, would be a success; it would be a successful failing of failure. For politics to emerge, however, there are two missing elements in inward pessimistic resignation. The first is that politics is a social phenomenon, which means it requires the expanding options of a social world. Turning away from the social world, though a statement about politics, is not, however, in and of itself political. The ancients from whom much western political theory or philosophy claimed affinity had a disparaging term for individuals who resigned themselves from political life: idio?te?s, a private person, one not concerned with public affairs, in a word – an idiot. I mention western political theory because that is the hegemonic intellectual context of Afropessimism. We don’t, however, have to end our etymological journey in ancient Greek. Extending our linguistic archaeology back a few thousand years, we could examine the Middle Kingdom Egyptian word idi (deaf). The presumption, later taken on by the ancient Athenians and Macedonians, was that a lack of hearing entailed isolation, at least in terms of audio speech. The contemporary inward resignation of seeking a form of purity from the loathsome historical reality of racial oppression, in this reading, collapses ultimately into a form of moralism (private, normative satisfaction) instead of public responsibility born of and borne by action. The second is the importance of power. Politics makes no sense without it. But what is power? Eurocentric etymology points to the Latin word potis as its source, from which came the word ‘‘potent’’ as in an omnipotent god. If we again look back further, we will notice the Middle Kingdom (2000 BCE–1700 BCE) KMT/ Egyptian word pHty, which refers to godlike strength. Yet for those ancient Northeast Africans, even the gods’ abilities came from a source: In the Coffin Texts, HqAw or heka activates the ka (sometimes translated as soul, spirit, or, in a word, ‘‘magic’’), which makes reality. All this amounts to a straightforward thesis on power as the ability with the means to make things happen. There is an alchemical quality to power. The human world, premised on symbolic communication, brings many forms of meaning into being, and those new meanings afford relationships that build institutions through a world of culture, a phenomenon that Freud (1989) rightly described as ‘‘a prosthetic god.’’ It is godlike because it addresses what humanity historically sought from the gods: protection from the elements, physical maledictions, and social forms of misery. Such power clearly can be abused. It is where those enabling capacities (empowerment) are pushed to the wayside in the hording of social resources into propping up some people as gods that the legitimating practices of cultural cum political institutions decline and stimulate pessimism and nihilism. That institutions in the Americas very rarely attempt establishing positive relations to Blacks is the subtext of Afropessimism and this entire meditation. The discussion points, however, to a demand for political commitment. Politics itself emerges under different names throughout the history of our species, but the one occasioning the word ‘‘politics’’ is from the Greek po?lis, which refers to ancient Hellenic city-states. It identifies specific kinds of activities conducted inside the city-state, where order necessitated the resolution of conflicts through rules of discourse the violation of which could lead to (civil) war, a breaking down of relations appropriate for ‘‘outsiders.’’ Returning to the Fanonian observation of selves and others, it is clear that imposed limitations on certain groups amounts to impeding or blocking the option of politics. Yet, as a problem occurring within the polity, the problem short of war becomes a political one. Returning to Afropessimistic challenges, the question becomes this: If the problem of antiblack racism is conceded as political, where antiblack institutions of power have, as their project, the impeding of Black power, which in effect requires barring Black access to political institutions, then antiblack societies are ultimately threats also to politics defined as the human negotiation of the expansion of human capabilities or more to the point: freedom. Anti-politics is one of the reasons why societies in which antiblack racism is hegemonic are also those in which racial moralizing dominates: moralizing stops at individuals at the expense of addressing institutions the transformation of which would make immoral individuals irrelevant. As a political problem, it demands a political solution. It is not accidental that Blacks continue to be the continued exemplars of unrealized freedom. As so many from Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Angela Davis (2003) and Michelle Alexander (2010) have shown, the expansion of privatization and incarceration is squarely placed in a structure of states and civil societies premised on the limitations of freedom (Blacks) – ironically, as seen in countries such as South Africa and the United States, in the name of freedom. That power is a facilitating or enabling phenomenon, a functional element of the human world, a viable response must be the establishing of relations that reach beyond the singularity of the body. I bring this up because proponents of Afropessimism might object to this analysis because of its appeal to a human world. If that world is abrogated, the site of struggle becomes that which is patently not human. It is not accidental that popular race discourse refers today to ‘‘black bodies,’’ for instance, instead of ‘‘black people.’’ As the human world is discursive, social, and relational, this abandonment amounts to an appeal to the non-relational, the incommunicability of singularity, and appeals to the body and its reach. At that point, it’s perhaps the psychologist, psychiatrist, or psychoanalyst who would be helpful, as turning radically inward offers the promise of despair, narcissistic delusions of godliness, and, as Fanon also observed, madness. Even if that slippery slope were rejected, the performative contradiction of attempting to communicate such singularity or absence thereof requires, at least for consistency, the appropriate course of action: silence. The remaining question for Afropessimism, especially those who are primarily academics, becomes this: Why write? It’s a question for which, in both existential and political terms, I don’t see how an answer could be given from an Afropessimistic perspective without the unfortunate revelation of cynicism. The marketability of Afropessimism is no doubt in the immediate and paradoxical satisfaction in dissatisfaction it offers. We are at this point on familiar terrain. As with ancient logical paradoxes denying the viability of time and motion, the best option, after a moment of immobilized reflection, is, eventually, to move on, even where the pause is itself significant as an encomium of thought. their descriptions are too abstract to accurately describe Black positionality, but voting for them cements ontological death and reifies violence that depends on Blackness-as-humanJohnson, 16—Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History (Walter, “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice,” , dml) NCC Packet 2019More important, though, is the ideological work accomplished by holding on to a normative notion of “humanity”—one that can be held separate from the “inhuman” actions of so many humans. Historians sometimes argue that some aspects of slavery were so violent, so obscene, so “inhuman” that, in order to live with themselves, the perpetrators had to somehow “dehumanize” their victims. While that “somehow” remains a problem—for it is never really specified what combination of unconscious, cultural, and social factors make a “somehow”—I want to question the assumption that slaveholders had to first “dehumanize” their slaves before they could swing a baby by the feet into a post to silence its cries, or jam the broken handle of a hoe down the throat of a field hand, or refer to their property as “darkies” or “hands” or “wool.” The apparent right-mindedness of such arguments notwithstanding, this language of “dehumanization” is misleading because slavery depended upon the human capacities of enslaved people. It depended upon their reproduction. It depended upon their labor. And it depended upon their sentience. Enslaved people could be taught: their intelligence made them valuable. They could be manipulated: their desires could make them pliable. They could be terrorized: their fears could make them controllable. And they could be tortured: beaten, starved, raped, humiliated, degraded. It is these last that are conventionally understood to be the most “inhuman” of slaveholders’ actions and those that most “dehumanized” enslaved people. And yet these actions epitomize the failure of this set of terms to capture what was at stake in slaveholding violence: the extent to which slaveholders depended upon violated slaves to bear witness, to provide satisfaction, to provide a living, human register of slaveholders’ power. More than misleading, however, the notion that enslavement “dehumanized” enslaved people is harmful; it indelibly and categorically alters those with whom it supposedly sympathizes. Dehumanization suggests an alienation of enslaved people from their humanity. Who is the judge of when a person has suffered so much or been objectified so fundamentally that the person’s humanity has been lost? How does the person regain that humanity? Can it even be regained? And who decides when it has been regained? The explicitly paternalist character of these questions suggests that a belief in the “dehumanization” of enslaved people is locked in an inextricable embrace with the very history of racial abjection it ostensibly confronts. All this while implicitly asserting the unimpeachable rectitude and “humanity” of latter-day observers.Their IR link conflates reality and reifies antiblack dominance by conflating it with realityGordon 18—Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut [Lewis R. Gordon, 2018, “Thoughts on two recent decades of studying race and racism”, Social Identities, Vol. 24, No. 1, pgs 30-33, DOI: 10.1080/13504630.2017.1314924, Taylor and Francis, Accessed through the Wake Forest Library] AMarb NCC Packet 2019The problem with addressing a problem in terms of bad faith is that its exemplars would immediately seek to defend themselves. Bad faith, as many who have studied the phenomenon know, is ashamed of itself and thus attempts to hide from itself often through shifting the orientation of critique (Gordon, 1995/1999; Sartre, 1943). Thus, the defense is on the alert for analyses of bad faith to be in bad faith. Much of this has to do with the negative associations of the word ‘bad’ and the legalistic meaning of ‘bad faith’ in the English language. Thus, I prefer simply to use the French term mauvaise-foi. Mauvaise-foi has its negative connotations in French, but its range is broader in usage than in English, just as Geist in German doesn’t exactly mean ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ as it is often translated into English. The aforementioned list of hegemonic theorists of the study of race and gender in the mid-1990s reflects the domination of three approaches: (1) poststructuralism, (2) Marxism, and (3) liberal political theory primarily in the form of analytical political philosophy. Existentialism and phenomenology were not only being treated as passé but also as incompatible with each other. There was also the problem of ‘compartmentalism’ and ‘disciplinary decadence’, two tendencies that continue to be features of not only much race theory but also most disciplinary practices in the academy. The former offered disciplines under a separate but equal rule, which, if history has taught us anything about such formulations, is never actually so. The latter sought methodological conquest. These constrained what one could talk about when it came to human matters and how one is supposed to do it. I eventually developed a formulation of the second: ‘methodological fetishism’ (Gordon, 2016). Poststructuralism, Marxism, and analytical philosophy in the form of liberal political philosophy exemplified this tendency. One could add continental philosophy to this, which was in fact another way of saying ‘Euro-continental philosophy’. It, however, became, and for the most part continues to be, dominated by poststructualism and, relatedly, hermeneutics or theories of interpretation. A form of cart before the horse was the result, where fetishized methods were being imposed on reality instead of constructing relationships with it. As should be apparent at this point, disciplinary decadence is a form of mauvaise-foi (Gordon, 2006, 2012, 2016). The similarity to Sartre’s famous formulation of the fallacy of placing essence before existence in the study of human reality also comes to the fore (Sartre, 1943, 1946). This is particularly ironic with regard to poststructuralism since its approach is patently anti-essentialist (Caws, 1992; Gordon, 2012). Mauvaise-foi emerged not only at the level of human phenomena in action but also at the ways in which they are studied. For instance, the compartmentalist approach of separating race away from other dimensions of human reality distorts the subject at hand. It could only be done, ultimately, in mauvaise-foi because of the imposition of non-relationality on a relational subject (Gordon, 2010, 2016). The old debate of race versus gender, or race versus class, or gender versus class, and any of these versus sexual orientation is a fine intellectual exercise under laboratory conditions in which the domain of inquiry is staked out and constrained. That, however, is not human reality. Typically, we (human beings) don’t ‘see’ race, gender, class, or sexual orientation walking around; we exemplify, coextensively, all of these, all the time, in different ways. Imagine the hyphenated version class-gender-race-sexuality (and more) with emphasis on different words at different times. Focus is not identical with elimination. Race for me, then, was and continues to be studied in relation to what made it, among other related phenomena, emerge as a reality of human life over the past several hundred years (Gordon, 1995/1999, 1995, 2006, 2010). There is a simple version of my argument from those years: Racism requires denying the humanity of other groups of human beings through the organization of them, through regimes of power, under the category of a race and then denying the ascription of human being to them. The performative contradiction is that they would first have to be identified as human beings in order to deny their being such. It is thus a form of mauvaise-foi. Since racism is a form of mauvaise-foi, antiblack racism, as a species of racism, must also be a form of mauvaise-foi. My seemingly simple argument had complicated theoretical consequences. How did such performative contradictions historically emerge? People were not always categorized under races. Gender and linguistic membership predated many racial concepts (Gordon, 1997). Many other examples, such as religious membership, location in an economy, and even specialized skills could be added to the mix. One approach is to look at the concepts informing dehumanization. They depend on a particular idea of human beings at work in racist practices. An obvious feature of racism is the rejection of having relationships with members of certain races. Non-relationality has many implications. For one, the notion that one could exist without relations with others (a slippery slope leading to being without relations) requires a model of the self as self-sustaining ‘substance’. That model has dominated much of market-oriented Euromodern thought, especially those in the Anglophone world. My writings could be read as a critique of this notion. Consider any act of studying a phenomenon. Such an effort cannot be done without establishing at least a relationship with something as a focus of study. This doesn’t involve eliminating one’s relationship to reality but instead reorienting oneself to relevant acts of knowing, learning, and understanding (Gordon, 1995, 2010, 2012, 2016). Commitment to the elimination of relations leads to contradictions. Try, for instance, eliminating relations to oneself. Mauvaise foi returns in many forms as each displeasing truth about relations is denied for the sake of pleasing falsehoods. In the chain of efforts, other important elements of study such as communicability, evidence, and sociality come to the fore, each of which raises concerns of the self as other. As I focused primarily on antiblack racism, the question of whether all other forms of racism are the same emerged. Blackness functions, after all, in peculiar ways in societies that have produced antiblack racism. A response to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, for instance, is often that ‘all lives matter’. That is true the extent to which each group lives under conditions of equal respect for life. What advocates of #BlackLivesMatter are doing, however, is responding to a world in which some lives matter a lot more than others, whose lives evidentially matter a lot less. The history of antiblack racism amounts to the conviction that black people are only valuable the extent to which there is use for their labor or, worse, profiting from their misfortune as we see with the heavily racialized prison industrial complexes in the United States and similar countries (Alexander, 2010; Davis, 1983, 2005). It collapses into the expectation of justified existence in a context in which the justification for whoever stands as most valued is intrinsic. Members of the dominant group could thus seek their justification – if they wish – personally, through mechanisms of love, professional recognition, athletic achievement, etc. Moreover, that such society renders some groups as positive and others as negative leads to notions of legitimate presence (illegitimate absence) and absence (illegitimate presence). Should the analysis remain at white and black, the world would, however, appear more closed than it in fact is. For one, simply being born black would bar the possibility of any legitimate appearance. This is a position that has been taken by a growing group of theorists known as ‘Afropessimists’, for whom ‘black’ signifies absolute ‘social death’ (Sexton, 2010, 2011; Wilderson, 2007, 2008, 2009). It is, in other words, outside of relations. My objections to this view are many. For one, no human being is ‘really’ any of these things. Do blacks, for instance, suffer social death in relation to each other? The project of making people into such is one thing. The achievement of such is another. This is an observation Fanon also makes in his formulation of the zone of nonbeing and his critique of otherness in the study of race in Black Skin, White Masks, which I discuss at length my (Gordon, 2015) study, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. Fanon (1952) is critical of how otherness is interpreted in race theories and the study of race. The rejection of otherness ignores the fact that others are human beings. Racism emerges in attempts to deny that. Instead, it offers the zone of nonbeing, non-appearance as human beings. The racially dominant group presumes self-justified reality (license), which means it doesn’t call itself into question. And the designated racially inferior group? Lacking justification, their access to being is illegitimate. This means their absence is a mark of the system’s legitimacy. Such groups face the Catch 22 of illegitimate appearance: To appear is to violate appearance. Put differently, the violation is one of appearing without a license to do such. To all this, a consideration that should be added is this: The human being comes to the fore through emerging from being in the first place. Thus, the assertion of Being, as in the thought of Heidegger and his followers is also an effort to push the human being out of existence, so to speak. Heidegger, fair enough in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1947/1971), saw no problem in this. Fanon (1952), and many others in Africana philosophy, including the South African philosopher and psychologist No?l Chabani Manganyi (1973, 1977), disagreed through showing how racial conflict is also an existential one in which an existential ontology is posed against an ontology of being. The latter, we submit, is best suited for gods. When such becomes the model of being human, humanity dies. Blacks thus face the paradox of existing (standing out, living – as ex sistere means such) as non-existence (not standing out). Antiblack racism makes black appearance illicit. Licit appearance would mean appearing as selves and others. It would mean the right to appear. Antiracist struggles will not work, then, as a struggle against otherness. It is, instead, against being non-selves and non-others. Returning to the Afropessmistic notion of blackness as social death, I’m compelled to ask: Why must the social world be premised on the attitudes and perspectives of antiblack racists? Why don’t blacks among each other and other communities of color count as social perspectives? If the question of racism is a function of unequal power, which it clearly is, why not offer a study of power, how it is gained and lost, instead of an assertion of its manifestations as ontological? I’m reminded here of Victor Anderson’s (1995) Beyond Ontological Blackness. Anderson would no doubt object that Afropessimism treats ‘blackness’ as an ontological, which makes it a self-sustaining (non-relational) concept. The historical emergence of blackness refutes that. But more, there is a logical paradox that emerges from ontological blackness. To identify blackness, one must be in a relation to it. This relational matter requires looking beyond blackness ironically in order to understand blackness. This means moving from the conception of meaning as singular, substance-based, and fixed into the grammar of how meaning is produced. Consider the grammar of gender. Women historically occupy the role of absence (de Beauvoir, 1949; Butler, 2011; Gordon, 1995/1999, 1997). Blackness and womanness are thus intimate (Gordon, 1995/1999, 1997). The grammar of presence and absence is peculiarly theodicean (Gordon, 2010, 2013). This is the form of mauvaise-foi in which presence takes on the hubris of the desire to be a (often the) god. Theodicy defends the integrity of the god (systemic maintenance) through placing its contradictions (for example, evil) outside of it. The result is Being as a form of systemic purity (Monahan, 2011, 2017). This grammar is also psychoanalytical, in the sense of existential psychoanalysis. Manichean ‘qualities’ (such as ‘hard’ masculinity and ‘soft’ femininity) are evident in these modes of being. This pertains as well to sexual orientation: A white man’s relation to a black man is not only one of race-to-race but also of race-to-gender where the meaning of being black (as ‘feminine’ and ‘sexual’) could collapse into gendered absence. And extended to the sexualization of absence – think of the plethora of literature on the feminine as soft, cold, dark, and absence. The relation among males in which one group manifests such qualities immediately collapses into a homoerotic one (Fanon, 1952; Gordon, 1995/1999, 1997, 2000). We see here a conception of dealing with racial and gender qualities that are today called ‘intersectional’, though that metaphor doesn’t at first quite work for their existential phenomenological psychoanalytical manifestations in mauvaise-foi (because purity seeks singularity). The major proponent of intersectionality – Kimberlé Crenshaw – is pretty clear that she is referring to identity collisions as they appear in law (especially tort and discrimination law); in other words, she is referring to harms that, because of how they are interpreted, don’t appear (supposedly don’t exist) despite their lived-reality. She often illustrates her point through her famous example of a collision at a four-way intersection (Crenshaw, 1991, 2014). If the fundamental site of harm is property, the concern will be about the cars, and if their status of property depends on being owned by, say, white men, then harm would pertain to them. If the location of harm expands simply to ‘whites’, then a white woman or man in one of the cars would be sufficient for harm having occurred. If, however, there were no whites in the cars, then the conclusion would be that no one was harmed. If harm extends to blacks and other people of color, and even further, to non-human animals, then any of them being in the car or cars would initiate a cause for redress. Notice that Crenshaw’s argument doesn’t deny the possibility of white men being harmed. Her point is that people such as black women were not historically acknowledged in the legal frameworks of harmed subjects because of a failure to see that human beings do not manifest a single category of identity on which to build a legal response. Simply referring to ‘man’ as the exemplar of human being fails to acknowledge that human beings are not only men but also women, and simply as ‘women’ fails to address what kind of women such as those of color and different sexual orientations. At an existential level, what is also missed is the lived-reality of the convergence of these and their social and legal implications. A black woman in an automobile collision is, for example, not just harmed but also harmed in ways linked to the wider legal framework of the society. The criminalization of black women and men, for instance, could mean that though harmed in the collision, such people may face the possibility of entanglement in a legal system that treats them as the cause of harm, which could lead to other dangers such as ensnarement in the criminal justice system. This is one of the reasons why, even when harmed, many people of color don’t seek the aid of law enforcement and other representatives of that system. Crenshaw’s theory therefore has an existential and phenomenological significance in that it is an argument for the appearance of what is otherwise treated as either non-existent or not worthy of appearing, of, that is, illicit appearance. Her theory is also about the radicalization of appearance in that the identified subjects emerge, so to speak, not only in terms of being seen but also through an effort to see what they see or experience – in short, to see or at least understand their point of view in terms of the conditions they face. It is thus not a subjective theory or a narrowly objective one but instead an intersubjective theory because it requires understanding how different human beings relate to and encounter legal structures – products of the human world – as simultaneously alienating and enabling. Crenshaw’s concept of an intersection could, however, be interpreted in problematic ways. The first is the geometric model of an intersection. That version presupposes well-formed or complete lines converging. A response would be that there was never a complete ‘whole’ or, as the feminist phenomenological communicologist Sara Ahmed (2006) would put it, ‘straight line’ with regard to human subjects in the first place. The queer phenomenological theorist David Ross Fryer (2008), in stream with Ahmed, offers the logical conclusion of this critique – namely, a fundamental queerness at the heart of race theory and related areas of study such as gender studies and queer theory. My recent work in philosophy of culture extends such a concern to the human condition as well – that is, the upsurge from being makes human reality a queer one. This is pretty much the argument articulated earlier with regard to questions raised by Fanon’s analysis of ontology, existential ontology, and the dialectics of selves and others. The second critical consideration is that as all human beings are manifestations of different dimensions of meaning, the question of identity requires more than an intersecting model, otherwise there will simply be one (a priori) normative outcome in every moment of inquiry: Whoever manifests the maximum manifestation of predetermined negative intersecting terms. That would in effect be an essence before an existence – indeed, before an actual event of harm. Some race theorists’ tendency to build their arguments on a particular group as ‘most oppressed’ without offering evidence for the continued truth of such a claim is an example of this fallacy. This observation emerges as well where pessimism is the guiding attitude. An existential critique would be that optimism and pessimism are symptomatic of the same attitude: a priori assertions on reality. Human existence is contingent but not accidental, which means that the social world at hand is a manifestation of choices and relationships – in other words, human actions. As human beings can only build the future instead of it determining us, the task at hand depends on commitment – what is to be done without guarantees of outcome. This concern also pertains to the initial concerns about authenticity. One could only be pessimistic about an outcome, an activity. It’s an act of forecasting what could only be meaningful once actually performed. Similarly, one could only be optimistic about the same. What, however, if there were no way to know either? Here we come to the foi element in mauvaise foi. Some actions are deontological, and if not that, they are at least reflections of our commitments, our projects. Thus, the point of some actions isn’t about their success or failure but whether we deem them worth doing (Fanon, 1961/ 1991; Gordon, 2015). Taking responsibility for such actions – bringing value to them – is opposed to another manifestation of mauvaise-foi: the spirit of seriousness. Liberalism Gooddismissing liberalism’s conceptual platform locks marginalized groups out of combatting oppression – centuries of historical fluctuations demonstrate emancipatory potentialMills 17 (Charles – New York University Philosophy Professor known for his work in social and political philosophy especially in oppositional political theory centered on class, gender, and race, 3/29/17, “Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism”, Occupy Liberalism essay, Kindle) NCC Packet 2019The “Occupy!” movement, which has made headlines around the country, has raised the hopes of young American radicals new to political engagement and revived the hopes of an older generation of radicals still clinging to nostalgic dreams of the glorious ’603. If the original and still most salient target was Wall Street, a long list of other candidates for “occupation” has since been put forward. In this essay, I want to propose as a target for radical occupation the somewhat unusual candidate of liberalism itself. But contrary to the conventional wisdom prevailing within radical circles, I am going to argue for the heretical thesis that liberalism should not be contemptuously rejected by radicals but retrieved for a radical agenda. Summarized in bullet-point form, my argument is as follows: 0 The “Occupy Wall Street" movement provides an opportunity unprecedented in decades to build a broad democratic movement to challenge plutocracy, patriarchy, and white supremacy in the United States. 0 Such a movement is more likely to be successful if it appeals to principles and values most Americans already endorse. o Liberalism has always been the dominant ideology in the United States. - Liberalism in the United States has historically been complicit with plutocracy, patriarchy, and white supremacy, but this complicity is a contingent function of dominant group interests rather than the result of an immanent conceptual logic. Therefore progressives in philosophy [and elsewhere) should try to retrieve liberalism for a radical democratic agenda rather than rejecting it, thereby positioning themselves in the ideological mainstream of the country and seeking its transformation. Let me now try to make this argument plausible for an audience likely to be aprioristically convinced of its obvious unsoundness. Preliminary Clarification of Terms First we need to clarify the key terms of “radicalism” and “liberalism.” While of course a radicalism of the right exists, I mean to refer here to radicals who are progressives. But “progressive” cannot just denote the left of the political spectrum, since the whole point of the “new social movements” of the 19 605 onwards was that the traditional left-right political spectrum, predicated on varying positions on the question of public vs. private ownership, did not ex- haust the topography of the political. Issues of gender and racial domination were to a significant extent “orthogonal” to this one-dimensional trope. So I will use “radicalism” broadly, though still in the zone of progressive politics, to refer generally to ideas/ concepts / principles/values endorsing pro-egalitari- an structural change to reduce or eliminate unjust hierarchies of domination. “Liberalism” may denote both a political philosophy and the institutions and practices characteristically tied to that political philosophy. My focus will be on the former. The issue of how bureaucratic logics may prove refractory to reformist agendas is undeniably an important one, but it does not really fall into the purview of philosophy proper. My aim is to challenge the radical Shibboleth that radical ideas / concepts/ principles/values are incompatible with liberalism. Given the deep entrenchment of this assumption in the worldview of most radicals, refuting it would still be an accomplishment, even if working out practical details of operationalization are delegated to other hands. In the United States, of course, “liberalism” in public parlance and everyday political discourse is used in such a way that it really denotes left- liberalism specifically (“left” by the standards of a country whose center of gravity has shifted right in recent decades]. In this vocabulary, right-liberals are then categorized as “conservatives”—in the market sense, as against the Burkean sense. On the other hand, some on the right would insist that only they, the heirs to the classic liberalism of John Locke and Adam Smith, are re- ally entitled to the “liberal” designation. Later welfarist theorists are fraudu- lent pretenders to be exposed as socialist intruders unworthy of the title. Re- jecting both of these usages, I will be employing “liberalism” in the expanded sense typical of political philosophy, which links both ends of this spectrum. “Liberalism” then refers broadly to the anti-feudal ideology of individual- ism, equal rights, and moral egalitarianism that arises in Western Europe in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries to challenge the ideas and values inherited from the old medieval order, and which is subsequently taken up and develped by others elsewhere, including many who would have been explicitly excluded by the original conception of the ideology. Left-wing so- cial democrats and right—wing market conservatives, fans of John Rawls on the one hand and Robert Nozick on the other, are thus both liberals.1 From this perspective, it will be appreciated that liberalism is not a monolith but an umbrella term for a variety of positions. Here are some ex- amples—some familiar, some perhaps less so: Varieties of Liberalism Left-wing [social democratic) vs. Right-wing (market conservative) Kantian vs. Lockean Contractarian vs. Utilitarian Corporate vs. Democratic Social vs. Individualist Comprehensive vs. Political Ideal-theory vs. Non-ideal-theory Patriarchal vs. Feminist Imperial vs. Anti-imperial Racial vs. Anti-racial Color-blind vs. Color-conscious Etc. It is not the case, of course, that these different species of liberalism have been equally represented in the ideational sphere, or equally implemented in the institutional sphere. On the contrary, some have been dominant while others have been subordinate, and some have never, at least in the full sense, been implemented at all. But nonetheless, I suggest they all count as liberalisms and as such they are all supposed to have certain elements in common, even those characterized by gender and racial exclusions. (My motivation for making these last varieties of liberalism rather than deviations from liberalism is precisely to challenge liberalism’s self- congratulatory history, which holds an idealized Platonized liberalism aloft, untainted by its actual record of complicity with oppressive social systems.) So the initial question we should always ask people making generalizations about “liberalism” is: What particular variety of liberalism do you mean? And are your generalizations really true about all the possible kinds of liberalism, or only a subset? Here is a characterization of liberalism from a very respectable source, the British political theorist, John Gray: Common to all variants of the liberal tradition is a definite conception, distinctively modern in character, of man and society. . . . It is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any social collectivity; egalitarian, inasmuch as it confers on all men the same moral status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among human beings; universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms; and meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements. It is this conception of man and society which gives liberalism a definite identity which transcends its vast internal variety and complexity.2 What generate the different varieties of liberalism are different concepts of individualism, different claims about how egalitarianism should be con- strued or realized, more or less inclusionary readings of universalism [Gray’s characterization sanitizes liberalism’s actual sexist and racist history), dif- ferent views of what count as desirable improvements, con?icting normative balancings of liberal values (freedom, equality) and competing theoretical prognoses about how best they can be realized in the light of (contested) soda-historical facts. The huge potential for disagreement about all of these explains how a common liberal core can produce such a wide range of vari- ants. Moreover, we need to take into account not merely the spectrum of actual liberalisms but also hypothetical liberalisms that could be generated through novel framings of some or all of the above. So one would need to differentiate dominant versions of liberalism from Oppositional versions, and actual from possible variants. Once the breadth of the range of liberalisms is appreciated—dominant and subordinate, actual and potential—the obvious question then raised is: Even if actual dominant liberalisms have been conservative in various ways (corporate, patriarchal, racist) why does this rule out the development of emancipatory, radical liberalisms? One kind of answer is the following [call this the internalist answer): Because there is an immanent conceptual/ normative logic to liberalism as a political ideology that precludes any emancipatory development of it. Another kind of answer is the following [call this the externalist an- swer): It doesn't. The historic domination of conservative exclusionary lib- eralisms is the result of group interests, group power, and successful group political projects. Apparent internal conceptual /normative barriers to an emancipatory liberalism can be successfully negotiated by drawing on the conceptual/normative resources of liberalism itself, in conjunction with a revisionist socio-historical picture of modernity. Most self-described radicals would endorse—indeed, re?exively, as an obvious truth-the first answer. But as indicated from the beginning, I think the second answer is actually the correct one. The obstacles to developing a “radical liberalism” are, in my opinion, primarily externalist in nature: material group interests, and the way they have shaped hegemonic varieties of liberalism. So I think we need to try to justify a radical agenda with the normative resources of liberalism rather than writing off liberalism. Since liberalism has always been the dominant ideology in the United States, and is now globally hegemonic, such a project would have the great ideological advantage of appealing to values and principles that most people already endorse. All projects of egalitarian social transformation are going to face a combination of material, political, and ideological obstacles, but this strategy would at least reduce somewhat the dimensions of the last. One would be trying to win mass support for policies that—and the challenge will, of course, be to demonstrate this—are justifiable by majoritarian norms, once reconceived and put in conjunction with facts not always familiar to the majority. Material barriers [vested group interests) and political barriers [organizational difficulties) will of course remain. But they will constitute a general obstacle for all egalitarian political programs, and as such cannot be claimed to be peculiar problems for an emancipatory liberalism. But the contention will be that such a liberalism cannot be developed. Why? Here are ten familiar objections, variants of internalism, and my re- plies to them. Ten Reasons Why Liberalism Cannot Be Radicalized (And My Replies) 1. Liberalism Has an Asocial, Atomic Individualist Ontology This is one of the oldest radical critiques of liberalism; it can be found in Marx’s derisive comments, for example in the Grundrisse, about the “Robin- sonades” of the social contract theory whose “golden age” [1650—1800) had long passed by the time he began his intellectual and political career: The individual and isolated hunter or fisher who forms the starting-point with Smith and Ricardo belongs to the insipid illusions of the eighteenth century. They are Robinson Crusoe stories . . . . no more based on such a naturalism than is Rousseau’s contrat social which makes naturally inde— pendent individuals come in contact and have mutual intercourse by con- tract... . . Man is in the most literal sense of the word a zoon politikon, not only a social animal, but an animal which can develop into an individual only in society. Production by individuals outside society . . . is as great an absurdity as the idea of the development of language without individuals living together and talking to one another.3 But several replies can be made to this indictment. To begin with, even if the accusation is true of contractarian liberalism, not all liberalisms are contractarian. Utilitarian liberalism rests on different theoretical founda- tions, as does the late nineteenth—century British liberalism of T. H. Green and his colleagues: a l-legelian, social liberalism.4 Closer to home, of course, we have [ohn Dewey’s brand of liberalism. MoreOver, even within the so- cial contract tradition, resources exist for contesting the assumptions of the Hobbesian/Lockean version of the contract. Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality [1755) (nowhere given proper credit by Marxs) re- thinks the “contract” to make it a contract entered into after the formation of society, and thus the creation of socialized human beings. So the ontology presupposed is explicitly a social one. In any case, the contemporary revival of contractarianism initiated by John Rawls's 1971 A Theory of ] ustice makes the contract a thought experiment, a “device of representation," rather than a literal or even metaphorical anthropological account. The communitar- ian/contractarian debates of the 19805 onwards recapitulated much of the “asocial” critique of contractarian liberalism (though usually without a radi- cal edge). But as Rawls pointed out against Michael Sandel, for example, one needs to distinguish the figures in the thought experiment from real hu- man beings.6 And radicals should be wary about accepting a communitarian ontology and claims about the general good that deny or marginalize the dynamics of group domination in actual societies represented as “communi- ties.” The great virtue of contractarian liberal individualism is the conceptu- al room it provides for hegemonic norms to be critically evaluatedthrough the epistemic and moral distancing from Sittiichkeit that the contract, as an intellectual device, provides. 2. Liberalism Cannot Recognize Groups and Group Oppression in Its Ontology—I (Macro) The second point needs to be logically distinguished from the first, since a theory could acknowledge the social shaping of individuals while denying that group oppression is central to that shaping. [So #1 is necessary, but not sufficient, for #2.) The Marxist critique, of course, was supposed to encapsulate both points: people were shaped by society and society (post- “primitive communism") was class-dominated. The ontology was social and it was an ontology of class. Today radicals would demand a richer ontology that can accommodate the realities of gender and racial oppression also. But whatever candidates are put forward, the ‘key claim is that a liberal framework cannot accommodate an ontology of groups in relations of domination and subordination. To the extent that liberalism recognizes social groups, these are basically conceived of as voluntary associations that one chooses to join or not join, which is obviously very different from, say, class, race, and gender memberships. But this evasive ontology, which obfuscates the most central and obvious fact about all societies since humanity exited the hunting-and-gathering stage—viz, that they are characterized by oppressions of one kind or another—is not a definitional constituent of liberalism. Liberalism has certainly recognized some kinds of oppression: the absolutism it opposed in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the Nazism and Stalinism it opposed in the twentieth century. Liberalism’s failure to systematically address structural oppression in supposedly liberal-democratic societies is a contingent artifact of the group perspectives and group interests privileged by those structures, not an intrinsic feature of liberalism’s conceptual apparatus.Engagement GoodPolitics of engaging is not bad Spillers ‘18?(Hortense, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English @ Vanderbilt U., “Or Else…”?The A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought,?) NCC Packet 2019Ironically, however twisted a standard of measure,?we might gauge how far we’ve come by?the degree of?doubt expressible toward?the efficacy of voter registration and?electoral politics, as have a couple of my fellow writers in this issue. Even though?I regard this?argumentative?posture as a strategic error of near-fatal proportions, I think I understand how we got here: basically, there are two related, but contrastive, founding propositions on black life and thought in modernity that critics have consistently elaborated since “time immemorial,” and by that, I mean the time that the student of history marks down as the beginning of her sense of crisis that initiates “blackness” in the Western context; as I understand it, Afrocentric views, for instance, elide “blackness” and Africanity which concept is driven back into the ancient world so that transatlantic slavery—relatively recent in light of an ancient human past—is not the origin—or more precisely, the prime time— of black personality’s historical identity, but, rather, an interruption of it. The diasporic, or (for lack of a better word) creolized reading of blackness lends weight to the term itself, insofar as blackness on this view defines a new historical apprenticeship, kin to Africanness, but distinct from it in its particular and stressful formation, instaurated by the trade. One “becomes” black –neither a phylogeny nor an ontogeny—by virtue of his/her interpellation in total Western Economy. These portions of discursive content imply discrete spatiotemporal registers, as the putative subjects of each overlap, but are not entirely conformable (even if they look exactly alike), and there’s the rub. In the former instance, one discovers as many occasions as possible to establish and sustain symbolic contact with an imagined past, long receded, so that emphasis comes to rest on the power and porosity of myth and its ceremonial/ritualistic determinations wherever possible. Whether the Afrocentric sense eventuates in a vision of strategic movement toward a putative origin (as in “return” narratives/actualities of black politics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries), or of ideological movement toward it (“ancestral” ceremonies, ritual celebrations), this reading seems to engender a politics that is cultural, that looks “otherworldly”—the place of the ego-ideal—in its valorized reference to an imagined ancestral field. We would anticipate that electoral politics in its uninspirational mundaneness might actually be beneath it. In the latter instance, focus comes to rest on the conditions that make blackness possible in the first place and what several diasporic thinkers, Frantz Fanon, prominent among them, describe as “disalienation,” or the process of undoing the deleterious effects of slavery and colonization; because the diasporic view installs the latter as efficient cause of historic black movement, its political projects are charged with a sense of urgency as they resonate the era of their appearance with unmistakable identitarian markings. David Walker’s, Anna Julia Cooper’s, and W.E.B.Du Bois’s respective discourse, for example, could never be mistaken for a different time/cultural period, which means that such discourses are organically linked to their own “now.” Consequently, the political protocols of a diasporic commitment tend to reflect the sense of crisis that characterizes blackness as an emergent category of human possibility. Because blackness in the diasporic reading runs parallel to modernity, blackness is cut away from the idea of Africa—perhaps we could say more precisely that the idea of Africa is bracketed in this ideological outline, rather than jettisoned as it might have been a century ago—as the idea of blackness itself assumes the name of a virtually absolute origin. If we think of these concurrent strands of ideas as postures, then we realize the extent to which they determine not only how one stands, but where, as well as why. This enormous conceptual legacy, one way or another, accounts, I believe, for the lion’s share of African-American theoretical production and might be said to proffer a rich example of the problem of being/becoming and time. In its impressive variations and combinations, recombinations and iterations,?black theory-making has engendered its fullest efflorescence?in my view?in the post-sixties period?with regard to both thematic variedness and complexity and the democratic and demographic distribution of its practitioners;?it is also true that any one of these?postures?and/or variations on it?might evince?at any given moment a kind of?intellectual sclerosis?which?would?induce?in turn a?conservative politics.?If, for example,?a theory?governed by a diasporic view of black history from which to commence its narrative?reifies slavery and colonization as inherent?properties in a subject, then?the theoretical posture no longer serves as an intellectual technology, or a heuristic device,?but, rather,?comes to advance an ontological valence.?In my own work, for instance,?I?attempt to?advance a theory of flesh/body?as a strategy?to differentiate historical positionalities?in confrontation with the modern world.?But?if this idea has?any?usefulness, it proposes the theory as an opening?into a closure; a torque that kicks off movement or rotation in static properties.?But I?should?hope?not?to?lose sight of the human potential that the subject?of the flesh?embodies; perhaps another way to say this is that?the enfleshed subject inscribes an opening in a chain of necessity?rather than a last word.?The theory does not exhaust the subject that it would address, but attempts to highlight it.?To hold?to the view?that the enfleshed subject is?actually chattel or property—which we cannot say, insofar as we have merely established a subject possibility in this case—defeats the purpose?of discriminating in the first place between a conceptual device on the one hand and a speaking?(even if barred)?subject on the other.?I have taken, then, the long way around in order to say that?the ballot does not lose efficacy when?it is?wielded by black personality because the latter was?once defined as?anomie, as?chattel.?In other words,?to premise the future of blackness on its past is to be mired in timelessness, which is precisely to be bereft of historicity, of differentiation, of progression. But?moreover,?it?confuses?a?conceptual?narrative, or a position in discourse,?with?an?actual narrative?that will always exceed it.?To disparage the black vote is?not?a?sophisticated, or?radical,?response to anything,?but?reverberates?instead, without meaning to, we might suppose,?a long-standing hatred of black people?and their aspirations. To express doubt about the vote, especially this election sMaking demands on the state doesn't mean we endorse it Choat 16 - PhD in Political Science at Queen Mary University of London, member of the Political Studies Association, Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics, Politics, and History(Simon Choat, “Marxism and anarchism in an age of neoliberal crisis,” 2/15/16, ) NCC Packet 2019Notwithstanding this strategic plurality within Marxism, it is anyway questionable whether a particular form of organisation can be defined as intrinsically progressive. Given that both the US army and its enemies such as al-Qaeda, for example, are increasingly adopting polycentric, networked forms (albeit in combination with traditional vertical hierarchies), it is clear that such forms do not always produce a radical politics. Ultimately, what really distinguishes emancipatory from reactionary groups are not their strategies or organisational arrangements but the goals that they pursue (Hardt and Negri 2006: 54-62, 93, 218). The risk of anarchism’s preoccupation with prefigurative politics is that is fetishises tactical purity at the expense of political analysis and aims. Above all, the anarchist critique of Marxist strategies is premised on an overly simplistic understanding of the relationship between theory and practice. Anarchists have attempted to attribute Marxism’s supposed antidemocratic tactics to its theoretical claims, but there can never be any straightforward connection between theoretical arguments and organisational or strategic practices. The links between theory and practice are complex and subtle and it is dangerous to read back from the practical failures of a movement in order to criticise a set of concepts and theories. To claim, for example, that Stalinism can be explained by mistakes in Marx’s methodology, or even that the former throws doubt on the latter, is to risk the idealist and ultimately untenable argument that political or economic failures are produced by incorrect or adequate theory. Historical events can never simply disprove or discredit any ideological position, because ideas are always developed and applied within a variety of social and historical contexts. The gulag does not result from something that Marx wrote, but from a complex web of material causes. Anarchists in particular should be especially wary of attempting to discredit Marxism in this way, because practical experiments in anarchism have so seldom been successful: if we are to judge an ideology or movement by its operation ‘in practice’, then anarchism does not fare much better than Marxism (Choat 2013: 337-8). It may be that Leninist tactics have not achieved a classless and stateless society, but so far neither have anarchist tactics: anarchists may have cleaner hands than Marxists, but that is only because anarchists have had their hands on so little. The anarchist critique of Marxist organisational forms is unconvincing, then, because it does not acknowledge the diversity of Marxist approaches and it tends towards a theoreticism that sees a linear, causal, and continuous line from theory to practice. Nonetheless, there are significant differences of strategy between anarchism and Marxism: it is just that these are less to do with organisation as such, and are much more broadly to do with differing attitudes toward politics and the state. Although some (though by no means all) anarchists have supported formal political organisations, with rules, membership criteria, and even internal discipline (Schmidt and van der Walt 2009: 247-263), they have traditionally rejected any engagement with the state – whether it be voting, demanding legal rights or protections, forming political parties, or attempting the revolutionary seizure of government – on the basis that such engagement can only end up replicating the oppressive hierarchies that they are fighting: either it will lead to new forms of dictatorship and bureaucracy (such as developed in the Soviet Union); or it will lead to parliamentary reformism and hence merely reinforce existing structures and relations of power. If Marxists support (qualified) engagement with the state and even the formation of political parties, however, it is not because they think that centralised hierarchies are desirable or inevitable, but because they begin from a different understanding of politics. They argue that the anarchist abstention from state politics denies us the most effective means of political action: we disempower ourselves rather than the state when we refuse to engage with it. Making demands on the state does not necessarily entail an endorsement of the state, any more than the demands that are made by employees during a strike are an endorsement of the employer or of the system of wage-labour (Marx 1988). Anarchists themselves have at least implicitly recognised the efficacy of political engagement by occasionally supporting the policies of certain governments and even participating in elections (Engels 1988; Franks 2012: 216). More than this, abstention from state politics is not a genuine option: whether we like it or not, we are all already involved in state politics, because we are all always already submitted to state power, control, and oppression. Anarchists are concerned that participation in conventional politics will lead to parliamentary reformism. But this concern is itself ultimately premised on a tacit acceptance of the liberal-parliamentary understanding of politics: to claim that we can safely repudiate state politics simply by refusing ever to enter a polling booth is to assume that ‘the state’ stops at the door of Parliament. Marxists, in contrast, have argued that the state apparatus includes educational institutions, the media, churches, the family, and so on (e.g. Althusser 1971): simply in going about our daily lives we are all therefore implicated in state politics. Given our necessary involvement within politics, the question is not whether we engage with it, but how we do so; even libertarian Marxists like Holloway argue that engagement with the state is inevitable (Holloway 2005: 40). In contrast, the anarchist recommendation of disengagement from the state risks a politics of withdrawal and isolation. There are two related reasons why under our current conditions in particular the Marxist willingness to engage in state politics is preferable to an anarchist position. The first is the dominance of neoliberalism today. Given the strength of neoliberalism since the crisis that it created, there is a strong case for a certain pragmatism in our response. A danger of the prefigurative politics favoured by anarchists is that it dogmatically dictates an a priori exclusion of certain forms of political action. For Marxists, on the other hand, political strategies must be decided according to particular conditions and within a certain context. In a context in which private companies are increasingly undertaking tasks previously performed by the state, the active defence of state services and institutions can be viewed as a radical position to adopt: defending welfare provision, public pensions, universal healthcare, and free higher education should be seen not as a reformist compromise with the existing order but as safeguarding the gains of class struggle against capitalist processes of accumulation by dispossession. This leads to the second reason for doubting the refusal of state politics as a viable tactic under current conditions, which concerns the specific role of the state under neoliberalism. The anti-state politics of anarchism may have made sense during eras in which the state could plausibly be presented as the main threat to freedom and equality: during the period of nation-building and imperialistic expansion in the mid- to late-19th century, of the rise of fascism in the early-20th century, or even of the development of welfare capitalism after WWII. But it has far less purchase in an era in which neoliberalism, as both the official ideology and a form of everyday common sense, is anti-statist. Put simply, the attack on state power too easily echoes the rhetoric of neoliberalism itself (Taylor 2013: 735). When government actors themselves are explicitly endorsing the retreat of the state, then anarchist attacks on state power have limited efficacy either as a tactical call to arms or as a convincing analysis of our present conjuncture. In practice, of course, it is true that neoliberalism has not dissolved state power. But nor has the relation between state and capital remained the same under neoliberalism, such that our analyses, strategies, or rhetoric need not alter. The nature of this relationship between state and capital will be examined in the next section.Space Literacy GoodSpace literacy—law can shape ontologies, so researching its intricacies is crucial to understand power relations that underlie and inevitably structure the world—turns the altDr. Edythe E. Weeks 12, professor, space law scholar and author, and is working to raise pre-awareness and stimulate knowledge inclusion for a broad range of people throughout the global general public about outer space development, teaches at Washington University, etc., on International Law and Politics of Outer Space; The New Space Rush; Introduction to International Relations; African Americans and the Law; and Diversity, Politics and Law, named as a Fulbright Specialist on International Affairs and International Space Law for the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Institute of International Education’s Council for International Exchange Scholars (“Outer Space Development, International Relations and Space Law: A Method for Elucidating Seeds,” , /\) Academics have often questioned whether theories of international relations are capable of possessing law-like qualities. Similar to laws, mathematical formulas, scientific calculations, and the like, theories of international relations can uncover patterns and connections which can increase our ability to understand social and behavioral phenomena. Over time, politics and international relations have impacted international and domestic space law. In so doing, power, although very subtle, is being exercised by multiple forces. Law has been used as a perfunctory instrument of power relations. Over time, as international power relations changed between nations, space law and space policy have also changed to mirror power relations. Understanding power relations and who has the power to cause change in international law is central to enabling students and scholars to predict upcoming economic-political trends, to track the origin of new laws, and to link those new laws to political actors and actions. This framework allows people to analyze and deconstruct hidden exercises of power and to highlight the interests of those who will likely benefit from new laws and new policies. With this methodology, we can also highlight those likely to be left behind, particularly in situations where new laws and new policies are targeted to bring new forms of wealth and inequality. Consent at the international level comes from a pattern whereby U.S. law and policies have set the pace for space commercialization trends, as can be noted in now-widespread commercial industries such as satellite telecommunications, remote sensing, space transportation, and launch systems—now become prevalent industries in the global economy. A key factor at the international level was the advent of the post–Cold War era, heralded by the fall of the Soviet Union as a superpower. In the post–Cold War era, characterized by the dominance of free-market ideology and globalization practices, the norm is to allow the market to determine legal principles. Space entrepreneurs have become key actors in shaping the new direction for outer space development. A Gramscian analysis allows an inclusion of ideological, institutional, and cultural factors, which includes being able to explain the role likely played by offering concessions to the general public in exchange for having them get excited by the newest direction of outer space development. In the post–Cold War era, free-market neoliberal ideology amounts to just plain “common sense”; thus, cultural and institutional elements have a tremendous chameleon-like power to influence international institutions. PermPerm do both---the law can be utilized for abolition of anti-blackness---the alt’s rejection of law shuts down the most realistic possibilities for ending the worldAmna Akbar 18, Assistant Professor, Moritz College of Law, 7/25/18, “Toward a Radical Imagination of Law,” Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series No. 426 NCC Packet 2019Around the same time, I had begun teaching a law and social movements seminar. We studied the Black Panthers and Young Lords, Len Holt, Assata Shakur, and Ella Baker. I worried my students found the questions faced by these movements to be abstract and faraway. I wanted them to understand that contemporary movements struggled with questions similar to those in the texts we labored over. That’s how an organizer found himself surrounded by future lawyers. Hayes, along with his comrades in the contemporary Black liberation and immigrant justice movements, confronted many of the same strategic and tactical choices every day. As I had hoped, his presence transformed our conversation.Our intellectual distance from the texts vanished, and our lively conversation ended with a question: What is the proper role of lawyers within the movement? After a short pause, Hayes praised the technical chops and procedural expertise lawyers bring to the table. But that is not enough, he said. “Most lawyers see a problem and think, ‘How can I fix this law?’” This view is too narrow: it obscures the stakes and concedes to status quo arrangements. “The role of the law is to protect the state,” Hayes reasoned. “Lawyers must work with movements to imagine with us the kind of state we want to live in. Only from there can we work together to think about the laws we need.”2In conversations with intellectuals and organizers around the country, I realized the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL or Movement)3—the larger movement configuration in which the chapter based Black Lives Matter network functions—was having a far richer and more imaginative conversation about law reform than lawyers and law faculty. The Movement for Black Lives was situating their critique in Black history and intellectual traditions, and their imagination of alternate futures in Black freedom movements. Their critique was more expansive at the same time as it was more grounded, and their imagination more radical.4Legal scholars often assume the movement’s fight is over policing: indictments for police killings, independent prosecutors to investigate police shootings, better training and supervision for police, more diverse police forces, and so on.5 But, as Hayes suggested, the most imaginative voices within contemporary racial justice movements are fighting for much more than body cameras and police convictions.6The movement is focused on shifting power into Black and other marginalized communities;7 shrinking the space of governance now reserved for policing, surveillance, and mass incarceration; and fundamentally transforming the relationship among state, market, and society.8 Movement actors have made policy proposals and engaged in law reform campaigns at the same time they have prominently contested law and politics as usual.9 In the few years after Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown, there were shutdowns of bridges and highways; die-ins at courthouses and statehouses; occupations of police stations, police unions, and universities; arrests and curfews; tear gas and riot gear.10 But the movement’s highprofile campaigns have not been waged by lawyers or via litigation.11Indeed, the movement has largely refrained from fighting to strengthen preexisting rights or demanding legal recognition of new ones.12 The focus is not on investing even-handedness to law or the police, not on restoring criminal justice to some imaginary constitutional or pre-raced status quo, and not on increasing resources for community policing.13 But it would be wrong to think the movement has given up on law. The movement is not attempting to operate outside of law, but rather to reimagine its possibilities within a broader attempt to reimagine the state. Law is fundamental to what movement actors are fighting against and for.14To illustrate how the movement approach reorients traditional criminal law reform conversations, I examine the 2016 policy platform of the Movement for Black Lives, “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice” (the Vision).15 I put the Vision in conversation with the Ferguson and Baltimore reports by the Department of Justice16—which represent more traditional liberal approaches to criminal law reform. The Vision and the DOJ reports offer some of the most damning critiques of policing in recent memory, but differ fundamentally in their analysis and conclusions. The contrast reflects the limitations of liberal law reform at the same time that it opens up a more imaginative set of possibilities about reorganizing the very structure of our society. By studying the convergences and divergences between these texts, this Article highlights how radical social movements reimagine the very same social problems with which significant bodies of legal scholarship engage.The Vision and DOJ reports offer alternate conceptualizations of the problem of policing and the appropriate approach to law reform. Reflective of liberal law reform projects on police, the DOJ reports identify policing as a fundamental tool of law and order that serves the collective interests of society, and locate the problems of police in a failure to adhere to constitutional law. As a corrective, the DOJ reports advocate for investing more resources in police: more trainings, better supervision, community policing. In contrast, the Vision identifies policing as a historical and violent force in Black communities, underpinning a system of racial capitalism and limiting the possibilities of Black life. As such, policing as we now know it cannot be fixed. Thus, the Vision’s reimagination of policing—rooted in Black history and Black intellectual traditions—transforms mainstream approaches to reform. In forwarding a decarceral agenda rooted in an abolitionist imagination, the Vision demands shrinking the large footprint of policing, surveillance, and incarceration, and shifting resources into social programs in Black communities: housing, health care, jobs, and schools. The Vision focuses on building power in Black communities, and fundamentally transforming the relationships among state, market, and society. In so doing, the movement offers transformative, affirmative visions for change designed to address the structures of inequality—something legal scholarship has lacked for far too long.The DOJ reports document the problems endemic to policing. While presenting a critical view of Ferguson’s and Baltimore’s police departments, the reports are committed to the legal status quo, to a mode of governance that relies on criminal law enforcement to deal with a broad set of deep-seated social problems, and to rules and authorities that are historically and functionally oppressive. As a result, the reports double down on traditional reforms that reinvest in law and police.17 This approach cedes more legitimacy—not to mention more resources—to the police and the legal frameworks in which they operate without a meaningful consideration of alternatives. Of course, the reports emerge from a particular time and social location: a prosecutorial agency, the Civil Rights Division, embedded within the executive branch during the Obama administration.18 As with any social location, there are possibilities, pressures, and constraints on what the DOJ may say or do as a law enforcement agency under a particular administration. But framed in a different understanding, accountable to different constituencies, the DOJ could have taken an approach to reform more aligned with the Vision, suggesting a realignment of resources from policing to the underlying social problems stemming from structural inequality in Ferguson and Baltimore.The additional importance of the DOJ reports lies in how they reflect how legal institutions—and, in turn, law scholarship— approach long-standing structural problems while firmly committed to the status quo and restoring legitimacy thereto. In this way, the DOJ reports expose a central dilemma of liberal law reform projects, caught between a commitment to the rule of law and status quo arrangements on the one hand, and the desire for substantive justice and social, economic, and political transformation on the other.19But our political moment is defined by crisis and polarization, with insurgencies on the left and right calling for reform, transformation, and even revolution.20 Amid the electoral triumph of Trump, protest and people-of-color-led anti-capitalist movements have surged in activity.21 These radical movements mark the revival of anti-capitalist racial justice politics in the United States in a way that we have not seen since the civil rights, Black power, and Chicano movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Contemporary racial justice movements are not simply arguing the state has created a fundamentally unequal criminal legal system. They are identifying policing, jail, and prison as the primary mode of governing Black, poor, and other communities of color in the United States, and pointing to law as the scaffolding. They are working to build another state—another world even—organized differently than the one we have inherited. They are aiming to use the law as a tool to build that alternative future. We can ignore their deep critiques and visionary alternatives, or we can embrace the possibilities of a more searching inquiry. This is a moment calling for a radical imagination, where the scale of deep critique is matched with a scale of grand vision.22While many progressive and left legal scholars reach for meaningful change, most of us lack alternative frameworks.23 Like the DOJ reports, even when the scale of our critique is large, our visions for change are often too small. We have focused on a narrow picture of law and law reform while sidestepping questions about the structure of the society, the state, and the market. These movements make these questions central to their work.24 They do not have it all worked out. But they are making powerful sketches of much-needed alternative frameworks.Imagining with social movements seeking to transform the state would invest law scholarship in a project of reconstruction and transformation.25 For radical racial justice movements, the primary commitment is not to law, its legitimacy, rationality, or stability: It is to people.26 The motivations are to protest an enduring set of social structures rooted in European and settler colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade; to fight for transformative change, justice, and liberation; and to invest in a redistributive and transformative project, one demanding a more equal distribution of resources and life chances,27 with a focus on the most intersectionally marginalized people.28the perm solves and they invert the error – erases black resistance and allows endless militaristic expansionMay 17 (Daniel – Organizer with ACORN, the IAF and the SEIU. “How to Revive the Peace Movement in the Trump Era.” ) NCC Packet 2019While this might strike some as naive, the shifting sands of our politics should unsettle those tempted to dismiss the possibility. The assault on corporate globalization that provided much of the energy behind both Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’s campaigns carried with it an implicit critique of the military infrastructure upon which much of the global economy depends. Sanders used a primary debate stage, amazingly, to attack Henry Kissinger for working to overthrow Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk. And though he was a loathsome vehicle for the message, when Trump asked whether the United States should provide defense services for Germany, Japan, and South Korea, when he questioned whether we should remain in NATO, and when he lamented the disaster of the Iraq War, he raised issues familiar to critics of American empire. Among the many alarming lessons of this election was that strong criticism of a globalized military—traditionally the ground of the left—can be manipulated by a shrewd right-wing demagogue. If progressives do not seize such ground, they will cede it to the isolationist right. ANTIWAR ORGANIZING AND THE NEW MOVEMENTS Anyone who has spent time in the antiwar movement quickly finds that the tension that bedevils all progressive politics—the one between policy-minded institutional leaders and more radical activists driven by ideological commitments—is particularly acute in the realm of foreign policy. The brutality of violence and repression in places like Syria, for example, leads some to sympathize with what has come to be called “humanitarian intervention,” while others see in those same circumstances evidence of the catastrophic results of a misconceived prior entanglement. The upshot is that apart from opposition to large-scale wars like the one in Iraq, progressives as a whole have little shared agenda when it comes to America’s role in the world. In speaking with organizers and activists about the future of the peace movement, these tensions were ever-present. Many older activists lamented that issues of militarism had become marginal to the broader progressive agenda. And yet most of the younger leaders with whom I spoke described the target of their struggles as inseparable from America’s global policy. The reason for this gulf, it became clear, is that each defines the problem differently. The traditional antiwar left defines itself in opposition to, well, war. Many younger leaders, on the other hand, are challenging the brutality of an empire that serves the interests of capital and perpetuates white supremacy. “We know the same companies that are building our prisons are the ones building our bases,” said Ahmad Abuznaid, co-founder of the Dream Defenders, a Miami-based racial-justice organization. “If one wanted to organize folks in the US that understand the destructive impact of American militarization, immigrants would be a good place to start,” said Sofia Campos, former board chair of United We Dream. Max Berger, an organizer in the Occupy movement who is currently helping to launch #AllOfUs, a project to organize millennials behind a radical progressive agenda, captured the perspective of many young activists: “Do we want to be a country where people can go to college without being in debt their whole lives, or do we want to have hundreds of military bases around the world that protect the corporate interests of the elites that own our government? Do we want an empire, or a democracy?” This orientation challenges the prevailing liberal consensus. The platform released last year by more than 50 organizations involved in the Movement for Black Lives, and the response it provoked, is indicative of the dynamic. “America is an empire that uses war to expand territory and power,” the platform declares. It calls for a cut in the military budget by 50 percent, the closing of all foreign US military bases, and an end to military support for Israel’s “genocide.” In tying the struggle for racial justice locally with America’s global military policy, the platform inspired those seeking to connect domestic injustice with global issues. (It also outraged some who wondered why a movement to achieve racial justice was addressing the Israeli occupation.) The perspective of these new movements creates both opportunities and challenges for those committed to demilitarization. If a mass movement to combat militarism emerges, it will likely do so in the same manner as other contemporary movements shaking and shaping progressive politics: not by any existing advocacy institutions, but by a groundswell of grassroots organizing energy. As Heather Hurlburt, director of the New Models of Policy Change initiative, put it, in striking words from a leader at a DC think tank, “The progressive foreign policy agenda will not be shaped by us here in DC. It will be made by those young folks organizing in the streets.” Yet today, engagement between the peace camp and the millennial movements follows a coalition model, as antiwar organizers reach out to other movements for support. Rashad Robinson, director of Color of Change, reflected that in the wake of the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, “you had all these folks jump on the anti-militarization bandwagon—as if the problem was just the military equipment, and not the police using them.” For people in the Movement for Black Lives, “that just confirmed that these activists care more about their pet issue than about actual black bodies that are getting brutalized.” Moving forward, the agenda will emerge with the relationships. In the work of building those relationships, the leadership of those hit hardest by America’s foreign policy will prove particularly important: military veterans, some 20 of whom commit suicide every day; refugees, many of whom have fled countries decimated by US attacks or invasions; and Muslim Americans, who suffer the humiliations of Islamophobia on a daily basis. Groups like Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, , and more recent initiatives like Beyond the Choir need to be supported and strengthened. The same goes for organizing in the Arab-American and refugee communities. So far, the lens of anti-imperialism provides a paradigm for many movements, but not yet a program. A strong case can be made that in fighting the violence unleashed on black bodies over the past four decades by the War on Crime and the War on Drugs—wars fought with some of the same equipment with which we have fought more distant conflicts—the Movement for Black Lives has become the most powerful antiwar movement in America. But on its own, that movement will not dismantle a structure that demands such an oversupply of MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles) that they end up parked in the lots of over 500 police departments. Such an effort will require that some of the younger leaders coming up in contemporary justice movements make the struggle against militarism central to their program, not just their analysis. Those organizers who make this their life’s labor will find ways of exposing the cost and waste of imperialism, organizing against those who profit from it, and offering a clear choice between global military expansion and a democracy that serves its citizens. Perhaps their work will be framed by the profit made from killing, or by the costs of our globalized military, or by the disastrous consequences of foreign entanglements. Perhaps it will target particular institutions that benefit from the corrosive connections between racism, militarism, and oil; perhaps it will expose how a culture of violence abroad is manifested in a culture of violence at home. Perhaps it will be led by veterans, or by refugees, or by women, who bear the brunt of so much American violence. All of these directions, and more, will have to be attempted, tested, grown—and supported by funders, many of whom, after Obama’s election, turned away from a focus on war and militarism. (For its part, the Colombe Foundation is launching a new fund to support such organizing and inviting other funders to join. The fund will support, among other projects, a series of trainings on militarism for movement leaders across the country and a coordinated campaign to address police militarization.) Whatever shape this organizing takes, it will run into the question that faces all oppositional politics: What alternative is on offer? This dilemma is particularly acute when it comes to American empire, opposition to which can easily devolve into a nativist isolationism. There is a long history to that trend—many leaders in the Anti-Imperialist League of the late 19th century were as racist as the imperialists, arguing that the browner populations of the Philippines and Puerto Rico didn’t have the racial composition required for liberty. There are two possible alternatives to American global hegemony, whose decline has perhaps been prematurely declared but is nonetheless on the wane. In one, the nativist impulse prevails and we have an even larger military, contained in a nation surrounded by walls and protected by travel bans. In the other, the United States embraces a true internationalism, working to build institutions to which it will also be accountable. At the moment, it may be difficult to imagine this latter path. But these past months have given us a glimpse of the consequences that await us if we fail to capture the anger that so many harbor toward an American empire that exacts such terrible costs and benefits so few. Nothing is promised in politics. Movements rise and fall, truth-tellers often lose, xenophobic nationalists sometimes gain power, cowards frequently prevail. There is no determined arc to our history; no guaranteed results have been foretold. But at no moment over the past half-century has there been such an opportunity to ask whether our empire serves our democracy or undermines it. The question is whether those committed to a less brutal, less violent, more just, more equal country can muster the imagination, anger, courage, and energy to seize it.Permutation do both---understanding the intricacies of politics, the state, and the military is a PREREQUISITE to addressing oppression – means our ACADEMIC theorizing is methodologically valuable and a PREREQUISITE to the alternative.Bryant 12 – (9/15, Levi, professor of Philosophy at Collin College and Chair of the Critical Philosophy program at the New Centre for Research and Practice, “War Machines and Military Logistics: Some Cards on the Table,” ) NCC Packet 2019We need answers to these questions to intervene effectively. We can call them questions of “military logistics”. We are, after all, constructing war machines to combat these intolerable conditions. Military logistics asks two questions: first, it asks what things the opposing force, the opposing war machine captured by the state apparatus, relies on in order to deploy its war machine: supply lines, communications networks, people willing to fight, propaganda or ideology, people believing in the cause, etc. Military logistics maps all of these things. Second, military logistics asks how to best deploy its own resources in fighting that state war machine. In what way should we deploy our war machine to defeat war machines like racism, sexism, capitalism, neoliberalism, etc? What are the things upon which these state based war machines are based, what are the privileged nodes within these state based war machines that allows them to function? These nodes are the things upon which we want our nomadic war machines to intervene. If we are to be effective in producing change we better know what the supply lines are so that we might make them our target.What I’ve heard in these discussions is a complete indifference to military logistics. It’s as if people like to wave their hands and say “this is horrible and unjust!” and believe that hand waving is a politically efficacious act. Yeah, you’re right, it is horrible but saying so doesn’t go very far and changing it. It’s also as if people are horrified when anyone discusses anything besides how horribly unjust everything is. Confronted with an analysis why the social functions in the horrible way, the next response is to say “you’re justifying that system and saying it’s a-okay!” This misses the point that the entire point is to map the “supply lines” of the opposing war machine so you can strategically intervene in them to destroy them and create alternative forms of life. You see, we already took for granted your analysis of how horrible things are. You’re preaching to the choir. We wanted to get to work determining how to change that and believed for that we needed good maps of the opposing state based war machine so we can decide how to intervene.We then look at your actual practices and see that your sole strategy seems to be ideological critique or debunking. Your idea seems to be that if you just prove that other people’s beliefs are incoherent, they’ll change and things will be different. But we’ve noticed a couple things about your strategy: 1) there have been a number of bang-on critiques of state based war machines, without things changing too much, and 2) we’ve noticed that we might even persuade others that labor under these ideologies that their position is incoherent, yet they still adhere to it as if the grounds of their ideology didn’t matter much. This leads us to suspect that there are other causal factors that undergird these social assemblages and cause them to endure is they do. We thought to ourselves, there are two reasons that an ideological critique can be successful and still fail to produce change: a) the problem can be one of “distribution”. The critique is right but fails to reach the people who need to hear it and even if they did receive the message they couldn’t receive it because it’s expressed in the foreign language of “academese” which they’ve never been substantially exposed to (academics seem to enjoy only speaking to other academics even as they say their aim is to change the world). Or b) there are other causal factors involved in why social worlds take the form they do that are not of the discursive, propositional, or semiotic order. My view is that it is a combination of both.I don’t deny that ideology is one component of why societies take the form they do and why people tolerate intolerable conditions. I merely deny that this is the only causal factor. I don’t reject your political aims, but merely wonder how to get there. Meanwhile, you guys behave like a war machine that believes it’s sufficient to drop pamphlets out of an airplane debunking the ideological reasons that persuade the opposing force’s soldiers to fight this war on behalf of the state apparatus, forgetting supply lines, that there are other soldiers behind them with guns to their back, that they have obligations to their fellows, that they have families to feed or debt to pay off, etc. When I point out these other things it’s not to reject your political aims, but to say that perhaps these are also good things to intervene in if we wish to change the world. In other words, I’m objecting to your tendency to use a hammer to solve all problems and to see all things as a nail (discursive problems), ignoring the role that material nonhuman entities play in the form that social assemblages take.This is the basic idea behind what I’ve called “terraism”. Terraism has three components: 1) “Cartography” or the mapping of assemblages to understand why they take the form they take and why they endure. This includes the mapping of both semiotic and material components of social assemblages. 2) “Deconstruction” Deconstruction is a practice. It includes both traditional modes of discursive deconstruction (Derridean deconstruction, post-structuralist feminist critique, Foucaultian genealogy, Cultural Marxist critique, etc), but also far more literal deconstruction in the sense of intervening in material or thingly orders upon which social assemblages are reliant. It is not simply beliefs, signs, and ideologies that cause oppressive social orders to endure or persist, but also material arrangements upon which people depend to live as they do. Part of changing a social order thus necessarily involves intervening in those material networks to undermine their ability to maintain their relations or feedback mechanisms that allow them to perpetuate certain dependencies for people. Finally, 3) there is “Terraformation”. Terraformation is the hardest thing of all, as it requires the activist to be something more than a critic, something more than someone who simply denounces how bad things are, someone more than someone who simply sneers, producing instead other material and semiotic arrangements rendering new forms of life and social relation possible. Terraformation consists in building alternative forms of life. None of this, however, is possible without good mapping of the terrain so as to know what to deconstruct and what resources are available for building new worlds. Sure, I care about ontology for political reasons because I believe this world sucks and is profoundly unjust. But rather than waving my hands and cursing because of how unjust and horrible it is so as to feel superior to all those about me who don’t agree, rather than playing the part of the beautiful soul who refuses to get his hands dirty, I think we need good maps so we can blow up the right bridges, power lines, and communications networks, and so we can engage in effective terraformation.Extinction BadExtinction being bad is not racist Thompson, 18 [Nicole Akoukou, Chicago-based creative writer with a varied background in journalism, education, social media, and brand management, WHY I WILL NOT ALLOW THE FEAR OF A NUCLEAR ATTACK TO BE WHITE-WASHED, RACEBAITR, April 6, 2018, ] NCC Packet 2019I still vibe with Harriot’s statement, “Black people have lived under the specter of having our existence erased on a white man’s whim since we stepped onto the shore at Jamestown Landing.” However, a friend—a Black friend—ignited my nuclear paranoia by sharing theories about when it might happen and who faced the greatest threat. In an attempt to ease my friend’s fear, I leaned in to listen but accidentally toppled down the rabbit hole too. I forked through curated news feeds. I sifted through “fake news,” “actual news,” and foreign news sources. Suddenly, an idea took root: nuclear strike would disproportionately impact Black people, brown people, and low-income individuals. North Korea won’t target the plain sight racists of Portland, Oregon, the violently microaggressive liberals of the rural Northwest, or the white-hooded klansmen of Diamondhead, Mississippi. No, under the instruction of the supreme leader Kim Jong-un, North Korea will likely strike densely populated urban areas, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York City. These locations stand-out as targets for a nuclear strike because they are densely populated U.S. population centers. Attacking the heart of the nation or populous cities would translate to more casualties. With that in mind, it’s not lost on me that the most populous cities in the United States boast sizeable diverse populations, or more plainly put: Black populations. This shit stresses me out! There’s a creeping chill that follows me, a silent alarm that rings each time my Google alert chimes letting me know that Donald Trump has yet again provoked Kim Jong-Un, a man who allegedly killed his very own uncle. I’ve grown so pressed by the idea of nuclear holocaust that my partner and I started gathering non-perishables, candlesticks, a hand-crank radio, and other must-buy items that can be banked in a shopping cart. The practice of preparing for a nuclear holocaust sometimes feels comical, particularly when acknowledging that there has long been a war on Black people in this country. Blackness is bittersweet in flavor. We are blessed with the melanized skin, the MacGyver-like inventiveness of our foremothers, and our blinding brightness—but the anti-blackness that we experience is also blinding as well as stifling. We are stuck by rigged systems, punished with the prison industrial complex, housing discrimination, pay discrimination, and worse. We get side-eyes from strangers when we’re “loitering,” and the police will pull us over for driving “too fast” in a residential neighborhood. We get murdered for holding cell phones while standing in our grandmother’s backyard. The racism that strung up our ancestors, kept them sequestered to the back of the bus and kept them in separate and unequal schools still lives. It lives, and it’s more palpable than dormant. To me, this means one thing: Trump’s America isn’t an unfortunate circumstance, it’s a homecoming event that’s hundreds of years in the making, no matter how many times my white friends’ say, “He’s not my president.” In light of this homecoming, we now flirt with a new, larger fear of a Black genocide. America has always worked towards Black eradication through a steady stream of life-threatening inequality, but nuclear war on American soil would be swift. And for this reason I’ve grown tired of whiteness being at the center of the nuclear conversation. The race-neutral approach to the dialogue, and a tendency to continue to promote the idea that missiles will land in suburban and rural backyards, instead of inner-city playgrounds, is false. “The Day After,” the iconic, highest-rated television film in history, aired November 20, 1983. More than 100 million people tuned in to watch a film postulating a war between the Soviet Union and the United States. The film, which would go on to affect President Ronald Reagan and policymakers’ nuclear intentions, shows the “true effects of nuclear war on average American citizens.” The Soviet-targeted areas featured in the film include Higginsville, Kansas City, Sedalia, Missouri, as well as El Dorado Springs, Missouri. They depict the destruction of the central United States, and viewers watch as full-scale nuclear war transforms middle America into a burned wasteland. Yet unsurprisingly, the devastation from the attack is completely white-washed, leaving out the more likely victims which are the more densely populated (Black) areas. Death tolls would be high for white populations, yes, but large-scale losses of Black and brown folks would outpace that number, due to placement and poverty. That number would be pushed higher by limited access to premium health care, wealth, and resources. The effects of radiation sickness, burns, compounded injuries, and malnutrition would throttle Black and brown communities and would mark us for generations. It’s for that reason that we have to do more to foster disaster preparedness among Black people where we can. Black people deserve the space to explore nuclear unease, even if we have competing threats, anxieties, and worries. Jacqui Patterson, Director of the Environmental and Climate Justice Initiative, once stated: African American communities are disproportionately vulnerable to and impacted by natural (and unnatural) catastrophes. Our socio-economic vulnerability is based on multiple factors including our lack of wealth to cushion us, our disproportionate representation in lower quality housing stock, and our relative lack of mobility, etc.Even if pessimism is a good academic stance, it can’t be used to justify accepting the harms of the status quo—life is a prerequisite to struggleSyedullah, 18—Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vassar College (Jasmine, “Afro-pessimism: Critical Exchange,” Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 1, 105–137, dml) NCC Packet 2019Given that the endgame of Afro-pessimism as an academic enterprise is limited by its location within the neoliberal university (see Fred Moten and Stephano Harney’s ‘‘The University and the UnderCommons,’’), the most generative aspects of its analysis of anti-blackness and Western civilization are indebted to knowledge about black life and liberation produced outside the academy and on the ground of struggles for freedom. The pessimism of conventional philosophical concern presses on the ontological foundations of a person’s individual sense of agency and purpose, throwing one’s will to live into question. Prophetic despair, such as that which Baldwin expresses in an often quoted interview between James Baldwin Dr. Kenneth Clark in May of 1963, presses on the material cohesion of our moral infrastructure. In the interview Baldwin professes to remaining pessimistic with regard to his own life when he says, ‘‘It doesn’t matter any longer what you do to me; you can put me in jail, you can kill me. By the time I was 17, you’d done everything that you could do to me. The problem now is, how are you going to save yourselves?’’ He goes on a bit later to refuse, in no uncertain term, pessimism as a politics of the future. When Clark asks, ‘‘Jim, what do you see deep in the recesses of your own mind as the future of our nation, … I think that the future of the Negro and the future of the nation are linked … What do you see?,’’ Baldwin replies, ‘‘I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country (Clark et al., 1963). I want to savor the tensions of Baldwin’s response. I want to hold them, not resolve them, and observe how they situate pedestrian personal pessimism outside the movement for black life, while calling out the limits of a political process propelled and legitimated by white supremacy. Even insofar as pessimism is a social expression of the affective limits of social death, a feeling that brings us back to life, out of isolation, and into conversation with each other the promise of pessimism is clearly far more than an academic matter. The antithesis of pessimism in this instance is not optimism but apathy, willful passive acceptance of the untenable conditions of a people systemically and forcibly made to understand that there are some whose existence is at best immaterial and at worst a clear and present danger, and then there are those lives that do matter. What we have been witnessing in the activist and academic movements for black life is the implosion of identity politics and the failure of its possessive claims to liberal demands for rights and protection. The abolition of whiteness demands a kind of justice the state may not yet know how to sanction. As Patrisse Cullors (2015), one of three original founders of #BLM, argues, ‘‘I believe we can’t wait on the State to take care of our Black lives. We have to show up now to build the world we want to see.’’ Thinking the purchase of the pessimistic prophetically then, as a residual, inevitable, yet generative practice of the black prophetic tradition with reparative properties that precede and exceed Afro-pessimism’s formal incorporation into scholarly journals and conferences, I find myself constantly reminding my students that while we can take the analysis of power Afro-pessimism offers and run with it, academic enunciations of pessimism run the risk of remaining loyal to the limits of legibility and respectability of politics as usual. As Nick Mitchell (forthcoming, p. 10) writes: ‘‘When the intellectual becomes interchangeable with the slave, it is perhaps too easy … to smooth over the fact that black intellectuals have interests as intellectuals that can and do diverge from those of the people for whom they might want justice. Without an acknowledgement (not a confession) of this divergence … the project of race theorization risks deploying the generalizing force of theory and the moralizing tendency of critique to generalize a class perspective.’’ What we are dealing with here is more than occidental anxiety of ontological uncertainty. It is an ethical imperative to engage in a struggle to change the meaning of rights and protection from the ground up (or suffer senselessly at the altar of the state’s right to defend itself by any means necessary). As Baldwin (in Clark et al., 1963) suggested in the interview with Kenneth Clark, the pessimism of antiblack racism is not just a black problem, it presses on the condition of whites and upon the country as a whole: ‘‘These people have deluded themselves for so long, that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say, and this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.’’ The predicament of the pessimist is not a personal problem that is easily selfcontained. It presses upon the body, moving it to unrest, unleashing a rage that cannot stand to be at home in moral monstrosity. It just wants to burn it all down. ‘‘Now, we are talking about human beings, there’s not such a thing as a monolithic wall or some abstraction called the Negro problem, these are Negro boys and girls, who at 16 and 17 don’t believe the country means anything that it says and don’t feel they have any place here, on the basis of the performance of the entire country.’’ The question Afro-pessimism poses as a practice of prophetic desire then, turns away from a politics of recognition and respectability toward an abolitionist praxis of fugitive reparation to ask, ‘‘Will you run with me?’’ Does my pessimism press on your sense of superiority, exception, perfection enough for you to forfeit your status and help us move the country, force the nation to believe there is freedom beyond this world, a more prophetic imagination of difference, identity, and inclusion? ‘‘What white people have to do,’’ Baldwin (in Clark et al., 1963) reminds us, ‘‘is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it.’’ In the present moment Black Lives Matter (BLM) is advancing the cause for the abolition of white supremacy in local ways in chapters throughout the world. They call us to account for the material consequences of the unfinished work of antislavery abolition and reconstruction. They are part of an underground lineage of fugitive communities that emerged from the marshes, swamps, and hiding spaces of the plantation South. Their message is decentralized. It is not uniform. It does not reproduce old antagonisms. It does not pit moral suasion against direct confrontation. It does not ask that we choose to remain either optimistic or pessimistic. It exercises a practice of the political that harnesses both. In this last section then I turn to a speech against apathy by Patrisse Cullors, a beacon in a leader-full movement who has been animating pessimism as a protocol of self-care and prophetic political organizing powerful enough to propel activist and intellectual movements from isolated places of loss into collective liberation, out of abstractions into objections, subjecting the logics of antiblack racism to the collective force of intersecting fugitive communities of abolitionist movement against nihilism and toward an affirmation of life. We Can Survive? At age 25 on 19 April 2015 Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained while shackled by his feet in a Baltimore Police Department van where he was being held in custody following his arrest. Baltimore stood up, rose up, died in, and rolled out. We all bore witness. His death was deemed a murder by the medical examiner a few weeks later. That Sunday morning, May 3, 2015, I, a Buddhist, found my way to church, to All Saints in Pasadena, CA, into the strikingly upper-class congregation of post-service attendees who piled in along with an unlikely mix of young greater Los Angeles activists-of-color and their white hipster allies. It would be my first time hearing our speaker in person. The whole room stood and cheered as she entered – the woman who helped coin the hashtag, the longtime activist organizer, Patrisse Cullors greeted us like family, all knowing eyes, bright smiles, and then began a talk she called ‘‘Abolition Theology.’’ Her voice was clear and certain, free of the cross-bearing affect of black suffering that often accompanies talk of state-sponsored antiblack violence in predominately white spaces. Cullors gave us a speech that touched us, that moved us – mourning, rage and all – into a mood for collective action. She impressed upon us the fact that the movement for black lives was a call to action for all black life, not just the names we could recite, not just cisgendered young men, not just ‘‘innocent’’ ‘‘children,’’ not just Americans. She let us know there had been recent formations of #Black Lives Matter chapters beyond U.S. borders. There were Afro-Latino chapters, chapters forming in Haiti, and in Ghana. She reminded us that the concept of blackness that resonates across the globe called on us to broaden the scope of our movements and to build alliances, to build with Latino communities in particular. It was a call for #BLM without borders. We were being enlisted in a movement that began, she reminded us, with the movement to abolish the institution of slavery. We were being reeducated as she drew connection between the hard-won efforts of formerly fugitive abolitionists to build resilient communities out of the so-called contraband during and following the Civil War through to the present-day ‘‘leader-full’’ movement of #BLM. ‘‘Isn’t this a great time to be alive?’’ Cullors asked in closing. Is she joking I wondered? I found not one drop of cynicism in her question. Without missing a beat, she proceeded to relay the names, the facts, the numbers, the bodies felled by police, by gun, by force. As she listed the lives taken a wave of loss flooded the room and we were still, breathless. ‘‘Protest is about disrupting apathy,’’ she continued. She left us eager to join her in this twenty-first century revival of reconstruction, in a fight for food, for access to housing, for access to education, and for a kind of justice for black lives that will not come without our willingness to show up, stand up, and throw down. In the streets, in solidarity, we will find the power to change people, she said, to change policy. She echoed the words of civil rights organizer Ella Baker, ‘‘the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed… It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.’’ For Cullors that ‘‘means’’ came by way of waves grief, rage, despair, the loss of family, the loss of hope, bearing witness, heartbreak, and the will to return to face it all again. She closed us out with the rallying chant of the movement for black lives, the recitation of a prayer by Twentieth century fugitive slave Assata Shakur, ‘‘It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and protect each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.’’ The congregation’s joy burst through the siren of her words and bound us toward another way of sitting with the litany of loss. We Must Survive What Baldwin and Cullors make clear is that pessimism is most powerful as an unrelenting political process of coming back to life, beginning to feel one another’s humanity. What my students who are taking up the work of Afro-pessimism are in most need of are new ways to put their pessimism to work, to come together and collectively counteract the mind-numbing soul-crushing isolation centuries of antiblack racism have waged on our humanity. We need not fear falling short. The more we ‘‘fail,’’ the stronger we rise to try again armed with the alchemy of despair. What we need are stories and speeches, and spaces that moves us from abjection toward that fertile ground of self-transformation one can only find in the witness of another. What might we give up in a move from critique to healing and reparation, generative of the choice to be fearless in the face of the impossibilities of freedom? What might the audacity to ‘‘lean on each other,’’ as Jasmine Abdullah Richards says in the epigraph, and imagine a future for black life otherwise, add to the pursuits of the pessimist?Alternative FailsState is inevitable Holcombe 04 (Randall G. Holcombe- Devoe Moor Professor of Economics at FSU, “Government: Unnecessary but Inevitable,” The Independent Review, v. VIII, n. 3, Winter 2004, p 333-334) RK NCC Packet 2019In the foregoing arguments, I have maintained that although government may not be desirable, it is inevitable because if no government exists, predators have an incentive to establish one. From a theoretical standpoint, Nozick’s argument—that competing protection firms will evolve into a monopoly that then becomes the state—represents one form of the general argument that government is inevitable. Because of the prominence of Nozick’s work, I offer no further theoretical defense of it here. More significant, however, as de Jasay notes, “Anarchy, if historical precedent is to be taken as conclusive, does not survive” (1989, 217). Every place in the world is ruled by government. The evidence shows that anarchy, no matter how desirable in theory, does not constitute a realistic alternative in practice, and it suggests that if government ever were to be eliminated anywhere, predators would move in to establish themselves as one by force.18 One can debate the merits of anarchy in theory, but the real-world libertarian issue is not whether it would more be desirable to establish a limited government or to eliminate government altogether. Economist Bruce Benson notes, “When a community is at a comparative disadvantage in the use of violence it may not be able to prevent subjugation by a protection racket such as the state” (1999, 153). Libertarian philosopher Jan Narveson writes, “Why does government remain in power? Why, in fact, are there still governments? The short answer is that governments command powers to which the ordinary citizen is utterly unequal” (2002, 199–200). Government is inevitable, and people with no government—or even with a weak THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW 334 ? RANDALL G. HOLCOMBE 19. Much has been made in libertarian literature of the case of Iceland from about A.D. 800 to 1262. For the historical details, see D. Friedman 1979. Yet this example ended nearly 750 years ago, and it existed in a world much different from the modern one. Iceland was remote, given the transportation technology of the day, it was poor, and it had an undesirable climate, making it an undesirable target for predators. Nevertheless, a government was eventually established from the inside. 20. This argument is aimed at libertarians and takes a libertarian perspective. Libertarians should keep in mind, however, that the overwhelming majority of people, if given the choice, would choose government over anarchy, and a substantial number of people would like a bigger and more powerful government than they have today. 21. Levi 1988 discusses the effect of the rulers’ time horizon and other factors on the degree to which they act in a predatory manner. Hoppe 2001 argues that monarchy is superior to democracy because political leaders have a longer time horizon. government—will find themselves taken over and ruled by predatory gangs who will establish a government over them.19 As de Jasay observes, “An anarchistic society may not be well equipped to resist military conquest by a command-directed one” (1997, 200). People may not need or want government, but inevitably they will find themselves under government’s jurisdiction.20Micropolitics fails to create an effective means of resistance – the perm’s key – it creates a means of changBayat 13 (Asef, Sociology Prof @ University of Illinois, Life As Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, pp. 41-45) NCC Packet 2019Beyond this, many resistance writers tend to confuse an awareness about oppression with acts of resistance against it. The fact that poor women sing songs about their plight or ridicule men in their private gatherings indicates their understanding of gender dynamics. This does not mean, however, that they are involved in acts of resistance; neither are the miracle stories of the poor urbanites who imagine the saints to come and punish the strong. Such an understanding of “resistance” fails to capture the extremely complex interplay of conflict and consent, and ideas and action, operating within systems of power. Indeed, the link between consciousness and action remains a major sociological dilemma.39 Scott makes it clear that re sis tance is an intentional act. In Weberian tradition, he takes the meaning of action as a crucial element. This intentionality, while signifi cant in itself, obviously leaves out many types of individual and collective practices whose intended and unintended consequences do not correspond. In Cairo or Tehran, for example, many poor families illegally tap into electricity and running water from the municipality despite their awareness of their behavior’s illegality. Yet they do not steal urban ser vices in order to express their defi ance vis-à- vis the authorities. Rather, they do it because they feel the necessity of those ser vices for a decent life, because they fi nd no other way to acquire them. But these very mundane acts when continued lead to signifi cant changes in the urban structure, in social policy, and in the actors’ own lives. Hence, the signifi cance of the unintended consequences of agents’ daily activities. In fact, many authors in the re sis tance paradigm have simply abandoned intent and meaning, focusing instead eclectically on both intended and unintended practices as manifestations of “re sis tance.” There is still a further question. Does re sis tance mean defending an already achieved gain (in Scott’s terms, denying claims made by dominant groups over the subordinate ones) or making fresh demands (to “advance its own claims”), what I like to call “encroachment”? In much of the re sis tance literature, this distinction is missing. Although one might imagine moments of overlap, the two strategies, however, lead to diff erent po liti cal consequences; this is so in par tic u lar when we view them in relation to the strategies of dominant power. The issue was so crucial that Lenin devoted his entire What Is to Be Done? to discussing the implications of these two strategies, albeit in diff erent terms of “economism/trade unionism” vs. “social demo cratic/party politics.” What ever one may think about a Leninist/vanguardist paradigm, it was one that corresponded to a par tic u lar theory of the state and power (a capitalist state to be seized by a mass movement led by the working- class party); in addition, it was clear where this strategy wanted to take the working class (to establish a socialist state). Now, what is the perception of the state in the “resistance” paradigm? What is the strategic aim in this perspective? Where does the resistance paradigm want to take its agents/subjects, beyond “prevent[ing] the worst and promis[ing] something better”?40 Much of the literature of resistance is based upon a notion of power that Foucault has articulated, that power is everywhere, that it “circulates” and is never “localized here and there, never in anybody’s hands.” 41 Such a formulation is surely instructive in transcending the myth of the powerlessness of the ordinary and in recognizing their agency. Yet this “decentered” notion of power, shared by many poststructuralist “re sis tance” writers, underestimates state power, notably its class dimension, since it fails to see that although power circulates, it does so unevenly— in some places it is far weightier, more concentrated, and “thicker,” so to speak, than in others. In other words, like it or not, the state does matter, and one needs to take that into account when discussing the potential of urban subaltern activism. Although Foucault insists that re sis tance is real when it occurs outside of and in de pen dent of the systems of power, the perception of power that informs the “re sis tance” literature leaves little room for an analysis of the state as a system of power. It is, therefore, not accidental that a theory of the state and, therefore, an analysis of the possibility of co- optation, are absent in almost all accounts of “resistance.” Consequently, the cherished acts of resistance float around aimlessly in an unknown, uncertain, and ambivalent universe of power relations, with the end result an unsettled, tense accommodation with the existing power arrangement. Lack of a clear concept of resistance, moreover, often leads writers in this genre to overestimate and read too much into the acts of the agents. The result is that almost any act of the subjects potentially becomes one of “resistance.” Determined to discover the “inevitable” acts of resistance, many poststructuralist writers often come to “replace their subject.”42 While they attempt to challenge the essentialism of such perspectives as “passive poor,” “submissive Muslim women,” and “inactive masses,” they tend, however, to fall into the trap of essentialism in reverse— by reading too much into ordinary behaviors, interpreting them as necessarily conscious or contentious acts of defi ance. This is so because they overlook the crucial fact that these practices occur mostly within the prevailing systems of power. For example, some of the lower class’s activities in the Middle East that some authors read as “resistance,” “intimate politics” of defi ance, or “avenues of participation” may actually contribute to the stability and legitimacy of the state.43 The fact that people are able to help themselves and extend their networks surely shows their daily activism and struggles. However, by doing so the actors may hardly win any space from the state (or other sources of power, like capital and patriarchy)— they are not necessarily challenging domination. In fact, governments often encourage self- help and local initiatives so long as they do not turn oppositional. They do so in order to shift some of their burdens of social welfare provision and responsibilities onto the individual citizens. The proliferation of many NGOs in the global South is a good indicator of this. In short, much of the re sis tance literature confuses what one might consider coping strategies (when the survival of the agents is secured at the cost of themselves or that of fellow humans) and effective participation or subversion of domination. There is a last question. If the poor are always able to resist in many ways (by discourse or actions, individual or collective, overt or covert) the systems of domination, then what is the need to assist them? If they are already po litically able citizens, why should we expect the state or any other agency to empower them? Misreading the behavior of the poor may, in fact, frustrate our moral responsibility toward the vulnerable. As Michael Brown rightly notes, when you “elevate the small injuries of childhood to the same moral status as suff ering of truly oppressed,” you are committing “a savage leveling that diminishes rather than intensifi es our sensitivities to injustice.” 44A2: Root CauseTheir explanation of blackness is ahistorical. Imperial expansion produces antiblackness, not the other way around.Bates, 18—Ph.D. candidate, Boston College, Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences (Julia, “The Occlusion of Empire in the Reification of Race: A Postcolonial Critique of the American Sociology of Race,” , dml) NCC Packet 2019Here, Patterson did not conceptualize race as a static category, or some kind of “original sin” that was passed on from U.S. slavery. Rather, he theorized racial categories particularly the category of blackness within the United States was continually produced and reproduced by U.S. Empire abroad. He argued the subordination of black Americans within the United States was dependent on the United States ability to produce the category of “race” abroad. With the production of race on a global level, the United States maintained racial hierarchy within the United States. He noted that as U.S. imperialism gained in power within global capitalism, African Americans’ internal subjugation within the United States increased. He stated, As American monopoly grows in strength, reaching out for control of the world, the exploitation of the Negro people in the United States grows in scope and severity. Thus, in 1947 the median wage or salary income of white wage earners was $1, 980 of non-white wage earners $863, or 43.6 per cent as much, according to the United States Department of Commerce. In 1949, according to the United States Bureau reports, while 16,800,000 Americans in 4,700,000 families had an income of less than $1,000 a year, the income of white families was two times greater than that of Negroes (136) Therefore, the global growth of capitalism in the 21 st century, did not decrease the significance of racial inequality relative to class inequality, but actually exponentially increased it. He argued race was not subsumed to class as capitalism progressed. Rather as capitalism progressed, racial and class inequality grew in strength in relation to one another. Thus, he saw the global growth in capitalism as a global growth in imperialism, or capitalist-imperialism. Imperialism was not seen as a past stage of capitalism, or something that was subsumed to a more pure form of capitalism in the future. Rather imperialism and capitalism were conceived of as integral to one another. Throughout the petition, Patterson highlighted how the expansion of U.S. Empire abroad was integral to the maintenance of racial inequality at home. He noted the maintenance of the slave system within the United States was maintained through U.S. imperial expansion in Mexico: The genocide that was American slavery, the killing of part of the group so that the remainder could be more readily exploited for profit, resulted in two wars. The first was the aggression against Mexico in 1846 seeking more territory for the expansion of slavery (24). Like corporations within the capitalist system that expand their markets globally to maintain profit, the United States government expanded slavery abroad to maintain slavery within. More specifically, to maintain the profits of the slave system, the United States government had to engage in acts of imperial conquest to increase land and resource extraction. This integrally linked the dynamics of racial structures within the United States to U.S. imperial expansion. Likewise, he noted that following the Civil War, the U.S. continued to repress anti-imperial insurgency within the United States through imperial expansion. He argued the U.S.’s imperial expansion into Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines helped to repress the threat posed to U.S. power by the Populist Party. The Populist Party brought together both black and white American workers against global corporate interests. By expanding into new territories, the U.S. government gained cheap labor and markets that offset the ability of the Populist Party to leverage the U.S. government for higher wages etc.: The Negro [black] people fought back chiefly through the Populist parties that opposed the Wall Street trusts through the eighties, nineties of the last century. But their fight became more hopeless against the increased power of American monopoly. Terror was unleashed against them at home…Side by side went terror unleashed abroad, as American imperialism entered the international arena by subjugating the Filipino, Puerto Rican, and Cuban peoples and reduced many Latin-American countries to economic and political vassalage (25). To put down a threat to U.S. Empire within the U.S. citizenry, the United States government expanded outwards. In doing so, they gained more land and cheap labor to use against the political threat to U.S. Empire within. Patterson argued this pattern persisted into the twenty first century. Discussing the Korean War, they note again that the U.S.’s expansion outward was integral to maintaining the United States’ Empire within: Jellied gasoline in Korea and the lynchers’ faggot at home are connected in more ways than that both result in death by fire. The lyncher and the atom bomber are related. The first cannot murder unpunished and unrebuked without so encouraging the latter that the peace of the world and the lives of millions are endangered. Nor is this metaphysics. The tie binding both is economic profit and political control. He observed the Korean War was coupled with an increased repression of black Americans within the United States. Thus, when the United States waged imperial wars abroad they increased the repression of African Americans within. Patterson did not view racism as a “baseless ideology”, nor did he view it as a psychological, or irrational phenomena. He asserted racism was based in global capitalist-imperialism. As a consequence, racism was not only rational, but also necessary to maintain the structure. It was not only used to produce and reproduce a class structure, but also as a means to prevent political counter-insurgency against U.S. Empire within the United States and other nations. Patterson viewed race, not just as a set of beliefs or a type of identity, but also as a structural category integral to the maintenance of capitalistimperialism. William Patterson argued U.S. racism has a base, and its base is imperialcapitalism; however, he also argued imperial-capitalism cannot be reduced on to the relationship between an unraced bourgeoisie and proletariat. In this definition, race is taken out and class is deemed just a material, non-cultural relationship between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. In this definition of capitalism, imperialism and racism are not conceptualized as integral, ongoing parts of capitalism (Chibber 2014). However, black Marxists, like William Patterson did see imperialism and racism as integral and ongoing parts of global capitalism. He stated, “It is because we Negro petitioners have no true and real recourse in these courts, because we receive no protection from the state, because police and courts are themselves involved in the genocide directed against us…” (41). He argued, the U.S. government was able to economically exploit African Americans more thoroughly than other Americans because they had politically dispossessed and geographically displaced them within the U.S. polity. More specifically, like colonial subjects they were contained in specific areas and unable to represent themselves in the polity. Likewise, he noted because the U.S. engaged in imperialism with African Americans it could easily use these same policies to promote U.S. imperialism abroad. Regarding the relationship between domestic genocide and global imperial genocide, they stated, This domestic genocide…was the foundation of predatory war and the prelude to the larger genocide that followed against the nationals of other countries, a genocide seeking the political and economic control of Europe, if not the world… (31) Thus, William Patterson bridged race and class, national and global. He stated the increasing subordination of black Americans increased the United States ability to dominate the world economy through a racial political order. Patterson also drew parallels between the U.S. Empire and the German Empire. He stated, “We cannot forget Hitler’s demonstration that genocide at home can become wider massacre abroad, that domestic genocide develops into a larger genocide that is predatory war…” Patterson noted the internal imperial order, within Germany gave way to an outward colonial expansion that dispossessed and murdered people based on race. Thus he predicted the United States would unleash more war abroad as racial inequality developed within. Likewise, he noted as American empire expanded outwards it would make the world’s peoples dependent on consuming commodities that were produced within a racist-imperial regime. He stated, “We speak of a progressive mankind because a policy of discrimination at home must inevitably create racist commodities for export abroad…” (xi). The American imperial regime first developed by the internalization of the global European imperial would now expand back outward making the world’s people dependent on cheap black American labor. Furthermore, he highlighted how the black labor regime within the United States was produced in relation to colonial labor regimes of European empires. He asserted, “The South’s plantation system, concealed by the United States census…produced for the world market in successful competition with the ‘coolie’ labor of Egypt and India, brought in one and a half billion dollars” (23). He noted the United States had to establish a system of colonial labor within the United States in order to be able to compete against European Empires. The United States solution to this predicament was slavery, and later, other forms of localized imperial structures to maintain colonial labor. He observed this structure within the United States can’t be reduced to a simple class relationship between an unraced proletariat and bourgeoisie. Rather with black Americans it was not just about economic alienation from the goods, but political alienation from the state and geographic dispossession from the territory. He stated, Most sharecroppers work from dawn- to dark for a living, which verges on starvation. Often these black Americans are not even able to quit or move not only because of lack of money but because of ancient debtors' laws which make it a crime to move while owing money…Much of the law of those states in the Black Belt, moreover, is directed towards guaranteeing an American peasantry without political or human rights available to work the land without pay sufficient for proper livelihood (23) This turns alt solvency by occluding the ways in which categories of blackness are contingently produced through imperial policy.Bates, 18—Ph.D. candidate, Boston College, Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences (Julia, “The Occlusion of Empire in the Reification of Race: A Postcolonial Critique of the American Sociology of Race,” , dml) NCC Packet 2019In my examination of the production of “racial codes” in U.S. Empire, I make two broad theoretical interventions. First, I challenge the reification of race as one unitary logic produced within the nation-state. In particular, I show how black Americans were ascribed different racial meanings relative to other racial groups within U.S. Empire. Second, I challenge the bifurcation between the nation-state and the global, which is prominent within social theory (Bhambra 2007, 2013, 2014; Go 2016; Go & Lawson 2017; Jung 2015). I show how the U.S. government not only produced the subordination of black Americans from ascription of racial meanings relative to other groups within the nation-state, but also through the conquest and subordination of other groups in U.S. Empire. In one of the most prominent sociological theories of race, Racial Formations (1994), Omi and Winant argued “a sort of ‘exceptionalism’” is needed to address racial dynamics in the United States (50). More specifically, they argued American “racial formations” were distinct from global colonial or class formations (ibid). This led to a growth in sociological research that examined the construction of racial formations within the U.S. (Saperstein 2013). While Racial Formations did help to overcome a kind of class reductionism in sociological theories of race, it also reinforced a conception of the U.S. as a contained nation-state. To overcome the analytical bifurcation between the United States and the global, I seek to challenge the conception of “race”, particularly blackness, being produced from within the United States. I examine the relational production of “blackness” relative to other groups within U.S. Empire (Bhambra 2014; Go 2016; Magubane 2017; Sassen 1999; Steinmetz 2005; Von Eschen 1997). In particular, I argue the subordination of black Americans within the United States is not produced in isolation from the subordination of other peoples within U.S. Empire. Rather the subordination of black Americans is produced through policies that also subordinated other colonized groups. Studying the different imperial mechanisms, which produce racial objects, or “race” can also further challenge the reification of race, or substantialism, prevalent in sociological theories of race (Fields 2013; Go 2004; Loveman 1999). Barbara Fields notes “race” is not an actual substance and therefore, it cannot cause other social phenomenon to occur. Rather “race” is a product of other socio-political mechanisms within U.S. Empire. If “race” is in fact produced within specific contexts then blackness will take on different meanings in different imperial contexts. I argue race cannot be bifurcated from those contexts, or mechanisms, without risking its reification. An ongoing debate within the sociology of race is the extent in which “race” exists as a substance that causes or produces other social phenomena (Boxill 2001; Brubaker 2009; Fields 2014; Graves 2015; Omi & Winant 1994; Loveman 1999; Magubane 2017; Mason 1994). In prominent theories in the sociology of race, scholars argue race must be taken seriously as its own independent axis of social inequality. In Racial Formations (1994), Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue racial formations must be studied in their own right and cannot be reduced to class, or colonial formations. Likewise, in “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation” (1997), Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues race is not just an ideology, but also a structure that places actors into racial categories, or races (469). However, other scholars have critiqued these theories for reifying race as a consistent, unitary categorization. They argue that when race is separated from other axis of power it is substantialized, rather than conceptualized as something produced through multiple structures of power. They note these theories don’t fully account for what political mechanisms produce and reproduce race as a social category (Fields 1994, 2001, 2014; Loveman 1999; Mason 1994). In her critique of “Rethinking Racism” (1999), Mara Loveman argues Eduardo Bonilla-Silva talks about the placement of “actors” into racial categories as if bounded, clearly demarcated races existed objectivity “out there” (893). Likewise, Barbara Fields argues that while social scientists note that race is “socially constructed” they precede with their analysis as though race is a static, ahistorical substance that has a life of its own external to the mechanisms that produce it (Fields 2014: 100). The reification of race, and the denial of the ongoing role of American imperialism in producing race, has a long history within American sociology. In the early twentieth century, the University of Chicago advanced the “race-relations cycle” theory, which became the hegemonic theory of race in American sociology. More specifically, the premiere American sociologist of race, Robert Park who worked as a ghost writer for General Armstrong’s student, Booker T. Washington (Morris 2015), argued races went through a series of stages that eventually led to their assimilation into the dominant Anglo-Saxon American culture (1914; 1928). In this theory, race was deemed an attribute of the group, rather than something grafted on to groups by institutions (Steinberg 2007: 50). In the post Civil-Rights Era, sociologists have developed new theories to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy of race-relations. More specifically, Michael Omi and Howard Winant developed Racial Formation theory. Dissatisfied with theories that “reduced” race to discrimination, or “race relations”, Omi and Winant argued sociologists needed to make the analysis of broader racial formations the conceptual focus of their work. They defined “racial formations” as a sociohistorical process, in which human bodies and social structures were represented and organized, but also a type of institutional hegemony, in which society is organized and ruled (1994: 56). Rather than showing how racial conflicts were actually class antagonisms, Omi and Winant asserted sociologists needed to show how other facets of social domination, i.e. gender, sexuality and class became cloaked in racial language. Likewise, in the 1990s scholars employed the language of social construction in its analysis of the U.S. racial state’s development of racial categories. Sociologists employed this perspective to show how racial categories and their associated meanings are unstable and historically contingent. For instance, in an analysis of the social construction of “whiteness” within Puerto Rico in the early twentieth century, Loveman and Muniz showed how boundary shifting led more people in Puerto Rico to identify as “white” on the Census between 1910 and 1920 (2007). Other scholars show how racial categories and hierarchies are central to the nation-building process (Sierlis 2004; Weiner 1995), as well as practices of capitalist exploitation (Winant 2001). There was also growth in scholarship, which analyzed how legislation served to maintain the racial order in society. For instance, some scholars analyzed how states attempt to maintain racial order through regulation of interracial intimacy in antimiscegenation law (Nagel 2000; Pascoe 2009). Other scholarship developed analysis on how explicit and implicit policies on national immigration served to control the racial order of countries around the world (Bashi 2004; Calavita 2007). Furthermore, feminist scholars showed how racial projects around identity and citizenship are also gendered (Dorr 1999; Luidheid 2004; Vacante 2007). Likewise, Critical Race scholars employed the racial formation perspective to show how race and law are mutually constituted (Carbado & Harris 2012; Gomez 2010). However, all these analyses tended to conceptualize the production of race within the nation-state framework. Within these analyses the U.S. racial state is analytically conceptualized as a contained unit with clear boundaries that produces “race” from within. I argue placing the production of racial meaning, particularly blackness, back into the global context in which it is produced, overcomes this reification. In particular, it shows how blackness was constructed relative to imperial objectives of the U.S. state. Drawing on post-colonial theory, I challenge the theory that “race” is primarily produced “within” the nation. Rather, I argue it is a “code” that takes on multiple, contradictory meanings relative to other groups within U.S. Empire. Furthermore, I specifically focus on the role colonial dispossession and geographic displacement play in producing and reproducing “race”, particularly blackness, within the United States. Furthermore, I argue these racial codes were not only symbolic, but also correlated with different imperial policies on the ground. Different racial codes were applied to black Americans in the Southern United States vs. Hawaii. In the Southern United States, General Armstrong applied a Lamarkian theory of racial development to both black Americans and Hawaiians. Lamarck (1744-1829) theorized all species had the power to progress if given the right environmental conditions, or education (Banton 1998, p. 33). This theory posited black Americans were inferior due to cultural circumstances, rather than biological characteristics. Conversely, in their advocacy for the exportation of black labor to Hawaii, General Armstrong and U.S. government officials applied biological, rather than Lamarckian racial codes to black bodies. In this coding, they argued black Americans were a suitable replacement for Hawaiian workers because of their innate characteristics (Fields 2013; Graves 2002). More specifically, they argued that because they were a tropical race like the Hawaiians, they were better suited both temperamentally and physically to work on the Hawaiian plantations than Chinese workers. In conceptualizing race as a code that is produced relationally within transnational networks, I seek to overcome the tendency towards analytic bifurcation and susbstantialism in sociological theories of race. I also seek to expand upon calls within the sociology of race to advance a structural theory of race that identifies mechanisms that produce race (Eduardo Bonilla-Silva 1997; Omi & Winant 1994). I argue these mechanisms cannot be conceptualized within the nation-state framework because many of them are not national. In the post-emancipation context, black Americans were resubordinated through global imperial policies. More specifically, their race was constructed relative to the subordination of Hawaiians and Chinese in Hawaii. The implication for future sociological research is the subordination of black Americans is not only something that is endogenously produced within the U.S. nation-state, but is also relationally produced within U.S. Empire relative to other racial groups. A2: IR/Deterrence Link1. No link—the aff reappropriates realism for counter-hegemonic ends—neoclassical defensive realism doesn’t “aim to stave off disorder,” it surrenders to disorder as inevitable—that’s an ethical reading of IR that doesn’t silence anti-imperial readings—you don’t have to affirm realism’s violent legacies to recognize the value of respecting difference that it espouses—blanket rejection makes counter-imperial politics impossible and reproduces liberal violenceAbraham, 17—Johns Hopkins University (Kavi Joseph, “Making Machines: Unlikely Resonances between Realist and Postcolonial Thought,” International Political Sociology (2017) 11, 221–238, dml) NCC Packet 2019This passage marks out one of the biggest obstacles to connecting realist and postcolonial thought: race. One would be hard pressed to find in realist theorizations anything resembling a supple understanding of race and racism (Vitalis 2015)— though Carr (2001b, 107) demonstrates a comparatively great deal of reflexivity on postcolonial liberation (see fn. 2 above). Even in Williams’s (2005) “wilful” realist tradition, there is scant discussion of how an embedded ethic of critical self-limitation fared in the context of racial or other forms of radical difference. Absent an engagement with the analytics of postcolonial thinking, or the diverse ways in which white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity inflect past and present liberal imperial formations, willful realism does not address the categories that threaten to push prudential skeptics toward violent responses, that pose limitations to an ethos of limits. As evidenced in Morgenthau, failure to think critically about race opens up the way for Morgenthau’s theoretical practice to be driven toward resentful rather than careful ends. It is at this juncture that those concerned with contemporary imperial formations are confronted with a number of possible responses: one is to deem realism, in all its complex and contradictory manifestations, as a failed, unethical, and fundamentally racist/imperial project. A second response is to politically align against liberalism, while holding this partnership at arm’s length. A third response, derived from Ayoob’s (2002) subaltern realism, is to work on an epistemic register, selectively taking insights from realist traditions that help better explain the neocolonial world. Morgenthau’s racist interjections should be critiqued and confronted—perhaps by outlining the innumerable non-Western contributions to the making of so-called Western modernity (Hobson 2004)—but this failing does not delegitimize other realist insights. What is important for Ayoob’s (2002) accommodationist stance is to combine plausible realist insights with other categories that can grasp the extent of global politics, including the dynamics of the postcolonial experience, better. The final response is the one I advance. To adopt a mode of argumentation concerned with building a counter-imperial machine is to neither dismiss constituencies that become caught up in imperial formations, nor merely to tactically align with them; rather, establishing resonant connections among postcolonial and realist lines of thought, highlighting shared dispositions to difference, is to push the latter toward repositioning itself on new ethical lines that limit contemporary forms of violence. To recover a minor position in realism is not to accept all realist positions, nor is it to synthesize or convert any theoretical line into a coherent framework. It is, however, to amplify the shared spirituality that informs both realist and postcolonial thinking, drawing constituencies toward prudential rather than imperial defenses of difference. It is to furnish current research agendas with an anti-imperial focus, to seek the creative possibilities that may arise when divergent constituencies meet, interfuse, and shift. Thus, our response to Morgenthau, as to other realists, is to cultivate the connections that do exist, not for epistemic reasons but for a political project that strengthens counter-imperial movements. Thinking from the Present By way of conclusion, it is important to reiterate the politics that motivates a theoretical project of linking realist and postcolonial thinking. If the ends of this project were to simply gather critiques of liberalism and its relationship to imperial practices, then certainly a return to classical realist thought adds little epistemic value over and above postcolonial approaches. However, the ends of this argument are to outline and energize a counter-imperial machine, to cultivate a shared spirituality that can gather diverse and divergent constituencies to confront dangerous practices. In my estimation, countering an imperial machine that operates in complex ways and at complex sites requires a political strategy as unwieldy and diffuse, linking constituencies that we may otherwise dismiss. That a tradition of realism regularly circulates through halls of power across the globe should be reason not to reject righteously but rather to leverage its authorized status. We can talk about imperialism, knowledge production, and race here, while they can talk about anarchy, power, and self-interest there—or we can theoretically work on the lines of thought that reverberate among us. To reiterate, building a countermachine is not driven to “pragmatic” reconciliation or consensus and, thus, remains distinct from the “eclecticism” of other plural approaches popular in IR today. While the combinatory logic of paradigmatic synthesis has its place, the connections between realist and postcolonial thought articulated here are made in a far more agonistic manner. Rather than produce something like a “postcolonial-realism,” this argument involves pushing contemporary realist scholarship toward new research agendas and new forms of critique that both capture a spirit internal to its own traditions while confronting the realities of contemporary global politics. It engages with minor positions along the realist canon to orient today’s realism away from the logic of great power politics operating under anarchy toward an understanding of how the logic of liberal order permits forms of imperial intervention. Needless to say, drawing together realist and postcolonial thought, as this essay has done, can be met with analytical skepticism and political hostility. A mode of argumentation that refuses comparisons of theoretical cores or non-truncated readings of select theorists strikes a note of analytical evasion. To this there is no defense—other than that already discussed at length. On the other hand, if the expressly political purpose of this work is accepted, the argument anticipates strong political reservations: why align the project of postcolonial theory with realism, an unethical tradition of militarism and realpolitik? To this I would respond that while a kind of strategic essentialism has its place, reducing “realists” to a coherent body of thought not only obscures the complexity of their thinking (see never-ending interpretations of Machiavelli as an example) but reproduces the narrative of transhistorical unity that some realists use to authorize unethical policy programs in the first place. More critically, however, in embodying an unproductive ahistoricism, it poses conventional realist categories of anarchy, selfinterest, and military power as the political problem to confront whereas the present historical context demands attunement to how some of these drives (militarism, national interest) connect with discrete problems of liberalism and imperial practices. In fact, there are good reasons to think that the dominance of (neo)realism in IR is overstated (Walker and Morton 2005; Maliniak et al. 2011) and that the ascension of liberal IR theory is sociologically tied up with the present hegemony of a US liberal world order (Sterling-Folker 2015). In other words, while realism may have been a productive foil in Cold War bipolarity, we must theorize from the present. In doing so, we may find that countering imperial formations may benefit from resonances established not just among postcolonial, feminist, poststructural, and other “critical” theorists but contemporary realists who identify links between liberalism and imperialism (Walt 2013). Indeed, if realism as a policy program defending the national interest is entangled with current militaristic and imperial interventions, we should push the premise of this statement, that difference should be defended, in anti-imperial and prudential directions. Doing so may allow new openings to emerge in the present sense of closure, new strategies to think and defend alternative politics. In this way, we may more fully embody postcoloniality by not being satisfied with either narrow critique or brash conversion but rather attentive translation.A2: Klinger---Zones of SacrificeSpace dominance makes infrastructure violence worse and demilitarization challenges it. Haris Durrani 19, JD/PhD candidate at Columbia Law School and Princeton University, winner of the Sacknoff Prize for Space History, 7/19/19, “Is Spaceflight Colonialism?” NCC Packet 2019Meanwhile, the US Global Positioning System (GPS) has established communication bases on numerous islands where America claims territory, disrupting communities that live there. Similarly, the US Air Force’s Lockheed Martin–commissioned Space Fence, which will monitor spacecraft and debris in orbit, will run 80 percent of its capabilities out of a military base in the Marshall Islands, a continuing subject of US empire. In these histories, spaceflight relies upon and continues imperial claims over territory and resources.Within the United States, launch sites can exploit marginalized populations as well. For instance, industry and government agencies in the Mojave Desert region—one of the nation’s oldest sites for space activities—employ locals as manufacturers and engineers and teach students about spaceflight. But these developments do not seem to have improved the economy in Mojave, where the median income is below the national median. The population is predominantly black and Latino. The US Department of Interior’s long history of imperial expansion even includes plans for a lunar colony and the use of satellites to survey resources on indigenous lands in the United States and abroad.Moreover, the massive technological feats of spaceflight rely on imperial claims over natural resources. Luxembourg, a recent hub for commercial space, accumulated wealth by virtue of its history of mining, but marginalized communities with valuable raw materials have fallen prey to the “resource trap” common to imperial encounters. For instance, the fact that Mojave was a key manufacturing and mining site for the Southern Pacific Railroad implicates the region in a longer history of indigenous violence and economic difficulty. Similarly, amid the advent of aerial technology and the Space Age, the US military-industrial complex funded mining projects throughout the Caribbean, extracting bauxite (aluminum) with which to construct US aerospace vehicles. Likewise, the Ball Corporation, famous for its subsidiary Ball Aerospace, is predominantly an aluminum, steel, and packaging company. Over the last decade, China has sought to instrumentalize its space capabilities to grow a network of soft power and economic resources, offering telecommunications satellites to several states, including Nigeria, Venezuela, and Bolivia, in exchange for access to natural resources like oil, raw materials, and agriculture.Spaceflight almost invariably involves activities that directly subjugate marginalized peoples. Space provides a strategic military position from which to continue postcolonial violence on Earth, exacerbating inequalities between spacefaring countries and the so-called “Third World.” Space is critical for surveilling and enacting violence upon communities throughout the Third World, from Moroccan spy satellites over occupied Western Sahara, to remote sensing of Afghanistan and other strategic regions, to monitoring of the US-Mexico border: The United States spends $10 billion per year on publicly known space projects, but $15 billion on classified military activities.Moreover, drones and most other military technologies that harm and surveil marginalized communities depend on global positioning technology and space-based communications. Significant advances in space technology developed in the context of US intervention in the Middle East and Latin America: Remote sensing and GPS developed in the Gulf War, and, decades earlier, the first US telecommunications satellites were used to communicate with troops in Saigon. More recently, consider the US Air Force’s aforementioned Space Fence or Boeing’s Space Based Space Surveillance satellite constellation and X-37B orbital drone, which has orbited Earth several times over the past decade.These claims over territory, resources, and populations highlight the enormous accumulation of capital necessary to access space. The US government and its corporate entities can afford the cost of spaceflight because it is but a fraction of their annual budgets. But for developing countries and marginalized communities, that cost is prohibitive: Spending on space is contingent on accumulated wealth.As with access to the sea or air, access to outer space, then, is not solely about obtaining resources, services, and other benefits in areas that exist outside of what are perceived as “conventional” borders. It is also about drawing on resources—capital, labor, raw materials, territory, intellectual property, expertise—from “back home,” Earth, that make those activities possible in the first place.In this way, the history of spaceflight is the story of powerful nations consolidating power against marginalized communities within their borders and throughout the Third World.In 2017, the Department of Defense announced that it would no longer treat space as a “sanctuary,” supplementing uses of force on the ground via surveillance, communications, and global positioning. Instead, DoD would treat space as a “warfighting domain,” in which states exercise force in space itself. This shift signals that a significant number of US officials believe in the need to secure the American economy’s most recent dependency: its space infrastructure.Then, last June, Donald Trump proposed the Space Force, a sixth military branch, to a room of government contractors, legislators, and policy-makers. In response, some argued that the Space Force would violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967; it probably does not. Others dismissed it as ludicrous: The Trump administration, entertaining a fantasy of battling other countries, or even extraterrestrials—in space! This is also probably incorrect. If there is violence in space, it will be a fight about who dominates the infrastructure that asserts violence, surveillance, and economic control over activities on Earth itself.Some thinkers on the left, on their part, regard the Space Force as woefully out of touch with fundamental questions of justice. They argue that the government should spend resources in more meaningful directions: What about Flint, Puerto Rico, climate change, police brutality? This response echoes critiques of many space ventures since the 1960s. Consider Gil Scott-Heron’s Whitey on the Moon, Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel’s contemporary update, “Whitey on Mars,” or environmentalist critiques of space futures like Interstellar’s. Even Garrett Hardin, a decade before he popularized the phrase “tragedy of the commons” in 1968, cast doubt on the idea of solving problems of population growth and limited resources by leaving Earth behind (although his racist legacy should moderate how his claims are read).This line of thinking must go further and acknowledge that the Space Force is not just a matter of “exploration” but the most recent instance of spaceflight’s postcolonial legacies that facilitate surveillance, military strikes, media, communication, resource surveying, disaster relief, and climate science.As most space advocates will rebut, spacecraft are essential to the infrastructure of modern life. A 2012 World Economic Forum panel concluded that “a day without satellites” would instigate a global economic catastrophe by taking out communications and media, GPS, disaster relief, meteorological observations, and monitoring of key resources like crops and water. Scientists’ understanding of climate change relies on data collected by weather satellites, and satellite observations of agriculture have aided sustainable development projects across the world, from the American Corn Belt to Morocco and elsewhere throughout Africa. Likewise, exploring other planets and stars can help scientists better understand Earth. And space activities produce trickle-down effects, such as novel, even life-saving technologies like heart pumps and prosthetics on Earth. To that point, Danielle Wood’s Space Enabled research group at the MIT Media Lab collaborates with marginalized communities to create space technologies that serve their interests. Consider also Erika Nesvold and Lucianne Walkowicz’s JustSpace Alliance.In this sense, the Space Force is not a superficial proposal. It matters for reasons of national security and political economy—hence the DoD’s new position on space as a “warfighting domain.” While military activities in space are not new, this explicit position signals that such activities might soon take unprecedented forms. Viewed against the histories of spaceflight, the Space Force is an attempt to secure American empire, to defend the high-tech infrastructure of the “haves” against the “have-nots.”In 1975, Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, the Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs, declared to the UN General Assembly in New York City that the UN must pursuea new and more satisfactory balance between the affluent and the impoverished worlds, between the rich peoples and the vast pauperized masses of the planet, on whose discontent one cannot build a lasting international order. Let us hope that no one will yield to the temptation of thinking that power and force constitute effective instruments for the perpetuation of old policies of privilege.These words concluded a speech in which Liévano made legal claims over geostationary orbit. Arthur C. Clarke had famously proposed the concept of geostationary satellites in 1945: If a satellite were placed above the equator at an altitude of about 35,786 km, it would orbit at the same rate as Earth’s rotation, such that the satellite hovered above a specific point on the ground. Because of this convenient physics, segments in this orbit were more valuable than others for remote sensing and, most importantly, for the nascent telecommunications satellite industry.Based on this physics, Liévano argued that international law must divide sovereignty in geostationary orbit according to the equatorial territory below. In other words, equatorial countries’ sovereignty included geostationary orbital segments above their territories.A year later, Liévano’s country gathered leaders from seven other equatorial nations—Congo, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda, and Zaire, with Brazil as observer—to sign the Bogotá Declaration of 1976. These countries not only claimed sovereignty over geostationary orbital segments above their territories but argued that segments hovering above the “high seas” were the “common heritage of mankind” and ought therefore to be collectively governed by all nations. Access to those segments would have to be distributed equitably among the “universal community” by keeping in mind developing countries’ interests.The signatories also proclaimed that American and Soviet dominance of space amounted to de facto claims of sovereignty—a “technological partition” of orbit. Today, the Colombian Constitution still contains a provision claiming sovereignty over the orbital segment above the country’s territory.The Bogotà Declaration is one piece of a bigger story. Historically, Third World lawyers and diplomats have long sought to reshape international law to equitably reorder barriers to access in extraterritorial or transnational domains like space, the sea, and the electromagnetic spectrum (for telecommunications). They articulated these claims by portraying US and Soviet or Russian extraterritorial activity as a unique form of empire. They saw global inequality as a perpetuation of older, more formal colonial orders, and they argued that the “Great Powers” exploited such inequality as they shaped the laws that governed extraterritorial domains.It is often forgotten that the Outer Space Treaty of 1967—the first and, to this day, most influential treaty governing spaceflight—arrived on the heels of decolonization. Article II of the Space Treaty, which famously proscribes “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means” in space, is frequently interpreted by US, Soviet, and European lawyers as an artifact of a Cold War compromise between the United States and USSR. But during its drafting, developing countries had recently declared independence or were continuously staving off foreign intervention. In light of this historical context, the treaty’s ban on claims of sovereignty has probably meant something different to the majority of the 107 state parties to the treaty which might be considered developing countries. Meanwhile, the treaty came to ban only weapons of mass destruction in space, not militarization as a whole.While the treaty, like the moon landing’s “one giant leap for mankind,” famously opened by declaring space “the province of mankind,” lawyers disagreed about what that principle meant. When the Brazilian delegation added language to this phrase clarifying that spaceflight must benefit all countries “irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development,” the US and Soviet delegations ensured that this would not amount to strong collective property rights. Instead, US lawyers argued that this much-lauded provision was not, legally speaking, a strong one. It was a general statement of the “spirit” of the text, not a formal, legal demand for equitable distribution of resources and access to space, particularly for developing countries.These claims were part of a broader mid-20th century movement to decolonize international law. From the 1950s to ’70s, Third World leaders initiated transnational projects like the Non-Aligned Movement and the New International Economic Order, aiming to redistribute markets and natural resources to repay developing countries for their economic strife in the aftermath of imperialism. In international laws on the sea, space, and intellectual property, Non-Aligned countries proposed concepts like “common interest” or the “common heritage of mankind.” By these theories, all states would collectively govern extraterritorial domains, such that property rights over scientific information in those domains, technologies used to access them, and economic benefits derived from them would be equitably shared with developing countries. These countries were concerned that American and Soviet technology, made possible with postcolonial violence and inequitable accumulations of capital and expertise, would deplete valuable extraterrestrial resources before the rest of the world could “catch up.”Anti-imperial notions of collective sovereignty were preceded by Latin American and Caribbean lawyers’ positions on space law. Even before the Space Treaty of 1967, lawyers in the Inter-American Bar Association signed the “Magna Carta of Space” at Bogotá in 1961 and at San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1965. In part, the document aimed to establish space as res communis—in other words, collectively owned by the international community.Decades later, in the Moon Agreement of 1984, several developing countries declared lunar resources to be the common heritage of mankind, attempting to establish a system for equitably distributing property rights for lunar mining.But subsequent efforts to get the international community to consider spaceflight itself as a resource that ought to be redistributed—and, in the process, restructure global inequality—mostly failed. Spacefaring countries have refused anti-imperial legal moves via explicit official statements or simply through technological practice. If outer space is a “global commons” or res communis at all—those terms’ legal meanings are controversially ambiguous—it is only insofar as space provides a domain not for collective sovereignty or property ownership but, rather, the free and uninhibited exercise of commercial and military might.Outer space governance thus represents a unique kind of postcolonial order. Space law encodes an empire that is not about colonizing peoples, as in the relations between spaceflight and postcolonial violence, territorial claims, and resource extraction on Earth. Rather, spacefaring states have shaped space law, or at least its effect, by exploiting global inequality. They have taken advantage of their political weight around when negotiating international law, or merely exercised superior technological capabilities without regard for consensus.Last year in the UN General Assembly, delegates from several developing nations, self-identified as Non-Aligned countries, responded to the Trump Administration’s proposed Space Force. They advocated for the total demilitarization of space, reasoning that militarization would increase the probability of producing more space debris. This would pose barriers to access, which was anathema to the legal status of space as, in their view, the “common heritage of mankind” and “a common asset for humanity.”Decades earlier, the signatories of the Bogotá Declaration had made similar arguments about debris, access, and collective governance with respect to the commercial exploitation of geostationary orbit.While the history of anti-imperial legal claims in space is largely a history of failure, they have affected subsequent legal developments by destabilizing the appearance of consensus among the so-called “international community.” For instance, the Bogotá Declaration may have “failed,” but it also influenced the ensuing decade of debates at the UN. Such perspectives have also shaped national legislation in industrialized countries. Even if these changes are minimal, understanding the history of these claims helps complicate the reasons “failures” are considered as such. Understanding the historical construction of dominant readings of space law might open the door for alternative, redistributive interpretations to take hold.A2: Linearity BadTheir kritik of linear time is reductionist and their alternative relies on linearity implicity. Andrew HOM School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh ’18 “Silent Order: the Temporal Turn in Critical International Relations” Millennium 46(3) p. 311-314 NCC Packet 2019Linear TimeEven more than timelessness, ‘linear time’ plays the bête noire in critical IR.48 This appellation subsumes a huge variety of temporal phenomena associated with hegemonic logics, including but not limited to state sovereignty,49 national citizenship,50 security,51 capitalism and colonialism,52 history,53 patriarchy,54 western calendars and clocks,55 neopositivism, 56 progress and rationality,57 and narrative.58 How precisely these issues link to or instantiate ‘linear time’ – and how this supports hegemony – typically remains unsaid. Moreover, rare qualifications of ‘linear time’ add little in the way of clarity. Linear time is ‘bounded’, ‘rational’, and ‘homogeneous’.59 It depends on heroic narratives of specific deeds but is also a smooth ‘continuum’ moving us ‘steadily from moment to moment’ or, relatedly, an ‘empty’ container for events.60 These visions of linear time contrast discontinuity.61 Yet elsewhere linear time associates with discontinuity, with discrete parcels of past, present, and future sometimes normatively valuated as progress.62 This distinguishes linear time from continuous, pre-modern, or indigenous temporalities, which are ‘non-linear’ because they co-mingle the past and future in each present and thus admit no temporal borders.63 Occasionally, ‘linear’ indicates both continuity and discontinuity, as when heroic national narratives produce discrete succession and time as ‘continuous and linear’.64Critical scholars also contrast linear time with cyclical or circular temporalities.65 By this way of thinking, cyclicality problematises the arrow-like trajectory of linear time’s forward thrust, a movement which complements the logics of nationalism, patriarchy, and causation.66 Cyclical alternatives to linearity as such are not especially coherent. In cyclical time the past ‘“directly effects the present and the future”’.67 This is very much a causal statement.68 Moreover, rendered as simplistic binaries, linear/cyclical distinctions are spurious: a cycle refers to an undulating line or sine wave,69 and the further in we zoom, the straighter it appears. Finally, like invocations of ‘timelessness’ a basic sense of linearity facilitates rather than precludes cyclical imputations, providing the serial baseline passage against which recurrence resolves as such.Other critical alternatives to linear time also depend on linearity inasmuch as they propound a lineal-spatial metaphor and/or assume some sense of past, present, and future (or before and after). For example, duration, chronotopicity, and retroactive and anticipatory meaning-making imply, respectively: the serial connectability of experiential content, a spatialised and gridded shape, a clear sense of backward and forward.70 Or consider time as ‘becoming’, which refutes linearity because it moves ‘in different directions at the same time, into the past and into the future’.71 Nothing about ‘linear’ per se opposes this movement or the sense of continual development evoked by ‘becoming’. As before, becoming only resolves as such against a basic linear comparator.Non-linear proposals based on time-as-becoming are even more explicitly linear. Aion describes the ‘pure’ and ‘empty form’ of a ‘straight line’,72 which vitiates ontologies of presence by stretching out ‘limitless in either direction’.73 It is the movement by which ‘the line’ frees itself from the punctual present so as to ‘[c]onstantly flee … in different directions’.74 These characterisations depend on a classical notion of linearity: ‘a line that is single, straight and infinite in both directions’.75 Yet aion’s champions pit these very qualities directly against the state’s linear time, in particular its ‘linear timelines and distinctions between before and after’.76 Now it may be that they mean aion to challenge a specifically discontinuous and unitary form of linearity, but as the summary above showed, these qualities do not exhaust the possible meanings of linearity. Similarly, it is difficult to understand how the ‘pure event’ associated with aion refuses distinctions between before and after but depends on notions of the past and future. Something more is going on with the aionic challenge to state and historical time, but most of the grappling remains hidden by a discourse based on a number of silent, shared assumptions about just what ‘linear’ encompasses.Similar problems stalk critical scholars’ interest in the non-linear ‘countertemporality’ of alternative knowledge genres.77 For instance, where linear state narratives close down political possibility, films are ‘powerful [because they do] not try to bring [experiences] together in order to form a unity’.78 Now alternative cinematic accounts of events may indeed challenge hegemonic interpretations. However, to gloss them as ‘non-linear’ because they possess no ‘clear temporal order that can be used … to determine the sequence of images and sounds in accordance with a homogeneous movement or a narrative that takes us from the past to the present’ forgets the linearity of the artistic medium itself and the sovereign practices involved in the ‘series of cutting and sequencing’ that the auteur uses to ‘disrupt the very notion of a whole’.79 It makes no sense to claim that cinema’s ‘time-image’ produces ‘“images without subordinating them to coherent movements and linear timelines”’80 unless we ignore the series of singular images that compose a film and have in mind a specific and particular understanding of linearity. Just as hegemonic narratives construct coherent unity, films purposefully construct a non-coherent storyline by manipulating an intrinsically linear series. It is this structural quality that led earlier time scholars to attack determinism by charging that it ‘denied time and freedom by rolling up the future in the present the way the end of a film is already determined at the start of the reel’.81 Such tensions would not be so conspicuous if critical scholars did not persist in positioning them against a murky, libertine notion of ‘linear time’.82 ................
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