Transcript
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The middle passage created a void of relationality distinct from events where black folk stood as socially dead IN RELATION to the rest of the world cementing a new order of signification that relies upon anti-black value systems
Wilderson 10 Frank B, Prof of African American studies and drama @ UC Irvine, [“Red White and Black Cinema and the Structure of U.S Antagonisms”]//Mberhe
During the emergence of new ontological relations in the modern world, from the late Middle Ages through the 1500s, many different kinds of people experienced slavery. In other words, there have been times when natal alienation, general dishonor, and gratuitous violence have turned individuals of myriad ethnicities and races into beings who are socially dead. But the African, or more precisely Blackness, is the moniker for an individual who is by definition always already void of relationality. Thus, modernity marks the emergence of a new ontology because it is an era in which an entire race of people who, a priori, that is prior to the contingency of the “transgressive act” (such as losing at war or being convicted of a crime), stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the world. This, I will argue, is as true for those who were herded onto the slave ships as it is for those who had no knowledge whatsoever of the coffles. In this period, chattel slavery, as a condition of ontology and not just as an event of experience, stuck to the African like Velcro. To the extent that we can think the essence of Whiteness and the essence of Blackness, we must think their essences through the structure of the Master/Slave relation. It should be clear by now that I am not only drawing a distinction between what is commonly thought of as the Master/Slave relation and the constituent elements of the Master/Slave relation (Patterson 6), but I am also drawing a distinction between the experience of slavery (which anyone can be subjected to) and the ontology 28 Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms of slavery, which in Modernity (the years 1300 to the present) becomes the singular purview of the Black. In this period, slavery is cathedralized. It “advances” from a word which describes a condition that anyone can be subjected to, to a word which reconfigures the African body into Black flesh. Far from being merely the experience of the African, slavery is now the African’s access to (or, more correctly, banishment from) ontology.
Debate is structured by an arch of redemption built around the axis of black subjugation. The rhetorical form of the 1AC siphons energy into modalities of humanist redress that are parasitic on black suffering.
Wilderson 16 (Frank B Wilderson III, associate professor of African American Studies and Drama at UC Irvine, PhD in Rhetoric and Film Studies from UC Berkeley, February 25 2016, “HSI Podcast 52,” http://www.podcastgarden.com/episode/hsi-podcast-52_71843, transcribed from audio 5:33-12:25, modified) gz
But here’s why I would say that the things can’t be reconciled and why I’m fascinated with the way high school and college debaters are using it. I think it was—I don’t know what sociologist—Max Weber (you know, I quote all sorts of people except right out fascists)—I believe he said that the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. And the way that the question is posed in the world of debate in January—the question that carries one through the entire twelve months—is posed in a way that cannot be reconciled with the basic lens of interpretation of Afropessimism. The question is always posed on what I call and others call an arch of redemption. In other words, the question assumes an instance of plenitude, say, the free association and the free assembly—the right to free assembly—of citizens, and then it moves from that assumption to a rupture. So it moves from equilibrium to disequilibrium, which is to say the manifestation of the surveillance state. And so the third move in the tripartite arc of narrative is, of course, the move of redemption, which is to say how can the plenitude—whether it’s a historical materialist plenitude, a social formation having its rights and liberties disrupted—how can that be restored. It’s that movement from equilibrium to disequilibrium to equilibrium restored which is precisely at the center of the critique of Afropessimism. Afropessimism is not an offering for historical redemption; it’s not an offering for the restoration of a body in need of redress the way that postcolonialism is, the way that Marxism is, the way that radical feminism is, the way that indigenism is. It’s a critique of the rhetorical structure of those lenses of interpretation, critiquing them as to a) what they don’t or are unable to say about the violence that subjugates and positions Blacks and b) why it is that they actually need Blackness as slaveness to be outside of their lens of interpretation. So there’s a way in which—to come full circle to where I started—there’s a way in which the rhetorical structure of debate, the demand of debate, the protocols are already ideologically laden. It doesn’t matter what question you pour into those protocols. The protocols, themselves, are all ideological straightjackets [constrictions] which preclude the kind of investigation of suffering. In order for Black suffering to be part of the debate question, it would have to go through a structural adjustment to begin to look like the suffering of some other group. The way Hartman talks about this is by suggesting that what you have in the world of subalterns—degraded humans who suffer—you have narratives of the possibility of real or imagined redemption, which is to say, narratives which are structured around the question of how to relieve the suffering that didn’t happen before the invasion of some sorts. But what she says with respect to Blacks is that you cannot tell the story of before the invasion, before the destruction. So, without being able to do that, she says when you think of narrating Blackness, you have to think of repetition as opposed to redemption. And so when we were off the air, one of the things I said to Marquis and to Josh is that one of the foreseeable problems with the future of Afropessimism is people kind of cherry-picking from it to enhance the explanatory power of their own suffering. And that cherry-picking will actually, inevitably, leave by the wayside the very deliberate absence in Afropessimism, and that is the absence of redemptive theorization, which is present in everything else. Redemptive theorization is theorized through all three volumes of Das Kapital; it’s theorized in the psychoanalytic feminism of Hartman and people like Julia Kristeva; it’s theorized in the work of Ward Churchill and Vine Deloria. It’s not only theorized. I should take a step back. It’s assumed. It’s assumed. And so, these are metacritiques of relationality. What Afropessimism is is a metacritique of the metacritique, to show how pure and simple relations are dependent upon—they’re parasitic—using blacks as a parasitic host.
Even radical social movements like Prison abolition are still founded upon linguistic value system defined parasitic to blackness to gain coherence, even if blacks are no longer prisoners they are still criminals and slaves—because they are always a threat to Civil Society
Wilderson 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal”, Published in Social Justice Vol.30, No.2)
THERE IS SOMETHING ORGANIC TO BLACK POSITIONALITY THAT MAKES IT ESSENTIAL to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction” (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society’s many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons. In light of this, coalitions and social movements, even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil society’s junior partners (i.e., immigrants, white women, and the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison-slave-in-waiting. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical structures and political desire are underwritten by a supplemental antiBlackness. In her autobiography, Assata Shakur’s comments vacillate between being interesting and insightful to painfully programmatic and “responsible.” The expository method of conveyance accounts for this air of responsibility. However, toward the end of the book, she accounts for coalition work by way of extended narrative as opposed to exposition. We accompany her on one of Zayd Shakur’s many Panther projects with outside groups, work “dealing with white support groups who were involved in raising bail for the Panther 21 members in jail” (Shakur, 1987: 224). With no more than three words, her recollection becomes matter of fact and unfiltered. She writes, “I hated it.” At the time, i felt that anything below 110th street was another country. All my activities were centered in Harlem and i almost never left it. Doing defense committee work was definitely not up my alley.... i hated standing around while all these white people asked me to explain myself, my existence. i became a master of the one-liner (Shakur, 1987: 224). Her hatred of this work is bound up in her anticipation, fully realized, of all the zonal violations to come when a white woman asks her if Zayd is her “panther...you know, is he your black cat?” and then runs her fingers through Assata’s hair to cop a kinky feel. Her narrative anticipates these violations-to-come at the level of the street, as well as at the level of the body. Here is the moment in her life as a prison-slave-in-waiting, which is to say, a moment as an ordinary Black person, when she finds herself among “friends” — abolitionists, at least partners in purpose, and yet she feels it necessary to adopt the same muscular constriction, the same coiled anticipation, the same combative “one-liners” that she will need to adopt just one year later to steel herself against the encroachment of prison guards. The verisimilitude between Assata’s well-known police encounters, and her experiences in civil society’s most nurturing nook, the radical coalition, raises disturbing questions about political desire, Black positionality, and hegemony as a modality of struggle. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes two moves with respect to civil society. First, he locates its genuine manifestation in Europe — the motherland. Then, with respect to the colony, he locates it only in the zone of the settler. This second move is vital for our understanding of Black positionality in America and for understanding the, at best, limitations of radical social movements in America. For if we are to follow Fanon’s analysis, and the gestures toward this understanding in some of the work of imprisoned intellectuals, then we have to come to grips with the fact that, for Black people, civil society itself — rather than its abuses or shortcomings — is a state of emergency.
The 1AC’s contingent relation to the world confuses Afro-pessimism as a meta-theory that precludes imaginative thought beyond nothingness AND is lexically prior to evaluation of aff-solvency.
Wilderson 20 Frank B, Prof of African American studies and drama @ UC Irvine [“Afropessimism” LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION A DIVISION OF W. W. NORTON & COMPANY INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923]//Mberhe
Black people embody (which is different from saying are always willing or allowed to express) a meta-aporia for political thought and action. For most critical theorists writing after 1968, the word aporia is used to designate a contradiction in a text or theoretical undertaking. For example, Jacques Derrida suggests an aporia indicates “a point FRANK B. WILDERSON III 14 of undecidability, which locates the site at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself.” But when I say that Black people embody a meta-aporia for political thought and action, the addition of the prefix meta- goes beyond what Derrida and the poststructuralists meant—it raises the level of abstraction and, in so doing, raises the stakes. In epistemology, a branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge, the prefix meta- is used to mean about (its own category). Metadata, for example, are data about data (who has produced them, when, what format the data are in, and so on). In linguistics, a grammar is considered as being expressed in a metalanguage, language operating on a higher level of abstraction to describe properties of the plain language (and not itself). Metadiscussion is a discussion about discussion (not any one particular topic of discussion but discussion itself). In computer science, a theoretical software engineer might be engaged in the pursuit of metaprogramming (i.e., writing programs that manipulate programs). Afropessimism, then, is less of a theory and more of a metatheory: a critical project that, by deploying Blackness as a lens of interpretation, interrogates the unspoken, assumptive logic of Marxism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism through rigorous theoretical consideration of their properties and assumptive logic, such as their foundations, methods, form, and utility; and it does so, again, on a higher level of abstraction than the discourse and methods of the theories it interrogates. Again, Afropessimism is, in the main, more of a metatheory than a theory. It is pessimistic about the claims theories of liberation make when these theories try to explain Black suffering or when they analogize Black suffering with the suffering of other oppressed beings. It does this by unearthing and exposing the metaaporias, strewn like land mines in what these theories of so-called universal liberation hold to be true.
The alternative is black nihilism - divert spiritual hope away from their desired fantasies to imagine blackness at the end of the world which escapes the prison house of metaphysics – only this relation nothingness retrieves spiritual hope.
Warren 15 Calvin Warren is an Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University. Warren’s research interests are in the area of Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Black Philosophy, Black nihilism, Afro-pessimism, and theology. [“Black Nihilism and the politics of hope” Michigan State university Press Spring 2015]//Mberhe
For the black nihilist, anti-blackness is metaphysics. It is the system of thought and organization of existence that structures the relationship between object/subject, human/animal, rational/irrational, and free/enslaved—essentially, the categories that constitute the "field of Ontology. Thus, the social rationalization, loss of individuality, economic expansionism, and technocratic domination that both Vattimo and Heidegger analyze actually depend on anti-blackness.5 Metaphysics, then, is unthinkable without antiblackness. Neither Heidegger nor Vattimo explores this aspect of Being’s oblivion—it is the literal destruction of black bodies that provide the psychic, economic, and philosophical resources for modernity to objectify, forget, and ultimately obliterate Being (nonmetaphysical Being). We might then consider black captivity in the modern world as the “perfection” of metaphysics, its shameful triumph, because through the violent technology of slavery Being itself was so thoroughly devastated. Personality became property, as Hortense Spillers would describe it, and with this transubstantiation, Being was objectified, infused with exchange value, and rendered malleable within a sociopolitical order. In short, Being lost its integrity with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; at that moment in history, it "finally became possible for an aggressive metaphysics to exercise obscene power—the ability to turn a “human” into a “thing.” The captive is fractured on both the Ontological and ontic levels. This violent transubstantiation leaves little room for the hopeful escape from metaphysics that Heidegger envisions. Can the black-as-object lay claim to DaSein? And if so, how exactly does hermeneutic nihilism restore Being to that which is an object? If we perform a “philosophy of history,” as Vattimo would advise, we understand that metaphysicians, and even those we now consider “postmetaphysicians,” constructed the rational subject against the nonreasoning black, who, according to Hegel, Kant, Hume, and even Nietzsche was situated outside of history, moral law, and consciousness (Bernasconi 2003; Judy 1993; and Mills 1998). It is not enough, then, to suggest that metaphysics engenders forms of violence as a necessity, as a byproduct; thinking itself is structured by anti-blackness from the very start. Any postmetaphysical project that does not take this into account will inevitably reproduce the very structures of thought that it would dismantle. Hermeneutic nihilism provides a discursive frame to understand the intransigence of metaphysics as the residue of anti-blackness in the contemporary moment. The black nihilist, however, must part ways with Vattimo concerning the question of emancipation. For Vattimo, hermeneutic nihilism avoids “passive nihilism.” Passive nihilism is characterized by strands of fatalism or by melancholic nostalgia for lost foundations. To avoid this situation, Vattimo introduces hermeneutics as an alternative to passive nihilism and conceives of hermeneutics as the natural result of an accomplished nihilism—namely, after the weakening of metaphysical Being, hermeneutics replaces metaphysics as a self-consuming “foundation.” He attempts to move beyond the metaphysical remnants found in the theories of Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Wittgenstein and think of hermeneutics as competing interpretations that reduce the violence of secure foundations. This of course provides the possibility for a radical democracy and a reconfiguration of Ethics, Law, and the Political. Ultimately, this weakening of metaphysical Being allows the human to project him-/ herself in the world, what Vattimo calls “projectionality,” and engage in the unique project that constitutes existence. This is the crux of emancipation for Vattimo. We, ironically, "find ourselves back in the province of “progress,” “hope,” “betterment,” all the metaphysical instruments that constrain the very life that he would emancipate. This, of course, is unavoidable, for he can only twist these concepts and reclaim them as part of a postmetaphysical agenda. Vattimo’s hermeneutic nihilism is not very much different than political theology and democratic liberalism. It is a discourse of hope, a politics of hope that advances the belief that we can weaken metaphysics and reduce suffering, violence, and pain. When it comes to black suffering, however, we are compelled to hold up the mirror of historicity and inquire about the possibilities of emancipation for the black-as-object. Anti-blackness is the residue that remains, the intransigent substance that makes it impossible to destroy metaphysics completely. The black nihilist must confront this residue, but with the understanding that the eradication of this residue would truly end the world itself. Black emancipation is world destructive; it is not an aperture or an opening for future possibilities and political reconfigurations (Wilderson 2010). The “end of the world” that Vattimo envisions does not take into account that pulverized black bodies sustain the world—its institutions, economic systems, environment, theologies, philosophies, and so forth. Because anti-blackness infuses itself into every fabric of social existence, it is impossible to emancipate blacks without literally destroying the world. Moreover, this means that black emancipation will not yield a new world or possibilities for reorganization—black emancipation is the nihilistic “solution” that would destroy the field of all possible solutions. In this sense, black emancipation becomes something like death for the world—with all its Heideggerian valences. Black bodies and black suffering, then, pose a problem for emancipatory logic. If literal black bodies sustain modernity and metaphysics—through various forms of captivity, terror, and subjection—then what would emancipation entail for blacks? How do we allow metaphysics to self-consume and weaken when blackness nourishes metaphysics? (We can define the “problem” in W. E. B. Dubois’s poignant question “what does it mean to be a problem?” in the twentieth century as metaphysics itself [1903, 10]. Now we must ask: “what does it mean to be the source of metaphysics’ sustenance in the 21st century?”) Either the world would have to eliminate black bodies, which would amount to a self-destructive solution for all, or it would have to wrest blackness from the clutches of metaphysical anti-blackness that sustains the world. Our hope is that black emancipation would be accomplished through the latter, but history does not prove that this is possible—every emancipatory strategy that attempted to rescue blackness from antiblackness inevitably reconstituted and reconfigured the anti-blackness it tried to eliminate. Anti-blackness is labile. It adapts to change and endlessly refashions itself; this makes emancipation an impossible feat. Because we are still attempting to mine the depths of anti-blackness in the twenty-first century and still contemplating the contours of this juggernaut, anti-blackness will escape every emancipatory attempt to capture it. We are left, yet again, to place our hope in a future politics that avoids history, historicity, and the immediacy of black suffering. For this reason, the black nihilist rejects the emancipatory impulse within certain aspects of black critical discourse and cultural/critical theory. In this sense, the modifier “black” in the term “black nihilism” indicates much more than an “identity”; a blackened nihilism pushes hermeneutic nihilism beyond the limits of its metaphysical thinking by foregrounding the function of anti-blackness in structuring thought. Black nihilism acknowledges that metaphysics is a destructive matrix, but it resists the temptation to believe that there is an alternative or a “beyond” the violence that sustains the world. For many, this could be read as fatalism or passive nihilism. The terms “passive” and “fatalism” applied to black nihilism are saturated with negativity to discredit its legitimacy; this discursive maneuver becomes another metaphysical strategy of disciplining and punishing “errant” thought. Despite these invectives and political hope’s “will to power,” black nihilism uses hermeneutics to return the political “dream” to its proper place—in the place of the void (Fanon). Black nihilism demands a traversal, but not the traversal that reintegrates “the subject” (and Being) back into society by shattering fundamental fantasies of metaphysics, but a traversal that disables and invalidates every imaginative and symbolic function. Its hermeneutics “blackens” the world, as Lewis Gordon suggests in “Theory in Black: Teleological Suspensions in Philosophy of Culture” (2010). The problem that confronts the black nihilist is one of epistemology, especially when the dominant epistemology privileges metaphysical forms of antiblack organizations of knowledge. The "field of knowledge is uneven and reflects the asymmetrical power relations that sustain anti-black violence in modernity. The difficulty in expressing black nihilistic thought is that it is situated in the tense space between hermeneutics and epistemology. If we think of epistemology as an anti-black formation, then every appeal to it will reproduce the very metaphysical violence that is the source of black suffering. Nihilistic Hermeneutics allows us to fracture epistemology, to chip away at its metaphysical science, and to enunciate from within this fissure. Vattimo provides a cogent explanation of the distinction between epistemology and hermeneutics in his reading of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Re!ection (1981): Epistemology is founded on the presumption that all discourses are commensurate with and translatable among each other, and that the foundation of their truth consists precisely in this translation into a basic language, that is, the one which mirrors facts themselves. Hermeneutics instead admits that there is no such single unifying language, and tries to appropriate the language of the other rather than translate into its own tongue... Epistemology is the discourse of normal science, while hermeneutics is discourse about as-yetincommensurable discourses. (Vattimo 1988, 149) Read through the register of anti-blackness, we can understand epistemology as the violent attempt at discursive and linguistic unification—the compulsion to establish a unifying ground of language. Because blackness is placed outside of the “customary lexis of life and culture,” as Hortense Spillers (2003) reminds us, blackness speaks an inassimilable language, an “anti-grammar” that resists linguistic/epistemological domination—what we call “translation” (221). Anti-black epistemology is somewhat schizophrenic in its aim: it at once posits blackness as an anti-grammatical entity—paradoxically, a nonfoundation-foundation that provides the condition of possibility for its own existence—and at the same time, and in stunning contradiction, it forces a translation of this anti-grammar into a system of understanding that is designed to exclude it. This tension between grammatical exclusion and compulsory inclusion is part of the violence of captivity. A hermeneutical practice that acknowledges the impossible translation of blackness without forcing its annihilation (through translation/domination) is the only way we can understand the nihilist. Put another way, black nihilism shatters the coherence of anti-black epistemology and cannot be “known,” or rendered legible, through traditional epistemology. The problem that we encounter is that black nihilism is reduced to an anti-black epistemology—the “illegible grammar” that speaks through the black body, psyche, and “spirit” is forcibly, and erroneously, translated into an epistemology that is inimical to its meaning. Black nihilism cannot be reduced to an anti-black foundation of knowledge (or metaphysics), and when this translation, this compulsory alignment of knowledge, fails to explain or understand the black nihilist, black nihilism is considered pathological and must be disciplined, contained, and, ultimately, destroyed. If all knowledge must submit to a bio-political imperative, then the socially dead object is always already situated at an impasse in relation to this imperative: either one lives in bad faith—the “optimistic” and politically hopeful belief that anti-black structures can be transformed to provide vitality to blackness, despite all evidence to the contrary—or one lives as the pathogen (i.e., socially pathological) and risks increased vulnerability to violent state apparatuses. In other words, the “pathological behavior” that West and Brogdon bemoan as self-destructive, pessimistic, and apathetic from black youth is a gross misreading. Perhaps this “pathology” is a way of speaking otherwise when other forms of discourse are inaccessible; the nihilist might have to assume an anti-grammatical enunciation to express the inexpressible. West and Brogdon subject this antigrammar to an anti-black epistemology, which mandates that all action must align with its bio-political imperative. When this forced translation fails, the nihilist is labeled “pathological,” “troubled,” “faithless,” “suicidal,” “fatalistic,” and “reckless.” Hermeneutical nihilism challenges this domination and allows incommensurate grammars to exist. The strategy of forced alignment— translation as domination—is a tool of the Political designed to preserve its metaphysical organization. Bio-politics will always fail the politically dead object because bio-politics depends on the politically dead black object to constitute itself. If political integration is the dream of the optimists, it will result in nothing more than what Achille Mbembe (2003) calls the “necropolitical” (40). In this context, we can define necro-politics as the distribution of fraudulent hope that leaves the subject endangered. Throughout this essay, I have argued that the Politics of hope preserve metaphysical structures that sustain black suffering. This preservation amounts to an exploitation of hope—when the Political colonizes the spiritual principle of organization of existence. The Politics of hope, then, is bound up with metaphysical violence, and this violence masquerades as a “solution” to the problem of anti-blackness. Temporal linearity, perfection, betterment, struggle, work, and utopian futurity are conceptual instruments of the Political that will never obviate black suffering or anti-black violence; these concepts only serve to reproduce the conditions that render existence unbearable for blacks. Political theologians and black optimists avoid the immediacy of black suffering, the horror of anti-black pulverization, and place relief in a “not-yet-but-is (maybe)-to-come-social order” that, itself, can do little more but admonish blacks to survive to keep struggling. Political hope becomes a vicious and abusive cycle of struggle—it mirrors the Lacanian drive, and we encircle an object (black freedom, justice, relief, redress, equality, etc.) that is inaccessible because it doesn’t really exist. The political theologian and black optimist, then, propose a collective Jouissance as an answer to black suffering—"finding the joy in struggle, the victory in toil, and the satisfaction in inefficacious action. We continue to “struggle” and “work” as black youth are slaughtered daily, black bodies are incarcerated as forms of capital, black infant mortality rates are soaring, and hunger is disabling the bodies, minds, and spirits of desperate black youth. In short, these conditions are deep metaphysical problems—the sadistic pleasure of metaphysical domination— and “work” and “struggle” avoid the terrifying fact that the world depends on black death to sustain itself. Black nihilism attempts to break this “drive”—to stop it in its tracks, as it were—and to end the cycle of insanity that political hope perpetuates. The question that remains is a question often put to the black nihilist: what is the point? This compulsory geometrical structuring of thought—all knowledge must submit to, and is reducible to, a point—it is an epistemic #icker of certainty, determination, and, to put it bluntly, life. “The point” exists for life; it enlivens, enables, and sustains knowledge. Thought outside of this mandatory point is illegible and useless. To write outside of the “episteme of life” and its grammar will require a position outside of this point, a position somewhere in the infinite horizon of thought (perhaps this is what Heidegger wanted to do with his reconfiguration of thought). Writing in this way is inherently subversive and refuses the geometry of thought. Nevertheless, the nihilist is forced to enunciate his refusal through a “point,” a point that is contradictory and paradoxical all at once. To say that the point of this essay is that “the point” is fraudulent—its promise of clarity and life are inadequate— will not satisfy the hunger of disciplining the nihilist and insisting that one undermine the very ground upon which one stands. Black nihilistic hermeneutics resists “the point” but is subjected to it to have one’s voice heard within the marketplace of ideas. The “point” of this essay is that political hope is pointless. Black suffering is an essential part of the world, and placing hope in the very structure that sustains metaphysical violence, the Political, will never resolve anything. This is why the black nihilist speaks of “exploited hope,” and the black nihilist attempts to wrest hope from the clutches of the Political. Can we think of hope outside the Political? Must “salvation” translate into a political grammar or a political program? The nihilist, then, hopes for the end of political hope and its metaphysical violence. Nihilism is not antithetical to hope; it does not extinguish hope but reconfigures it. Hope is the foundation of the black nihilistic hermeneutic. In “Blackness and Nothingness,” Fred Moten (2013) conceptualizes blackness as a “pathogen” to metaphysics, something that has the ability to unravel, to disable, and to destroy anti-blackness. If we read Vattimo through Moten’s brilliant analysis, we can suggest that blackness is the limit that Heidegger and Nietzsche were really after. It is a “blackened” world that will ultimately end metaphysics, but putting an end to metaphysics will also put an end to the world itself—this is the nihilism that the black nihilist must theorize through. This is a far cry from what we call “anarchy,” however. The black nihilist has as little faith in the metaphysical reorganization of society through anarchy than he does in traditional forms of political existence. The black nihilist offers political apostasy as the spiritual practice of denouncing metaphysical violence, black suffering, and the idol of antiblackness. The act of renouncing will not change political structures or offer a political program; instead, it is the act of retrieving the spiritual concept of hope from the captivity of the Political. Ultimately, it is impossible to end metaphysics without ending blackness, and the black nihilist will never be able to withdraw from the Political completely without a certain death-drive or being-toward-death. This is the essence of black suffering: the lack of reprieve from metaphysics, the tormenting complicity in the reproduction of violence, and the lack of a coherent grammar to articulate these dilemmas.
The ROJ is to be an anti-ethical decision maker – the aff is not ethical but merely coheres whiteness through finding ways to “survive and generate freedom” in a world constituted by the slave
WILDERSON 10 Frank B., Associate Professor of African American Studies and Drama at the University of California & former member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, (“Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms”, p. 10, C.A.)
Again, if accumulation and fungibility are the modalities through which Blackness is positioned as incapacity, then genocide is that modality through which embodied Redness is positioned as incapacity. Ontological incapacity, I have inferred and here state forthright, is the constituent element of ethics. Put another way, one cannot embody capacity and be, simultaneously, ethical. Where there are Slaves it is unethical to be free. The Settler/Master’s capacity, I have argued, is a function of exploitation and alienation, and the Slave’s incapacity is elaborated by accumulation and fungibility. But the “Savage” is positioned, structurally, by subjective capacity and objective incapacity, by sovereignty and genocide, respectively. The Indian’s liminal status in political economy, how her and his position shuttles between the incapacity of a genocided object and the capacity of a sovereign subject, coupled with the fact that Redness does not overdetermine the thanatology of libidinal economy (this liminal capacity within political economy and complete freedom from incapacity within libidinal economy) raises serious doubts about the status of “Savage” ethicality vis-à-vis the triangulated structure (Red, White, and Black) of antagonisms. Clearly, the coherence of Whiteness as a structural position in modernity depends on the capacity to be free from genocide, perhaps not as a historical experience, but at least as a positioning modality. This embodied capacity (genocidal immunity) of Whiteness jettisons the White/Red relation from that of a conflict and marks it as an antagonism: it stains it with irreconcilability. Here, the Indian comes into being and is positioned by an a priori violence of genocide. Whiteness can also experience this kind of violence but only a fortiori: genocide may be one of a thousand contingent experiences of Whiteness but it is not a constituent element, it does not make Whites white (or Humans human). Whiteness can grasp its own capacity, be present to itself, coherent, by its unavailability to the a priori violence of Red genocide, as well as by its unavailability to the a priori violence of Black accumulation and fungibility. If it experiences accumulation and fungibility, or genocide, those experiences must be named, qualified, that is, “White slavery,” or the Armenian massacre, the Jewish Holocaust, Bosnian interment, so that such contingent experience is not confused with ontological necessity. In such a position one can always say, “Im not a ‘Savage’” or “I’m being treated like a nigger.” One can assert one’s Humanity by refusing the ruse of analogy. Regardless of Whites’ historical, and brief, encounters with the modalities of the “Savage” and the Slave, these modalities do not break in on the position of Whiteness with such a force as to replace exploitation and alienation as the Settler/Master’s constituent elements. We might think of exploitation and alienation as modalities of suffering which inoculate Whiteness from death. If this is indeed the case, then perhaps Whiteness has no constituent elements other than the immanent status of immunity. Still, this immunity is no small matter, for it is the sine qua non of Human capacity.
Case
[1] Vote neg on presumption
[a] Alliances turn – using debate as a mode of advocacy ensures the failure of their radical project – competition means debaters ally themselves with individuals who vote for them and alienate those who are positioned with the burden of rejoinder and forced to negate – at worst you vote negative on presumption because they don’t use debate as a stepping stone for their advocacy outside the space and don’t have a net benefit to affirming the 1ac
[b] Academia turn – the 1ac is a regurgitation of knowledge that already exists within academia which proves they aren’t a departure from the status quo and voting aff is not intrinsic to affirming abolitionist pedagogy
[c] Movements – the abolitionists movements their aff details already exist and there’s no reason their affirmation would better those – no reason to affirm their scholarship
[2] Competition process turn – the competitive nature of debate ensures that they don’t adapt their radical project to what’s actually best for their movement but what’s best for them to win ballots from judges which saps radicality from their movement
[3] Reading Traber 18 is a joke – it’s written by a former LD coach proves that the plan’s movements are insular and can’t construct a telos that can uniquely challenge carceral structures external to the debate space
[4] Can’t solve – the plan text says that they only abolish forensic science, policing, and sentencing which isn’t a total abolition of the system as there are things external to those 3 things involved in the carceral system
Academia is a pollution of the affirmative project—an inoculation and re-scripting of the very terms of contestation such that nothing is left but the continued propagation of social death
OUCB ‘9 (“The Necrosocial – Civic Life, Social Death, and the University of California,” November 2009, Craccum Magazine – University of Auckland Student Magazine. Iss. 4, 2012. http://craccum.ausa.auckland.ac.nz/?p=286) [m leap]
Yes, very much a cemetery. Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt. The classroom just like the workplace just like the university just like the state just like the economy manages our social death, translating what we once knew from high school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social conflict. Who knew that behind so much civic life (electoral campaigns, student body representatives, bureaucratic administrators, public relations officials, Peace and Conflict Studies, ad nauseam) was so much social death? What postures we maintain to claim representation, what limits we assume, what desires we dismiss? And in this moment of crisis they ask us to twist ourselves in a way that they can hear. Petitions to Sacramento, phone calls to Congressmen—even the chancellor patronizingly congratulates our September 24th student strike, shaping the meaning and the force of the movement as a movement against the policies of Sacramento. He expands his institutional authority to encompass the movement. When students begin to hold libraries over night, beginning to take our first baby step as an autonomous movement he reins us in by serendipitously announcing library money. He manages movement, he kills movement by funneling it into the electoral process. He manages our social death. He looks forward to these battles on his terrain, to eulogize a proposition, to win this or that—he and his look forward to exhausting us. He and his look forward to a reproduction of the logic of representative governance, the release valve of the university plunges us into an abyss where ideas are wisps of ether—that is, meaning is ripped from action. Let’s talk about the fight endlessly, but always only in their managed form: to perpetually deliberate, the endless fleshing-out-of—when we push the boundaries of this form they are quick to reconfigure themselves to contain us: the chancellor’s congratulations, the reopening of the libraries, the managed general assembly—there is no fight against the administration here, only its own extension. Each day passes in this way, the administration on the look out to shape student discourse—it happens without pause, we don’t notice nor do we care to. It becomes banal, thoughtless. So much so that we see we are accumulating days: one semester, two, how close to being this or that, how far? This accumulation is our shared history. This accumulation—every once in a while interrupted, violated by a riot, a wild protest, unforgettable fucking, the overwhelming joy of love, life shattering heartbreak—is a muted, but desirous life. A dead but restless and desirous life. The university steals and homogenizes our time yes, our bank accounts also, but it also steals and homogenizes meaning. As much as capital is invested in building a killing apparatus abroad, an incarceration apparatus in California, it is equally invested here in an apparatus for managing social death. Social death is, of course, simply the power source, the generator, of civic life with its talk of reform, responsibility, unity. A ‘life,’ then, which serves merely as the public relations mechanism for death: its garrulous slogans of freedom and democracy designed to obscure the shit and decay in which our feet are planted. Yes, the university is a graveyard, but it is also a factory: a factory of meaning which produces civic life and at the same time produces social death. A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality can be separated; which everywhere reproduces the empty reactionary behavior of students based on the values of life (identity), liberty (electoral politics), and happiness (private property). Everywhere the same whimsical ideas of the future. Everywhere democracy. Everywhere discourse to shape our desires and distress in a way acceptable to the electoral state, discourse designed to make our very moments here together into a set of legible and fruitless demands. Totally managed death. A machine for administering death, for the proliferation of technologies of death. As elsewhere, things rule. Dead objects rule. In this sense, it matters little what face one puts on the university—whether Yudof or some other lackey. These are merely the personifications of the rule of the dead, the pools of investments, the buildings, the flows of materials into and out of the physical space of the university—each one the product of some exploitation—which seek to absorb more of our work, more tuition, more energy. The university is a machine which wants to grow, to accumulate, to expand, to absorb more and more of the living into its peculiar and perverse machinery: high-tech research centers, new stadiums and office complexes. And at this critical juncture the only way it can continue to grow is by more intense exploitation, higher tuition, austerity measures for the departments that fail to pass the test of ‘relevancy.’ But the ‘irrelevant’ departments also have their place. With their ‘pure’ motives of knowledge for its own sake, they perpetuate the blind inertia of meaning ostensibly detached from its social context. As the university cultivates its cozy relationship with capital, war and power, these discourses and research programs play their own role, co-opting and containing radical potential. And so we attend lecture after lecture about how ‘discourse’ produces ‘subjects,’ ignoring the most obvious fact that we ourselves are produced by this discourse about discourse which leaves us believing that it is only words which matter, words about words which matter. The university gladly permits the precautionary lectures on biopower; on the production of race and gender; on the reification and the fetishization of commodities. A taste of the poison serves well to inoculate us against any confrontational radicalism. And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which contain and neutralize all thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture halls. There is no need to speak truth to power when power already speaks the truth. The university is a graveyard– así es. The graveyard of liberal good intentions, of meritocracy, opportunity, equality, democracy. Here the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. We graft our flesh, our labor, our debt to the skeletons of this or that social cliché. In seminars and lectures and essays, we pay tribute to the university’s ghosts, the ghosts of all those it has excluded—the immiserated, the incarcerated, the just-plain-fucked. They are summoned forth and banished by a few well-meaning phrases and research programs, given their book titles, their citations. This is our gothic—we are so morbidly aware, we are so practiced at stomaching horror that the horror is thoughtless. In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us. Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be. That is, we are students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning. We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot. Who doesn’t participate in this graveyard? In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality translates to a value of domination. We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else. Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than everyone else. We have measured ourselves and we have measured others. It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat, test them as a professor, extract value from their capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying, completing. It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of domination. After all, we are intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this. We are convinced, owned, broken. We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. This triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own students—we have used their words on their stages: Save public education! When those values are violated by the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant. We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values. What many have learned again and again is that these institutions don’t care for those values, not at all, not for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own. The values create popular images and ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on violence, the expansion of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation in general. They sell the practice through the image. We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept the practice. In this crisis the Chancellors and Presidents, the Regents and the British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all intend to be true to their values and capitalize on the university economically and socially—which is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an escalation, a provocation. Their most recent attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more willing to accept their new terms as well as what was always dead in the university, to see just how dead we are willing to play, how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous. Every institution has of course our best interest in mind, so much so that we’re willing to pay, to enter debt contracts, to strike a submissive pose in the classroom, in the lab, in the seminar, in the dorm, and eventually or simultaneously in the workplace to pay back those debts. Each bulging institutional value longing to become more than its sentiment through us, each of our empty gestures of feigned-anxiety to appear under pressure, or of cool-ambivalence to appear accustomed to horror, every moment of student life, is the management of our consent to social death. Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning. It’s the positions we thoughtlessly enact. It’s the particular nature of being owned. Social rupture is the initial divorce between the owners and the owned. A social movement is a function of war. War contains the ability to create a new frame, to build a new tension for the agents at play, new dynamics in the battles both for the meaning and the material. When we move without a return to their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war. It is November 2009. For an end to the values of social death we need ruptures and self-propelled, unmanaged movements of wild bodies. We need, we desire occupations. We are an antagonistic dead.
The aff’s submission to normative policy interventions turn their entire movement
Brown, M., & Schept, J. (2016), Michelle Brown is a Professor and Associate Head Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee and Judah Schept, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. He holds a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Indiana University and a BA in Sociology from Vassar College, New abolition, criminology and a critical carceral studies. Punishment & Society. doi:10.1177/1462474516666281//WY
Still, these efforts have occurred alongside of a much more politically empowered form of mainstream criminology, with greater access to state funding, policy making, institutional support, and knowledge production. Importantly, the policy recommendations around reentry and justice reinvestment initiatives have extended carceral logics, state intervention, and surveillance through the constructs of justice reform (Gottschalk, 2014; Maruna, 2011; Schept, 2015; Story, 2016). While a small group of dedicated largely White activists and academics in criminology have maintained a steady and decidedly empirical critique of carceral regimes, this is not enough. Largely missing from these discussions, as with all of criminology, are the subjugated and subaltern knowledges of Black feminist, intersectional, queer, indigenous, critical race, and anticolonial activist scholarship, which, in the US, form the foundational work of the new abolitionists (although see Agozino, 2003 and Saleh-Hanna, 2015). New abolitionists and critical carceral studies scholars show little interest in a public sociology or criminology dedicated to questions of abolition’s political tenability in policy discussions. Rather, their work emanates from experiences, practices, and movement-generated theories grounded in survivability: the urgent pursuit of liberation from the threat of captivity, torture, and social death, from generational histories in the continuous shadow of conquest, settler colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, and the carceral state. The history, scale, and scope of the neoliberal carceral state makes evident the long omissions and marginalization from the criminological canon of work against White supremacy, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism as well as the epistemologies of vulnerability. At stake in these debates and contradictions are the very terms upon which the discipline has over-relied. A critical carceral studies in solidarity with the project of abolition and meaningful decarceration requires us to rethink the keywords of criminology in order to understand if abolition is a project to which criminology can contribute. We offer the following as a way in which to take up that problem and begin the work of reimagining our relationships and commitments to the carceral lexicon and logics that define us. Criminology has been a key site, in its varied forms, for the reproduction of the very carceral logics we aim to dismantle. The ways in which we assume, write, and lecture about carceral and police power play an important role in carrying the regime forward, reproducing—reforming—its logics, training the next generation of its players and, in the process, further calcifying its legitimacy (Schept et al., 2015). Abolition of the materiality or edifice of the prison industrial complex will require the abolition—the dismantling, changing, and building anew—of the normative discourses and vocabularies, the ways of thinking and being, that constitute the conditions of the prison–industrial complex’s (PIC) possibility and which derive their legitimacy in part from criminology (Foucault, 1980). One key contribution of new abolitionist work is the interruption of dominant understandings of crime, law, punishment, safety and accountability, and justice, and the generation of alternative vocabularies and analyses from which to begin to work our way out of the carceral state. This work brings the undiscussable into the discussion, asking us to reconceptualize violence, victims, perpetrators, rehabilitation, safety, and accountability through the affective and emotional lives of the actors closest to and locked within the PIC. To take seriously the embeddedness of carceral logics as well as the lived experience of carcerality produces epistemological engagements that necessarily and foundationally destabilize the keywords of criminology. Such work goes far to ensure that survivability and precarity become visible as political events within the structural context of US criminal justice. This pursuit is one avenue by which to create the conditions for the legibility of everyday racialized state violence (Martinot and Sexton, 2003) and its attendant oppressions out of which may come a transformative set of questions and possibilities about the nature of injury, harm, and accountability. We introduce this possibility through the systematic dismantling of a series of criminological keywords, a disruption that, if central to our foundations, analysis, and practice, might open up transformative spaces within our training, pedagogy, and practice.
The form of abolition precedes it’s content – the plan’s will to make criminality more transparent is intrinsically correlated to phobia, litany of examples prove.
Muhammad 10 prof of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School Khalil Gibbran-at time of book’s publication he was the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture @ the New York Public Library; [“THE CONDEMNATION OF BLACKNESS: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America”, won the John Hope Franklin award in 2011 for the best book in American Studies; pp. 269-277]//Daryl Burch
Thorsten Sellin’s and Edwin H. Sutherland’s cautions about the limits of racial crime statistics were a breakthrough accomplishment in the four- decades evolution of the national discourse on black criminality. By comparison to their Progressive era predecessors, the interracial collaborations of a new generation of social scientists proved to be far more responsive to the realities of racism in American society and to the voices of African American crime experts, crime fighters, and ordinary citizens. Nathaniel Cantor’s colorful injunction against the linking of blackness and criminality, like those of M. V. Ball, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Ida B. Wells in the 1890s, revealed that the perspective had gained a level of unprecedented legitimacy within some circles of mainstream social science. None of these scholars and activists ignored the real crime in black communities or the toll that it took on law- abiding victims. But they resisted the condemnation of blackness. They resisted the racialization of crime among African Americans in the same way that progressives and later Chicago School sociologists opposed the racialization of immigrant crime and delinquency. “The problem of crime and colored groups,” Cantor insisted, “does not differ from the general problem of crime causation.”1 For the many researchers, journalists, crime fighters, and law- abiding citizens who were dedicated to the cause of civil rights, rewriting black criminality in terms of police misconduct was an attractive rhetorical weapon because it fundamentally undercut the use of black crime statistics to justify other forms of discrimination. Policing racism in the northern criminal justice system became an effective rebuttal to the statistical arguments of earlier white social scientists that the “numbers speak for themselves.”2 The many blacks and liberal white criminologists whose ideas were influenced by The Negro in Chicago, or whose work picked up where it left off, never again viewed racial crime statistics in quite the same way. Doubts were even raised within the pages of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, a first- rate academic publication that merged with the American Journal of Police Science in 1932. Hans Von Hentig’s 1940 article, “The Criminality of the Negro,” was rare in that it illustrated the unreliability of racial crime statistics in relation to policing in a periodical with no obvious sympathies for the black civil rights struggle. After showing evidence that white offenders were more likely to go undetected by the police than were black offenders, Hentig concluded: Many, many more than we think escape this formal judgment and remain in the category of law- abiding citizens. Others, in contrast, are subjected to another sort of error. They are not overlooked but are misjudged in the opposite way; they are, so to speak over- assessed. . . . Arrests are made by human beings; sentences are pronounced by human beings; statistics are compiled by the same unwise homosapiens [sic]. When, as it is in our case, minorities are the subject of judgment and treatment, it is more than ever important to turn our attention to these agencies which we would like to believe unbiased and evenhanded and which are the more liable to errors the less they feel free of them. Furthermore, the colored race is a minority of which we are in dread.3 By Hentig’s reasoning, racism in the criminal justice system had become a central problem in the judgment and treatment of the “colored race.” The gap separating Hentig’s logic and reasoning from Frederic L. Hoffman’s— the span of half a century of statistical discourse on black criminality— now seemed unbridgeable. But it was not. Hoffman was still producing crime data and still shaping the statistical discourse on black criminality, much to Du Bois’s frustration.4 More importantly for the IACP and the FBI— creators of the Uniform Crime Reports (UCRs)— the cautions of Sellin, Cantor, and Ira De A. Reid seemed to fall on deaf ears. To the nation’s top law enforcement officials, race tables continued to speak for themselves. Three years after they were first published in 1930, the UCRs began, for the first time, to report arrest statistics by race, based on fingerprint cards sent by local police agencies to the Identification Division of the FBI. Sellin’s and Sutherland’s prison report warnings about the inappropriateness of using data to “draw any conclusions . . . regarding the comparative criminality of race groups” nowhere appeared in the new UCRs. Instead the following statement accompanied the first three annual racial tabulations of arrests by offense: “It is believed that figures pertaining to the number of Negroes and foreign- born whites who were arrested and fingerprinted can most fairly be presented by showing them in proportion to the number of such individuals in the general population of the country.” After 1935 “foreign- born” was removed from the statement: “The significance of the figures showing the number of Negroes arrested as compared with the number of whites can best be indicated in terms of the number of each in the general population of the country.” By 1941 the foreign- born had been completely absorbed in the race tables under the category “white,” and the text simply read: “Most of the persons in this tabulation were members of the white and Negro races.”5 On this statistical trajectory, the nation’s most respected and authoritative crime source had simplified the racial crime calculus in 1930s America. Blackness now stood as the singular mark of a criminal. “Negro” became the only statistically significant category in the UCR tables upon which to mea sure “white” criminality, deviance, and pathology. It was a losing prospect for African Americans. “The machinery of justice” was after all, as many had long observed, “entirely in the hands of the white man.”
