Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
File Notes
The stuff under case turns is all very good, and its at the
top of the file for a reason. None of it has a lot of evidence
designed for extension but theres also some purpose to that,
toobetter to read one or two deep pieces of evidence and
engage the 2ac than to pile up cards on what should be an
analysis-oriented debate.
There are also 1nc cards to challenge the various methods of
fugitive poetics (poems, narratives, music, hip hop,
performance, etc.) Given the number of affs that utilize some
form of hip hop, there are additional extensions to that for the
block at the bottom of the file, though I would encourage you
to be thoughtful about why the evidence youre reading which
indicts hip hop broadly applies to the specific art form/song
the 1ac is utilizing.
Theres a pretty solid topicality section, two very good
separate critiques (counter gazing and a loosely formed Ballot
K, where the safe spaces evidence is one of the better cards
in the file), a couple links to different K affs and two CPs that
advocate what might loosely be thought of as PICs.
Case Turns**
Grammar of Suffering K
The affirmatives positioning of violence as central to the slave
reinscribes a grammar of suffering as a standard for others to
live up to, further entrenching antiblack violence within the
academy
McKittrick, 2014 Professor of Gender Studies @ Queen's University in
Kingston Ontario. Peter Hudson interviewing Katherine McKittrick. (Katherine; The
Geographies of Blackness and Anti-Blackness: An Interview with Katherine
McKittrick; Online PDF;
http://www.katherinemckittrick.com/download/hudson_mckittrick.pdf; DOA: 7/6/15 ||
NDW)
There are always two things on my mind when I am researching and writing about blackness, black geographies, and practices of
Slavery Images K
Spectacular images of black suffering only serve to re-create
racial domination through exaggerated instances of power.
Only a realization of mundane forms of violence are capable of
addressing the reality of antiblackness.
Hartman, 1997 - Professor of African American literature and history at
Columbia University (Saidiya V.; Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America; Book; Pg. 42; DOA: 7/7/15 || NDW)
The parade of shackled bodies to market captured not only the debasements of
slavery but also its diversions. Yet the convergence of pleasure and terror so striking in the humiliating exhibitions
and defiling pageantry of the trade was also present in "innocent amusements. The slave dancing a reel at the
big house or stepping it up lively in the come similarly transformed subjugation into
a pleasing display for the master, albeit disguised , to use Pierre Boutdieu's terms, by the "veil of
enchanted relationships." These gentler forms" extended and maintained the relations
of domination through euphemism and concealment. Innocent amusements
constituted a form of symbolic violence--that is, a form of domination which is
exercised through the communication in which it is disguised. When viewed in this light. the
most invasive forms of slavery's violence lie not in these exhibitions of "extreme
suffering or in what we see but in what we dont see. Shocking displays too easily
obfuscate the more mundane and socially endurable forms of terror. 92 ln the benign
scenes of plantation life (which comprised much of the Southern and, ironically. abolitionist literature of slavery)
reciprocity and recreation obscure the quotidian routine of violence. The bucolic scenes of
plantation life and the innocent amusements of the enslaved. contrary to our expectations, succeeded not in mollifying terror but in
entertaining at the big house, master cutting a figure among the dancing slaves, the mistress egging him on with her laughter, what
do we see?
Plantation K
The 1ACs focus on the plantation creates memory images of
the black body as silent, suffering, and perpetually violated.
The plantation becomes a site of racialized violence that we
run from but never stop talking about, reinforcing its violence
and shutting out any possibility of reform
McKittrick, 2013 Professor of Gender Studies @ Queen's University in
Kingston Ontario. (Katherine; Plantation Futures; Essay; Pg. 8-10; DOA: 7/6/15 ||
NDW)
It is the descriptive statement identifying black geographies as dead spaces of absolute otherness that has prompted my return to
block, a garden area, slave quarters and kitchen, stables, a cemetery, and a building or buildings through which crops are prepared,
such as a mill or a refinery; the plantation will also include a crop area and fields, woods, and a pasture. Plantation towns are linked
This is a
meaningful geographic process to keep in mind because it compels us to think
about the ways the plantation became key to transforming the lands of no one into
the lands of someone, with black forced labor propelling an economic structure that
would underpin town and industry development in the Americas. With this in mind, the
plantation spatializes early conceptions of urban life within the context of a racial
economy: the plantation contained identifiable economic zones; it bolstered economic and social growth along transportation
to transportrivers, roads, small rail networksthat enable the shipping of crops, slaves, and other commodities.
corridors; land use was for both agricultural and industrial growth; patterns of specialized activitiesfrom domestic labor and field
labor to blacksmithing, management, and church activitieswere performed; racial groups were differentially inserted into the local
economy, and so forth.31 In Cabin, Quarter, Plantation, Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsberg examine the architecture and landscape
of plantation towns in North America, adding to the racial economy by noticing the hand of enslaved workers in transforming
Indeed, the long poem draws the reader to the violent acts, the despair, and the
hopelessness that make the poet's inventory possibleone can mathematically
calculate, and gather, death:
still in June,
in their hiatus eight killed by suicide bomb at
bus station, at least eleven killed in Shula at
restaurants, at least fifteen by car bomb. (25)
of biological human life and place: Places share the problems of survival and
mortality in our biological existence. Just as biological life may be called a set of
activities intended to resist death, so our place and the world are at least partly a
means to resist psychosocial and cultural dissolution.42 One way of disclosing the
mortality of place is through expressive texts such as Brand's Inventory. These
narratives, texts that would otherwise be considered ungeographic and politically detached from the empirical work of city
plans, bear witness to the destruction of place by invoking the stakes of human
struggle. The reading-work Inventory asks us to do might not simply be to consume
transparent enumeration but rather to engage cooperative human efforts and turn
the practice of accounting for the brutalities of our world toward the reader. Reading the
textour grief will dry lakes (61)demands the reader register the data by asking why the
poet would acknowledge, make plain, and versify this data. To turn to decolonial
poetics produced by diasporic communities who have survived violent displacement
and white supremacy allows us to identify unseen and uncharted aspects of city life
and, in doing so, depict city death not as a biological end and biological fact but as
a pathway to honoring human life and what W. E. B. Du Bois called our sorrow songs
the expression[s] of human experience that have been neglected, misunderstood, despised.43 Brand's long poem
suggests that black perspectives on the city reveal spaces of absolute otherness, so
often occupied by the racially and economically condemned, are geographies of
survival, resistance, creativity, and the struggle against death . In other words, we might
read the poem not as a text that tracks a linear progression toward death but rather
as the creative consequences of the plot and the plantationa conception of the
city imbued with a narrative of black history that is neither celebratory nor dissident
but rooted in an articulation of city life that accepts that relations of violence and
domination have made our existence and presence in the Americas possible as it
recasts this knowledge to envision an alternative future. Inventory demands ethical
engagement. Brand's work often refuses a commitment to our present order of things; she writes geography and her own
political affiliations to space, as assertions of humanness rather than tacked to one side of an insider/outsider world.44 This
positioning of the poet is important, because it refuses to venerate the comforts of us/them paradigms as Brand herself writes cities
read through a different register. The lists and catalogues, the dead and dying, might be read as a way to identify that acts of
genocidal and ecocidal violence, to return to Wynter, should in no instance be taken as the index of what the empirical reality of
our social universe is.45 The aesthetics Brand provides us with in Inventory can thus be imagined as a route to noticing how the
normalization of body counts and city deaths in fact disclose the ways our present systems of urban planning and its attendant
modes of city lifethe normally good cities and the normally bad citieseffectively bind us to a process of morally geographic
human life, or a new math-space, where the calculus of human actions and
cooperative human efforts encounter poetry to reinvent the unambiguous dead-end
culmination that is so often coupled with analyses of violence (2152). Working with
Inventory requires honoring and living city life differently. The difficult poem
demands imagining cities and global struggles, plantation pasts and futures, as
predicated on all-of-human-lifeeven in deathand the work of survival. Here, we
envision a life on the edge, a geography that demands you stay alive yet threatens
your physiology, a spatial politics of living just enough, just enough for the city: this
is a political location that fosters more humanly workable, and alterable, geographic
practices.
Suffering K
The affirmative is a form of damage-centered research which
puts the slave in a matrix of pain and suffering. This focus
shuts out any other potential for the slave and reentrenches
the suffering it claims to critique
Tuck and Yang 14 (Eve Tuck professor of educational studies and coordinator
of Native American Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, K
Wayne Yang professor of ethnic studies at UC San Diego, R-Words: Refusing
Research, https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-RWords_Refusing-Research.pdf)
educational research and much of social
science research has been concerned with documenting damage, or empirically
substantiating the oppression and pain of Native communities, urban communities,
and other disenfranchised communities. Damage-centered researchers may
operate, even benevolently, within a theory of change in which harm must be
recorded or proven in order to convince an outside adjudicator that reparations
are deserved. These reparations presumably take the form of additional resources,
settlements, affirmative actions, and other material, political, and sovereign
adjustments. Eve has described this theory of change 1 as both colonial and flawed,
because it relies upon Western notions of power as scarce and concentrated,
and because it requires disenfranchised communities to position themselves as
both singularly defective and powerless to make change (2010). Finally, Eve has
observed that won reparations rarely become reality, and that in many cases,
communities are left with a narrative that tells them that they are broken.
Similarly, at the center of the analysis in this chapter is a concern with the fixation
social science research has exhibited in eliciting pain stories from communities
that are not White, not wealthy, and not straight. Academes demonstrated
fascination with telling and retelling narratives of pain is troubling, both for its
voyeurism and for its consumptive implacability. Imagining itself to be a voice,
and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised (Simpson, 2007, p. 67,
emphasis in the original) is not just a rare historical occurrence in anthropology and related
fields. We observe that much of the work of the academy is to reproduce stories of
oppression in its own voice. At first, this may read as an intolerant condemnation of the academy, one
Elsewhere, Eve (Tuck, 2009, 2010) has argued that
that refuses to forgive past blunders and see how things have changed in recent decades. However, it is our view
many individual scholars have chosen to pursue other lines of inquiry than
the pain narratives typical of their disciplines, novice researchers emerge from
doctoral programs eager to launch pain-based inquiry projects because they believe
that such approaches embody what it means to do social science. The collection of
pain narratives and the theories of change that champion the value of such
narratives are so prevalent in the social sciences that one might surmise that they
are indeed what the academy is about. In her examination of the symbolic violence of the
academy, bell hooks (1990) portrays the core message from the academy to those on the margins as thus: No
need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about
yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to
know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in
that while
such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I
am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now
at the center of my talk. (p. 343) Hookss words resonate with our observation of how much of social
science research is concerned with providing recognition to the presumed voiceless,
a recognition that is enamored with knowing through pain. Further, this passage describes the
ways in which the researchers voice is constituted by, legitimated by, animated by the
voices on the margins. The researcher-self is made anew by telling back the story
of the marginalized/subaltern subject. Hooks works to untangle the almost
imperceptible differences between forces that silence and forces that seemingly
liberate by inviting those on the margins to speak, to tell their stories. Yet the forces
that invite those on the margins to speak also say, Do not speak in a voice of
resistance. Only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a
wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain (hooks, 1990, p. 343). The costs of
a politics of recognition that is rooted in naming pain have been critiqued by recent
decolonizing and feminist scholars (Hartman, 1997, 2007; Tuck, 2009). In Scenes of Subjection, Sadiya
Hartman (1997) discusses how recognizing the personhood of slaves enhanced the
power of the Southern slaveowning class. Supplicating narratives of former slaves
were deployed effectively by abolitionists, mainly White, well-to-do, Northern
women, to generate portraits of abuse that ergo recognize slaves as human (Hartman,
2007). In response, new laws afforded minimal standards of existence, making
personhood coterminous with injury (Hartman, 1997, p. 93), while simultaneously
authorizing necessary violence to suppress slave agency. The slave emerges as a
legal person only when seen as criminal or a violated body in need of limited forms
of protection (p. 55). Recognition humanizes the slave, but is predicated upon her
or his abjection. You are in pain, therefore you are. [T]he recognition of
humanity require[s] the event of excessive violence, cruelty beyond the limits of the
socially tolerable, in order to acknowledge and protect the slaves person (p. 55).
Furthermore, Hartman describes how slave-as-victim as human accordingly establishes
slave-as-agent as criminal. Applying Hartmans analysis, we note how the agency of Margaret
Garner or Nat Turner can only be viewed as outsider violence that humane society
must reject while simultaneously upholding the legitimated violence of the state
to punish such outsider violence. Hartman asks, Is it possible that such recognition
effectively forecloses agency as the object of punishment . . . Or is this limited
conferral of humanity merely a reinscription of subjugation and pained existence?
(p. 55).
Stealing K
The 1ac advocates a means of flight, of abandoning surrender,
of becoming fugitive. Its an academic theorization of a
narrative that has been repeated for centuries; that the target
must escape the gaze of the captor to achieve freedom.
This oversimplified view infantilizes targets and real avenues
of resistance, such as strategically stealing from and utilizing
surveillance their oversimplification overlooks alternative
fugitive strategies that can be reappropriated as more
effective challenges to authority and control.
Goffman, 14 Sociology Prof @ UW-Madison, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an
American City, p 105-107 BR
From these examples, we can see that young men and women around 6th street
sometimes reappropriate the intense surveillance and the looming threat of
prison for their own purposes. Even as women endure police raids and
interrogations, and suffer the pain of betraying the man they'd rather protect, they
occasionally make use of a man's "go to jail" card to protect him from what they
perceive to be mortal danger. In anger and frustration at men's bad behavior, they
can sometimes use men's precarious legal status to control them, to get back at
them, and to punish them for any number of misdeeds. In doing so, they get men
taken into custody, not for the crimes or violations the police are concerned with,
but for personal wrongs the police may not know or care about.
Perhaps more remarkably, the young men who are the targets of these systems of
policing and surveillance occasionally succeed in using the police, the courts, and
the prisons for their own purposes. They may check themselves into jail when they
believe the streets have become too dangerous, transforming jail into a safe haven.
When they come home from jail or prison, they may turn the bail office into a kind
of bank, storing money there for specific needs later on, or using those funds as
collateral for informal loans. Young men even turn their fugitive status into an
advantage by invoking a warrant as an excuse for a variety of unmet
obligations and personal failings.
In these ways, men and women in the neighborhood turn the presence of the
police, the courts, and the prisons into a resource they make use of in
ways the authorities neither sanction nor anticipate. Taken together, these
strategies present an alternative to the view that 6th street residents are
simply the pawns of authorities, caught in legal entanglements that constrain
and oppress them.
A2 Perms
The permutation failswe must begin out-from-outside, a
space distinct and away from the relations of same and
other
Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2004
(Fred, Knowledge of Freedom, The New Centennial Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2004,
p. 281, ProjectMUSE, IC)
The point, here, is that those critiques which pay descriptive and prescriptive
attention to singularity and totality while responsibly confronting the horrific effects
of singularist totalization must be acknowledged and assimilated. But the fact that
they offer only choked and strained and silenced articulations of the wholethat
which allows our aspirations for equality, justice, freedommeans they must be
improvised. The various discourses that are informed by identity theories open the
possibility for such improvisation in their directions toward other philosophical or
anti-philosophical or antephilosophical modes of thought and representation. But it
is precisely in the thought of the other, the hope for another subjectivity and an
other ontology, that the metaphysical foundations and antilibertarian implications of
the politico-philosophical tradition to which identity theories attempt to respond are
replicated and deepened. Improvisationand thus the possibility of describing and
activating an improvisational wholeis thereby foreclosed. I want to offer here
another chorus of ensembleby way of what/whom youll come to know as Uncle
Toliveras something out-from-outside, other than the other or the same,
something unbound by their relation or nonrelation, and situated at an opening onto
the site of the intersection of the knowledge of language (as prayer, curse, narrative
[rcit or recitation]) and the knowledge of freedom (as both a negative function of
the experience of oppression and the trace of an innate endowment that serves to
bridge the gap between experience and knowledge . . .). (Chomsky 1986, xxvxxvi)
Method Answers1nc
Poems1nc
The affirmative interpretation of intersubjective meaning is
empty signification that closes down other potentialities for
meaning
Fernando 10 --- Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, Research Fellow at the Centre
for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
(Jeremy, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, ATROPOS PRESS, pg 146-147)//RAW
Not only do we have face an absolute blindness in terms of the moment when death encounters death, we are also
faced with the problem of who is recounting this moment, recalling this unrecallable moment,
and testifying to what is essentially un-testifiable . For even though every testimony requires an
uncertainty, a potentiality of fictionotherwise it would just be fact, and knowledge this moment of death
remains blind from testimony due to the fact that in order to testify, one has to have
experienced it, and if one is dead, there is no testimony that can be uttered . Hence,
this testimony, this remembering of the event of his death, can only be uttered from this position of impossibility,
this position of being living and dead at the same time, as a living-dead where one is not in either state but in a
duality, of being both self and other at the same time, of being both the 'I' and the ' he', the duality embodied in the
archipassivity, which is the "neuter and a certain neutrality of the 'narrative voice' , a voice
"young man." There is an echo of this living-dead in what Jacques Derrida says of Maurice Blanchot and
without person, without the narrative voice from which the 'I' posits and identifies itself."7 For if the "young man" is
always already potentially both the ''I" and the "he" at the same time, then the "young man"
is a signifier,
utterance without referent, without any possibility of reference: and by extension all that can be said
about death is through an imaginative gesture: the instant of death is the instant in which death
is uttered, but it is nothing more or less than an utterance. It is this "unanalyzable
state of death that continues to haunt us, and unsettle us. For if it is undefinable and
remains always in the realm of the imagination not only can one not be certain about death, it is
always already in full potentiality. And like the problem that Vladimir and Estragon face in never being able to
tell if and when Godot comes, we face the same dilemma : we would not know even if death is
staring us in the face.
is an
-- A2 We Dont Interpret
The affirmatives refusal to engage in even a subjective
interpretation of poetry constitutes a withdrawal from life
itself. Only intersubjective meaning can continue the
conversation.
Fernando 10 --- Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, Research Fellow at the Centre
for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
(Jeremy, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, ATROPOS PRESS, pg 219-220)//RAW
In all of this, there is always already an echo of the strange pairing of despair and
hope in the Beckettian formulation of not being able to go on, but yet having to at the same
time. We also hear this strange paradox resound in Wolfgang Schirmacher's wonderful response to aporia, one
that he formulates in his deceptively simple maxim of 'Just Living'. This is not a over-arching philosophy to life - one
All you
can ever do is choose, respond, livelive your life as a concept, life in general, will
take care of itself. In other words, in order to live life, you have to actually distance
yourself, at least momentarily, from life as an idea, and actually be ambivalent to
life. When one is asked, 'how to live', the only answer which is at best a provisional response is you just do.
And perhaps it is in this ambivalence towards the answer of having to come up with a provisional
answer whilst knowing that it is only provisional at the same time that allows one
to maintain a proper distance as it were, towards the answer, towards a final
solution.
that frames, guides, or attempts to be a framework - but the exact opposite; it is a response to life itself.
the chuckle lies not an ironic distance that is indifferent to anything and
everything. That would be a position of utter and absolute non-response ; what Slavoj Zizek
For, in
Apparently most of them seemed to have completely overlooked - effaced - the fact that in Buddhism, the self is
completely absent as well; the self is absolutely other to itself.
Narratives1nc
Trading autobiographical narrative for the ballot commodifies
ones identity and has limited impact on the culture that one
attempts to reform when autobiographical narrative wins,
it subverts its own most radical intentions by becoming an
exemplar of the very culture under indictment
Coughlin 95associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. (Anne,
REGULATING THE SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER
SCHOLARSHIP, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1229)
Although Williams is quick to detect insensitivity and bigotry in remarks made by
strangers, colleagues, and friends, her taste for irony fails her when it comes to reflection
on her relationship with her readers and the material benefits that her
autobiographical performances have earned for her. n196 Perhaps Williams should be more
inclined to thank, rather than reprimand, her editors for behaving as readers of autobiography invariably do. When
we examine this literary faux pas - the incongruity between Williams's condemnation of her editors and the
professional benefits their publication secured her - we detect yet another contradiction between the outsiders' use
of autobiography and their desire to transform culture radically. Lejeune's characterization of autobiography as a
Certainly, publication of a best seller may transform its author's life, with the resulting commercial success and
While
writing a successful autobiography may be momentous for the individual author,
this success has a limited impact on culture. Indeed, the transformation of
outsider authors into "success stories" subverts outsiders' radical
intentions by constituting them as exemplary participants within
contemporary culture, willing to market even themselves to literary and academic consumers. n203
What good does this transformation do for outsiders who are less
fortunate and less articulate than middle-class law professors? n204 Although they style
themselves cultural critics, the [*1284] storytellers generally do not reflect
on the meaning of their own commercial success, nor ponder its
entanglement with the cultural values they claim to resist . Rather, for the most
part, they seem content simply to take advantage of the peculiarly American license, identified by
Professor Sacvan Bercovitch, "to have your dissent and make it too." n205
academic renown. n201 As one critic of autobiography puts it, "failures do not get published." n202
those
who participate in autobiographical discourse speak not in a different voice, but in a
common voice that reflects their membership in a culture devoted to liberal
values. n206 As Sacvan Bercovitch puts it, American cultural ideals, including specifically the mythic connection
experiences and political perspectives, numerous historians and critics of autobiography have insisted that
between the "heroic individual ... [and] the values of free enterprise," are "epitomized in autobiography." n207 In his
seminal essay on the subject, Professor Georges Gusdorf makes an observation that seems like a prescient warning
practice of writing
one's own self reflects a belief in the autonomous individual, which is "peculiar to
Western man, a concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest of
the [*1285] universe and that he has communicated to men of other cultures; but those men will thereby have
to outsiders who would appropriate autobiography as their voice. He remarks that the
about
been annexed by a sort of intellectual colonizing to a mentality that was not their own." n208 Similarly, Albert
n209 Stone begins to elucidate the prescriptive character of autobiographical discourse as he notes with wonder
"the tenacious social ideal whose persistence is all the more significant when found repeated in personal histories of
Afro-Americans, immigrants, penitentiary prisoners, and others whose claims to full individuality have often been
affirming the myths of individual success in our culture, autobiography reproduces the [*1286] political, economic,
social and psychological structures that attend such success. n211 In this light, the outsider autobiographies
unwittingly deflect attention from collective social responsibility and thwart the development of collective solutions
for the eradication of racist and sexist harms. Although we may suspect in some cases that the author's own sense
of self was shaped by a community whose values oppose those of liberal individualism, her decision to register her
experience in autobiographical discourse will have a significant effect on the self she reproduces. n212 Her story
will solicit the public's attention to the life of one individual, and it will privilege her individual desires and rights
above the needs and obligations of a collectivity. Moreover, literary theorists have remarked the tendency of
narrative engrosses the readers' imagination. Fascinated by the travails and triumphs of the developing
autobiography is the product of a culture that cultivates human individuality, the genre seems to make available
only a limited number of autobiographical protagonists. n214 Many theorists have noticed that when an author
assumes the task of defining her own, unique subjectivity, she invariably reproduces herself as a character with
whom culture already is well-acquainted. n215 While a variety of forces coerce the autobiographer [*1287] to
conform to culturally sanctioned human models, n216 the pressures exerted by the literary market surely play a
-- A2 Metaphors
Metaphors fail
Dillon 13 assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of
Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality
Studies from the University of Minnesota. (Stephen, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender,
and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State ,A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA , May
2013 //SRSL)
writes: And from the first letter to
the last, nothing has been willed, written or composed for the sake of a book, yet
here is a book, tough and sure, both a weapon of liberation and a love poem. In this
case I see no miracle except the miracle of truth itself, the naked truth revealed. 527
In his afterword to George Jacksons Soledad Brother, Jean Genet
I return to this quote because it sums up the project of Fugitive Life. It can be easy to overlookor indeed to erase
and ignorethe truth produced by those forced to inhabit the time of slow death and spaces of social death.
Fugitive Life has argued that there is a truth that lies within what has been erased, destroyed, and rendered
invisible. Many of the writings examined throughout this project are documents that are not supposed to exist.
Some were written on toilet paper and smuggled out of prisons. Some were spoken through glass walls and
composed by lawyers. Some were written on the run from forces seeking the authors capture. And some were
than a flash or revelation, if it is a piling up, if time does not pass but accumulates, then one must be able to search
the wreckage, but also see what was destroyed along the way. In Fugitive Life, I have tried to search what has been
left behind, forgotten, and erased in an attempt to comprehend neoliberalism and the prison in ways that open new
lines of thought when considering the unprecedented economic and penal changes of the last forty years. In the
working to destroy the very object of study. One certainly needs to be cautious, but caution is required in any
scholarly and political project. Pitfalls, traps,e and opportunities for collusion abound. However, I do think there is a
danger in Critical Prison studies becoming divorced from the insights, theories, and concerns produced by people in
prison and people targeted by the police. This is why Genets insight is so crucial. Fugitive Life has shown that the
theories of incarceration now central to what is becoming Critical Prison studies were first articulated by imprisoned
black feminists, underground feminist writing groups, and queer activists on the run in the 1970s. If scholars of the
prison are to truly understand the convergence of neoliberalism and the prison, reckoning with and further
exploring this rich body of work is of the utmost importance. Simply put, Critical Prison studies must be intimately
connected to the concerns and epistemologies of prisoners and former prisoners. There is another critical warning
embedded in Daviss speech. There is a danger in Critical Prison studies mistaking the end of the prison for the end
of power. Fugitive Life positions the prison as site from which to advance the study of power; the object is
important, but not essential. The prison could disappear tomorrow and the forms of power that gave rise to its reign
could live on in other forms. Indeed, this is one of the lessons of the Control Unit at Lexington. The Lexington unit
was shut down, but a new unit opened up in Florida, another in California, another in Colorado, and on and on. All
the while the Federal Prison at Marion has held prisoners in isolation since 1972. The end of Lexington was a
symptom that could have been misunderstood as a solution. Daviss writing from prison addresses the problem of
mistaking the prison for power when confronting and theorizing the politics of incarceration. In the 1971 essay
Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation, Davis argues that the sole purpose of the police was to
intimidate blacks and to to persuade us with their violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our
imaginaries at the time, Davis wanted more than an end to the prison and the violence of the police. Like other
early black feminist writing, Davis did not just call for the overthrow of one form of state power so that a new one
may take its place. Instead, Davis implied that the social order itself must be undone. For Davis, the prison was not
the primary problem. The prison was made possible by the libidinal, symbolic, and discursive regimes that
actualized the uneven institutionalized distribution of value and disposability along the lines of race, gender, and
sexuality. Davis called for the total epistemological and ontological undoing of the forms of knowledge and
subjectivity that were produced by the racial state. In short, hope, for Davis, meant that the prison could not have a
future, and more so, that a world that could have the prison would need to end as well. This insight of Daviss is
why Critical Prison studies must engage queer of color and feminist of color scholarship. The critique of the prison
advanced by many scholars of the prison does not comprehend the forms of devaluation that render poor women of
color and queer people of color vulnerable to the power that makes the prison possible. As I have been arguing
through Fugitive Life, the prison is more than an institution, more than cement and steel walls, more than razor
wire. In her 1979 essay, Coming of Age: A Black Revolutionary the Black Panther and Black Liberation Army
member Safiya Bukhari described this when she wrote, The maturation process is full of obstacles and
had to say
that, even though nothing as spectacular takes place in the maturation process of
the average black woman.531 Like the writings of Assata Shakur and Davis,
Bukhari argues that everyday life in the free world mimicked and replicated her
experience of incarceration. For her, black womens lives are a story of humiliation,
degradation, deprivation, and waste that [starts] in infancy and [lasts] until death,
but unlike stories of spectacular repression and brutality in the prison, the
forms of subjection and subjugation black women experience are so banal
that metaphors fail to describe them.532 For Bukhari, the Greek myth of the Minotaurs maze
entanglements for anyone, but for a black woman it has all the markings of a Minotaurs maze. I
describes the impossibility of escape that confronts black women and other people surrounded by capitalism, white
supremacy, and sexism. Yet the analogy fails because the impossibility of escape is not isolated to a maze or a
prisonit describes the mundane contours of the world. Bukhari, Davis, and Shakur are three women who have all
been prisoners and fugitives, and their critiques of the prison and neoliberalism emerged from these two symbiotic
positionalities. The fugitive and the prisoner are figures we can turn to as the sites of an immanent critique of the
states policing and penal powersfigures produced by those same formations. As fugitives and prisoners, Davis,
Shakur, and Bukhari could see what they could not see beforeinvisible things became glaring in an absence they
no longer inhabited, and what had always been visible became strange and unfamiliar. Running away was a tactic
that challenged the power of the neoliberal-carceral state, yet it also opened up new formations of knowledge and
Yet, like Jennys flight from the police and the regulatory power of knowledge
in American Woman, Davis, Shakur, and Bukhari were not only forced to flee the
police and disappear into the world of the underground; they have also been
fugitives from normative modes of thought. They were always trying to flee the
forms of knowledge constitutive of the racial state, the prison, heteronormativity,
and new formations of global capital. For all three, there might not be a way out, but
that does not mean you stay put. In his correspondence with Barbara Smith, the
white anti-racist and anti- imperialist political prisoner David Gilbert describes the
imperative to escape through his transcription of a poem to Smith written by the
Turkish political prisoner Nazim Hikmet, Its This Way. I stand in the advancing
light, my hands hungry, the world beautiful. My eyes cant get enough of the trees - theyre so
politics.
hopeful, so green. A sunny road runs through the mulberries, Im at the window of the prison infirmary. I cant smell
the medicines- carnations must be blooming nearby. Its this way: being captured is beside the point, the point is
not to surrender.533 Even though Gilberts body is immobilized, and will be until he dies, he remains committed to
Music1nc
Musical performance cannot act as vehicle for resistance it
operates through a circular logic: one starts with identifying
the groups that are hegemonic and the groups that are
marginal and then simply valorizes the practices of those
groups without rigorously researching and debating the
material political conditions that produce poverty, racism, and
violence. This undermines political agency by offering the
false hope that engaging in the practices that become the
markers of identity is political while remaining elusive
whenever one is pressed to define the conditions of oppression
that one opposes and whenever one is challenged to defend
the substantive politics that might actual redress those
conditions.
Gitlin 97sociology, Columbia (Todd, The anti-political populism of cultural
studies, Dissent; Spring, Vol. 44, Iss. 2; p 77, ProQuest)
From the late 1960s onward, as I have said, the insurgent energy was to be found in
movements that aimed to politicize specific identities-racial minorities, women,
gays. If the "collective behavior" school of once-conventional sociology had grouped
movements in behalf of justice and democratic rights together with fads and
fashions, cultural studies now set out to separate movements from fads, to take
seriously the accounts of movement participants themselves, and thereby to restore
the dignity of the movements only to end up, in the 1980s, linking movements with
fads by finding equivalent dignity in both spheres, so that, for example, dressing like
Madonna might be upgraded to an act of "resistance" equivalent to demonstrating
in behalf of the right to abortion, and watching a talk show on family violence was
positioned on the same plane. In this way, cultural studies extended the New Left
symbiosis with popular culture. Eventually, the popular culture of marginal groups
(punk, reggae, disco, feminist poetry, hip-hop) was promoted to a sort of
counterstructure of feeling, and even, at the edges, a surrogate politics-a sphere of
thought and sensibility thought to be insulated from the pressures of hegemonic
discourse, of instrumental reason, of economic rationality, of class, gender, and
sexual subordination. The other move in cultural studies was to claim that culture
continued radical politics by other means. The idea was that cultural innovation was
daily insinuating itself into the activity of ordinary people. Perhaps the millions had
not actually been absorbed into the hegemonic sponge of mainstream popular
culture. Perhaps they were freely dissenting. If "the revolution" had receded to the
point of invisibility, it would be depressing to contemplate the victory of a
hegemonic culture imposed by strong, virtually irresistible media. How much more
reassuring to detect "resistance" saturating the pores of everyday life! In this spirit,
there emerged a welter of studies purporting to discover not only the "active"
participation of audiences in shaping the meaning of popular culture, but the
"resistance" of those audiences to hegemonic frames of interpretation in a variety
culture is more than an academic's way of filling her hours; it is a useful certification
of the people and their projects. To put it more neutrally, the political aura of
cultural studies is supported by something like a "false consciousness" premise: the
analytical assumption that what holds the ruling groups in power is their capacity to
muffle, deform, paralyze, or destroy contrary tendencies of an emotional or
ideological nature. By the same token, if there is to be a significant "opposition," it
must first find a base in popular culture-and first also turns out to be second, third,
and fourth, since popular culture is so much more accessible, so much more porous,
so much more changeable than the economic and political order. With time, what
began as compensation hardened-became institutionalized-into a tradition. Younger
scholars gravitated to cultural studies because it was to them incontestable that
culture was politics. To do cultural studies, especially in connection with identity
politics, was the politics they knew. The contrast with the rest of the West is
illuminating. In varying degrees, left-wing intellectuals in France, Italy, Scandinavia,
Germany, Spain and elsewhere retain energizing attachments to Social Democratic,
Green, and other left-wing parties. There, the association of culture with excellence
and traditional elites remains strong. But in the Anglo-American world, including
Australia, these conditions scarcely obtain. Here, in a discouraging time, popular
culture emerges as a consolation prize. (The same happened in Latin America, with
the decline of left-wing hopes.) The sting fades from the fragmentation of the
organized left, the metastasis of murderous nationalism, the twilight of socialist
dreams virtually everywhere. Class inequality may have soared, ruthless
individualism may have intensified, the conditions of life for the poor may have
worsened, racial tensions may have mounted, unions and social democratic
parties may have weakened or reached an impasse, but never mind. Attend to
popular culture, study it with sympathy, and one need not dwell on unpleasant
realities. One need not be unduly vexed by electoral defeats. One need not be
preoccupied by the ways in which the political culture's center of gravity has moved
rightward-or rather, one can put this down to the iron grip of the established media
institutions. One need not even be rigorous about what one opposes and
what one proposes in its place. Is capitalism the trouble? Is it the particular form
of capitalism practiced by multinational corporations in a deregulatory era? Is it
patriarchy (and is that the proper term for a society that has seen an upheaval in
relations between women and men in the course of a half-century)? Racism?
Antidemocracy? Practitioners of cultural studies, like the rest of the academic left,
are frequently elusive. Speaking cavalierly of "opposition" and "resistance"
permits-rather, cultivates-a certain sloppiness of thinking, making it possible to
remain "left" without having to face the most difficult questions of political
selfdefinition. The situation of cultural studies conforms to the contours of our
political moment. It confirms-and reinforces-the current paralysis: the
incapacity of social movements and dissonant sensibilities to imagine effective
forms of public engagement. It substitutes an obsession with popular culture for
coherent economic-political thought or a connection with mobilizable populations
outside the academy and across identity lines. One must underscore that this is not
simply because of cultural studies' default. The default is an effect more than a
cause. It has its reasons. The odds are indeed stacked against serious forward
motion in conventional politics. Political power is not only beyond reach, but
functional majorities disdain it, finding the government and all its works
contemptible. Few of the central problems of contemporary civilization are seriously
contested within the narrow band of conventional discourse. Unconventional
politics, such as it is, is mostly fragmented and self-contained along lines of racial,
gender, and sexual identities. One cannot say that cultural studies diverts energy
from a vigorous politics that is already in force. Still, insofar as cultural studies
makes claims for itself as an insurgent politics, the field is presumptuous and
misleading. Its attempt to legitimize the ecstasies of the moment confirms the
collective withdrawal from democratic hope. Seeking to find political energies
in audiences who function as audiences, rather than in citizens functioning as
citizens, the dominant current in cultural studies is pressed willy-nilly toward an
uncritical celebration of technological progress. It offers no resistance to the
primacy of visual and nonlinear culture over the literary and linear. To the contrary:
it embraces technological innovation as soon as the latest developments prove
popular. It embraces the sufficiency of markets; its main idea of the intellect's
democratic commitment is to flatter the audience. Is there a chance of a modest
redemption? Perhaps, if we imagine a harder headed, less wishful cultural studies,
free of the burden of imagining itself to be a political practice. A chastened, realistic
cultural studies would divest itself of political pretensions. It would not claim to
be politics. It would not mistake the academy for the larger society. It would be less
romantic about the world-and about itself. Rigorous practitioners of cultural studies
should be more curious about the world that remains to be researched and
changed. We would learn more about politics, economy, and society, and in the
process, appreciate better what culture, and cultural study, do not accomplish.
If we wish to do politics, let us organize groups, coalitions, demonstrations,
lobbies, whatever; let us do politics. Let us not think that our academic work is
already that.
inane ditty that anchors the fantasy, that runs endlessly in one's head; what one wishes to add
here is the criterion of force, of intensity, of sound so loud that, even though it is a cultural
product from top to bottom, it nonetheless enfolds the audience and isolates it
within the symbolic order. The intensity of loud drowns out the Other. It is the limit
of the symbolic, its null point, experienced in the very onslaught of its signs . Perhaps
we could appropriate a Lacanian term for this fantastic volume that goes beyond fantasy: the
*sinthome.*
Hip Hop1nc
Hip hop is inevitably marketed to white consumers- turns black
culture into a commodity that can be tossed away
-Card can also be used as an alt- diaspora movement
the centerpiece of critical cultural analysis. Gilroy plainly asserts that the starting point of this book is that the era
of New Racism is emphatically over (34).
new conceptual focus. When Gilroy delineates the elements and dimensions of diaspora, culture provides
the basic conceptual background and terminology. In characterizing the Atlantic diaspora and its
successor-cultures, Gilroy sequentially invokes black cultural styles and postslave cultures
that have supplied a platform for youth cultures , popular cultures, and styles of dissent far from
their place of origin (178). Gilroy explains how the cultural expressions of hip-hop and rap,
along with other expressive forms of black popular culture, are marketed by the
cultural industries to white consumers who currently support this black culture
(181). Granted, in these uses of culture Gilroy remains critical of absolutist
definitions of culture and the process of commodification that culture in turn
supports. But his move away from race importantly hinges upon some notion of
culture. We may be able to do away with race, but seemingly not with culture.
Rap and hip hop are tools to be exploited by corporations- images of rap
as a platform just entrench racism
Kitwana 2- fellow at the Jamestown Project, think tank @ Harvard
(Bakari, The Hip Hop Generation, p. 9-11)
Let us begin with popular culture and the visibility of Black youth within it. Today,
more and more Black youth are turning to rap music, music videos, designer
clothing, popular Black films, and television programs for values and identity. One
can find the faces, bodies, attitudes, and language of Black youth attached to slick
advertisements that sell what have become global products, whether its Coca-Cola
and Pepsi, Reebok and Nike sneakers, films such as Love Jones and Set it Off, or
popular rap artists like Missy Elliot and Busta Rhymes. Working diligently behind the
scene and toward the bottom line are the multinational corporations that produce,
distribute, and shape these images. That Black youth in New Orleans, Louisiana,
and Champaign, Illinois, for example, share similar dress styles, colloquialisms, and
body language with urban kids from Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City is not
coincidental. We live in an age where corporate mergers, particularly in media and
entertainment, have redefined public space. Within this largely expanded public
space, the viewing public is constantly bombarded by visual images that have
become central to the identity of an entire generation. Within the arena of popular
culture, rap music more than anything else has helped shape the new Black youth
culture. From 1997 to 1998, rap music sales showed a 31 percent increase, making
rap the fastest growing music genre, ahead of country, rock, classical, and all other
musical forms. By 1998 rap was the top-selling musical format, outdistancing rock
music and country music, the previous leading sellers. Rap musics prominence on
the American music scene was evident by the late 1990s- from its increasing
presence at the Grammys (which in 1998, for example, awarded rapper Lauryn Hill
five awards) to its pervasiveness in advertisements for mainstream corporation like
AT&T, The Gap, Levis, and so on. Cultural critic Cornel West, in his prophetic Race
Matters (Beacon Press, 1993), refers to this high level of visibility of young blacks,
primarily professional athletes and entertainers, in American popular culture as the
Afro-Americanization of white youth. The Afro-Americanization of white youth has
been more a male than female affair given the prominence of male athletes and the
cultural weight of male pop artists. This process results in white youth-male and
female- imitating and emulating black male styles of walking, talking, dressing and
gesticulating in relations to others. The irony in our present moment is that just as
young black men are murdered, maimed, and imprisoned in record numbers, their
styles have become disproportionately influential in shaping popular culture.
Whereas previously the voices of young Blacks had been locked out of the global
ages public square, the mainstreaming of rap music now gave Black youth more
visibility and a broader platform than we ever had enjoyed before. At the same
time, it gave young Blacks across the country who identified with it and were
informed by it a medium through which to share a national culture. In the process,
rap artists became the dominant public voice of this generation. Many have been
effective in bringing the generations issues to the fore. From NWA to Master P,
rappers- through their lyrics, style, and attitude- helped to carve a new Black youth
identity into the national landscape. Rappers access to global media and their use
of popular culture to articulate many aspects of this national identity renders rap
music central to any discussion of the new Black youth culture. The irony in all this
is that the global corporate structure that gave young Blacks a platform was the
driving force behind our plight.
Performance 1nc
Performance is not a mode of resistance it gives too much
power to the audience because the performer is structurally
blocked from controlling the (re)presentation of their
representations. Appealing to the ballot is a way of turning
over ones identity to the same reproductive economy that
underwrites liberalism
Phelan 96chair of New York University's Department of Performance Studies
(Peggy, Unmarked: the politics of performance, ed published in the Taylor & Francis
e-Library, 2005, 146-9)
146
Performances only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved,
recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of
representations of representations : once it does so, it becomes something
other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the
economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own
ontology. Performances being, like the ontology of subjectivityproposed here, becomes itself through
disappearance.
The other arts, especially painting and photography, are drawnincreasingly toward performance. The French-born artist Sophie
Calle,for example, has photographed the galleries of the Isabella StewartGardner Museum in Boston. Several valuable paintings
were stolen fromthe museum in 1990. Calle interviewed various visitors and membersof the muse um staff, asking them to describe
the stolen paintings. She then transcribed these texts and placed them next to the photographs of the galleries. Her work suggests
that the descriptions and memories of the paintings constitute their continuing presence, despite the absence of the paintings
Calle gestures toward a notion of the interactive exchange between the art
and the viewer. While such exchanges are often recorded as the stated goals of museums
and galleries, the institutional effect of the gallery often seems to put the masterpiece
under house arrest , controlling all conflicting and unprofessional
commentary about it. The speech act of memory and description (Austins constative utterance) becomes a
themselves.
object
asked them to draw small pictures of their memories of the paintings. She then arranged the texts and pictures according to the
exact dimensions of the circulating paintings and placed them on the wall where the actual paintings usually hang. Calle calls her
piece Ghosts, and as the visitor discovers Calles work spread throughout the museum, it is as if Calles own eye is following and
tracking the viewer as she makes her way through the museum.1 Moreover, Calles work seems to disappear because it is dispersed
throughout the permanent collectiona collection which circulates despite its permanence. Calles artistic contribution is a kind
of self-concealment in which she offers the words of others about other works of art under her own artistic signature. By making
visible her attempt to offer what she does not have, what cannot be seen, Calle subverts the goal of museum display. She exposes
what the museum does not have and cannot offer and uses that absence to generate her own work. By placing memories in the
place of paintings, Calle asks that the ghosts of memory be seen as equivalent to the permanent collection of great works. One
senses that if she asked the same people over and over about the same paintings, each time they would describe a slightly different
painting. In this sense, Calle demonstrates the performative quality of all seeing.
148
was the affinity between the ideology of capitalism and art made more manifest than in the debates about the funding policies for
the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).2 Targeting both photography and performance art, conservative politicians sought to
prevent endorsing the real bodies implicated and made visible by these art forms. Performance implicates the real through the
presence of living bodies. In performance art spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no left-overs, the gazing
spectator must try to take everything in. Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibilityin a maniacally charged present
and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control. Performance
resists the balanced circulations of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends. While photography is vulnerable to charges of
counterfeiting and copying, performance art is vulnerable to charges of valuelessness and emptiness. Performance indicates the
possibility of revaluing that emptiness; this potential revaluation gives performance art its distinctive oppositional edge.3 To attempt
to write about the undocumentable event of performance is to invoke the rules of the written document and thereby alter the event
itself. Just as quantum physics discovered that macro-instruments cannot measure microscopic particles without transforming those
particles, so too must performance critics realize that the labor to write about performance (and thus to preserve it) is also a labor
that fundamentally alters the event. It does no good, however, to simply refuse to write about performance because of this
inescapable transformation. The challenge raised by the ontological claims of performance for writing is to re-mark again the
performative possibilities of writing itself. The act of writing toward disappearance, rather than the act of writing toward
preservation, must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself. This is the project of
Roland Barthes in both Camera Lucida and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. It is also his project in Empire of Signs, but in this
book he takes the memory of a city in which he no longer is, a city from which he disappears, as the motivation for the search for a
disappearing performative writing. The trace left by that script is the meeting-point of a mutual disappearance; shared subjectivity is
possible for Barthes because two people can recognize the same Impossible. To live for a love whose goal is to share the Impossible
is both a humbling project and an exceedingly ambitious one, for it seeks to find connection only in that which is no longer there.
Memory. Sight. Love. It must involve a full seeing of the Others absence (the ambitious part), a seeing which also entails the
acknowledgment of the Others presence (the humbling part). For to acknowledge the Others (always partial) presence is to
acknowledge ones own (always partial) absence. In the field of linguistics, the performative speech act shares with the ontology of
performance the inability to be reproduced or repeated. Being an individual and historical act, a performative utterance cannot be
repeated. Each reproduction is a new act performed by someone who is qualified. Otherwise, the reproduction of the performative
utterance by someone else necessarily transforms it into a constative utterance.4
149
Writing, an activity which relies on the reproduction of the Same(the three letters cat will repeatedly signify the four-legged furry
animalwith whiskers) for the production of meaning, can broach the frame of performance but cannot mimic an art that is
this strength. Writing aboutperformance often, unwittingly, encourages this weakness and falls inbehind the drive of the
Topicality
T-Version**
Multiple topical versions of the aff that prove the aff can
discuss both institutionalized racism and how Blacks have
responded (i.e. fugitivity)welfare searches, stop-and-frisk,
public housing surveillance, stop-and-sniff, motor vehicle
stops, etc., are all topical policy proposals that solve
Bailey, Chicago-Kent law assistant professor, 2014 (Kimberly D.,
Watching Me: The War on Crime, Privacy, and the State, University of California
Davis Law Review, Vol. 47, January 2014,
http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=3395&context=fac_schol, p. 1555-1561, IC)
Scholars have documented the fact that the poor and people of color continue to
have the least amount of privacy in our society and, therefore, they are still the
most vulnerable to more extreme state social control policies.101 Some argue that
welfare is still a means of regulating the sexual behavior of many poor, single
women.102 Indeed, many women currently must participate in mandatory paternity
proceedings in order to be entitled to benefits, and many jurisdictions impose family
caps, which limit cash benefit increases for any children conceived while the mother
is receiving welfare benefits.103 Recipients of state funded prenatal care often have
to endure highly embarrassing and intrusive questions about their parenting history,
criminal history, immigration status, contraceptive use, and finances, which
middleand upper-class women simply do not have to endure.104 Furthermore, the
Supreme Court has held that welfare recipients are not entitled to Fourth
Amendment rights when it comes to searches in their homes.105 Social workers can
stop by and search a recipients home and interview her with no warning or warrant.
As will be discussed more fully below, the privacy invasions that result from current
criminal justice policies also contribute to greater social control of poor people of
color because of the chilling effects they have on selfdetermination, freedom of
association, and freedom of expression.
In addition to making poor people of color more vulnerable to oppressive state
social control, the war on crime has also created serious dignitary harms. When the
state curtails privacy, it sends a powerful message: an individual cannot be trusted
to use his privacy in legitimate ways.106 For example, parents tend to give their
children less privacy because they do not yet trust that the children have the
maturity and wisdom not to make choices that could potentially harm themselves or
others. Likewise, one reason we limit the privacy of prisoners is because their past
acts suggest that we cannot trust them not to engage in criminal and potentially
dangerous activities, at least for a set period of time. The lack of trust expressed by
the state through the war on crime, therefore, at best resembles a form of
paternalism; at worst, it resembles a form de facto criminalization of individuals
simply because they are poor and of color.107 These individuals logically conclude
that the state does not respect them nor does it view their identities and viewpoints
as equal to those of white and wealthier citizens.108
stereotypical ethnic clothing and hair styles to make themselves less likely to be
accosted by the police.129 They also describe taking public transportation and
avoiding walking altogether to avoid encounters with law enforcement on the
street.130 Others describe how young people have to stay indoors and cannot play
outside.131 Adults feel like they cannot sit on the porch or go to the store or
interact with their neighbors.132
The police have particularly focused on public housing sites for heightened
surveillance,133 but the city of New York also has a special program, Operation
Clean Halls, which involves private buildings.134 Under this program, owners of
private buildings sign contracts with the New York Police Department, which allows
the police to patrol these buildings.135 African-Americans and Latinos are
disproportionately stopped by police as part of this program.136
In order to avoid the accusation of trespassing, many New Yorkers report always
carrying identification or a piece of mail verifying that they live in a particular
building.137 Some report that residents of a building may even have to produce a
lease in order to avoid arrest.138 For many, they daily must endure police inquiries
of, Do you live here?139 New Yorkers report that they also carry pay stubs to
prove that they have a legitimate source of income.140
In Chicago, police cars patrol public housing projects and when they stop, every
young African-American man in the area automatically places his hands against the
car and spreads his legs to be searched.141 This automatic reflex to assume the
position happens in poor communities of color across the nation,142 and it
underscores how constant police presence and surveillance have become woven
into the everyday fabric of poor, urban life. It is not surprising, therefore, that
residents in these communities describe this constant presence as a type of
military occupation143 or outside prison.144
A variation of the stop-and-frisk is the stop-and-sniff. New York police officers will
stop individuals drinking from cups in public.145 They then ask to sniff the contents
of the individuals cup to see if it contains alcohol.146 If it smells like alcohol, they
are issued a summons for public drinking.147 The penalty for the offense is small at
twentyfive dollars per ticket, but the real purpose for these stops is to have an
excuse to check to see if an individual has any outstanding warrants.148 As is the
case with stop-and-frisk practices, residents are angry and resentful when police
officers demand to sniff the contents of their cups.149 Furthermore, one judge
found that 85% of the summonses that were issued during one month in Brooklyn
were to AfricanAmericans and Latinos.150
Just as is the case with stops-and-frisks, motor vehicle stops are a numbers
game.151 As a result, tens of thousands of innocent individuals are pulled over
every year as part of the war on drugs.152 Unfortunately, a disproportionate
number of these individuals are African-American and Latino.153 Indeed, many are
familiar with the terms driving while black or driving while brown, which refer to
the disproportionate effects of traffic stops on African-Americans and Latinos.154
Some New Yorkers report that they avoid driving altogether and opt for public
transportation in order to avoid these confrontations.155
Surveillance**
Surveillance mattersit is part and parcel to the creation of
the Black as criminal and lesserinstitutional engagement is
necessary to change it
Brucato, former Union College adjunct professor, 2014 (Ben,
Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy: From Slave Catchers to Petty
Sovereigns, ResearchGate, Theoria, December 2014,
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ben_Brucato/publication/269998697_Fabricating
_the_Color_Line_in_a_White_Democracy_From_Slave_Catchers_to_Petty_Sovereigns/l
inks/5564740608ae6f4dcc99eb45.pdf, p. 48, IC)
In 1721, the first agency in the U.S. that looked anything like modern police was
given its mandate: prevent Black insurrection. This mandate has remained core to
U.S. police ever since. Nothing more profoundly explains the persistence in racial
outcomes of policing than this genetic moment, as throughout the nearly 300 years
since, all reforms to the institution have managed to retain this imperative, when
not in directive then certainly in practice. The historical practices of police in
fulfilling this mandate have not only shaped contemporary policing, but also
established that Black insurrection is to be prevented through constant proximity of
police to communities of colour, intensive surveillance, routine harassment and
violent terror by agents of the state and white citizens. Nonetheless, specific
political and juridical adaptations have directed these activities. Since
Reconstruction, the line between the symbols 'young Black male' and 'criminal' is
difficult to draw. The two categories practically define one another. It is through the
surveillance and physical violence of police that the symbolic violence of this
identity is made functional, reliable and durable.
Police, by virtue of this mandate, is the strong blue thread that weaves together the
white race and the state, forming a barrier to full political inclusion of non-whites. As
such, this institution represents a key point of strategic intervention to weaken the
centuries-old white democracy. Just as race has been a primary point of tension that
has been central to every political shift in U.S. history, the peculiar institution of U.S.
police has been profoundly implicated in these processes. The institution has both
shaped these events and been shaped by them.
State key**
Identity is not constructed in isolation from political norms,
but rather, is constructed by institutionsrecognizing how the
state interacts with the formation of identities is key
Hayward, Washington University in St. Louis political science
associate professor, and Watson, Washington University in St.
Louis doctoral student, 2010 (Clarissa and Ron, Identity and Political
Theory, Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, Vol. 33, Issue 1, January
2010, http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1064&context=law_journal_law_policy, p. 31-33, IC)
This is not our view. Political theory, we want to suggest in the final sections of this
Article, can and should continue to contribute to work on the role of the state in
identity politics. Indeed, some of the most important work on this topic in recent
years has been by theorists who are beginning to shift the terms of the debate.98 To
frame identity politics normative-political problem in terms of state recognition
in terms of its benefits or its burdensis a mistake, their claim is. Although Taylors
work in the early 1990s performed the critically important task of drawing attention
to the limits of toleration and initiating a conversation about other state responses
to identity politics, his languageindeed, the very logic of recognition misleads.
The term recognition, along with much of the debate about identity that has been
conducted using that term, implies, erroneously, that states merely react tothat
they acknowledge the existence or truth of (or, alternatively, refuse to
acknowledge)racial, national, ethnic, gendered, and other collective identities.99
But states never simply recognize (or refuse to recognize) identities. Instead, they
play a crucial role in producing and reproducing them. States strongly shape
national identities, for example, through citizenship law and family law.100 States
strongly shape racial, ethnic, and gender identities, as well. They institutionalize
them in legal norms and in policies, for example, in census categories, and in the
case of race in the United States, in racial zoning laws and explicitly racist federal
housing policies.101 States vest some, but not other, identities with public
significance by distributing resources and opportunities along group lines.102 They
thus influence how citizens identify, and incentivize people to organize and mobilize
as members of particular groups.
States construct identities, in other words, even before people advance political
claims in their names, shaping group boundaries, group norms, and group practices,
through laws, policies, and political institutions. What is more, when people press
claims in the name of identity, state responses to those claims never simply
acknowledge [identitys] existence or truth (or fail to). Instead, they actively
produce and reproduce identity. Recall Charles Taylors example of the proposed
Meech amendment to the Canadian constitution. Even Taylor would acknowledge
that the Canadian state changes Quebecois culture when it gives French-speaking
parents the right to educate their children in English.103 Indeed, the force of the
example is his claim that the state changes culture when it acts to transform a
Part, they should do so in ways that render identitarian norms, boundaries, and
practices as responsive as possible to those they affect. To construct identity
democratically is a matter, less of recognizing it, than promoting nondomination,
by which we mean that state of power relations in which all participants are
enabled, and equally so, to challenge and change, or alternatively to defend, their
terms.112
Nondomination in identity politics has at least three important dimensions. First, in
every multicultural and socially stratified political society, it has an inter-group
dimension, since in such societies relations of power tend to follow group lines.
Second, whenever group boundaries are controversial, whenever group practices
are internally contested and relations of power within groups hierarchical,
nondomination has an intra-group dimension. Third and finally, nondomination has a
systemic dimension, since people are unfree when subjected to social, yet
impersonal forms of power, such as the power of norms that are deeply entrenched
(for instance, because naturalized or sacralized).113
States should construct and reconstruct identity, our view is, with a view to
promoting inter-group, intra-group, and systemic nondomination. In some cases,
promoting nondomination along the first (inter-group) dimension may require the
very political institutions multiculturalists recommend. It may require various forms
of group rights, for instance, or even relatively broad powers of group selfgovernment. The aim, however, is not to protect and preserve cultures, but to
reverse significant identity-based forms of domination.
Promoting nondomination along the second (inter-group) dimension typically will
require defining and protecting a wide range of individual rights. Intra-group
nondomination requires rights to exit, to cite one important example. It requires
individual political rights that ensure effective participation in the processes through
which group boundaries and norms are defined. The aim, however, is not to
promote individual autonomy, but to reduceideally to eliminatethe arbitrary
exercise of power by some group members over others.114
Promoting nondomination along the third (systemic) dimension requires state action
to ensure the malleability of group norms and group boundaries: to ensure their
responsiveness, that is, to the human subjects whose lives they govern. To be sure,
it may be the casecontra some theorists of agonistic democracythat in a
given social context it would be infelicitous to destabilize a particular identitarian
practice.115 Even still, that practice should be in principle open to challenge and
change. The institutions that best promote this systemic form of nondomination are
procedurally democratic institutions that foster contestatory forms of political
engagement in which people critique and defend, and sometimes transform, the
groups with which they identify.
Institutions Good
Shifting to their politics is a way to dodge fundamental
collective debates with the hegemonic forces that underwrite
oppression training an incapacity to engage with institutional
power sets activism up to fail against the organized forces of
political control the aff is a modern day Nero who fiddles the
night away as Rome burns down around him
Chandler 7 Researcher @ Centre for the Study of Democracy, Chandler. 2007.
Centre for the Study of Democracy, Westminster, Area, Vol. 39, No. 1, p. 118-119
This disjunction between the human/ethical/global causes of post-territorial political
activism and the capacity to 'make a difference' is what makes these individuated
claims immediately abstract and metaphysical there is no specific demand or
programme or attempt to build a collective project. This is the politics of
symbolism. The rise of symbolic activism is highlighted in the increasingly popular
framework of 'raising awareness' here there is no longer even a formal
connection between ethical activity and intended outcomes (Pupavac 2006).
Raising awareness about issues has replaced even the pretense of taking
responsibility for engaging with the world the act is ethical in-itself. Probably the
most high profile example of awareness raising is the shift from Live Aid, which at
least attempted to measure its consequences in fund-raising terms, to Live 8 whose
goal was solely that of raising an 'awareness of poverty'. The struggle for
'awareness' makes it clear that the focus of symbolic politics is the individual and
their desire to elaborate upon their identity to make us aware of their 'awareness',
rather than to engage us in an instrumental project of changing or engaging with
the outside world. It would appear that in freeing politics from the constraints
of territorial political community there is a danger that political activity is freed
from any constraints of social mediation(see further, Chandler 2004a). Without
being forced to test and hone our arguments, or even to clearly articulate
them, we can rest on the radical 'incommunicability' of our personal
identities and claims you are 'either with us or against us'; engaging with those
who disagree is no longer possible or even desirable. It is this lack of desire to
engage which most distinguishes the unmediated activism of post-territorial political
actors from the old politics of territorial communities, founded on struggles of
collective interests (Chandler 2004b). The clearest example is old representational
politics this forced engagement in order to win the votes of people necessary for
political parties to assume political power. Individuals with a belief in a collective
programme knocked on strangers' doors and were willing to engage with them, not
on the basis of personal feelings but on what they understood were their potential
shared interests. Few people would engage in this type of campaigning today;
engaging with people who do not share our views, in an attempt to change their
minds, is increasingly anathema and most people would rather share their
individual vulnerabilities or express their identities in protest than attempt to argue
with a peer. This paper is not intended to be a nostalgic paean to the old world of
collective subjects and national interests or a call for a revival of territorial state-
based politics or even to reject global aspirations: quite the reverse. Today, politics
has been 'freed' from the constraints of territorial political community
governments without coherent policy programmes do not face the constraints of
failure or the constraints of the electorate in any meaningful way; activists, without
any collective opposition to relate to, are free to choose their causes and ethical
identities; protest, from Al Qaeda, to anti-war demonstrations, to the riots in France,
is inchoate and atomized. When attempts are made to formally organize
opposition, the ephemeral and incoherent character of protest is immediately
apparent.
Clash is Nice
In order for clash to occur, debate must follow the set rules. The objective of the
affirmative is to present a case that defends the resolution in order to be fair and
educational for both sides.
Idea 05 [October 10, 2005, Idea (International Debate Education Association, develops, organizes and promotes debate and debate-related
activities in communities throughout the world. IDEA acts as an independent membership organization of national debate clubs, associations, programs,
and individuals who share a common purpose: to promote mutual understanding and democracy globally by supporting discussion and active citizenship
locally.), Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate, online, http://idebate.org/sites/live/files/standards/documents/rules-cross-examination.pdf, RaMan]
Debate, in its use of a two-person team. Cross-Examination Debate also places emphasis on questioning or cross-examination between constructive
This section highlights the important rules that govern the Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate format. Because these rules focus on the goals and
procedures of debate, they do not include all that might be considered, from a strategic perspective, principles of effective debate. A. Resolutions and
learning of their students, but should limit the amount of research they conduct for debaters. B. Interpretation of the Resolution Cross-Examination (Policy)
variety of possible strategies available when refuting the affirmative case. C. Rules During the Debate 1. In-Round Research is Prohibited Topic research
must be completed prior to the beginning of a debate. Once the debate begins, the participants may not conduct research via electronic or any other
means. No outside person(s) may conduct research during the debate and provide it directly or indirectly to the debaters. Debaters, however, are allowed
to use a dictionary to determine the meaning of English words. 2. Citations are Mandatory Debaters may cite or refer to any public information. When
doing so, they should be prepared to provide complete source documentation to the opposing team and to the judge, upon request. A team's
documentation of cited material must be complete enough so that the opposing team and the judge can locate the information of their own. Ordinarily,
such documentation would include the name of an author (if any), the name and date of a publication, the URL of a Web site (if the information was
retrieved electronically), and a page number (if
Counter Gazing K
to that used by grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up, I was pained to think that there was no absolute
movements, the attitudes, the glances or the Utner nxed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was
fixes us, not only in its violence, hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of
its desire. Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we
see. The "gaze" has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people
globally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a
critical gaze, one that "looks" to document, one that is oppositional. In resistance
struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating
"aware- ness" politicizes "looking" relations--one learns to look a certain way in
order to resist.
2nc Solvency
Counter gazing challenges structures of privilege and creates a
possibility for agency the alternative is the first step to
constructing social hierarchies
Farough 04 [Steven D, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Assumption
College. The Social Geographies of White Masculinities, pages 253-254.
http://crs.sagepub.com/content/30/2/241.short accessed 7/10/15]//kmc
It is also important to consider the agency of those marginalized by racial inequality.
In Black Looks, bell hooks (1992) notes the racialized politics of looking back at those in
position of power. This seemingly innocuous act highlights the exploitative relations of power
for those in privileged standpoints . To gaze upon someone constitutes an
interrogation, a right for the gazer to survey the gazed . Hooks (1992) points out that the
entitlement of whites to gaze upon blacks is a deeply structured practice throughout
U.S. history. However, when African Americans gaze back this produces
violent or defensive reactions among whites because their privileged
standpoint is exposed. Such a gaze is deeply gendered as well. John Berger
(1972) notes the gendered structure of sight where men are allowed to look at
women as objects; between men the gaze is structured through rituals intended to
mark dominance and deference (Connell 1987). The right to gaze also plays out in a
spatial context where the public sphere is more often occupied by men and
structured by the male gaze (Connell 1987). However, the structure of racialized
and gendered sight that positions white men as those who posses the
right to gaze can fail in certain contexts. In geographies where whites are
the numerical minority, the power to gaze can be reversed by the traditionally
oppressed group. This reversal of the gaze can have the effect of
transforming the sense of self of those in privileged positions . bell hooks calls
this the oppositional gaze. She notes: That all attempts to repress our black peoples right to
gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an
oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: Not
only will I stare. I want my look to change reality. Even in the worse circumstances of
domination, the ability to manipulate ones gaze in the face of structures of
domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency . (Hooks
1992:116; emphasis added) It is this possibility of looking back that marks white male bodies in a way that
[T]he movements, the attitudes, the glances of the Other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution
is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments
reading of the paranoia of counter surveillance; that white men can feel fear that the others might look back and
retaliate.
production of its own existence (Brennan 1993). Yet the political economy of this
visual form of exchange is deeply rooted in the specifics of spatial context
and social interaction.
revisited fugitive slave travel writing by William Grimes, Moses Roper, and Frederick
Douglass. Much of this work provides insights into pivotal moments in history (GifraAdroher 2000) and highlights the tensions and conflicts underlying early U.S. history and
culture (Hotz 2006, p. 11). However, further investigation is needed to understand how
slaves, whose identities were contested, appropriated and engaged in tourism (by definition
an activity in freedom) while their personal freedom was in doubt.
Only confrontation can solve and move black bodies from the
margins of society and disrupt dominant power structures
Schreiber, 96, Ph.D. in literature, University of Colorado (Evelyn, Reader, text,
and subjectivity: Toni Morrison's Beloved as Lacan's gaze Qua object, George
Washington University Literature Review, Vol. 30, Iss. 3, p. 445
http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 231174378?pq-origsite=gscholar//RF)
Thus, we can look at Morrison's Beloved as a performative representation of the
gaze through the signification of black culture. This articulation of culture and
history from the point of view of the marginalized and through the cultural
embodiment of the gaze of the other reinscribes that culture and the Other. Consider
Beloved as a montage of differing realities, of the multiple identities within the text.
Morrison's montage reveals points of fissure, or the real, on a phallic level, just as
Hitchcock's tracking shot captures differing aspects of reality. Morrison's text is a cultural
verbal exchange are produced by the historical connection between public space and the entitlement of being a
Eye contact between men can evoke a sense of defending ones right
to the public sphere. In this ritual, who ever looks away first is interpreted
as deferring to the other man. Yet in the context of staring Jesses
interpretation makes references to racialized and gendered social power.
Jesse notes that he could not stop staring, otherwise he would lose in
the visual exchange. The narrative ends with anger They are defiant. They are defiant people... Racist
man.
is how I look at it. Jesses ending comments of African Americans being defiant and racist in this narrative are
important because it moves his specific experience with a young black man on a bus to a more general account of
A2 Ignores Slavery
The countergaze creates anxiety in the audienceforcing
consciousness and reflection on the position of the slave
Schreiber, 96, Ph.D. in literature, University of Colorado (Evelyn, Reader, text,
and subjectivity: Toni Morrison's Beloved as Lacan's gaze Qua object, George
Washington University Literature Review, Vol. 30, Iss. 3, p. 445
http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 231174378?pq-origsite=gscholar//RF)
Morrison's text creates this unhomeliness for the reader in the points where the real
emerges, producing for the reader a sense of unease in the shift from object to subject
when the traditional object-Other-becomes subject. Points of fissure in the narrative,
the places where pieces of the real emerge, signify the gaze of the Other and point to the
nullity of the reader's own subjectivity. These locations in the text exemplify Lacan's
statement that "[t]he message, our message, in all cases comes from the Other[,] . . . `from
the place of the Other"' ("Of Structure" 186). These varying points in the text, materialized
through shifts in perspective, create a bombardment-the montage-of pieces of the real. And
it is in these fissures that the characters perceive their own object positions so as to claim
their subjectivity. Morrison consciously opens Beloved in medias res so that the
Ballot K
Brown
Resistance via the ballot can only instill an adaptive politics of
being and effaces the institutional constraints that reproduce
structural violence
Brown 95prof at UC Berkeley (Wendy, States of Injury, 21-3)
For some, fueled by opprobrium toward regulatory norms or other mo- dalities of domination, the language of "resistance"
has taken up the ground vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom. For others, it is the discourse of
empowerment that carries the ghost of freedom's valence 22. Yet as many have noted, insofar as resistance is
an effect of the regime it opposes on the one hand, and insofar as its practitioners often
seek to void it of normativity to differentiate it from the (regulatory) nature of
what it opposes on the other, it is at best politically rebellious; at worst, politically amorphous.
Resistance stands against, not for; it is re-action to domination, rarely willing to admit to a desire for it,
and it is neutral with regard to possible political direction . Resistance is in no way constrained to a
radical or emancipatory aim. a fact that emerges clearly as soon as one analogizes Foucault's notion of resistance to its companion terms in Freud or
Nietzsche. Yet in some ways this point is less a critique of Foucault, who especially in his later years made clear that his political commitments were not
identical with his theoretical ones (and un- apologetically revised the latter), than a sign of his misappropriation. For Foucault, resistance marks the
presence of power and expands our under- standing of its mechanics, but it is in this regard an analytical strategy rather than an expressly political one.
recourse to a very non-Foucaultian moral evaluation of power as bad or that which is to be overcome that it is possible to equate resistance with that
which is good, progressive, or seeking an end to domination. If popular and academic notions of resistance attach, however weakly at times, to a
tradition of protest, the other contemporary substitute for a discourse of freedomempowermentwould seem to correspond more closely to a tradition
talk of empowerment is always only illusion or delusion. It is to argue, rather, that while the notion of empowerment articulates that feature of freedom
contemporary
deployments of that notion also draw so heavily on an undeconstructed subjectivity that
they risk establishing a wide chasm between the (experience of)
empowerment and an actual capacity to shape the terms of political,
social, or economic life. Indeed, the possibility that one can feel
empowered without being so forms an important element of legitimacy
for the antidemocratic dimensions of liberalism .
concerned with action, with being more than the consumer subject figured in discourses of rights and eco- nomic democracy,
Safe Spaces**
The affirmatives focus on the struggle of the slave parades
this space to be one of safety. This claim only serves to further
reinforce the violent exclusion that makes educational spaces
possible, precluding the possibility of real political resistance.
McKittrick, 2014 Professor of Gender Studies @ Queen's University in
Kingston Ontario. Peter Hudson interviewing Katherine McKittrick. (Katherine; The
Geographies of Blackness and Anti-Blackness: An Interview with Katherine
McKittrick; Online PDF;
http://www.katherinemckittrick.com/download/hudson_mckittrick.pdf; DOA: 7/6/15 ||
NDW)
On twitter, you (depressingly, brilliantly) wrote, Ive never glimpsed safe teaching (and learning) space. It is a white fantasy that
harms. Im wondering if you could expand on that as it pertains to the Black student in Canada? How does such a vexed space
be (and are) asked, across a range of disciplines and interdisciplines, necessarily attend to violence and sadness and the struggle for
assistant says: look out, I need to acknowledge a trigger moment that will make you uncomfortable: we are going to talk about
All of this, too, also recalls the long history of silencingsubalterns not
speaking and all of that. Why is silencing, now, something that protects or enables
whiteness!)
safety? Who does silence protect and who does silence make safe and who does
silence erase? Who has the privilege to demand tolerance? In my teaching, although this is a day-to-day skirmish for me
because the site where we begin to teach is already white supremacist , I try very hard to create
classroom conversations that work out how knowledge is linked to an ongoing struggle to end violence and that, while racist or
we need to
situate these practices within the wider context of colonialism and anti-blackness.
This is a pedagogy wherein the brutalities of racial violence are not descriptively
rehearsed, but always already demand practical activities of resistance, encounter,
and anti-colonial thinking.
homophobic practices are certainly not encouraged or welcome, when they do emerge (because they always do!)
A2 Challenge Oppression
The claim that oppression should be the basis for winning a
debate round is a pretty good example of our link argument--the ballot is not a tool of emancipation, but rather a tool of
revenge---it serves as a palliative that denies their investment
in oppression as a means by which to claim the power of
victory
Enns 12Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University (Dianne, The Violence of
Victimhood, 28-30)
Guilt and Ressentiment We need to think carefully about what is at stake here. Why is this perspective appealing,
and what are its effects? At first glance, the argument appears simple: white, privileged women, in their theoretical
and practical interventions, must take into account the experiences and conceptual work of women who are less
fortunate and less powerful, have fewer resources, and are therefore more subject to systemic oppression. The
lesson of feminism's mistakes in the civil rights era is that this mainstream group must not speak for other
women. But such a view must be interrogated. Its effects, as I have argued, include a veneration of the other, moral
currency for the victim, and an insidious competition for victimhood. We will see in later chapters that these effects
are also common in situations of conflict where the stakes are much higher. We witness here a twofold appeal:
otherness discourse in feminism appeals both to the guilt of the privileged and to the
resentment, or ressentiment, of the other. Suleri's allusion to embarrassed privilege exposes the
operation of guilt in the misunderstanding that often divides Western feminists from women in the developing
and colonization. Nietzsche describes ressentiment as the overwhelming sentiment of slave morality, the revolt
desire to deaden, by means of a more violent emotion of any kind, a tormenting, secret pain that is becoming
unendurable, and to drive it out of consciousness at least for the moment: for that one requires an affect, as savage
an affect as possible, and, in order to excite that, any pretext at all. 20 In its contemporary manifestation, Wendy
does. 21 30 Such a concept is useful for understanding why an ethics of absolute responsibility to the other
appeals to the victimized. Brown remarks that, for Nietzsche, the source of
ethics is equated with the responsibility of the privileged Western woman, while moral immunity is granted to the
victimized other. Ranjana Khanna describes this operation aptly when she writes that in the field of transnational
A2 Change Debate
Their speech act doesnt spill over to change anything but
their own minds
a. Structural constraints
Atchison and Panetta 9 *Director of Debate at Wake Forest University and
**Director of Debate at the University of Georgia (Jarrod, and Edward,
Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Issues for the Future, The
Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed., 2009, p. 317-334)
The first problem that we isolate is the difficulty of any individual debate to
generate community change. Although any debate has the potential to create
problems for the community (videotapes of objectionable behavior, etc.), rarely doesany one
debate have the power to create community-wide change. We attribute thisineffectiveness
tothe structural problems inherent in individual debates and the collective forgetfulness of
the debate community. The structural problems stem from the current tournament format
that has remained relatively consistent for the past 30 years. Debaters engage in
preliminary debates in rooms that are rarely populated by anyone other than the
judge. Judges are instructed to vote for the team that does the best debating, but the
ballot is rarely seen by anyone outside the tab ulation room. Given the limited number of
debates in which a judge actually writes meaningful comments, there is little
documentation of whatactually transpiredduring the debate round. During the period when judges
interact with the debaters, there are often external pressures (filing evidence, preparing
for the next debate, etc.) that restrict the ability of anyoneoutside the debate to pay attention to
the judges justification for their decision. Elimination debates do not provide for a much
better audience because debates still occur simul- taneously, and travel schedules
dictate that most of the participants have left by the later elimination rounds. It is
difficult for anyone to substantiate the claim that asking a judge to vote to solve a
community problem in an individual debate with so few participants is the best
strategy for addressing important problems.
b. Competition
Atchison and Panetta 9 *Director of Debate at Wake Forest University and
**Director of Debate at the University of Georgia (Jarrod, and Edward,
Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Issues for the Future, The
Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed., 2009, p. 317-334)
The debate community has become more self-reflexive and increasingly invested in attempting to address the
problems that have plagued the community from the start. The degrees to which things are considered problems
and the appropriateness of different solutions to the problems have been hotly contested, but some fundamental
issues, such as diversity and accessibility, have received considerable attention in recent years. This section will
address the debate as activism perspective that argues that the appropriate site for addressing community
problems is individual debates. In contrast to the debate as innovation perspective, which assumes that the
activity is an isolated game with educational benefits, proponents of the debate as activism perspective argue
that individual debates have the potential to create change in the debate community and society at large. If the
first approach assumed that debate was completely insulated, this perspective assumes that there is no substantive
using individual
debates to create community change is an insufficient strategy for three reasons. First,
individual debates are, for the most part, insulated from the community at large. Second,
insulation between individual debates and the community at large. From our perspective,
individual debates limit the conversation to the immediate participants and the
judge, excluding many important contributors to the debate community. Third, locating the
discussion within theconfines of a competition diminishes theadditional potential for
collaboration, consensus, and coalition building .
the editors to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, that October in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic
analyses of modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past ... With regard to this radical
chic, the first gesture toward Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game straight and are honest in their
expression of hidden power mechanisms as the reborn pseudo-Nietzscheans like to emphasize, truth is a lie which is most efficient in asserting our will to
power. The very question "Is it true?" apropos of some statement is supplanted by another question: "Under what power conditions can this statement be
Richard Rorty and Peter Singer honest in their respective stances. Rorty defines the basic coordinates: the fundamental dimension of a human being is
the ability to suffer, to experience pain and humiliation consequently, since humans are symbolic animals, the fundamental right is the right to narrate
one's experience of suffering and humiliation.2 Singer then provides
Link Supplement
LIslamophobia
Theres no church in the wild
Halberstam, 13 (Judith Halberstam, also known as Jack Halberstam, is the
Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University
of Southern California. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study:
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten)
Like all world-making and all world-shattering encounters, when you enter this book
and learn how to be with and for, in coalition, and on the way to the place we are
already making, you will also feel fear, trepidation, concern, and
disorientation. The disorientation, Moten and Harney will tell you is not just
unfortunate, it is necessary be- cause you will no longer be in one location
moving forward to another, instead you will already be part of "the
"movement of things" and on the way to this "outlawed social life of
nothing."The movement of things can be felt and touched and exists in
language and in fantasy, it is flight, it is motion, it is fugitivity itself.
Fugitivity is not only es- cape, "exit" as Paolo Virno might put it, or "exodus" in the
terms of- fered by Hardt and Negri, fugitivity is being separate from settling. It is
a being in motion that has learned that "organizations are obstacles to
organising ourselves" (The Invisible Committee in The Coming In- surrection) and
that there are spaces and modalities that exist separate from the logical,
logistical, the housed and the positioned. Moten and Harney call this mode a
"being together in homelessness" which does not idealize homelessness nor
merely metaphorize it. Homeless- ness is the state of dispossession that
we seek and that we embrace: "Can this being together in homelessness,
this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, this undercommon
appositionality, be a place from which emerges neither self-consciousness
nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from
somewhere on the other side of an unasked question?" I think this is what
Jay-Z and Kanye West (another collaborative unit of study) call "no church in the
wild." For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, we must make common cause with
those desires and (non) positions that seem crazy and unimaginable: we
must, on behalf of this alignment, refuse that which was first refused to us
and in this refusal reshape desire, reorient hope, reimagine possibility and
do so separate from the fantasies nestled into rights and respectability.
Instead, our fantasies must come from what Moten and Harney citing
Frank B. Wilderson III call "the hold": "And so it is we remain in the hold, in
the break, as if entering again and again the broken world, to trace the
visionary company and join it." The hold here is the hold in the slave ship
but it is also the hold that we have on reality and fantasy, the hold they
have on us and the hold we decide to forego on the other, preferring instead
to touch, to be with, to love. If there is no church in the wild, if there is
study rather than knowledge production, if there is a way of being together
in brokenness, if there is an undercommons, then we must all find our way to
it. And it will not be there where the wild things are, it will be a place where
refuge is not necessary and you will find that you were already in it all
along.
LNeolib
The affirmatives politics of cultural performance withdrawal
themselves from resistance, allowing for excessive
consumption without restraint, strengthening systems of
neoliberalism. Only direct confrontation solves.
Goldberg, 2007 - Director of the University of California Humanities Research
Institute. (David T.; Neoliberalizing Race; Article; Pg. 21-23;
http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1013&context=maccivicf; DOA: 7/10/15 || NDW )
It follows that the individualizing of discrimination and exclusion, and the
slipperiness as well as ghost-like quality of racial terms, make it an often thankless,
even burdensome task to point out racist discrimination. Critics of racisms are
viewed as akin to whistleblowers and often treated analogouslyas spoil sports, or
paranoid, or just plain delusional, seeing wrong by invoking terms the prevailing
social order claims to reject. Racist exclusions accordingly become unreferenced
even as they permeate sociality. They are often unrecognizable because society
lacks the terms of characterization or engagement. When recognizable, however,
they are more often than not in deep denialthe ghost in the machine of neoliberal
sociality. There are two further considerations barely discernible in the preceding
line of analysis. The history of racial configuration is profoundly linked in its
emergence, elaboration, and expression, to death and violence, variously
articulated. Fred Moten has noted that black social life is one angled towards death,
both physical and social. Blackness, historically conceived, is being-towardsdeath. One could perhaps generalize the point without diminishing the particular
and quite pressing exemplification of the principle embodied in the modern histories
of blackness. The intense modern experience of any group that has been conjured
principally as the object of racial configuration will find its sense of self mediated, if
not massaged and managedin short, threatenedthrough its relation to death.
What traces do the voluminous legacies of racially prompted death and violence
leave in the making and making over, the remaking, of racially marked communities
imagining themselves anew? Different minoritized groups react to this mediation
in different ways. For Jews, the slogan Never Again, articulated by Emil
Fackenheim as the 614th biblical commandment, internalizes a vigilant
aggressiveness expressed as survival at almost any cost. Radical Muslim political
theology rationalizes the violence of its response to what Philomena Essed
revealingly identifies as humiliation in terms of the lure of a liberatory reward in the
afterlife. American Indians suffer the liquidation of their interests, first in the
melancholy of disaffected sociality and in some regional states more recently in the
turn to con-ventional electoral politics. Blacks respond variously to their persistent
minority status and repeated (often spotlighted) invisibility. One type of response
includes a turn to an insistent visibility of cultural performance, sometimes
celebrating a counter-violence in the wake of a persistent challenge to selfconfidence. Another reaction is racially driven political organizing, by assimilating or
integrating as best as conditions allow, or (as in the case of Latin America) by an
effort to amalgamate through mixing. All responses have decidedly varying results.
In each instance, the valence of death lingers, if only as a negative dialectic,
modulating the inevitable melancholy or aggressiveness vying for the sense and
sensibility the group comes to have of itself. Virtually every dominant structural or
policy response by the state to this relational, racially inscribed being-towardsdeath that insists on what I have characterized as Euro-mimesis once more
minoritizes the contributions and concerns of the historically diminutized and
devalued. These responses thus reinscribe the racially excluded as secondary social
citizens, as burdens of state largesse. The state suppresses their contributions in
their own right to state formation or social reconstruction while silencing the terms
of reference for even registering such contributions. In short, they offer both the
precursor and perfect exemplification of neoliberal commitment to consumption
sans the source of production, to pleasure denuded of guilt, excess unrestricted by
constraint, fabrication unanchored from fact. Anti-racist social movements mobilize
for greater social recognition, access, equality, and protection from discrimination
when focused on race as the principal organizing feature. They will more likely
succeed in enabling greater recognition than produce any significant material
benefits or dramatic social improvements, as Michael Hanchard has demonstrated
in the case of Brazils Moviemiento Negro. Vigorous access, equality, and diminished
discrimination require ongoing, relentless, scaled social challenge and change
around residential improvements and interraciality, significantly better educational
opportunities from the earliest age, steady employment, and public recognition and
general enforcement of the importance of antidiscrimination regimes. The ongoing
tensions between anti-racist transformation, racelessness, socio-class divisions,
persistent debilitations, and variations on the devastations of everyday life reveal in
their ambivalence and ambiguity the enormous challenges to face down a half
millennium of periodically renewed racial rule.
Invisibility PIC
Note
Kind of like the Mann K but instead of saying dont do the
plan/get invested in producing a new episteme/academic
approach, this K/advocacy says we should do that but do it on
the low low
1NC
Complete invisibilitynot fugitivity, but a step beyondthats
the only way to create insurrection
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, (The Coming Insurrection,
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
We cant even see where an insurrection would begin anymore. Sixty years of
pacification, of suspended historical upheavals; sixty years of democratic anesthesia,
of managed events have weakened our ability to abruptly perceive whats real, to
understand the meaning of the resistance going on in the current war... Weve got to
rediscover that ability of perception first. Theres no reason to get indignant about the fact
that a law as notoriously unconstitutional as the Everyday Security Law47 has been in force
for the past five years, or to protest against the total implosion of the whole legal
framework. Organize accordingly instead. Theres no reason to engage in one citizens
trembling of terror thats never really left them. Because to govern has never meant
anything but to hold back, by a thousand subterfuges, the moment when the crowd
will string you up and every act of government is nothing but another way to keep
from losing control over the population. 47 An ensemble of anti-terrorist legislation
passed a few months after September 11th. 48 A temporary protrusion of the surface of
an amoeba for movement and feeding. The starting point for us is one of extreme
isolation and extreme powerlessness. Everything about the insurrectionary process
still remains to be built. It may be that nothing seems more unlikely than an
insurrection; but nothing is more necessary
2NC Overview
The counterplan is the only mechanism for complete
invisibility. Thats the only way to solve the impacts of the 1AC
and create social changes. Their offense is based on the fact
that those who need to understand will. If thats true,
complete invisibility solves 100% of the aff while avoiding any
risk of state cooption.
Only complete invisibility brings activists together without
exposing intentions to outsiders
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, (The Coming Insurrection,
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
An encounter, a discovery, a huge strike movement, an earthquake : every event produces
truth by changing our way of being in the world. Conversely, an official report that is
indifferent to us, that leaves us unchanged, that engages nothing, doesnt even
deserve to be called a truth anymore. Theres a truth underlying every gesture,
every practice, every relationship, and every situation. Our habit is to elude it, to
manage it, which produces the characteristic distractedness of the majority of people these
days. In fact, everything is linked. The feeling that youre living in a great lie is also a truth.
But you have to not let that go, and start from there, even. A truth isnt a view on the world;
a truth is something that keeps us tied to it in an irreducible way . A truth isnt something
you hold but something that holds you. It makes and unmakes me, its my
constitution and destitution as an individual; it distances me from a lot, but brings me
closer to those who feel it too. An isolated being attached to it will unavoidably
meet a few fellow creatures. In fact, every insurrectional process starts from a truth
that refuses to be given up. In Hamburg, in 1980, a handful of the occupants of a
squatted house decided that they would only be expelled over their dead bodies. The whole
neighborhood was besieged by tanks and helicopters; days were filled with street battles,
monster demonstrations and the mayor at last gave in. Georges Guingouin, the first
French resistance fighter in 1940 had nothing but the certitude that he refused the Nazi
occupation. At the time, the Communist Party called him just some madman living in the
woods; and they kept on thinking that way until 20,000 of those madmen living in the
woods liberated Limoges.
2NC Solvency
Community connections are necessary to combat structures of
poweronly the CP solves
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, (The Coming Insurrection,
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
Communes come into being when people find themselves, understand each other,
and decide to go forth together. The commune itself makes the decision as to when it
would perhaps be useful to break it up. Its the joy of encounters, surviving its obligatory
asphyxiation. Its what makes us say we, and what makes that an event. Whats strange
isnt that people who agree with each other form communes, but that they remain
separated. Why shouldnt communes proliferate everywhere? In every factory, every
street, every village, every school. At last the true reign of the committees of the base!
We need communes that accept being what they are, where they are; a multitude of
communes, replacing societys institutions: family, school, union, sports club, etc. We
need communes that, outside of their specifically political activity , arent afraid to
organize themselves for the material and moral survival of all their members and all
the lost ones that surround them. Communes that dont define themselves as
collectives tend to do by whats within them and whats outside of them, but by the
density of the connections at their core. Communes not defined by the persons that
make them up, but by the spirit that animates them. A commune is formed every time a
few people, freed of their individual straitjackets, decide to rely only on themselves and pit
their strength against the reality. Every wildcat strike is a commune; every house occupied
collectively on a clean-cut foundation is a commune; the action committees of 1968 were
communes, as were the runaway slave villages in the United States, or even Radio Alice in
Bologna in 1977. Every commune needs to be based on itself. It needs to bring the question
of needs to an end. It needs to smash all political subjection and all economic dependency,
and degenerates in milieus whenever it loses contact with the truths that founded it. There
are all kinds of communes now that arent waiting to have the numbers, or the resources, or
much less the right moment which never comes to get organized.
beyond a certain size, after which it would lose contact with itself and almost
unavoidably give rise to a dominant class within it. And the communes will prefer to
split up, to spread themselves better that way, and simultaneously to prevent such
an unfortunate problem. The uprising of Algerian youth that set all Kabylia aflame in
spring 2001 managed to retake almost the whole territory, attacking the armed police,
the courthouses, and all the representations of the State, and generalizing the riot until they
caused the unilateral retreat of the forces of order, until they physically prevented the
elections from being held. The movements strength was in the diffuse
2NC A2 Perm
The CPs opacity is key to localized movementsinstead of
occupying a compromised space like the debate community,
we should become the territory itself
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, (The Coming Insurrection,
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
More and more reformists have started talking these days about the approach of
peak oil, and about how in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we will need
to re-localize the economy, encourage regional supply lines, short distribution circuits,
give up having easy access to imports from far away lands, etc. What they forget is that
the nature of everything thats done locally in economic matters is that its done
under the table, in an informal manner; that this simple ecological measure of relocalizing the economy implies either total freedom from state control, or total submission to
it. The present territory is the product of many centuries of police operations. The
people have constantly been pushed back -- out of their fields, then out of their streets,
then out of their neighborhoods, and finally out of their building lobbies , in the demented
hope that all life could be contained within the four sweating walls of a private
existence. The territorial question isnt the same for us and for the State. For us its
not about holding onto it. Rather its a matter of creating density in the communes, in
our circulation, and in our solidarity, to such a point that the territory becomes
incomprehensible and opaque to all authority. Its not a question of occupying, but
of being the territory. Every practice brings a territory into existence the territory of
the deal, or of the hunt; the territory of childs play, of lovers, of a riot; the territory of
farmers, ornithologists, or gleaners. The rule is simple: the more territories there are
superimposed on a given zone, the more circulation there is between them, and the less
Power will find footholds. Bistros, print shops, sports arenas, vague terrains, second-hand
book stalls, building rooftops, improvised street markets, kebab shops, garages, could all
easily be used for purposes other than their official ones if enough complicities can be found
there. Local self-organization, superimposing its own geography over the States
cartography, jams it and annuls it, and produces its own secession.
theyre doing exactly the opposite of what they ought to. To not be visible, but
rather to turn to our advantage the anonymity weve been relegated to, and with
conspiracies, nocturnal and/or masked actions, to make it into an unassailable
once weve entered the realm of visibility, our days are numbered; either well be in
a position to pulverize its reign quickly, or it will crush us without delay.
AT: Perm
Double bind---either the perm is unable to solve or it severs--1% risk of a link to the net benefit taints the perm because
there is a real tradeoff between visibility and invisibility--severance is a voting issue because it justifies aff
conditionality and sets a precedent.
INCLUDING ANY ELEMENT of the visible strategy of the 1AC
ONLY RISKS short-circuiting the radical potential of the
counterplan by making protest visible. Invisibility is a
precondition for freedom of action
The Invisible Committee 7 [an anonymous group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, in the book The Coming Insurrection published by Semiotext(e) (attributed to the Tarnac
Nine by the French police), http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]
Stay invisible. Put anonymity on the offense. In a demonstration, a unionist pulls the mask
off an anonymous protester who had just broken a window: Assume responsibility for what youre
doing instead of hiding yourself. To be visible is to be out in the open that is, above all
to
be vulnerable. When the leftists of all nations continually make their cause more
visible whether that of the homeless, of women, or of immigrants in the hope
that it will get taken care of, theyre doing exactly the opposite of what they ought to.
To not be visible, but rather to turn to our advantage the anonymity weve been relegated
to, and with conspiracies, nocturnal and/or masked actions, to make it into an unassailable
attack-position. The fires of November 2005 offer a model. No leader, no demands, no
organization, but words, gestures, complicities. To be nothing socially is not a humiliating
condition, the source of some tragic lack of recognition (to be recognized: but by who?), but
on the contrary is the precondition for maximum freedom of action . Not
signing your name to your crimes, but only attaching some imaginary acronym people still remember
the ephemeral BAFT (Tarterets AntiCop Brigade) is a way to preserve that freedom. Obviously, one of
the regimes first defensive maneuvers was to create a suburban slum subject to treat as the author
of the riots of November 2005. Just take a look at the ugly mugs of those who are someone in this
society if you want help understanding the joy of being no one.
Mann KTop
about these throwaway fanzines and unreadable rants , these neo-tattoos and recycled
apocalypses, this mountainous accumulation of declassified factoids, these bloody smears, this
incredible noise? Why wade through these piles of nano-shit? Why submit oneself to these hysterical
purveyors, these hypertheories and walls of sound? Why insist on picking this particular species of nit?
Why abject criticism, whose putative task was once to preserve the best that has
been known and thought, by guilty association with so fatuous, banal, idiotic,
untenable a class of cultural objects ? Why not decline, not so politely, to participate in the tiny
spectacle of aging intellectuals dressing in black to prowl festering galleries and clubs where,
sometime before dawn, they will encounter the contemptuous gaze of their own children, and almost
manage to elide that event when they finally produce their bilious reports, their chunks of cultural
criticism? No excuse, no justification: all one can put forward is an unendurable habit
of attention, a meager fascination, no more or less commanding than that hypnosis one enters in
the face of television; a rut that has always led downward and in the end always found
itself stuck on the surface; a kind of drivenness, if not a drive; a *critique*, if you can forgive such
a word, that has never located any cultural object whose poverty failed to reflect its own; a rage to find
some point at which criticism would come to an end, and that only intensified as that end-point
receded and shrunk to the size of an ideal. Then if one must persist in investigating these
epi-epiphenomena, perhaps compelled by some critical fashion (no doubt already out of vogue),
perhaps merely out of an interminable immaturity, why not refer the stupid underground
back to all the old undergrounds, back to the most familiar histories ? Why not cast it
as nothing more than another and another and another stillborn incarnation of an
avant-garde that wallows in but doesn't quite believe its own obituaries, and that one has
already wasted years considering? Why not just settle for mapping it according to the old
topography of center and margin, or some other arthritic dichotomy that , for all their
alleged postness, the discourses we are about to breach always manage to drag along behind them?
Why not simply accede to the mock-heroic rhetoric of cultural opposition (subversion,
needed was to add a few more disparate topic headings to break the hold of a One that, in truth, one
still manages to project in the very act of superceding it? Nothing will prevent usindeed nothing
can save us--from
bored intellectual groping for a way to heat up his rhetoric, if not his thought, whatever else we
might encounter here, it is important to insist that you will not find these maps laid out
for your inspection, as if on an intellectual sale table, and rated for accuracy and charm. No
claim is being staked here; no one is being championed, no one offered up on the critical auction block
as the other of the month. There is nothing here to choose; all the choices have already been made.
One can only hope, in what will surely prove an idle gesture, to complicate cultural space
for a moment or two, for a reader or two, to thicken it and slow one's passage
through it, and, as always, to render criticism itself as painful and difficult as possible .
Indeed, let us suggest that this tour of the stupid underground is above all else
designed--according to a certain imaginary, a certain parody, the curve of a perfectly distorted
mirror--not to give us an opportunity to rub elbows with the natives and feel some little thrill of
identification with them, but to expose to criticism its own stupidity, its impossibility,
its
abject necessity. Why go there at all? To pursue a renunciation of culture past the limit,
where it precisely leaves us behind, where criticism can no longer observe it, no longer
recuperate it; and at the same time to witness the turning-back and collapse of the
critical into the very form and function of everything it would seek to distance and
negate: a double negation that will end up what else?--reinvesting in the stupidity of
culture. No venture could be more idiotic. Shades have been distributed, the bus is leaving,
our stupid-critical theme-park tour is about to begin.
The affirmative will try to claim they are genuine and garner a
no link argument, but that isnt the question. Its a question of
the fact that the intellectual position sustains the system that
they critique.
Mann 96 [ January 1996, Paul Mann (Professor at Pomona College), The Nine Grounds of
Intellectual Warfare, online, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.196/mann.196, RaMan]
The position is surrounded by a border, a margin. This circular, flat earth topography
mirrors larger discursive models, which still map everything in terms of centers, lines of defense, and
antagonistic margins. It is little wonder that questions of colonialism have become so pressing in
current critical practice: here too we encounter an oblique phenomenalization of the discursive device.
this topography of margins and centersand in the end there might not be much to recommend itit
might be better to see the marginal force as a function and effect of the center, the very means by
which it establishes its line of defense. Military commanders might be unlikely to deploy
their most troublesome troops along their perimeter, but in intellectual warfare the
perimeter is marked out and held primarily by troops who imagine themselves in
revolt against headquarters. This is the historical paradox of the avant-gardes: they believe they
are attacking the army for which they are in fact the advance guard. The contradiction does not
dissolve their importance, it marks their precise task: the dialectical defense and
advance of discursive boundaries. It might therefore indicate the fundamental
instability of cultural positions, but it does nothing to support the strictly
oppositional claims of marginal forces, which is why postcolonial criticism remains a
colonial outpost of an older critical form. Without exception, all positions are
oriented toward the institutional apparatus. Marginality here is only relative and
temporary: the moment black studies or womens studies or queer theory conceives
of itself as a discipline, its primary orientation is toward the institution. The fact that
the institution might treat it badly hardly constitutes an ethical privilege. Any
intellectual who holds a position is a function of this apparatus; his or her
marginality is, for the most part, only an operational device. It is a critical commonplace
that the state is not a monolithic hegemony but rather a constellation of disorganized and fragmentary
agencies of production. This is often taken as a validation for the political potential of
possible, and nothing I propose here argues against such a possibility. I wish only to
insist that effective resistance will never be located in the position, however
oppositional it imagines itself to be. Resistance is first of all a function of the
apparatus itself. What would seem to be the transgressive potential of such institutional agencies
as certain orders of gender criticism might demonstrate the entropy of the institution, but it does
nothing to prove the counterpolitical claims of the position. Fantasies of resistance most often
serve as mere alibis for collusion. Any position is a state agency, and its relative marginality is a
mode of orientation, not an exception. Effective resistance must be located in other tactical forms.
attempt to take up or tear down the banner of the avant-gardes in the critical arena,
every attempt to advance the avant-gardes claims or to put them to rest: no
matter what their ideological strategy or stakes, all end up serving the white
economy of cultural production. It is, finally, circulation alone that matters. Even the
critique, in recent years, of the structure of this economythe critique of the
museum and gallery, for instance, in the work of Broodthaers and Haackeends up
recuperated, displayed, and circulated for profit . More than the way iconoclasm becomes
tradition and the new becomes old, it is this increasing phenomenalization of the mechanism by means
of which the discursive economy whites out ideological differences and collapses critical distance that
constitutes the death of the avant-garde, announced in hundreds of obituaries during the past thirty
years. The death of the avant-garde is not an end to its production, which continues
identified as the institution of art, all of the critical means for doing so seem
rather to further its interests, and without releasing us from the necessity of
opposition. The dilemma of the necessary-impossible one encounters here haunts all of the present
essays: they occupy a perspective from which the impossibility of criticism is
precisely as pressing as its necessity. That, in brief, is where the argument of Theory-Death
leaves off, and where the first essay in this volume begins. What is the relationship between
this recuperative economy and death, between the death of the avant-garde and
death as it is theorized, for instance, in the late Freud? What would it mean for criticism to
imagine a writing or an art that had undergone a kind of second death, a death no longer for display
and description but one that passed entirely from the screens and relays of the discursive economy?
What if there were an avant-garde that was no longer committed to throwing itself
on the spears of its enemies but operated in utter secrecy? What if the very history of
cultural recuperation led us to imagine that some segment of what had once been the avant-garde
must finally have learned from its mistakes and extended its trajectory into silence and invisibility? I t
might be necessary then to turn that silence and invisibility back against the critical
project; it might be necessary to inflict that silence on ones own discourse and
suffer it as a kind of wound, a mark of utter insufficiency, and a way to bind oneself
to the surrogate forms of its absent object. This act of turning the force of criticism
against itself should not be mistaken for productive self-criticism. It is the
autoaggressive trace of a death drive that no longer has anything to do with
biological instincts (if it ever did), perhaps only with writing itself , the incipient form of
the masocriticism pursued in this book, which is explored most directly and schematically in the title
essay. That essay proceeds, moreover, through the books most characteristic strategy: it describes
masocriticism by performing it, a theatricalism that is, after all, one of masochisms
most distinctive traits.
constant. Marginal groups are suppressed almost to the point of invisibility , or at least
to a theoretical *position* of "silence"; centers might seem to disintegrate, and parties consigned
to the margin in one generation might rise to power in the next; one even speaks of multiple "sites"
(all women are marginalized, although caucasian women are more likely to occupy a hegemonic
position in relation to women of color; one can be white-male but gay, straight-female and Asian, etc.);
but the general structure of center and margin remains in a sort of hypertense steady state.^1^ The
limited exclusion of the margin constitutes the center's defining boundary . Margins
exist insofar as they are held in an orbit, placed at the constitutive limit of whatever
power the center consigns itself. We are hardly breaking any new ground in stating that this
dialectical topography underlies almost all of our cultural criticism, often in the most
tacit manner; it has been exceedingly difficult for anyone to propose more sophisticated models. It is
here that we find the first relevance of the stupid underground. While it readily lends
itself to this topographical reduction, it cannot be simply constrained to an orbit.
It is deployed--but
by what force? by some hegemonic "Power" or by another, undetermined order of cultural physics?--a s
a means of carrying every mode of cultural activity past its limits, to its termination. At
times this termination seems merely symbolic, as they say: an end-point that might indeed be fatal but
is nonetheless reflected back into the cultural economy as a series of still quite spectacular and
profitable images. The death of painting as a mode of painting, etc. And yet the trajectory of the
stupid underground also begins to make the notion of the margin rather uncertain.
One is reminded of the blank spaces at the edges of archaic, flat-earth maps, the monsters that lurk
past the edges of the world. Cartoonish monsters, hardly worthy of a child's nightmare, and yet
marking the place of an unimaginable destruction, of the invisible itself. Not marginal spaces, strictly
speaking, since they cannot be mapped, since they are precisely beyond the limit: but at the same
time an extra-cartographic reach that is preserved as a kind of threat, if you will, or seduction, if you
would rather, to the very adventure of marginality. The stupid underground is not only the
against-art to non-art (folk, *brut*, etc.) to the end of art (autodestructive art, art strikes) to the most
vigilant refusal, a refusal that never puts itself on display at all; from mainstream rock to punk to
industrial music to experiments in subsonic effects generators (Survival Research Laboratory, Psychic
TV, Non) to utter silence; from rock-tour T-shirts to skinhead fascist costuming to criminal disguise and
disappearance from every spectacle and every surveillance; from sexually explicit art to pornography
and soft or "theoretical" S/M (masocriticism itself) to hardcore consensual sadism and masochism to
pedophilic aggression to the consequent "knowledge" of the most violent sexuality carried out in the
strictest secrecy.^3^ The stupid underground is the immanence and extension *to
through cultural space of this fatal and yet never simply terminal movement. We should also
note that even as one pursues these trajectories, the underground lends this Deleuzian
rhetoric of becoming-X its most abiding cultural form: becoming-%cliche%, becomingstupid. In the stupid underground any innovation can be, at one and the same time,
utterly radical and worthless in advance. The trajectory past %cliche% is at stake here as
well, a trajectory that takes us not into further innovation but into repetition itself: the
repetition of a cultural adventure long after its domestication, but as if it were still
an adventure. The trajectory is thus seldom a straight line into the beyond, a singular line of flight
through becoming-imperceptible, into the invisible. The complexity of these movements
suggests four trajectories, or four dimensions of the trajectory as such: to the apotheosis
of stupidity, as sublime becomes ridiculous as if without transition; to the violent limit of the
tolerable, the very limit of recuperability; to disappearance past the boundary of cultural
representation, a disappearance so critical that it gives the lie to every other form of
criticism; and to what turns out, in the very midst of an innovative frenzy, to be stupid
repetition, an autonomous, automatic repetition that drains cultural forms of every
meaning, even that of parody: the stupefying force of repetition, which, we are told, is the very
trace of the death drive.
2NC LinkResistance
Strategies of resistance fail and only help to proliferate the
discourse of their opposition
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
What was once called nihilism has long since revealed itself as a general, integral
function of a culture that, in all its glorious positivism, is far more destructive than
the most vehement no. Nothing could be more destructive, more cancerous, than
the positive proliferation of civilization (now there's a critical cliche), and all the forms of
opposition have long since revealed themselves as means of advancing it. As for the
ethos of "resistance": just because something feels like resistance and still manages to
offend a few people (usually not even the right people) hardly makes it effective. It
is merely *ressentiment* in one or another ideological drag. And how can anyone still be deluded by
youth, by its tedious shrugs of revolt? Even the young no longer believe their myth, although they are
quite willing to promote it when convenient. Punk nihilism was never more than the nihilism of the
commodity itself. You should not credit Malcolm McLaren with having realized this just because he was
once pro-situ. All he wanted was to sell more trousers without boring himself to death; indeed he is
proof that the guy with the flashiest *ressentiment* sells the most rags. And if he wasn't bored, can he
be said to have advanced the same favor to us?
art, but a means of rendering the very distance required for such reflection null and void;
not a "deconstruction" (sic) of the institution of art but the evacuation of criticism
itself. In this zone, criticism is stupid, hence only stupidity can be critical. The illogic
of this proposition cannot entirely eliminate its force. We are caught up in culture's inability to purge
itself of the inanity utterly native to it. The patent stupidity of certain postmodern works of
art, and of the commentary that tags along behind them, is a symptom of a virulent
truth that infects everything and everyone, the holy blood of Van Gogh, Cezanne at his
sublime labors, the Sistine Chapel englobing a void, empty frame after empty frame, vast libraries of
special pleading, the whole dumb hollow of culture.
2NC LinkMusic
The 1ACs use of music as a means of dissent exposes their
discourse to those who should not hear it-- hipster critics who
only wish to be subversive so they can claim they are--while
preventing wide-spread movements
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
"Although functioning as a support for the totalitarian order, fantasy is then at the same time the
leftover of the real that enables us to 'pull ourselves out,' to preserve a kind of distance from the sociosymbolic network. When we become crazed in our obsession with idiotic enjoyment, even totalitarian
manipulation cannot reach us" (128). Zizek's example here is precisely popular music, the
inane ditty that anchors the fantasy, that runs endlessly in one's head; what one wishes to add
here is the criterion of force, of intensity, of sound so loud that, even though it is a cultural
product from top to bottom, it nonetheless enfolds the audience and isolates it
within the symbolic order. The intensity of loud drowns out the Other. It is the limit
of the symbolic, its null point, experienced in the very onslaught of its signs . Perhaps
we could appropriate a Lacanian term for this fantastic volume that goes beyond fantasy: the
*sinthome.* Zizek calls it "subversive," but that, unfortunately, is to offer it to
those
who wannabe subversive, to see themselves seen as subversives, to be (to
fantasize being) political agents in an older and ever more current sense.^26^ Let
us nonetheless pursue the concept for a moment.
2NC Alt
The aff is neither a subversion of the status quos politics nor
an intelligent movement for change. The stupid
underground posits itself as valuable knowledge production,
without any ability to solve.
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
We have witnessed so many spectacles of critical
intelligence's dumb complicity in everything it claims to oppose that we no longer
have the slightest confidence in it. One knows with the utmost certainty that the most intense
criticism goes hand in hand with the most venal careerism , that institutional critiques
bolster the institution by the mere fact of taking part in their discourse, that every position
is ignorant of its deepest stakes. Each school of critical thought sustains itself by its
stupidity, often expressed in the most scurrilous asides, about its competitors, and a sort of
willed blindness about its own investments, hypocrisies, illusory truths. And one can
Intelligence is no longer enough.^5^
count on each critical generation exposing the founding truths of its predecessors as so much smoke
and lies. Thought, reading, analysis, theory, criticism has transported us to so many Laputas that we
should hardly be surprised to encounter a general--or perhaps not general enough--mistrust of
intelligence as such. What is most "subversive" now is neither critical intelligence nor
romantic madness (the commonplace is that they are two sides of the same Enlightenment coin)
but the dull weight of stupidity, spectacularly elaborated, and subversive only by
means of evacuating the significance of everything it touches --including the romance of
subversion itself. To abandon intelligence because it has been duplicitous or built such
grandly inane intellectual systems might seem to be throwing the baby out with the
bathwater, but if rejecting intelligence is rejecting too much, never underestimate
the stupid exhilaration of *too much*; and flying babies are a nicely stupid image, quite
suitable for a record cover. Let us insist that we are not arguing for poetic madness breaking out of the
prison of reason, nor for the philosophical acephalism of Bataille and his university epigones, still
helplessly playing out the dialectic of the enlightenment. The rationalization of unreason is not much of
a remedy; that is why we took the trouble to diagnose the recuperation and critical evacuation of
Bataille. What confronts us in the stupid underground is also the rationalization of
unreason, but it is accompanied by a much more naked idiocy, sheer stupidity posing
as value, as the last truth of culture, value without value, and an irresistible lure for
suicidal reason. That is, for us, the valueprecisely worthless--of the expansive, aggressively
sophomoric network of the Church of the SubGenius, of these exaggerated revolutionary claims for
a few noisy CDs and nipple piercings, o r of the posturing of the so-called Hakim Bey: "I am all too
well aware of the 'intelligence' which prevents action. Every once in a while however I have
managed to behave as if I were stupid enough to try to change my own life. Sometimes I've
used dangerous stupifiants like religion, marijuana, chaos, the love of boys. On a few occasions I have
attained some degree of success."^6^ The only undergrounds that surface any more are
to pursue, absolutely at the risk of abject humiliation, absolutely at the risk of making oneself a perfect
fool, lines of inquiry that official intelligence would rather have shut down. The dismissal of some
dubious scientific fact or method by official intelligence is taken as a clear sign that the powers that be
are hiding something important, and that by this very means assumes the status of truth. Enormous
labors will be devoted to unlocking its secrets and locating it in a worldview that is as logical as it is
laughable, and that sustains the force of truth in large part by giving the lie to official truth. Reactive
research, parody of science. Or of the mission of art and cultural commentary. Once it was crucial to
separate high and low, art and kitsch, for the very good of the human spirit; then one tried to
"transgress" these distinctions, without quite managing to get rid of them. But to copy comic books on
vast canvases or laminate a few thriftshop tchotchkis and exhibit them in a major museum is not what
used to be called a critical gesture, no matter what the catalogues say. It is not a critical reflection on
the commodification of art, but a means of rendering the very distance required for such reflection null
and void; not a "deconstruction" (sic) of the institution of art but the evacuation of criticism itself. In
this zone, criticism is stupid, hence only stupidity can be critical. The illogic of this proposition cannot
entirely eliminate its force. We are caught up in culture's inability to purge itself of the inanity utterly
native to it. The patent stupidity of certain postmodern works of art, and of the commentary that tags
along behind them, is a symptom of a virulent truth that infects everything and everyone, the holy
blood of Van Gogh, Cezanne at his sublime labors, the Sistine Chapel englobing a void, empty frame
after empty frame, vast libraries of special pleading, the whole dumb hollow of culture.
The fact that the aff chooses to bring the conversation into the
debate space at all inherently causes its failure. The alt, an
underground beneath the underground, is the only way to
solve the impacts of the 1AC
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
We have mapped the stupid underground as the capital of the culture of
resentment, of a strict, self-indulgent, and self-evacuating reactivity, lamely
proposing "new" models and modes of existence that nonetheless can never be
entirely reduced to the dialectics of recuperation, and that, even as they sacrifice
themselves to such a facile criticism, gather their critics into a suffocating embrace and
cancel critical distance itself. But there is more at stake than this peculiar and essential
contradiction. Here we will follow the line of what Deleuze and Guattari call
*becoming-imperceptible* toward an underground beneath the underground, one
that does not make itself available to the critic's screens, a strange disappearance
from discourse, from both recuperation and its stupid collapse, an *ars moratorii,* a
withdrawal or disengagement from the discursive economies than render null and
void a thousand pretensions to resistance and subversion, an embryonic turning away, an
internal exile (in all the complex associations of that interiority), a secret that the critic must finally
postulate precisely in the absence of all evidence. If, in one sort of analysis, as we have noted,
everything now is coming up signs, everything is rendered instantly spectacular, simulacral, obscene,
we must assume that there are at least a few who have learned their lesson, a few for
whom the lacerating parodies of the stupid underground no longer suffice, a few
who have cancelled all bets and turned themselves out, declined any further reactivity and
gone off the map. We should note here that, for Nietzsche, the *man of ressentiment* is a man of
secrets, one who is "neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul
*squints;* his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as
*his* world, *his* security, *his* refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how to forget, how to
wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble."^36^ For Zizek, too, this overt obedience
and covert refusal is the mark of a cynical reason that is the proper product of enlightenment reason
itself. Kant's opening of free liberal argument conceals a deeper obedience to the law,
one that is not so much reversed as extended by the cynic: "we know there is no
truth in authority, yet we continue to play its game and to obey it in order not to
disturb the usual run of things ."^37^ This, for us as for Zizek, is in fact the normative model of
criticism, and it is found most of all in the very place where Kant situated it: faculties of liberal arts,
philosophy departments, and so on. Critical distance is belied by the deep obedience
primarily focus on the transformation of the conditions of the double-R axiom (rights and
representation) but on the insertion of new social forces into a given political terrain. In the previous
chapter we called this form of politics outside politics: the politics which opposes the representational
regime of policing. Imperceptibility is the everyday strategy which allows us to move and to act below
the overcoding regime of representation. This everyday strategy is inherently anti-
theoretical; that is, it resists any ultimate theorisation, it cannot be reduced to one
successful and necessary form of politics (such as state-oriented politics or
micropolitics, for example). Rather, imperceptible politics is genuinely empiricist,
that is it is always enacted as ad hoc practices which allow the decomposition of
the representational strategies in a particular field and the composition of events
which cannot be left unanswered by the existing regime of control. If imperceptible
politics resists theorisation and is ultimately empiricist, what then are the criteria
for doing imperceptible politics? There are three dimensions which characterise
imperceptible politics: objectlessness, totality, trust. Firstly, imperceptible politics is
objectless, that is it performs political transformation without primarily targeting a
specific political aim (such as transformation of a law or institution, or a particular
claim for inclusion, etc). Instead imperceptible politics proceeds by materialising its
own political actions through contagious and affective transformations. The object
of its political practice is its own practices. In this sense, imperceptible politics is
non-intentional - and therein lies its difference from state-oriented politics or the
politics of civil rights movements, for example - it instigates change through a
series of everyday transformations which can only be codified as having a central
political aim or function in retrospect. Secondly, imperceptible politics addresses the totality of
an existing field of power. This seems to be the difference between imperceptible politics and
micropolitics or other alternative social movements: imperceptible politics is not concerned with
containing itself to a molecular level of action; it addresses the totality of power through the social
changes which it puts to work in a particular field of action. The distinction between molar and
molecular (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 275) has only analytical significance from the perspective of
imperceptible politics. In fact imperceptible politics is both molar and molecular, because by being local
situated action it addresses the whole order of control in a certain field. Imperceptible politics is located at
the heart of a field of power and at the same time it opens a way to move outside this field by forcing
the transformation of all these elements which are constitutive of this field. In this sense,
imperceptible politics is a driving force which is simultaneously both present and absent. We described
this in the previous chapter by exploring the importance of speculative figurations for the practice of
escape. On the everyday level of escape (a level we called in this chapter imperceptible politics)
speculative figuration can be translated into trust. This is the third characteristic of imperceptible
politics; it is driven by a firm belief in the importance and truthfulness of its actions,
without seeking any evidence for, or conducting any investigation into its practices.
This is trust. Imperceptible politics is driven by trust in something which seems to
be absent from a particular situation. Imperceptible politics operates around a void,
and it is exactly the conversion of this void into everyday politics that becomes the
vital force for imperceptible politics.
Whatever angle you look at it from, there's no escape from the present. That's
not the least of its virtues. For those who want absolutely to have hope, it knocks down every
support. Those who claim to have solutions are proven wrong almost immediately.
It's understood that now everything can only go from bad to worse. "There's no future for
the future" is the wisdom behind an era that for all its appearances of extreme normalcy has come
to have about the consciousness level of the first punks. The sphere of political representation
is closed. From left to right, it's the same nothingness acting by turns either as the big
that their only intention is to knock out the polling booths by voting as a pure act of protest. And we've
started to understand that in fact its only against the vote itself that people go on voting.
Nothing we've seen can come up to the heights of the present situation; not by far.
By its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more 'grown up' than all those squabbling amongst
themselves to govern it do. Any Belleville chibani 1 is wiser in his chats than in all of those puppets
grand declarations put together. The lid of the social kettle is triple-tight, and the pressure inside wont
stop building. The ghost of Argentinas Que Se Vayan Todos 2 is seriously starting to haunt the ruling
heads. The fires of November 2005 will never cease to cast their shadow on all
consciences. Those first joyous fires were the baptism of a whole decade full of promises. The
medias suburbs vs. the Republic myth, if its not inefficient, is certainly not true. The fatherland was
ablaze all the way to downtown everywhere, with fires that were methodically snuffed out. Whole
streets went up in flames of solidarity in Barcelona and no one but the people who
lived there even found out about it. And the country hasnt stopped burning since. Among the
accused we find diverse profiles, without much in common besides a hatred for existing society; not
united by class, race, or even by neighborhood. What was new wasnt the suburban revolt, since that
was already happening in the 80s, but the rupture with its established forms. The assailants werent
listening to anybody at all anymore, not their big brothers, not the local associations assigned to help
return things to normal. No SOS Racism which only fatigue, falsification, and media omert
could feign putting an end. The whole series of nocturnal strikes, anonymous attacks,
wordless destruction, had the merit of busting wide open the split between politics
and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious weight of this assault which made no
demands, and had no message other than a threat which had nothing to do with
politics. But youd have to be blind not to see what is purely political about this
resolute negation of politics, and youd certainly have to know absolutely nothing about the
autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years. Like abandoned children we burned the
first baby toys of a society that deserves no more respect than the monuments of Paris did
at the end of Bloody Week 5 -- and knows it. Theres no social solution to the present
situation. First off because the vague aggregate of social groupings, institutions, and
individual bubbles that we designate by the anti-phrase society has no substance ,
because theres no language left to express common experiences wit h. It took a half4
century of fighting by the Lumires to thaw out the possibility of a French Revolution, and a century of
fighting by work to give birth to the fearful Welfare State. Struggles creating the language in which
the new order expresses itself. Nothing like today. Europe is now a de-monied continent that sneaks off
to make a run to the Lidl 6 and has to fly with the low-cost airlines to be able to keep on flying. None
less
humiliation and more benefit in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not give
up their weapons, and prison wont make them love society. The rage to enjoy of the
hordes of the retired will not take the somber cuts to their monthly income on an empty stomach, and
will get only too excited about the refusal to work among a large sector of the youth. And to conclude,
no guaranteed income granted the day after a quasi-uprising will lay the
foundations for a new New Deal, a new pact, and a new peace. The social sentiment is
rather too evaporated for all that. As their solution, theyll just never stop putting on
the pressure, to make sure nothing happens, and with it well have more and more
police chases all over the neighborhood. The drone that even according to the police
did fly over Seine-Saint-Denis 7 last July 14 th is a picture of the future in much more
straightforward colors than all the hazy images we get from the humanists. That they
indeed
took the time to clarify that it was not armed shows pretty clearly the kind of road were headed down.
The country is going to be cut up into ever more air-tight zones. Highways built along the border of the
sensitive neighborhoods already form walls that are invisible and yet able to cut them off from the
private subdivisions. Whatever good patriotic souls may think about it, the management of
neighborhoods by community is most effective just by its notoriety. The purely metropolitan
portions of the country, the main downtowns, lead their luxurious lives in an ever
more calculating, ever more sophisticated, ever more shimmering deconstruction.
They light up the whole planet with their whorehouse red lights, while the BAC 8 and the private
security companies -- read: militias -- patrols multiply infinitely, all the while
benefiting from being able to hide behind an ever more disrespectful judicial front.
The catch-22 of the present, though perceptible everywhere, is denied everywhere. Never
have so many psychologists, sociologists, and literary people devoted themselves to it,
each with their own special jargon, and each with their own specially missing
solution. Its enough just to listen to the songs that come out these days, the trifling new French
music, where the petty-bourgeoisie dissects the states of its soul and the K1Fry mafia 9 makes its
declarations of war, to know that this coexistence will come to an end soon and that a decision is
about to be made. This book is signed in the name of an imaginary collective. Its editors are not its
authors. They are merely content to do a little clean-up of whats scattered around the eras common
areas, around the murmurings at bar-tables, behind closed bedroom doors. Theyve only determined a
few necessary truths, whose universal repression fills up the psychiatric hospitals and the
painful gazes. Theyve made themselves scribes of the situation. Its the privilege of radical
circumstances that justice leads them quite logically to revolution. Its enough just to say
what we can see and not avoid the conclusions to be drawn from i
released by the stupid underground is never anything more than an effect of its
very morbidity. It is marketed as novelty, but that is not its truth. Nor will it ever constitute
a base for opposition: it cannot be yoked to any program of reform, nor serve any
longer the heroic myth of transgression. It is merely a symptom of order itself.
Everything has been recuperated, but what is recuperated and put to death returns, returns
ferociously, and it is the return of its most immanent dead that most threatens every form of order. The
repressed does not come back as a living being but as the ghost it always was, and not to free us but
to haunt us. It returns as repetition; when we see it in the mirror, as our mirror, we pretend not to
recognize it. The fury of the punk or skinhead is the fury of this stupid repetition, and it is far more
destructive than the most brilliant modernist invention. It ruins everything and leaves it all still in
place, still functioning as if it mattered, never relieving us of its apparition, never pretending to go
beyond it, draining it of value without clearing it away. That is why one cannot dismiss it
according to the logic of the new, whereby the only admissible revolutionary force
must conform to the movement of progress and innovation. The rhetoric of
innovation is parroted by the stupid underground, because it still obeys the
superficial form of the avant-garde. But it obeys it long after it is dead, and as if that
death didn't matter, as if history had never occurred in the first place, as if
everything retro just suddenly appeared, in all its original vacuity. As if it were even better,
more powerful, once it is dead, so long as one insists that it is and pretends that it isn't. It is the blind
repetition of every exhausted logic far past the point of termination that generates the most virulent
negation. The stupid persistence of the dead has taken the place of the critical.
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
The stupid underground can be mapped onto a familiar and perhaps quite objectionable
psychotopography: it is a zone of the repressed of culture and thus, according to this model, both a
pathological site giving rise to all sorts of pathogenic surface effects, and a
therapeutic matrix, a place where impacted energies may be guided toward a proper sublimation.
The stupid underground presents itself as both a symptom of the disease of capital
and an indication of the direction of its cure. But in the stupid underground, as in so
many other sites, the direction of the cure often leads back into the disease; or the
cure itself turns out to be nothing more than a symptom. For instance, in the terms of
one standard hypothesis, the stupid underground reproduces the pathology of Other, of
the Symbolic order, in the very attempt to avoid it, like the alcoholic's prodigal son
who is so repelled by his father's disease that he can only end by becoming an
alcoholic himself; at the same time, it is a kind of paranoid rechanneling of obsessions
and defenses, a way to reconceive the social world by means of , indeed as a
psychosis. Perhaps merely the critical equivalent of lining your hat with aluminum foil to protect
yourself from alien radiation or government microwave transmissions (often: the same thing); perhaps
a more radical form of schizoanalytic political action.
AT: Perm
Double bind---either the perm links or it severs---the link
debate determines how you view perm solvency---1% risk of a
link taints the perm because there is a real tradeoff between
visibility and invisibility---severance is a voting issue because
it justifies aff conditionality and sets a precedent.
INCLUDING ANY ELEMENT of the political strategy of the 1AC
ONLY RISKS short-circuiting the radical potential of the
alternative by making protest visible. Invisibility is a
precondition for freedom of action
The Invisible Committee 7 [an anonymous group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, in the book The Coming Insurrection published by Semiotext(e) (attributed to the Tarnac
Nine by the French police), http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]
Stay invisible. Put anonymity on the offense. In a demonstration, a unionist pulls the mask
off an anonymous protester who had just broken a window: Assume responsibility for what youre
doing instead of hiding yourself. To be visible is to be out in the open that is, above all
to
be vulnerable. When the leftists of all nations continually make their cause more
visible whether that of the homeless, of women, or of immigrants in the hope
that it will get taken care of, theyre doing exactly the opposite of what they ought to.
To not be visible, but rather to turn to our advantage the anonymity weve been relegated
to, and with conspiracies, nocturnal and/or masked actions, to make it into an unassailable
attack-position. The fires of November 2005 offer a model. No leader, no demands, no
organization, but words, gestures, complicities. To be nothing socially is not a humiliating
condition, the source of some tragic lack of recognition (to be recognized: but by who?), but
on the contrary is the precondition for maximum freedom of action . Not
signing your name to your crimes, but only attaching some imaginary acronym people still remember
the ephemeral BAFT (Tarterets AntiCop Brigade) is a way to preserve that freedom. Obviously, one of
the regimes first defensive maneuvers was to create a suburban slum subject to treat as the author
of the riots of November 2005. Just take a look at the ugly mugs of those who are someone in this
society if you want help understanding the joy of being no one.
To escape policing and start doing politics necessitates dis-identi- fication - the
refusal of assigned, proper places for participation in society. As indicated earlier,
escape functions not as a form of exile, nor as mere opposition or protest, but as an interval
which interrupts everyday policing (Ranciere, 1998). Political disputes - as distinct from
disputes over policing - are not concerned with rights or repre sentation or with the
construction of a majoritarian position in the political arena. They are not even
disputes over the terms of inclusion or the features of a minority. They occur prior to
inclusion, beyond the terms of the double-R axiom, beyond the majority-minority duality.
They are disputes over the existence of those who have no part (and in this sense they are disputes
about justice in a Benjaminian sense of the word, Benjamin, 1996a). Politics arises from the
emergence of the miscounted, the imperceptible, those who have no place within
the normalising organisation of the social realm. The refusal of represen tation is a
way of introducing the part which is outside of policing, which is not a part of
community, which is neither a minority nor intends to be included within the
majority. Outside politics is the way to escape the controlling and repressive force
of contemporary politics (that is of contemporary policing); or else it is a way to change
our senses, our habits, our practices in order to experiment together with those who
have no part, instead of attempting to include them into the current regime of
control. This emergence fractures normalising, police logic. It refigures the
perceptible, not so that others can finally recognise one's proper place in the social
order, but to make evident the incommensurability of worlds, the
incommensurability of an existing distribution of bodies and subjectivities with the
principle of equality. Politics is a refusal of representation. Politics happens beyond,
before representation. Outside politics is the materialisation of the attempt to occupy this space
outside the controlling force of becoming majoritarian through the process of representation. If we
return to our initial question of how people contest control, then we can say that
when regimes of control encounter escape they instigate processes of naming and
representation. They attempt to reinsert escaping subjectivities into the subjectform. Outside politics arises as people attempt to evade the imposition of control
through their subsumption into the subject-form. This is not an attempt simply to
move against or to negate representation. Nor is it a matter of introducing pure potential and
imagination in reaction to the constraining power of control. Rather, escape is a constructive
and creative movement - it is a literal, material, embodied movement towards
authority thus renders our circumstances mute and justifies ignoring the
contributions that might be made by the seasons or the spiritual force of the
mountains to the meaning -- the direction of movement -- of our ongoing patterns of
interdependence. With the "perfection" of technically-mediated control, our wills
would know no limit. We would be as gods, existing with no imperatives, no external
compulsions, and no priorities. We would have no reason to do one thing first or
hold one thing, and not another, as most sacred or dear. Such "perfection" is,
perhaps, as fabulous and unattainable as it is finally depressing. Yet the vast
energies of global capital are committed to moving in its direction, for the most part
quite uncritically. The consequences -- as revealed in the desecration and
impoverishing of both 'external' and 'internal' wilderness (for instance, the
rainforests and our imaginations) -- are every day more evident. The critical
question we must answer is whether the "soft" technologies of legally-biased and
controlled social change commit us to an equivalent impoverishment and
desecration. The analogy between the dependence of technological progress on natural laws and
that of social activism on societal laws is by no means perfect. Except among a scattering of
philosophers and historians of science, for example, the laws of nature are not viewed as changeable
artifacts of human culture. But for present purposes, the analogy need only focus our attention on the
way legal institutions -- like natural laws -- do not prescriptively determine the shape of all things to
come, but rather establish generic limits for what relationships or states of affairs are factually
admissible. Laws that guarantee certain "freedoms" necessarily also prohibit others.
Without the fulcrums of unallowable acts, the work of changing a society would
remain as purely idealistic as using wishful thinking to move mountains. Changing
legal institutions at once forces and enforces societal reform. By affirming and
safeguarding those freedoms or modes of autonomy that have come to be seen as
We can do better than that kind of politics. There is an old joke in which someone is looking within
the light cast by a streetlight for a dollar bill they dropped. Someone asks why they are looking there when they
dropped the dollar bill a block away, and they say "the light's better here." The politics of hip-hop is exactly like
Being oppositional feels good and makes for good rhymes spit over great beats.
But meanwhile, black people's lives are improving in ways that have nothing do with
sticking up their middle fingers. They are overcoming in the real America, the only
America they will ever know. The hip-hop ethos, ever assailing the suits, cannot even see
any of this, because it is all about that upturned middle finger. The beat is better
over here. But what about the great things going on where there is no beat? Hip-hop, quite simply,
doesn't care. Why would it? It's music. Too often for it to be an accident, I have found that people making
big claims about the potential for hip-hop to affect politics or create a revolution
have mysteriously little interest in politics as traditionally understood, or political change as it
actually happens, as opposed to via dramatic revolutionary uprisings. Rehashing that too many
black men are in prison, they know nothing about nationwide efforts to reintegrate
ex- cons into society. Whipping up applause knocking Republicans, they couldn't
cite a single bill making its way through Congress related to the black condition (and
there are always some). They are not, really, political junkies at all. The politics that they
intend when referring to its rela tionship to hip-hop is actually the personal kind: to
them, politics is an attitude. Attitude alone will do nothing for that ex-con. Efforts
that help that ex-con are sustained in ongoing fashion quite separately from
anything going on in the rap arena or stemming from it. This means that if we are really
interested in moving forward, then in relation to that task, hip-hop does not merit serious
interest. Hip-hop is a style, in rhythm, dress code, carriage, and attitude. But there is style and there is substance. Hip-hop's style, however much it makes the neck snap, is ill-conceived to create
substance for black people or anyone else.
this.
(Anonymous member of Black Block and Active Transformation who lives in East Lansing, MI, Date
Last Mod. Feb 8, http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/global/a16dcdiscussion.htm, DavidK)
What follows is not an attempt to discredit our efforts. It was a powerful and inspiring couple of days. I feel it is
important to always analyze our actions and be self-critical, and try to move forward, advancing our movement.
The State has used Seattle as an excuse to beef up police forces all over the
country. In many ways Seattle caught us off-guard, and we will pay the price for it if
we don't become better organized. The main weakness of the Black Block in DC
was that clear goals were not elaborated in a strategic way and tactical leadership was not
developed to coordinate our actions. By leadership I don't mean any sort of authority, but some coordination beside
the call of the mob. We were being led around DC by any and everybody . All someone would do
is make a call loud enough, and the Black Block would be in motion. We were often lead around by Direct Action
We were therefore
used to assist in their strategy, which was doomed from the get go, because we had
none of our own. The DAN strategy was the same as it was in Seattle, which the DC police learned how to
Network (DAN - organizers of the civil disobedience) tactical people, for lack of our own.
police. Our only chance at disrupting the IMF/WB meetings was with drawing the police out of their security
perimeter, therefore weakening it and allowing civil disobedience people to break through the barriers. This needs
to be kept in mind as we approach the party conventions this summer. Philadelphia is especially ripe for this new
strategy, since the convention is not happening in the business center. Demonstrations should be planned all over
the city to draw police all over the place. On Monday the event culminated in the ultimate anti-climax, an arranged
civil disobedience. The civil disobedience folks arranged with police to allow a few people to protest for a couple
minutes closer to where the meetings were happening, where they would then be arrested. The CD strategy needed
arrests. Our movement should try to avoid this kind of stuff as often as possible. While this is pretty critical of the
DAN/CD strategy, it is so in hindsight. This is the same strategy that succeeded in shutting down the WTO
ministerial in Seattle. And, while we didn't shut down the IMF/WB meetings, we did shut down 90 blocks of the
the lack of
strategy problem is a general problem within the North American anarchist movement. We get
caught up in tactical thinking without establishing clear goals. We need to elaborate
how our actions today fit into a plan that leads to the destruction of the state and
capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy. Moving away from strictly tactical
thinking toward political goals and long term strategy needs to be a priority for the
anarchist movement. No longer can we justify a moralistic approach to the latest outrage running around like chickens with their heads cut off . We need to prioritize developing the
American government on tax day - so we should be empowered by their fear of us! The root of
political unity of our affinity groups and collectives, as well as developing regional federations and starting the
process of developing the political principles that they will be based around (which will be easier if we have made
some headway in our local groups). The NorthEastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC) is a good
The
strategies that we develop in our collectives and networks will never be blueprints set in stone. They will
be documents in motion, constantly being challenged and adapted. But without a
specific elaboration of what we are working toward and how we plan to get there,
we will always end up making bad decisions. If we just assume everyone is on the
same page, we will find out otherwise really quick when shit gets critical . Developing
example of doing this. They have prioritized developing the political principles they are federated around.
regional anarchist federations and networks is a great step for our movement. We should start getting these things
going all over the continent. We should also prioritize developing these across national borders, which NEFAC has
also done with northeastern Canada. Some of the errors of Love and Rage were that it tried to cover too much
space too soon, and that it was based too much on individual membership, instead of collective membership. We
need to keep these in mind as we start to develop these projects. One of the benefits of Love and Rage was that it
a forum among a lot of people to have a lot of political discussion and try to
develop strategy in a collective way. This, along with mutual aid and security, could be the priorities of
provided
the regional anarchist federations. These regional federations could also form the basis for tactical leadership at
demonstrations. Let me first give one example why we need tactical teams at large demos. In DC the Black Block
amorphously made the decision to try to drive a dumpster through one of the police lines. The people in front with
the dumpster ended up getting abandoned by the other half of the Black Block who were persuaded by the voice of
the moment to move elsewhere. The people up front were in a critical confrontation with police when they were
abandoned. This could be avoided if the Black Block had a decision making system that slowed down decision
making long enough for the block to stay together. With this in mind we must remember that the chaotic,
decentralized nature of our organization is what makes us hard to police. We must maximize the benefits of
decentralized leadership, without establishing permanent leaders and targets. Here is a proposal to consider for
developing tactical teams for demos. Delegates from each collective in the regional federation where the action is
happening would form the tactical team. Delegates from other regional federations could also be a part of the
tactical team. Communications between the tactical team and collectives, affinity groups, runners, etc. could be
established via radio. The delegates would be recallable by their collectives if problems arose, and as long as clear
goals are elaborated ahead of time with broader participation, the tactical team should be able to make informed
decisions. An effort should be made to rotate delegates so that everyone develops the ability. People with less
experience should be given the chance to represent their collectives in less critical situations, where they can
become more comfortable with it. The reality is that liberal politics will not lead to an end to economic exploitation,
racism, and sexism. Anarchism offers a truly radical alternative. Only a radical critique that links the oppressive
nature of global capitalism to the police state at home has a chance of diversifying the movement against global
In order for the most oppressed people here to get involved the movement
must offer the possibility of changing their lives for the better. A vision of what
"winning" would look like must be elaborated if people are going to take the risk with
tremendous social upheaval, which is what we are calling for. We cannot afford to give the old
anarchist excuse that "the people will decide after the revolution" how this or that
will work. We must have plans and ideas for things as diverse as transportation, schooling, crime
prevention, and criminal justice. People don't want to hear simple solutions to complex questions,
that only enforces people's opinions of us as naive. We need practical examples of what
we are fighting for. People can respond to examples better than unusual theory . While we
capitalism.
understand that we will not determine the shape of things to come, when the system critically fails someone needs
Revolution Fails
Hip-hop is too anti-establishment to result in political change.
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 85-86, DavidK]
Hip- Hop to change our point of view, it means for us to have a candidate that understands Hip-Hop. If you say
hip-hop politics
denies the legitimacy of the way America operates and always willi.e., real
politics. Hip- hop stands outside of the political establishment, seeking a brand-new
day. Nas has no reason to think that politics of that brand has the slightest chance
of helping the black people he raps about. The only way a recreationally radical
stance such as his makes any kind of sense is that hip-hop is not about politics at all
it is about being oppositional regardless of the outcome. This is why the Hip-Hop Revolution never
seems to actually happen, and never could.
Vote or Die then you are saying it's all good that Anheuser-Busch supports Vote or Die. So,
No revolutionhip hop has tried and failed for more than 25 years
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 100-101, DavidK]
Something interesting about the Hip-hop Revolution is that , like the uprising of the proletariat
that Marxists predicted, it seems to be ever in the future. We move ever fur ther into the
future in real life, but never any closer to that marvelous time when hip-hop
becomes "a political tool" and starts improving lives. It's been a while now. For example, the
1989 "Self Destruction" video speaking against black-on-black violence is now a period piece, and the rate of
excited about hip-hop's "political potential" are referring to a music that emerged only ten years ago, not long
the Rubik's Cube; when VCRs were a new luxury item; the media was abuzz with profiles of "yuppies" and
"preppies"; e-mail, laptops, CDs, the Internet, and cell phones did not exist; most people had never had sushi or
say, the "Skinz" track on Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth's Mecca and the Soul Brother, which one could justifiably have
thought of as a positive message in 1992. It urges black people to use condoms, which would be especially
pregnancy rates are down since then, yes, but it'd be hard to say that the "Skinz" or any of the other rap tracks
addressing similar themes is the reason for that. And really, pregnancy rates are just down a tad, not enough to
A question that must be asked is also just what a black revolution would even be
about today. Certainly black America has serious problems. However, a revolution
does not consist solely of howling grievances. For a revolutionary effort to be worth anyone's time,
the demands have to be ones that those being revolted against have some way of
fulfilling. In one episode of the animated version of Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks, there is an articulate
depiction of the idea that black people need to Rise Up as a group and Make Demands. Huey, whose bitter frown is
as ingrained in his design as a vapid smile is on Mickey Mouse, imagines that Martin Luther King comes back to life
and inspires a revolution in black America, graphically indicated as hordes of blacks swarming the gates at the
White House. "It's fun to dream," Huey concludes, the idea being that black people know what to rise up against,
but that they would run up against the heartless moral cesspool that is AmeriKKKa, where, say, "George Bush
program for widows to an open- ended dole for any unmarried woman with children (done largely as riot insurance
in the late 1960s, called for by leftist activists including black ones) ... I could go on. Soyes,
black America
still has problems. Yes, there is still racism. But what is it that the White House
should do now, in 2008, that is staring everyone in the face but hasn't happened
because white people just "don't care" and the black community has failed to
"demand" it? What? Precisely? I am not implying that what needs to happen is black people getting
acquainted with those "bootstraps" we hear so much about. But the problems are not the kind that
could be solved by simply buckshotting whitey with the usual cries of "racism." Would
the people at the gates be calling for inner city schools to get as much money as schools in leafy white suburbs? If
they did, they would see the same thing that has happened when exactly that was done in places like New Jersey
and Kansas City: nothing changes. Obviously something needs to be done about the schools. But what, of the sort
schools filled with kids there because of oh dearvouchers, in Ohio and Florida? Let's face
itmost of the people at that fence would draw a blank on what KIPP schools even
were, much less the good that vouchers are doing. Some revolution. Would the
people at the gates be calling for police forces to stop beating up on young black
men and sometimes killing them? Well, that's a legitimate concern. But the
revolution on that is already happening, in every American city making concerted
efforts to foster dialogue between the police and the street. We're not there yet, but things
are better. Anyone who says that the shooting death of Sean Bell in 2006 in New York was
evidence that nothing had changed since the death of Amadou Diallo in 1998 knows
little of what the relationship between the police and black people was like in New York
and so many other places before the nineties. In 1960, the death of Amadou Diallo would have made the local
papers only, for one day, and, even in those papers, on some back page. It wouldn't have been considered
important news. Going through newspapers of that era, one constantly comes across stories about things that
happened to "Negroes," on page A31, that today would be front-page breaking news.
that America. And back to the main point: what could the White House do to prevent things like the Diallo and
Bell incidents? What simple, wave-the-wand policy point would make it so that never again would a young black
The
relationship between police forces and black people is not as simple as something
that could be changed by storming through a gate , which is obvious from how persistent that
man be killed by the police in dicey circumstances where everybody lost his head for a minute or so?
No Social Change
Note: This card uses the F-word
Hip hop isnt a good avenue for social changeit is too radical
and insulated as art.
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 10-12, DavidK]
I
"politics" of hip-hop has to tell us about where to go after we erupt with
the idle, reactive eruption of Fuck. And where does hip-hop tell us to go? Boiling down the
"revolutionary" statements by rappers of all kinds and their band of chroniclers, one
gleans a manifesto that goes roughly like this: The Civil Rights, revolution only took
us halfway. Some lucky ducks rose into the middle class , there are more blacks in the movies
If the message of this supposedly revolutionary music is just "Fuck!" the message is weak. Fuck! is tap water.
am concerned with
what the
and on TV, and some blacks have risen high in the governmentalthough they are merely apologists for
Still, vast numbers of black people remain poor and/or in jail, and the
reason is that white people are holding them down. Racism remains black America's main
AmeriKKKa.
problem, and the solution is for whites to finally come to a grand realization that there is still work for them to do. In
the sixties the white man only took one hand off our necks. The job of the informed black person is to rage against
the machine, with the plan of forcing the white man to take that other hand off. Otherwise, we can expect little of
ourselves up by our own bootstraps." There is a third way. The manifesto would go something like this: Black
America's politics must be about helping people be their best within the American system as it always will be,
divorced of romantic, unfeasible notions of some massive transformation of basic procedure along the lines of what
happened in the sixties. If that sounds strange or vaguely unexciting, this is only because a hangover from the
victories of the sixties has conditioned so many of us to think that the only significant change is the kind that
makes for good TV (and has a catchy beat). I, for one, am quite excited about the prospects of black America right
any sense of black politics implying that we must seek some kind of
dramatic rupture with current reality is a black politics that can go nowhere, misses
opportunities to forge real change in the real world, and misses changes already
going on. Hip-hop, with its volume, infectiousness, and the media-friendly array of celebrities it has created,
is a primary conduit of this "revolutionary" brand of black politics , held about up as
enlightenment to a black America notoriously conflicted as to how to move ahead. This is dangerous and
retrograde. We are infected with an idea that snapping our necks to black men
chanting cynical potshots the Powers That Be in surly voices over a beat is a form of
political engagement. We are taught that this is showing ourselves to have broad horizons. On the
contrary, this music has less to teach us than we are told. Hip-hop fans ridicule
critics of the music as taking the violence and misogyny too seriously. "It's just
music," they often saybut then at the same time, thrill to people talking about
hip-hop as political and revolutionary. In fact, they too are taking hip-hop too seriously.
Hip- hop presents nothing useful to forging political change in the real world. It's all
about attitude and just that. It's just music. Good music, but just music.
now. However,
Their focus on revolutionary split divorces focus from avenues that can
lead to real progressivism
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 12-13, DavidK]
The fashionable pretense otherwise discourages seri ous progressive thought of the
kind that the old Civil Rights heroes who made our America possible would recognize. It clouds our eyes
and ears with a dream vision of black America spitting verses so fierce and true that
white America once again realizes that black people are America's biggest problem ,
gets down on its knees, begs forgiveness, sheds all vestiges of racist bias, and starts coughing up. Folks, that's
never going to happen again. That vision has no hope of coming true, and I will explain
why. It's not only that there will be no hip-hop revolution. There will be no revolution
at all. And yet there is no reason to see this as a message of hopelessness. Black
America has all reason at this moment to be hopeful , and I will show why. What we can be
hopeful about is that change will hap pen. Not rupture, but change. Slow but sure.
Faster than just fifteen years ago, even, but overall, slowly. Mesmerized by the idea that the only
meaningful change in black America will be abrupt, dramatic, and will leave whitey
with egg on his facethat is, "hip-hoperatic"we miss signs of real change right under our
noses, unable to see that anything is going on worth our support and participation.
We will not be satisfied just proving that we know life isn't fair. We will not rest until
we are actually moving something.
In terms of how rappers address social and political issues relevant to solving black
America's biggest problems, we also see that attitude alone has pride of place over
sincere interest in making a difference. The leading cause of death for black
Americans aged twenty- five to forty-four is not gunfire but AIDS. Every year these days, two-thirds of
new AIDS cases are black women. How does rap, so "political" and "revolutionary,"
approach this? For every rap urging people to use condoms , such as "Skinz" on Pete Rock and
C. L. Smooth's Mecca and the Soul Brother, there are two reminding us that AIDS was foisted
upon blacks by whites to sterilize us. You hear this again and again in hip-hop: Kanye West pulls it in
the "Heard 'Em Say" opener to his Late Registration, such a gorgeous piece of work, but tainted in his tossing this
a case that the scientists working out the details on this are closet racists blowing a smoke screen. Nor would
what is front
and center in hip-hop's take on AIDS is belliger ence, because it fits the hip-hop
"feel." Belligerence is what makes the music good. But in this case, the belligerence is based on a
dopey cartoon street myth, spread by books and pamphlets that sway readers under the impression that
anybody want to write a rap about people getting AIDS from a monkey bite. And that is because
what is printed must be true, especially if it appeals to their gut instincts (one thinks of the anti-Western fundamentalist Muslims fond of conspiracy theories about the West who earnestly defend their claims by saying "It's on
the Internet!"or, in fact, Amiri Baraka saying the same thing in defending his claim that the attack on the Twin
I know there is conscious rap that urges clean living , and we'll get to conscious rap in the next
chapter, but the overall tendency is clear: using and even selling drugs is a huge part
of the hip-hop soundscape. On Guerillas in tha Mist, Ice Cube's character in his guest shot "All on My
Nutsac" is even a dealer. "All on My Nutsac" is, in itself, one of the best things on the album, a fun duet with J-Dee.
how constructive is a message like that? Is the rev olution going to be that all
young black men start selling drugs? The simple reason that things like community
policing and employment counseling don't make it into hip-hop is that they wouldn't
be as much fun to rap about, or to listen to. That's because the sound and the attitude
of hip-hop is all about noisewonderful, raucous noise. Noise lends itself to rapping about
the po-po, complete with gunshots laced into the track, the sound of prison doors
clanking shut, sirens, the sound of a gun cocking , etc. Guns and clicks sound good
set to rap music because the beats already sound kind of like guns, and gunshots
are inherently dramatic. Think, say, of the tight and right "Careful" (the "click click" one) from the Wu-Tang
Clan's The W. But does anyone think that fighting the police , even on a "symbolic" level, is how
to solve black people's problems with them? It's one thing to enjoy Tupac's cartoon idea of black
men rising up against the police with their hands on their gats. But what about real life? Isn't it, rather, that
this metaphorical solution is only so attractive to hip-hop fans because the notion of
fighting the police lends itself well to young men "spraying" lyrics in a
confrontational tone over sharp, loud rhythmic pat terns? Again and again, rappers
calling themselves "serious" pull things that spell nothing useful for us here in the
world outside of rap albums, but make perfect sense if we see the main goal as being confrontational
But still,
and only that. In his N.W.A. days, for example, Ice Cube thought of himself not as a gangsta rapper but as a
"reality" rapper. Thus the reality in "Fuck tha Police" on Straight Outta Compton, where Ice Cube assails the police
but admits gang membership. Did he want more young black men to join gangs? Of course not. He was just making
Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a
revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. They couldnt be more wrong. By
reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks
that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly authentic response to a
presumptively racist society, rap retards black success. The venom that suffuses rap
had little place in black popular culture indeed, in black attitudesbefore the 1960s. The
hip-hop ethos can trace its genealogy to the emergence in that decade of a black
ideology that equated black strength and authentic black identity with a militantly
adversarial stance toward American society. In the angry new mood, captured by Malcolm Xs
upraised fist, many blacks (and many more white liberals) began to view black crime and
violence as perfectly natural, even appropriate, responses to the supposed
dehumanization and poverty inflicted by a racist society. Briefly, this militant spirit,
embodied above all in the Black Panthers, infused black popular culture, from the plays of LeRoi Jones to
blaxploitation movies, like Melvin Van Peebless Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song, which celebrated
the black criminal rebel as a hero. But blaxploitation and similar genres burned out fast. The memory
of whites blatantly stereotyping blacks was too recent for the typecasting in something like Sweet Sweetbacks
Baadasssss Song not to offend many blacks. Observed black historian Lerone Bennett: There is a certain grim
white humor in the fact that the black marches and demonstrations of the 1960s reached artistic fulfillment with
provocative and ultimately insidious reincarnations of all the Sapphires and Studds of yesteryear. Early rap mostly
steered clear of the Sapphires and Studds, beginning not as a growl from below but as happy party music. The first
big rap hit, the Sugar Hill Gangs 1978 Rappers Delight, featured a catchy bass groove that drove the music
forward, as the jolly rapper celebrated himself as a ladies man and a great dancer. Soon, kids across America were
rapping along with the nonsense chorus: I said a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie, to the hip-hip hop, ah you dont
stop the rock it to the bang bang boogie, say up jump the boogie, to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat. A string of
ebullient raps ensued in the months ahead. At the time, I assumed it was a harmless craze, certain to run out of
rap took a dark turn in the early 1980s, as this bubble gum music gave way to a
gangsta style that picked up where blaxploitation left off. Now top rappers began to
write edgy lyrics celebrating street warfare or drugs and promiscuity. Grandmaster Flashs
steam soon. But
ominous 1982 hit, The Message, with its chorus, Its like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep
from going under, marked the change in sensibility. It depicted ghetto life as profoundly desolate: You grow in the
ghetto, living second rate And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate. The places you play and where you stay
Looks like one great big alley way. Youll admire all the numberbook takers, Thugs, pimps and pushers, and the big
money makers.
Hip hope glamorizes ghettos as a ruthless war zone and entrenches the nihilistic
belief that poverty is inescapable
McWhorter 03-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley, Lecturer @
Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor
@ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John H, City Journal, How
Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back, Summer 2003, http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_3_how_hip_hop.html, DavidK]
The idea that rap is an authentic cry against oppression is all the sillier when you
recall that black Americans had lots more to be frustrated about in the past but
never produced or enjoyed music as nihilistic as 50 Cent or N.W.A. On the contrary, black
popular music was almost always affirmative and hopeful. Nor do we discover music
of such violence in places of great misery like Ethiopia or the Congounless its
imported American hip-hop. Given the hip-hop worlds reflexive alienation, its no surprise that its
explicit political efforts, such as they are, are hardly progressive. Simmons has founded the HipHop Summit Action Network to bring rap stars and fans together in order to forge a bridge between hip-hop and
politics. But HSANs policy positions are mostly tired bromides. Sticking with the long-discredited idea that urban
schools fail because of inadequate funding from the stingy, racist white Establishment, for example, HSAN joined
forces with the teachers union to protest New York mayor Bloombergs proposed education budget for its supposed
lack of generosity. HSAN has also stuck it to President Bush for invading Iraq. And it has vociferously protested the
affixing of advisory labels on rap CDs that warn parents about the obscene language inside. Fighting for rappers
rights to obscenity: thats some kind of revolution! Okay, maybe rap isnt progressive in any meaningful sense,
some observers will admit; but isnt it just a bunch of kids blowing off steam and so nothing to worry about? I think
that response is too easy. With music videos, DVD players, Walkmans, the Internet, clothes, and magazines all
hip-hop an accompaniment to a persons entire existence, we need to take it more seriously. In fact, I
is seriously harmful to the black community. The rise of nihilistic rap
has mirrored the breakdown of community norms among inner-city youth over the
last couple of decades. It was just as gangsta rap hit its stride that neighborhood
elders began really to notice that theyd lost control of young black men, who were
frequently drifting into lives of gang violence and drug dealing. Well into the
seventies, the ghetto was a shabby part of town, where , despite unemployment and rising
illegitimacy, a healthy number of people were doing their best to keep their heads
above water, as the theme song of the old black sitcom Good Times put it. By the eighties, the
ghetto had become a ruthless war zone , where black people were their own worst enemies. It
would be silly, of course, to blame hip-hop for this sad downward spiral, but by
glamorizing life in the war zone, it has made it harder for many of the kids stuck
there to extricate themselves. Seeing a privileged star like Sean Combs behave like
a street thug tells those kids that theres nothing more authentic than ghetto
pathology, even when youve got wealth beyond imagining.
making
groundbreaking, socially-conscious music, sans lyrical content based on materialism, sex, and violence, which has
dominated airwaves during the late nineties and millennia. Public Enemy, Arrested Development, and A Tribe Called
Quest, along with individuals like KRS-One, created positive-minded, Afrocentric, stimulating hip-hop music. Now,
hip-hop artists mostly create music exploiting ways of ghetto life: the body
count tied to a burner; the amount of hos in a repertoire; the riches acquired,
mostly through ill-gotten gains; and/or how icy a person is. Of course, the biggest
debate has been the influence hip-hop music has had on youths. During my childhood and
mainstream
adolescence, which were the eighties and early nineties, hip-hop music was diverse. Throughout this time frame,
male youths were offered a varied range of hip-hop role models to admire, such as Chuck D, Big Daddy Kane, Too
Short, or Doug E. Fresh. It was almost as if record labels and artists were saying, You can get with this, or you can
get with that" remember those lyrics? When regarding choices female youths had, there was Roxanne, Queen
Latifah, Mc Lyte, Salt-N-Peppa and Spinderella, Yo-Yo, Da Brat, and Smooth amongst others. The images of female
hip-hop artists varied: there were female rap vixens, while others had a you-better-R-E-S-P-E-C-T-me-or-getslapped tomboyish persona. In the eighties and early nineties, women were not all portrayed as sex symbols, and
those that were not, were still able to achieve popularity and success. This delivered a message to female youths
that a strong, intelligent, and witty female, who held herself in high esteem, could be successful and gain respect
not based on looks. Although the appearances of Salt-N-Peppa and Spinderella were more seductive, they still made
meaningful songs: Lets Talk About Sex, which cautions youths against having unprotected sex and educates the
public on AIDS awareness; Expression, which encourages youths to be comfortable in their own skin; Aint
Nuthin but a She Thing, which promotes feminism; and Its None of Your Business, which combats sexism. Of
course, there was Smooth, The Female Mack, who represented those females that wanted to prove males could
be outwitted at the art of pimpin. Yet, for the most part, many of these hip-hop female artists, who started out as
teenagers themselves, seem to have fought earnestly to be respected in hip-hop, which was and still is a male-
once said during a MTV interview, Anything opposite of hip-hop is considered gay in the hip-hop community a
If
youre a male who grew up in the suburbs rather than in the hood, youre
considered soft, which equals gay. If a male wears fitted shirts and pants that
dont sag off his derrire so the whole world can see his goods, then he is considered soft, which equals
gay. This very perception is what often forces youths , especially black male if not strongminded, to pursue a life of crime in order to appear hard to his peers. There is a
huge overrepresentation of criminal aspects of black youth culture in videos and
songs. Although there are always news reports exposing youth criminal activity, there is a percentage of youths
not on the streets slinging rocks nor shooting their peers and robbing elders. There are many black
youths who are honor roll students and have honest jobs. However, these kids are
not represented in music, as youths with such lifestyles as a topic would not sell
music. Nevertheless, the pressure felt from peers and the media can potentially cause youths, who do not wish to
statement with which I totally concur, especially when concerning the hip-hop socialization of black male youths.
engage in such dangerous lifestyles, to falsely portray a gangster to feel accepted. Sadly, even grown men attempt
to falsely portray themselves as gangsters, as many rappers have been ousted for perpetuating a false thuggish
persona to meet record sale quotas little do black male youths know who want to emulate this lifestyle: the
mansion, Escalade, and ice are rented until these artists make enough money to pay off their record companies for
loaning these material goods to them to fit the image that will bring in millions.
A point I should make before we go on: there are some who will object that if I am
trying to make a point about politics and rap, then I should address only the likes of
either Public Enemy back in the day or Talib Kweli now, and leave out the more
commercial acts in between like N.W.A. I reject that argument. Rap's fans, including
its academic ones, refer constantly to rappers in general when proposing that there
is something political about the music. Writers like Nelson George, Tricia Rose, Michael Eric Dyson,
William Van DeBurg, Imani Perry, Robin Kelley, Cheryl Keyes, Bakari Kitwana, and others do not primly
restrict their arguments to the albums only the buffs and fanatics know. They, while
well aware that some rappers like Lil Jon are largely irrelevant as "conscious" goes, are referring to hip-hop
in general. And this is because most of even the mainstream rap pers have their
"conscious" moments. These cuts are now even cliches, formulas, just like the ones about guns and
bitches. A rapper who wants to be taken seriously is almost required to dip into the
"conscious" well at least one or two times per album. The Wu-Tang Clan came up with cuts like "Can It All Be So
Simple?" and "Tearz"; then there are always tracks like Das EFX's "Can't Have Nuttin'," Ludacris's "Hopeless," and
Young Jeezy's "Dreamin'," or Ice Cube saluting Afrika Bambatta and Public Enemy at the end of AmeriKKKa's Most
Wanted. This means that this book is not flawed in addressing rappers like Jay-Z and The Game as well as Pete Rock
A book on whether hip-hop is useful politics that left out the rappers the
world loves the most would make no sense, since they constantly toss their two
cents in on what they think of as politics. Making sense about what rap means for
black politics requires, then, bringing Jadakiss into the discussion as well as KRS-One.
and Mos Def.
AT Policing
Even if they are right about police brutality being a status quo
problemhip hop politics leaves no blueprint change
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 27-28, DavidK]
while we're on the police, the relationship between them and young black men is
an especially urgent issue in the black community. This one issue , in fact, grounds the
whole conception of hip-hop as politics. Much of the rea son hip-hop is now
considered significant rather than infectious is that so many rappers have had so much to
say about police brutality. But the question is how useful is what they have said in
terms of helping to change the situation? Hip-hop is supposedly going to lead to a
revolution: things are going to be really different. Has hip-hop given any indication of this in
terms of what it has to say about the cops? Let's take Da Lench Mob's Guerillas in tha Mist as an
example, although countless other recordings would serve equally well. The general message of Guerillas in
tha Mist is that blacks need to, somehow, fight the policeor at least, get back at them
with attitude. In "Lost in tha System," J- Dee is in court before the judge and "He added on another year 'cause
And
I dissed him / Now here I go gettin' lost in the system." The diss in question was a suggestion that the judge suck
upon his penis. This is typical of the attitude toward the police and the criminal justice system on a great many rap
albums, including ones celebrated as among the best recordings of all time such as Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most
But if the idea is that hip-hop is "political" in the sim ple message that
relations between police forces and young black men are often rough, then this is a
highly static form of politics, especially if what we get over twenty-five years is
endless variations on that same message. That there is felt to be a need to air this "political"
Wanted.
message over so much time suggests that the problem is not an easy one to resolvei.e., that simply
complaining about it to a beat does not have a significant effect. It would seem that
effective engagement with this issue would require more than mere complaint.
Especially if we're talking about some kind of revolution. Yet all we get year after
year for two decades and a half from rappers is "the police hate us, so hate them back" while "hiphop intellectuals" cheer from the sidelines that this is politics. Yet this is a "politics" that has nothing
to do with doing somethingor even suggesting what might be done. If this
posturing is a "politics" black America should be proud of, then black America is accepting
nothing as something: stasis as progress, gesture as action.
Capitalism Links
The use of hip hop as a strategy for activism fails because it is
inevitably coopted by capitalismvoices wont be heard
Coates 07-senior editor @ The Atlantic, staff writer @ TIME, B.A. @ Howard University [Ta-Nehisi, TIME
Magazine, Hip-hops down beat, August 17, 2007, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,16536391,00.html, DavidK]
When the political activist Al Sharpton pivoted from his war against bigmouth radio man Don Imus to a war on badmouth gangsta rap, the instinct among older music fans was to roll their eyes and yawn. Ten years ago, another
activist, C. Delores Tucker, launched a very similar campaign to clean up rap music. She focused on Time Warner
(parent of TIME), whose subsidiary Interscope was home to hard-core rappers Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur. In
1995 Tucker succeeded in forcing Time Warner to dump Interscope. Her victory was Pyrrhic. Interscope flourished,
the genre
exploded across the planet, with rappers emerging everywhere from Capetown to
the banlieues of Paris. In the U.S. alone, sales reached $1.8 billion. The lesson was
Capitalism 101: rap music's market strength gave its artists permission to say what
they pleased. And the rappers themselves exhibited an entrepreneurial bent unlike
that of musicians before them. They understood the need to market and the
benefits of line extensions. Theirs was capitalism with a beat. Today that same market is
launching artists like 50 Cent and Eminem and distributing the posthumous recordings of Shakur. And
telling rappers to please shut up. While music-industry sales have plummeted, no genre has fallen harder than rap.
According to the music trade publication Billboard, rap sales have dropped 44% since 2000 and declined from 13%
of all music sales to 10%. Artists who were once the tent poles at rap labels are posting disappointing numbers. JayZ's return album, Kingdom Come, for instance, sold a gaudy 680,000 units in its first week, according to Billboard.
But by the second week, its sales had declined some 80%. This year rap sales are down 33% so far. Longtime rap
fans are doing the math and coming to the same conclusions as the music's voluminous critics. In February, the
filmmaker Byron Hurt released Beyond Beats and Rhymes, a documentary notable not just for its hard critique but
for the fact that most of the people doing the criticizing were not dowdy church ladies but members of the hip-hop
generation who deplore rap's recent fixation on the sensational. Both rappers and music execs are clamoring for
solutions. Russell Simmons recently made a tepid call for rappers to self-censor the words nigger and bitch from
produced enterprises like Roc-A-Fella, which straddled fashion, music and film and in 2001 was worth $300 million.
It produced moguls like No Limit's Master P and Bad Boy's Puff Daddy, each of whom in
2001 made an appearance on FORTUNE's list of the richest 40 under 40. Along the way,
the music influenced everything from advertising to fashion to sports.
Hip hop has become commoditized and voices have been co-opted and
manipulated by capitalism
Philosog 11-[Philosog, Concerning Hip Hop, Capitalism, and Politics, March 2, 2011,
http://philosog.com/Jonesing/concerning-hip-hop-capitalism-and-politics/, DavidK]
for them. Group conflict is the context for the black political agenda. Capitalism is the context for American politics.
Merging group conflict and capitalist development, merging the black political agenda and American politics, we are
The get rich or die trying mentality of hip hop has led to it becoming a
forum to be dominated by capitalist beliefs consistent with the neoconservative agenda
Johnson 08-Professor of Economics and Geography @ the Coggin College of Business, University of Florida,
PhD in Economics @ University of Alabama, B.S. in Economics and Mathematics @ the University of Alabama, writes
for the Journal of Pan-African Studies, specializes poverty and inequality in Urban and Regional Economics
[Christopher, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Danceable Capitalism: Hip-Hops Links to Corporate Space, June
2008, Volume 2, Number 4, pg. 91, http://www.jpanafrican.com/docs/vol2no4/2.4_Danceable_Cap.pdf, DavidK]
Black Nationalist sentiment within popular hip-hop has faded , but the
message of Black capitalism has (not surprisingly) increased over the last decade. To discount the
It is true that
validity of capitalist sentiment one would have to ignore the rise of prosperity ministries within the Black church,
the increase in Black business ownership, and the high percentage of Black college students enrolled in business
uncomfortably at times)
Capitalism forces any political meaning in rap to the way side and dictates
what artists can and cannot say
Ali 09-Staff Writer @ The Washington Examiner, writers @ the magazine empower, specializes in social
awareness and activism [Aisha, The Examiner, Hip-hop meets its ultimate fate: Hip-hop surrenders to capitalism,
May 4, 2009, http://www.examiner.com/dc-in-washington-dc/hip-hop-meets-its-ultimate-fate-hip-hop-surrenders-tocapitalism-dollar-dollar-bill-ya-ll, DavidK]
the suits behind the corporate desks are the real pimps . This is an organized crime model
at its best. As hip-hop became more influential and accepted in pop mainstream,
capitalism dominated how artists were to portray themselves to gain enough
popularity needed to control airwaves. However, capitalism cannot be only associated
with todays hip-hop, as it has been a dominating factor. Old school rappers in hip-hop spoke of
So,
escaping impoverished conditions through money gained from their record sales as dope emcees. If capitalism
was the killer of hip-hop, then it was suicidal. In Paid In Full, one of my favorite old school hip-hop joints by Eric
B and Rakim, along with Dont Sweat The Technique, Rakim describes a situation of a young, stickup kid, who
realized this path led to a dead end, ultimately deciding to use his lyrical talents as a positive means to gain the
materialistic lifestyle desired. Now, whether Rakim is referring to himself, another individual, or just a fictional
character in a hypothetical situation is debatable; yet, the fact remains this song discusses materialism, just as
songs today. Although Rakims style and talent is greater than 95 percent of mainstream rappers today, this song
political and originators intentions were righteous, as hip-hop began as a story of marginalized people with limited
resources in underserved communities, explicit, hardcore attempts to be political, while occasionally entertaining,
had a superfluous impact. The end result: f ollowers
offered a new twist that many people had not heard. The mega success of Suge Knights Death Row Records, the
music empire that manufactured Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, dominated the new direction in which hip-hop was to go,
Tupac thought that welfare had always offered payments for kids on an open-ended
basis, and that the problem was just that there had always been some small-minded people like Brenda's mother.
Tupac would likely have laughed along with most blacks at the welfare office's
posted slogan in Eddie Murphy's Claymation series The PJs about life in the projects: "Keeping You in
the Projects Since 1965." But if he was aware of Bill Clinton's promise in 1992 to end
"welfare as we know it," he likely thought of it as covertly racist this was the standard
position at the time among people of his leftist politics. Like so many, he likely had never considered
the cognitive dissonance between laughing at that sign in The PJs and resisting
welfare reform. Becausefor him there was no dissonance at all. Rap is about
dissing. You diss the "poverty pimps" at the welfare office who want to keep people
on welfare in order to keep themselves employed ("Word!") and you diss white
congressmen who want to time-limit welfare ("Word!"). That's hip-hop's "politics." To
Tupac, then, Brenda was, as a poor black girl, "invisible" to America, and otherwise just up against the seamier side
of human nature in the family circle sense. That's the hip-hop way of looking at things: anti-establishment, angsty.
just as KRS-One today cannot see the death of welfare as we knew it as good
news for the black employment situation, the hip-hop way of looking at things could not
perceive, in 1991, what one of Brenda's [the] main sociopolitical problems was: welfare as
we knew it. In 1991, welfare as we knew it was every bit as important to the fate of
Tupac's people as the police and how he got treated at stores now and then (as he chronicled in "I Don't
Give a Fuck" on the same album 2Pacalypse Now). I'm well aware that welfare reform would not, let's face
it, make much of a rap track. I am aware of one cut that makes a kind of stab at it, "She's Alive," on
But
OutKast's smashing Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, actually weaving in interview clips with single mothers doing
their best. But that one cut is just an exception, as are the handful of others in the whole body of hip-hop that one
Gender Links
NOTE: this could also work as a good link to the cap K
which educated while they entertained, some that made gangsta rap, some, like D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince,
that made us laugh, and some that just said whatever they felt. And that was the point there was a time in hip
hop where one could pretty much say anything. See, in the time period I am discussing, record labels still hadnt
figured out how to make money off of hip-hop. Because there was not yet any set formula, creativity reigned, and
songs about anything and everything imaginable were made. That meant that all comers including women could
has been commodified for centuries. In the 1880s, Ms. Sarah Baartman was taken around the world and displayed
as the Hottentot Venus. Her buttocks and genitalia were prominently displayed. She was an object of fascination
and curiosity. There is a wonderful YouTube video essay that chronicles the relationship between Sarah Baartman
and the young women in todays videos better than my words ever could. The comparison is startling, but the
Capitalism has transformed the message of hip hop from real to one of
misogyny and sexismwe have to reject it
Ciaccio 04-Professor @ University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee [Nichali, ZNet, Hip Hop, Gender, Race, and
Capitalism, June 5, 2004, http://www.zcommunications.org/hip-hop-gender-race-and-capitalism-by-nichali-ciaccio,
DavidK]
Mark Anthony Neal was insightful to point out that the industry thrives on sexism, and that asking artists
to promote a feminist vision would be asking them to drop their contracts and start selling far fewer records. After
radical acts like the Coup are, despite their vision, small players in the industry as a whole. Yet
clearly by playing this game, the major artists are responsible for proliferating
sexism the potency of which alters the mores of huge segments of the youth
population. This insight turns our attention to an issue fundamentally important if
we want to address the pervasiveness of sexism in hip-hop and society in general:
the role of capitalism in not just reinforcing but actively promoting the dominant
views (which are, at this time, reactionary towards women, the LGBTQ community, etc). Acting according to
all,
demand, major record companies produce and distribute music that people will buy. So as long as music is
produced via a demand system and sexism continues to exist, so will its presence in music. With the exception of
extremely rare artists who have both attained a national audience and are brave enough to challenge their base, it
artists lack the capacity to change the system themselves without a large
change in the consumer base. In lieu of some form of direct censorship (or indirect, in the case of Walseems
Mart, whose "family-based" approach to music has artists censoring themselves out of fear of losing a huge
market)-which I am personally opposed to-there is little chance that the industry itself will change this paradigm on
artists
actively promote misogynistic viewpoints. They aren't simply passive elements of
capitalism but participants whose voice greatly influences youth opinion and
continue to reinforce the same views in new generations of music listeners and
makers. By making sexism part of their image they aren't just allowing it to become
acceptable among youth groups but setting a standard by which youth are supposed to
treat each other as a prerequisite for acceptance. Thus challenging the sexism in hip-hop and
rap requires not only looking at sexism writ large in society but how capitalism
continues to promote it. Developing a larger, dynamic and holistic strategy to this problem means
addressing distribution as well as the product itself. Sexism cannot be cured without
understanding its influence on, and how it is influenced by, capitalism. Building a thoughtful and
its own. On the other hand, as spokespeople for hip-hop and (in some cases, worldwide) celebrity-idols,
dynamic radical theory requires addressing every issue of oppression. This means looking at the interactions not
only between capitalism and sexism, but politics and racism as well. In this case, there are a few things we can do
to make small changes in the system now, but the effects of which become larger over time. First, we can promote
the activities of students like those of Spelman Colleg e, whose level of consciousness can alter youth
challenges both predominant gender views and the consumer base of major
corporations-and we know how much they fear the vacillation of youth opinion (as is
seen in their struggles to control it).
If the pervasive spirit of female rap's early days was defiance, the mid-'90s gave rise to a sort of
radical compliance. In their porno-grade raps, Lil' Kim, Foxy Brown, and Trina offered
themselves up almost as grotesques, inhabiting lewd sexual fantasies almost to the point of
caricature. Kimwho offset constant demands for cunnilingus with a famous brag about "how I make a Sprite can disappear in
my mouth"was the best of these, and the only pop star in history to serve as muse to both Notorious B.I.G. and Marc Jacobs. Her
take-no-shit attitude appealed to hardened hip-hop fans, while her hypersexualized camp made her a gay icon. Hip-hop
femininity is often described in binary: Women are either "independent"they pay their own bills and,
conveniently, ask men for nothingor they are hos. Lil' Kim made the case for the independent ho. (Sometimes another
option, cited in the case of confident female rappers, appears: lesbian.) So why has female hip-hop made so few
lasting inroads over 30 years? For one thing, what most of the women mentioned above have in common is that their
music rebuts and responds to guy-spun gender narratives. One effect of this is to make female
rap seem second class, occurring outside the "real," "primary" work of hip-hop canon building, even
as it argues for first-class citizenship. When we hear the word rappers, we think of black males; they're what feminists
would call hip-hop's unmarked category. This makes tough going for pretenders outside of this category, and it's meant that many of
the identities that female comers have carved for themselvesBoss' gangsta bitch, Kim's badass nympho, or,
recently, Lil' Mama's lunchroom alpha girlhave registered as one-offs or fads. (We see the same thing with white
rappers, whether it's the Beastie Boys' nerdy boogie or Eminem's white-trash horror-core.)