1NC

K
The AFFIRMATIVE Is ultimately a momentary insurrection that itself is
produced by the condition of Neoliberal Domination The Project of Liberal
Ressilience requires the constant production of Insurection and destruction to
justify the constant expansion of the liberal violence
Luke 15 (T.W. Luke is Professor of Political Science @ Virginia Tech, Oct 29 , On
Insurrectionality: Theses on Contemporary Revolts and Resilience ) //NotJacob
These theses on insurrection are only a provisional assessment. They attempt to assay certain
logics of change and containment apparently at work in new radical appeals for direct action,
like those made in The Coming Insurrection (2009), The Democracy Project (2013), or Two
Cheers for Anarchism (2012). While these calls for upheaval are provocative, this analysis
suggests one should ask to what extent the politics touted by such programmatic manifestos
now are becoming, and already have been for some good while, interwoven into the existing
order of power in the subtle dialectics of resilience? For months, Occupy Wall Street (OWS)
activists organized public protests and teach-ins against economic and political inequality all
across the USA during 2011 and 2012. Thousands joined this peaceable uprising against
corporate power. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security
kept it under continuous watch for terrorist intentions at its peak of popularity, but then
classified it as a peaceful movement' when its appeal waned. OWS popularized, and in many
ways glamorized, popular resistance, but its inchoate critiques of embedded corporate and state
power seem to have only made the top 1% much more resilient as the decisive social force at
work in business and government. This outcome leads one to suggest that insurrectionists now
are an intrinsic part of a robustly resilient social order that justifies itself, and legitimizes its own
expansive controls, in part, by tolerating the possibility of constant revolts while continuously
containing their impact? Also in 2011, thousands of Egyptians rose up against President Hosni
Mubarak in Tahrir Square, toppling his government with the assistance of the nation's armed
forces in less than two weeks. A new elected regime of Islamist partisans from the Muslim
Brotherhood led by President Mohamed Morsi quickly was elected as well as a new constitution
installed to appease the insurrection. Yet, this regime also met its own quick demise at the hands
of new uprisings centered in Tahrir Square. That renewed insurrection in the streets then turned
to the Egyptian military and General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi to take control of the state. This
complicated cycle of embedded regime collapse, and then reconstruction, could be characterized
as a useful case study in insurrectionality. Like other parallel ideologies of good works, like
accountability, diversity, or sustainability, the logics of insurrectionality appear to be another
facet of flexible control in a new regime of resilient power. This emergent system of maintaining
social order seems to mobilize disorder to generate its power and knowledge. It is affected, in
part, by achieving a loose containment of insurrectionists as well as by accepting, to a degree,
the legitimacy of insurrectionism as a general civil/political/social freedom, if not, a new type of
right. For a world in which 85 elite rich individuals own as much wealth as one half of the entire
Earth's population, and where the number of billionaires has doubled since 2008 (even as most
of the 99% of world's population is floundering economically), insurrection is attractive. For too
many people everywhere, their nearly insignificant existential meaning and financial net worth
are at best stagnant. This lack of purpose and wealth amidst tremendous affluence is associated
with their growing sense of anomie, disempowerment, and impoverishment. Insurrectionality,
then, can flare up here in all of the conflicted complementarities crackling between their
frustrated aspirations and growing hopelessness (Baudrillard, 1996). The widespread outbreaks
of insurrectionist political movements in open defiance of today's dominant economic and social
order perhaps are a defining quality at this juncture in history. From the Arab Spring' uprisings,
to the color revolutions' in Eastern Europe, to the worldwide Occupy' movements, to numerous
attacks of pre-mediated violent terrorist action, this new politics of insurrection has been
unfolding rapidly during the twenty-first century (Graeber, 2013). In some instances, these
movements often appear to be quite radical, but also not necessarily progressive. They seem
very popular, but not always seeking emancipation for all people. They have political
complaints, but also have not usually pursued conventional governmental means of redress
within the workings of modern state structures as they stand (Dussel, 1985). Most distinctively,
despite the open, and quite often aggressive, defiance of these insurrectional movements there is
little transformation coming from their activities. Such discontinuities raise questions: do
insurrections pose significant challenges to the existing social order, have they taken different
epistemic or ethical positions that put them in complete opposition to prevailing systemic
authority, and do their insurrections challenge conventional humanist conventions of secular,
statal, and social identity (Elden, 2007)? Working to advance some provisional responses here
to these fascinating developments could cast new light on how contemporary insurrections, and
systemic transformations that they profess to pursue, are either closely connected or completely
contradictory historical changes that appear to have very low probabilities of success no matter
how intensely their supporters push for them. Insurrection is an old word, and one whose
meaning resonates across time and space from its Latin origins in the notion insurgere' to
ascend, rise up or rebel. Close to the idea of insurgency, insurrection also implies being
mutinous, rebellious, or revolutionary in open acts of rebellion against civil authority, ruling
elites, or government power. To be insurrectional, or incite insurrection, and rise up, as an
insurrectionist does not imply, however, that those who rise in rebellion necessarily will
continue to stay up or succeed in their would-be ascension to power (Bartelson, 1995; Giddens,
1985). Consequently, insurrection can be seen as some latent potentiality, a quality of being at
readiness for, an instance of launching into, or a need for rising up, which allows one to discuss
simultaneously the intermittent emergence and persistent embeddedness of insurrectionality as
a crucial characteristic in the governance of contemporary life (Luke, 2012). As Miller and Rose
(2008, p. 149) claim. the emergence of professionals in the conduct of conduct, professionals
whose expertise lies in the shaping of this self-steering mechanism of others in relation to
certain norms grounded in positive knowledge, may be seen as a decisive event in the exercise of
authority. Therefore, one must pay heed to the management of insurrectionality by expert
professionals. It follows fresh scripts in which less rigid and resilient forms of authority become
exercised via the machinic unconsciousness imprinted in the assemblages of everyday life
(Guattari, 2011). One wonders how protests against debt, unemployment, and dispossession in
America's contemporary capitalist economy are, in fact, a strategic mediation of a government
of each and all, evincing a concern for every individual and the population as a whole, which
essentially involves the health, welfare, prosperity, and happiness of the population' such that
to govern properly, to ensure the happiness and prosperity of the population, it is necessary to
govern through a particular register, that of the economy' (Dean, 1999, p. 19). Accepting
economic and political crisis, therefore, becomes an effective strategy to communicate, control,
and command the containment of popular uprisings via unwritten constitutional provisos for
such insurrectionality. By accepting mediagenic street demonstrations and colorful site
occupations, if only for a short stretch of time, as liminal movements in which direct actions by
the people' to engage in the popular review, legitimation, or alteration of the existing regime,
does the exercise of sovereign authority and disciplinary practice provisionally reinvent the
regulation and ordering of the numbers of people within that territory' (Dean, 1999, p. 20) by
turning to such unorthodox means of governance via insurrectionality? 2. Risk to Sustain and
Develop Resilient Rule This brief analysis, therefore, plays off contradictions, conflicts, and
contagions in the contemporary events around the world to find the patterns in these variations
of power. From Paris in 2005, Athens in 2008, Tunis in 2011, Kiev in 2012, Bangkok in 2014, or
innumerable other instances of organized violence, popular turmoil, civic unrest, or social
mayhem in smaller cities and towns going back years, if not decades, all over the world, many
have foretold of the coming of grand insurrections from all of these seemingly disparate events
(Hardt & Negri, 2000). Nonetheless, crisis management by corporations and states has been
refining its practices as a mode of governance since the 1960s to the extent that it essentially
risks revolt to sustain and develop resilience as a logic of rule (Luke, 1978, pp. 5672). Plainly,
for 50 years, fresh waves of insurrectional activity have erupted, only to be disrupted, and then
crushed, contained, or captured to dissipate or redirect their activism (Scott, 2012). These are
distinctive trends in today's risk society' (Beck, 1992). Its incumbent authorities at many levels
of administration often accept and manage the risk of insurrection, like any sets of collective
social risk. The coevolutionary coexistence of established power and emergent insurrection
iterate this logic of insurrectionality. In keeping the media looking for unrest, citizens ready to
engage in mayhem, and flexible state power mobilized to defend with considerable force the
existing order against unruly street mobs, strategic elite decision-makers nurture resilience
through revolts. That is, they continue draining off, or cultivating, more limited aspects of the
credible, helpful, or useful normative policy agendas borne by the programs of insurrectionists
when and where they appear in orderly demonstrations as spectacles of free assembly,
conscience, and speech. Insurrection, then, never truly disappears with the development of
modernizing urban industrial societies (Luke, 1990). On the contrary, it must persist. The
enduring promise of revolt perpetuates its never fully fulfilled promise with precepts and
possibilities that portend their advocates can never be manageable, disreputable, or contained
the next time. These recurring tendencies must be explored, because one rightly can ask if there
are new strategic practices at work within these manifestations of insurrectionality, which have
been integral to the survival and strength of the existing order (Dean, 2008). Is it possible that
the culture of resilience, now so cherished by the existing order, cannot be implemented, and
then continuously refined, without conflicts, contention, or crises to degrade everyday
economic, political, and social processes to the point that their crisis-ridden eventuation's must,
and can, bounce back' resiliently to keep new cycles of neoliberal economic growth and social
reform expanding?

This is Especially true in context of Academia itself The Affirmative presumes

their argument an Insurrection , Or a Virus you might call it, that will destroy
power from inside but is instead only becomes rescripted to complete the
condition of social death
Occupied UC Berkeley 9 (The Necrosocial Civic Life, Social Death, and the
University of California, November 2009, http://craccum.ausa.auckland.ac.nz/?p=286)
//NotJacob

Yes, very much a cemetery. Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing
of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt. The classroom just like the workplace just
like the university just like the state just like the economy manages our social death, translating
what we once knew from high school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance,
into acceptable forms of social conflict. Who knew that behind so much civic life (electoral
campaigns, student body representatives, bureaucratic administrators, public relations officials,
Peace and Conflict Studies, ad nauseam) was so much social death? What postures we maintain
to claim representation, what limits we assume, what desires we dismiss? And in this moment of
crisis they ask us to twist ourselves in a way that they can hear. Petitions to Sacramento, phone
calls to Congressmeneven the chancellor patronizingly congratulates our September 24th
student strike, shaping the meaning and the force of the movement as a movement against the
policies of Sacramento. He expands his institutional authority to encompass the movement.
When students begin to hold libraries over night, beginning to take our first baby step as an
autonomous movement he reins us in by serendipitously announcing library money. He
manages movement, he kills movement by funneling it into the electoral process. He manages
our social death. He looks forward to these battles on his terrain, to eulogize a proposition, to
win this or thathe and his look forward to exhausting us. He and his look forward to a
reproduction of the logic of representative governance, the release valve of the university
plunges us into an abyss where ideas are wisps of etherthat is, meaning is ripped from action.
Lets talk about the fight endlessly, but always only in their managed form: to perpetually
deliberate, the endless fleshing-out-ofwhen we push the boundaries of this form they are quick
to reconfigure themselves to contain us: the chancellors congratulations, the reopening of the
libraries, the managed general assemblythere is no fight against the administration here, only
its own extension. Each day passes in this way, the administration on the look out to shape
student discourseit happens without pause, we dont notice nor do we care to. It becomes
banal, thoughtless. So much so that we see we are accumulating days: one semester, two, how
close to being this or that, how far? This accumulation is our shared history. This
accumulationevery once in a while interrupted, violated by a riot, a wild protest, unforgettable
fucking, the overwhelming joy of love, life shattering heartbreakis a muted, but desirous life. A
dead but restless and desirous life. The university steals and homogenizes our time yes, our bank
accounts also, but it also steals and homogenizes meaning. As much as capital is invested in
building a killing apparatus abroad, an incarceration apparatus in California, it is equally
invested here in an apparatus for managing social death. Social death is, of course, simply the
power source, the generator, of civic life with its talk of reform, responsibility, unity. A life,
then, which serves merely as the public relations mechanism for death: its garrulous slogans of
freedom and democracy designed to obscure the shit and decay in which our feet are planted.
Yes, the university is a graveyard, but it is also a factory: a factory of meaning which produces
civic life and at the same time produces social death. A factory which produces the illusion that
meaning and reality can be separated; which everywhere reproduces the empty reactionary
behavior of students based on the values of life (identity), liberty (electoral politics), and
happiness (private property). Everywhere the same whimsical ideas of the future. Everywhere
democracy. Everywhere discourse to shape our desires and distress in a way acceptable to the
electoral state, discourse designed to make our very moments here together into a set of legible
and fruitless demands. Totally managed death. A machine for administering death, for the
proliferation of technologies of death. As elsewhere, things rule. Dead objects rule. In this sense,
it matters little what face one puts on the universitywhether Yudof or some other lackey. These
are merely the personifications of the rule of the dead, the pools of investments, the buildings,
the flows of materials into and out of the physical space of the universityeach one the product
of some exploitationwhich seek to absorb more of our work, more tuition, more energy. The
university is a machine which wants to grow, to accumulate, to expand, to absorb more and
more of the living into its peculiar and perverse machinery: high-tech research centers, new
stadiums and office complexes. And at this critical juncture the only way it can continue to grow
is by more intense exploitation, higher tuition, austerity measures for the departments that fail
to pass the test of relevancy. But the irrelevant departments also have their place. With their
pure motives of knowledge for its own sake, they perpetuate the blind inertia of meaning
ostensibly detached from its social context. As the university cultivates its cozy relationship with
capital, war and power, these discourses and research programs play their own role, co-opting
and containing radical potential. And so we attend lecture after lecture about how discourse
produces subjects, ignoring the most obvious fact that we ourselves are produced by this
discourse about discourse which leaves us believing that it is only words which matter, words
about words which matter. The university gladly permits the precautionary lectures on
biopower; on the production of race and gender; on the reification and the fetishization of
commodities. A taste of the poison serves well to inoculate us against any confrontational
radicalism. And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which contain and neutralize all
thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture halls. There is no need to speak
truth to power when power already speaks the truth. The university is a graveyard as es. The
graveyard of liberal good intentions, of meritocracy, opportunity, equality, democracy. Here the
tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. We graft our
flesh, our labor, our debt to the skeletons of this or that social clich. In seminars and lectures
and essays, we pay tribute to the universitys ghosts, the ghosts of all those it has excludedthe
immiserated, the incarcerated, the just-plain-fucked. They are summoned forth and banished by
a few well-meaning phrases and research programs, given their book titles, their citations. This
is our gothicwe are so morbidly aware, we are so practiced at stomaching horror that the
horror is thoughtless. In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the
conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity
categoriesour force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us.
Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums,
activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/
homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-
to-be. That is, we are students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or
Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift
leaderseach with our own office, place, time, and given meaning. We form teams, clubs,
fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subculturesand
thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot. Who doesnt participate in this
graveyard? In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality
translates to a value of domination. We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves
were brighter than everyone else. Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we
deserve more than everyone else. We have measured ourselves and we have measured others. It
should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose
people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat, test them as a professor, extract value from
their capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying, completing. It is our private wet
dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of domination. After all, we are
intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this. We are convinced,
owned, broken. We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
This triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater
the fight between the university and its own studentswe have used their words on their stages:
Save public education! When those values are violated by the very institutions which are created
to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get
indignant. We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values. What many have
learned again and again is that these institutions dont care for those values, not at all, not for
all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own. The values
create popular images and ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality,
pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling
of commodified identities, the states monopoly on violence, the expansion of markets and
capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class,
and domination and humiliation in general. They sell the practice through the image. Were
taught well live the images once we accept the practice. In this crisis the Chancellors and
Presidents, the Regents and the British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all
intend to be true to their values and capitalize on the university economically and socially
which is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an escalation, a provocation. Their most recent
attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more willing to accept
their new terms as well as what was always dead in the university, to see just how dead we are
willing to play, how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous. Every institution has of course
our best interest in mind, so much so that were willing to pay, to enter debt contracts, to strike a
submissive pose in the classroom, in the lab, in the seminar, in the dorm, and eventually or
simultaneously in the workplace to pay back those debts. Each bulging institutional value
longing to become more than its sentiment through us, each of our empty gestures of feigned-
anxiety to appear under pressure, or of cool-ambivalence to appear accustomed to horror, every
moment of student life, is the management of our consent to social death. Social death is our
banal acceptance of an institutions meaning for our own lack of meaning. Its the positions we
thoughtlessly enact. Its the particular nature of being owned. Social rupture is the initial divorce
between the owners and the owned. A social movement is a function of war. War contains the
ability to create a new frame, to build a new tension for the agents at play, new dynamics in the
battles both for the meaning and the material. When we move without a return to their tired
meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war. It is November
2009. For an end to the values of social death we need ruptures and self-propelled, unmanaged
movements of wild bodies. We need, we desire occupations. We are an antagonistic dead.

Telling stories is the perfection of anthropology. Knowledge objects. New

knowledge will become tools of colonialism colonial states love detailed
information to better rule its subjects
Bhuta 8 (The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs, Nehal, State-
Building, Democratization and Politics as Technology Dec,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1574349)
While the principles of a good polity were regarded as universal and so appropriately applied by
outsiders, the subjects of tutelage also had to be thoroughly known as objects of
sociological and anthropological knowledge, to maximize the efficacy of the institutional
reform and re-design. 24 Hence, as Nicholas Dirks observes in his recent work, The Scandal of Empire, colonial
bureaucracy was not just about control: it was also an accumulation and creation of
knowledge in the service of rule, a rule which created its own objects and its own
experts.25 East India Company governor Warren Hastings impeached by Edmund Burke for the scandals of Company
rule in India in fact took great care to study indigenous systems of justice, in order to create a

colonial legal order that appeared directly modeled on indigenous customs, texts and
practices.26 The new legal procedures introduced by Hastings appeared fully justified as the
maintenance of an Indian legal tradition, which had been rationalized and modernized to ensure
the best approximation of the rule of law that could achieved under Indian conditions.27 Similarly,
Lord Lugards model of indirect rule required the diligent district officer to accumulate and
codify as much knowledge about local custom and tradition as possible, in order to
be able to use that knowledge to improve the efficacy of indirect rule and its ultimate goal of
reforming the political life of the colonized population.28 The colonial state was
relentless in its quest for detailed information29 about subject populations, in
order to better rule them in an enlightened manner and to authorize the fact of that rule. The
conceit of techno-politics (or politics as techn), of which colonial liberal reform is a variety, is that social relations can be mapped and known as
objects of knowledge within a Euclidean space,30 and so rendered amenable to more and more intensive technical intervention. Precisely in the mode
of Rousseaus omniscient LawGiver cum Engineer, colonialisms
will to knowledge sought a snapshot of
subject societies,31 all the better to reconstitute and re-order them . But as Tim Mitchell
reminds us in his study of Egypt, to claim to know an object in this way is also to act on and transform it,
through codification, systematization, rearticulation. Such knowledge objects are neither mere
representation nor hard facts they are artifactual creations that simplify the world and
underwrite claims of expertise only by resolving social reality into a much simpler
set of forces and oppositions.32 Expertise constructs its object as much as it claims to know
it.33 Unsurprisingly, under such circumstances, there is rarely a linear relation between the
expert reformers claimed knowledge and intention, and the sought-after outcome. Thus,
Warren Hastings effort to re-establish an Indian legal tradition on rationalist principles in fact
created a new and radically different system of classification and codification.34

This locks power into a productive cycle by which momentary

insurrection provide the libidinal energy to sustain liberalisms
constant state of insecurity No Longer is there an imagined future
by which society has rendered itself pure or secure but instead an
absorption of that constant state of Risk created by momentary
insurrections like the affirmative to extend networks of domination
across the periphery
Luke 15(T.W. Luke is Professor of Political Science @ Virginia Tech, Oct 29 , On
Insurrectionality: Theses on Contemporary Revolts and Resilience) //NotJacob
Many of these revolutionary movements key representational spaces' do generate
insurrectionist spatiality, like Tahrir Square, the Maidan, or Zuccotti Park, that feed into the
mythos of new world order grounded in vigilant resilience, but those shifts become more
feasible only with microelectronic information and communication technologies. Diversely
imagined communities of incumbent and insurgent forces interact through space as directly
lived through its associated images and symbols, and the space of inhabitants and usersthis
is the dominatedand hence passively experiencedspace which the imagination seeks to
change and appropriate' (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 39). Both sets of contending imaginative forces will
change and appropriate the acts and artifacts of insurrection in many small ways that affirm the
resistance of insurrections as well as actualize the resilience of the authorities they challenge.
These calculated and intelligible workings of power are neither so formulaic nor inspired that
they appear unprecedented. Rather they are continuously emergent, and deeply embedded,
aspects of post-Cold War relations of power, which are both intentional and non-subjective,
making them as Foucault would argue, imbued, through and through, with calculation: There is
no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives' (Foucault, 1978, pp. 9495).
Resilience certainly has objective aims as a mode of governmentalizing rule. Nevertheless, it
seemingly accepts some aspects of sustainability, insurrectionality, complexity, or reflexivity as
harnessed oppositional energies. These elective affinities cannot be tracked back to the choice
or decision of an individual subject, even though it is readily apparent that each one's
operational logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable' (Foucault, 1978, p. 95).
Insurrectionality unfolds, like sustainability, as another layer in the contemporary codes of
global performativity. Resilient authority structures at work in the deep state collaborate
continuously through never-ending police operations to contain, shape, or manage
insurrectionable development. In so doing, they refine appear to refine their systems of
neutralization and equivalence' to select those motifs, styles or traits of insurgency that become
comparable within the capitalistic economy of flows, even though it often will be necessary to
hide them, cut them off, make them over, or better yet transform them from the inside'
(Guattari, 2011, p. 79). Organizing new anti-capitalist insurrections through tweets, posts, and
blogs is not that dissimilar from enforcing their pacification through commercial counter-
tweets, anti-posts, and reactive blogs. Systemic stability arguably presumes episodes of failure,
interruption, and turbulence. Otherwise, it is less effective at maintaining operational resilience
in all the functions of opening and reclosing signifying assemblages' for the distributed and
resilient power grids maintaining today's precarious social peace (Guattari, 2011, p. 79).
Insurrectionality might well improve these networks of order by bringing new social demands to
light, but so too does it strengthen the resilience of
those authorities who may concede or crush these demands. 4. Resilience is Insurrectionable
Development The rapid urbanization of planet Earth transmutates cityscapes and countrysides
into a profusion of man-made conurbanations (Virilio, 2000). Still the metropolis is not just this
urban pile-up, the final collusion of city and country. It is also a flow of beings and things, a
current that runs through fiber-optic networks, through high-speed train lines, satellites, and
video surveillance cameras, making sure that this world keeps running straight to its ruin.
(Invisible Committee, 2009, pp. 5859) Maintaining cohesion and coherence against any and all
insurrectionists under these circumstances basically is improbable, if not impossible. Hence, an
ethos of accepting risk and accommodating it resiliently unfolds to rejoin shattered pieces and
reintegrate suddenly incoherent practices as viable and enhanced forms of life (Miller & Rose,
2008). Rather than pretending to be invulnerable and steady, resilient state power may well
concede its tendencies to fail even as it labors to stay up and running. It is precisely due to this
architecture of flows that the metropolis is one of the most vulnerable human arrangements that
has ever existed. Supple, subtle, but vulnerablethe world would not be moving so fast if it
didn't have to constantly outrun its own collapse. (Invisible Committee, 2009, 60) Frequently,
the resilience thinking behind current-day governmentality accedes that the Earth's
environment as such is becoming a continuous catastrophe. Instead of struggling to guard
pristine ecologies against all probable threats, the ethos of endangerment at the core of
resilience affirms that all environments must persist through punctuated incidents of toxic
catastrophe. The relation of state power to the masses in resilience regimes recognizes the
environment is nothing more than the relationship to the world that is proper to the metropolis
and that projects itself onto everything that would escape it' (Invisible Committee, 2009, p. 75).
Indeed, the modalities of insurrectionable development concede that the metropolis is a terrain
of constant low-intensity conflict, in which the taking of Basra, Mogadishu, or Nablus mark
politics of culminationno longer undertaken in view of victory or peace, or even the re-
establishment of order, such interventions' continue a security operation that is always already
in progress. War is no longer a distinct event in time, but instead diffracts into a series of micro-
operations, by both military and police, to ensure security. (Invisible Committee, 2009, pp. 56
57) These institutional developments arguably are also part of the effects following from the
advent of walled states and waning sovereignty. This couplet of order and disorder is taking hold
across many societies around the world, but especially in those regimes that rest upon building
physical barriers between the starkly divided classes of technologically competent, obsolescent,
and superfluous workers proliferating in divisive cultures and exploited societies trapped in a
globalized world economy. Wendy Brown focuses her attention on the border walls between the
USA and Mexico running from California to Texas and Israel's security walls on the West Bank
in the Sinai, and near Gaza (2010, pp. 2842) to spotlight these contradictions. Such security
fences' seem often fail as impermeable barriers, and therefore create little security (Nevins,
2002; Weizman, 2007). Yet, they never were intended to be impermeable secure barriers.
Rather they are the most massive markers of how far more tangible divides already are always
being erected between businesses and communities, the rich and poor, racial majorities and
minorities, or the top and bottom of society over the last 50 years. Through the practices of
urban redevelopment, freeway construction, public housing, gated communities, secure
skyscrapers, guarded campuses, and other defensible spaces' around the world, the walled state
has morphed into the sine qua non of civil society. As Brown suggests, walls respond to and
externalize the causes of different kinds of perceived violence to the nation, and the walls
themselves exercise different kinds of violence toward the families, communities, lands, and
political possibilities they traverse and shape' (2010, p. 38). While she regards them as
ineffective security mechanisms per se, one wonders how insurrections are the material effects
of when and where walls inadvertently subvert the distinction between inside and outside that
they are intended to mark' as well as what contingent effects they have in contouring
nationalisms, citizen subjectivities, and the identities of political entities on both of their sides'
(Brown, 2010, p. 41). To solidify the logics of resilience, then, walls prove to be important
mechanisms to effectuating the insecurities that resilient rule requires. In too many ways, the
growing inequalities and social divisions in post-Fordist neoliberal economies are barriers very
rarely experienced everyday in mass behavior. The fabrication of walls, fences, checkpoints, and
other dividers simultaneously imply insurrections can be both fueled, and actively contained, by
the structural violence of neoliberal dispossession (Lazzarato, 2012). In stimulating and then
sparking insurrection, then, how normalized is insurrectionality becoming in these decades-old
patterns? And, after multiple cycles of insurrection-and-suppression, to what extent have
resilient responses become, in fact, an emergent regimen of governance rather than entrenched
embattlement? Inequality is growing, insurrectionality persists, and injustice is rife. Yet, the
prevailing powers concede openly these realities by reimagining themselves always improving
how they will respond to injustice-fueled mayhem, insurrectional destruction, and inegalitarian
turmoil. Events like Watts, California; Detroit, Michigan; Liberty City, Florida; South Los
Angeles, California; and Ferguson, Missouri from the 1960s through the 2010s in the USA
unfold different manifold variations of insurrectionality, but the growing resilience of civil
municipal authority and police powers in facing these events matters also evolves. They are
being tested, refined, and readied for the next insurrectionable developments waiting to be
triggered by a traffic stop, a street fight or an ID check involving a cop and citizen. Inside and
outside now coincide in the logics of resilience-as-rule. 5. Insurrectionality: Governance through
Resilience With the militarization of municipal, regional and national police forces in the USA
and other OECD countries (one here can think about the overly aggressive display of military-
grade weaponry in response at Ferguson, Missouri or Keene, New Hampshire to civil rights
protest or student mayhem that was not wholly unlike that of Egyptian military and police forces
in Tahrir Square), new global trends of social control and organization, rooted in resilient styles
of governance, are gelling in the turbulence of insurrectionality. Add to these rapid response
forces, the securitized surveillance system of closed-circuit television, cybertracking, biometric
scanning, and addressable individual tracking devices; and, the withering away of many other
streams of popular ideological resistance as corrective feedback loops, the powers that be, have
been, and will be seem, if they are truly sophisticated, to be adding insurrection to their risk
society calculi. Indeed, these new integers for innovation justify building and enforcing a potent
mix of resilience tactics, which are tested as ideology and practice for continued elite
empowerment. Rising up in the streets against authority in the fury of intense insurrection is
acceptable, but standing up slowly to truly assume power has become much less likely. Still, the
collapse of economic growth, the decay of middle and working class job opportunities, civic
infrastructure decay, loss of public goods, and degradation of private markets are all generating
and maintaining a high level of insurrectional energy (Luke, 2012). Now the elite discourses
embedded in the reproduction of existing power structures knowingly accedes to insurrection,
and even can concede conceptually, its justifiable bases, which endorses its existence as
insurrectionable development'. Instead of a clash of civilizations' (Huntington, 1996), these
arrangements for a resilient adaptation to recurrent anarchy are the nuts and bolts needed for
governing the present' (Miller & Rose, 2008). Governance games on this scale harness
legitimate corrective impulses from the outsiders, underclasses, and superfluous populace to
make improvements in some state and non-state services, which usually enhance systemic
resilience, regime stability, and the sustainability of ruling alliance/elite/bloc/class power
(Guattari & Negri, 2010). Are insurrectionsboth peaceful and violent instances of direct
actioncrucial opportunities for policy innovations? They seem to appear as fluid zones of
indeterminate determination where layers of opposition and acceptance arguably are at once
economic, political, and culturaland hence they are biopolitical struggles, struggles over the
forms of lifecreating new public spaces and new forms of community' (Hardt & Negri, 2000,
p. 56). Likewise, do insurrections reconfigure the organization of the social worker and
immaterial labor' in which bodies are on the front lines of this battle, bodies that consolidate in
an irreversible way the results of past struggles and incorporate a power that has been gained
ontologically' (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 410) stand ready to OWS, but are they also truly unable
to ever manage Wall Street? Along these lines, insurrection becomes yet one more reflexive
dimension of modernity's disciplinary modulations of individual and collective human life. State
authority rationally maps, and then manages the degrees of freedom allowed in the life of its
subjects or citizens through the dispositifs at work in many embedded institutions woven into
the territorial fabric of states. The command and control containments of these degrees of
unruly freedom, which are clearly allowed to human life by state power, unevenly meld
sovereignty, territoriality, and population as new resistant-and-resilient coproductions of
governmentality (Foucault, 1978). Hence, resilience-ready rulers often use popular direct action
effectively to ensnare the population in apparatuses of security', like those created by various
police forces, homeland security units, public health measures, etc., in a manner such that these
events also address health, education and social welfare systems and the mechanisms of the
management of the national economy' (Dean, 1999, p. 20). In turn, can these
governmentalizations of insurrectionable developments settle into the juridical and
administrative apparatuses of the state in all of the ways that optimize the health, welfare and
life of populations' as biopolitical formations (Dean, 1999, p. 20)? Quite clearly, this complex
style of resilient response must be studied, since the emergent regimentations of governance
practices have a technical or technological dimension' with new adaptive strategies that display
characteristic techniques, instrumentalities and mechanisms through which such practices
operate, by which they attempt to realize their goals, and through which they have a range of
effects' (Dean, 1999, p. 21). Seeing insurrectionality as a tactical move for the defense of fluid,
global and unstable public order follows from Foucault's vision of the apparatuses of
government. The problematization of insurrectionable developments as constructive moments
of collective purpose seconds his sense of the world today, namely, not that everything is bad,
but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is
dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to
hyper- and pessimistic activism. (Foucault, 1997, p. 256) The division of social forces into
insurrectionists' that are continuously tracked by anti-insurrectionist' security assessment
experts, working as threat assessment teams' to assay teeming assessable threats' confirms this
consciousness of everything merely being dangerous, and thereby producing a fluid new social
order out of constant flexible imperatives that assure all they will have something to do'.
Strangely, endangerment' becomes a new operational baseline assumption for making the
advances of development'. Are these strategies leading to more secure order, or only
securitizing everyday life to accustom citizens to living on the minimal basis they appear to
accept? They are unruly wards protected by quasi-police state power, who permit the public to
protest the conditions of their confinement in advocacy networks within and across borders, but
always remain at the mercy of the same resilient power practitioners (Keck & Sikkink, 1998).
Ironically, insurrectionality serves multiple purposes; but, most importantly, its practices
sustain resilient state networks for ruling elites, and this link cultivates the expected outcomes
a barely passable life for the masses trapped in shells of passivity, dependency, and inaction that
remarkably are regarded by far too many citizens, clients or consumers as the freedoms of
insurrectional agency.

The alternative is to reject the affirmative. Sentimental politics lead to a stage in

which we can feel political together which calcifies their political project inside
of the lines already prescribed by modern institutions our refusal isnt apathy,
rather an interruption in which power produces subjects.
Berlant 11
Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago, Affect, Noise, Silence, Protest: Ambient Citizenship [This essay is based on a talk delivered at
the mini-plenary "Keywords:The Public Sphere, Public Culture and Reasoned Public Choice" of the 59th Annual ICA Conference in
Chicago, May 22, 2009. The piece comes from the author's forthcoming book Cruel Optimism.---ed.]

Intensely political seasons spawn reveries of a different immediacy. People

imagine alternative environments
where authenticity trumps ideology , truths cannot be concealed, and
communication feels intimate , face-to-face. In these times, even politicians imagine occupying
a public sphere where they might just somehow make an unmediated transmission to the body
politic. Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people,
President George W. Bush commented in October 2003, echoing a long tradition of sentimental political
fantasies soon to be followed by condemnations of the filter by the Presidential Campaign of John
McCain and Sarah Palin and circumnavigations of it by Barack Obama. What does it mean to want to
dismantle the filter? Bush seems to be inverting the meaning of his own, mixed metaphor. As Jacques Attali and Michel
Serres have argued, a filter separates out noise from communication and, in so doing, makes
communication possible.
Yet Bushs wish to skirt the filter pointed to something profound in the desire for the political. He
wanted to transmit not the message, but the noise. He wanted the public to feel the funk, the
live intensities and desires that make messages affectively immediate , seductive , and
binding . In his head a publics binding to the political is best achieved neither by policy nor
ideology but the affect of feeling political together , in the absence of which, as we have recently seen in
the health care town hall meetings, great dramas of betrayal are felt and staged. The desire for the political that relies
on noise confirms to the mass cultural listening audience that it already shares an affective
environment; its senses have already provided an experience of a better world that exists right
here, right now, in a fold more intimate and secure and just as real as the world made by the
medias distortions.
What exactly is the problem with the filter? 24-7, the contemporary filtered or mediated political
sphere in the U.S.
transmits news from a new ordinary created by crisis, in which life seems reduced to
discussions about tactics for survival and whos to blame. The filter tells you that the
public has entered a historical situation whose contours it does not know. It impresses itself
upon mass consciousness as an epochal crisis but without a name, unfolding like a disaster
film made up of human-interest stories and stories about institutions that have lost their way. It
is a moment on the verge of a post-normative phase, in which phantasmatic clarities about the conditions for enduring collectivity,
historical continuity, and infrastructural stability have melted away, along with predictable relations between event and effect.
Living amidst war and environmental disaster , people are shown constantly being
surprised at what does and does not seem to have a transformative impact. Living amidst
economic crisis , people are shown constantly being surprised at the amount, location, and
enormity of moral and affective irregulation that comes from fading rules of accountability and
recognition. What will govern the terms and relations of reliable reciprocity amongst governments,
intimates, workers, owners, churches, citizens, political parties, or strangers? Nobody knows. The news about the
recent past and pressures of the near future demand constant emergency clean-up and
hyperspeculation about what it means to live in the ongoing present amongst piles of cases where
things didnt work out or seem to make sense, at least not yet. There are vigils; there is witnessing, and
testimony: but there is not yet a consensual rubric on offer that would shape these matters into
an event. The affective structure of the situation is therefore anxious and the political emotions attached
to it veer wildly away from recognition of the enigma that is clearly there toward
explanations that make sense , the kind of satisfying sense that enables optimism for
enduring.
This uncertainty was the filter that Bush wished to bracket. His
yearning for a politics of ambient noise,
prepropositional transmission, and intuitive reciprocity sought to displace the filtered story of
instability and contradiction from the center of US sociality. It also wishfully banished self-
reflexive , cultivated opinion and judgment from their central public-sphere function. In
short, his wishful feeling was to separate the political from politics as such. In so doing he would
cast the ongoing activity of social antagonism to the realm of the epiphenomenal , in contrast
to which the affective feedback loop of the political would make stronger the true soul-to-soul
continuity between politicians and their public, a much stronger binding than
representation.
 Case
Decolonization of the mind is a cop-out for genuine indigenous sovereignty - This
critical conscientization they propose remains imbedded in settler colonialism
discourse - turns the case.
Tuck & Yang 12
[Eve, SUNY-New Paltz, and K. Wayne, UC-San Diego, Decolonization is not a metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education &
Society 1.1 (2012): 1-40, http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/18630/15554, Date Accessed: 1.15.15)

Fanon told us in 1963 that decolonizing the mind is the first step, not the only step toward overthrowing colonial
regimes. Yet we wonder whether another settler move to innocence is to focus on decolonizing the mind,
or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole activity of decolonization; to
allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen
land . We agree that curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to
articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics that reject domination and
exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the
front-loading of critical consciousness building can
waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of
settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change. Until stolen
land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that
disrupts settler colonialism . So, we respectfully disagree with George Clinton and Funkadelic
(1970) and En Vogue (1992) when they assert that if you free your mind, the rest (your ass) will follow.
Paulo Freire, eminent education philosopher, popular educator, and liberation theologian, wrote his celebrated book, Pedagogy of
the Oppressed, in no small part as a response to Fanons Wretched of the Earth. Its influence upon critical pedagogy and on the
practices of educators committed to social justice cannot be overstated. Therefore, it is important to point out significant differences
between Freire and Fanon, especially with regard to de/colonization. Freire situates the work of liberation in the minds of the
oppressed, an abstract category of dehumanized worker vis-a-vis a similarly abstract category of oppressor. This is a sharp right turn
away from Fanons work, which always positioned the work of liberation in the particularities of colonization, in the specific
structural and interpersonal categories of Native and settler. Under Freires paradigm, it is unclear who the oppressed are, even
more ambiguous who the oppressors are, and it is inferred throughout that an innocent third category of enlightened human exists:
those who suffer with [the oppressed] and fight at their side (Freire, 2000, p. 42). These words, taken from the opening dedication
of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, invoke the same settler fantasy of mutuality based on sympathy and suffering. Fanon positions
decolonization as chaotic, an unclean break from a colonial condition that is already over determined by the violence of the colonizer
and unresolved in its possible futures. By contrast, Freire positions liberation as redemption, a freeing of both oppressor and
oppressed through their humanity. Humans become subjects who then proceed to work on the objects of the world (animals,
earth, water), and indeed read the word (critical consciousness) in order to write the world (exploit nature). For Freire, there are no
Natives, no Settlers, and indeed no history, and the future is simply a rupture from the timeless present. Settler colonialism is absent
from his discussion, implying either that it is an unimportant analytic or that it is an already completed project of the past (a past
oppression perhaps). Freires theories of liberation resoundingly echo the allegory of Platos Cave, a continental philosophy of
mental emancipation, whereby the thinking man individualistically emerges from the dark cave of ignorance into the light of critical
consciousness. By contrast, black feminist thought roots freedom in the darkness of the cave, in that well of feeling and wisdom from
which all knowledge is recreated. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they
have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity
and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor
surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. (Lorde, 1984, pp. 36-37) Audre Lordes words provide a sharp contrast to Platos sight-
centric image of liberation: The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us - the poet -
whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free (p. 38). For Lorde, writing is not action upon the world. Rather, poetry is
giving a name to the nameless, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action (p. 37). Importantly,
freedom is a possibility that is not just mentally generated; it is particular and felt. Freires
philosophies have encouraged educators to use colonization as a metaphor for oppression . In such
a paradigm, internal colonization reduces to mental colonization , logically leading to the
solution of decolonizing ones mind and the rest will follow. Such philosophy conveniently sidesteps the
most unsettling of questions : The essential thing is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously and to answer
clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32) Because
colonialism is comprised of global and historical relations, Cesaires question must be considered globally and
historically. However, it cannot be reduced to a global answer, nor a historical answer. To do so is to
use colonization metaphorically. What is colonization? must be answered specifically, with
attention to the colonial apparatus that is assembled to order the relationships between particular peoples, lands, the
natural world, and civilization. Colonialism is marked by its specializations. In North America and other
settings, settler sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion and property in
specific ways. Decolonization likewise must be thought through in these particularities. To agree
on what [decolonization] is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to
push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny... (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32) We deliberately extend
Cesaires words above to assert what decolonization is not. It is not converting Indigenous politics to a
Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of helping the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is
not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes. The broad umbrella of
social justice may have room underneath for all of these efforts. By contrast, decolonization
specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a
metonym for social justice. We dont intend to discourage those who have dedicated careers and lives to teaching
themselves and others to be critically conscious of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia, and settler colonialism. We
are asking them/you to consider how the
pursuit of critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice
through a critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence - diversions,
distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need
to give up land or power or privilege. Anna Jacobs 2009 Masters thesis explores the possibilities for what she calls
white harm reduction models. Harm reduction models attempt to reduce the harm or risk of specific practices. Jacobs identifies
white supremacy as a public health issue that is at the root of most other public health issues.

The 1ACs counter narrative is an appeal to liberal subjectivity to produce change.

This reinscribes suffering by making experience fungible- turns the case by
recreating colonialism
Hartman, 97 <Saidya Hartman, Saidiya Hartman is a professor at Columbia University
specializing in African American literature and history. She grew up in Brooklyn and received
her B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University, Scenes of Subjection>
In an epistle to his brother, John Rankin illumined the "very dangerous evil" of slavery in a description of the coffle, detailing the
obscene theatricality of the slave trade: "Unfeeling wretches purchased a considerable drove of slaves how many of them were
separated from husbands and wives, I will not pretend to say-and having chained a number of them together, hoisted over the flag of
American liberty, and with the music of two violins marched the woe-worn, heart-broken, and sobbing creatures through the town."
1 Rankin, aghast at the spectacle and shocked by "seeing the most oppressive sorrows of suffering innocence mocked with all the
lightness of sportive music,'' decried: ''My soul abhors the crime.'' The violation of domesticity, the parody of liberty, and the callous
defiance of sorrow define the scene in which crime becomes spectacle. The "very dangerous evil" of slavery and the "agonizing
groans of suffering humanity" had been made music.2 Although Rankin conceded that the cruelty of slavery "far exceed[ed] the
power of description," he nonetheless strove to render the horrors of slavery, And in so doing, Rankin makes apparent that the
crimes of state is the slavery are not only witnessed but staged. This is a result of the recourse to terms
like "stage," "spectacle, and "scene in conveying these horrors, and, more important, because the abominations of slavery" are
disclosed through the reiteration of secondhand accounts and circulating stories from "unquestionable authorities" to which Rankin
must act as surrogate witness. In the effort to "bring slavery close," these circulating reports of atrocity, in essence, are reenacted in
Rankin epistles. The grotesqueries enumerated in documenting the injustice of slavery are intended
to shock and to disrupt the comfortable remove of the reader/spectator. By providing the
minutest detail of macabre acts of violence, embellished by his own fantasy of slavery's bloodstained gate, Rankin
hoped to rouse the sensibility of those indifferent to slavery by exhibit ing the suffering of the
enslaved and facilitating an identification between those free and those enslaved: "We are naturally
too callous to the sufferings of others, and consequently prone to look upon them with cold indifference, until, in imagination
we identify ourselves with the sufferers, and make their sufferings our own .... When I bring it near,
inspect it closely, and find that it is inflicted on men and women, who possess the same nature and feelings with myself, my
sensibility is roused" (56-57). By bringing suffering near, the ties of sentiment are forged. In
letter after letter, Rankin strove to create this shared experience of horror in order to transform his slaveholding brother, to whom
In this case, pain provides the common language of
the letters were addressed, as well as the audience of readers.
humanity; it extends humanity to the dispossessed and, in turn, remedies the indifference of the
callous. The shocking accounts of whipping, rape, mutilation, and suicide assault the barrier of indifference, for the
abhorrence and indignity roused by these scenes of terror, which range from the mockery of the
coffle to the dismemberment and incineration of a slave boy, give rise to a shared sentience
between those formerly indifferent and those suffering. So intent and determined is Rankin to establish that
slaves possess the same nature and feelings as himself, and thereby establish the common humanity of all men on the basis of this
extended suffering, that he literally narrates an imagined scenario in which he, along with his wife and
child, is enslaved. The "horrible scenes of cruelty that were presented to [his] mind as a consequence of this imagining
aroused the ''highest pitch of indignant feeling.'' In addition this scenario enables Rankin to speak not only for
but literally in the place of the enslaved. By believing himself to be and by phantasmically becoming the enslaved, he
creates the scenario for shared feelings: My flighty imagination added much to the tumult of passion by persuading me, for he
moment, that 1 myself was a slave, and with my wife and children placed under the reign of terror. I began in reality to feel for
myself, my wife, and my children-the thoughts of being whipped at the pleasure of a morose and capricious master, aroused the
strongest feelings of resentment; but when I fancied the cruel lash was. Approaching my wife and children, and my imagination
depicted in lively colors, their tears, their shrieks, and bloody stripes, every indignant principle of my bloody nature was exerted to
the highest degree. (56) The nature of the feelings aroused here is rather complicated. While this flight of imagination enables a
vicarious firsthand experience of the lash, excoriates the pleasure experienced by the master in this brutal exercise of power, and
unleashes Rankin's fiery indignation and resentment, the
phantasmic vehicle of this identification is
complicated, unsettling, and disturbing. Although Rankin's fantasy culminates in indignant
outcries against the institution of slavery and, clearly, the purpose of this identification is to
highlight the crimes of slavery, this flight of imagination and slipping into the captive's body
unlatches a Pandora's box and, surprisingly, what comes to the fore is the difficulty and slipperiness of
empathy. Properly speaking, empathy is a projection of oneself into another in order to better under
stand the other or "the projection of one's own personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one's own
emotions."4 Yet empathy in important respects confounds Rankin's efforts to identify with the enslaved
because in making the slave's suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather than for
those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach. Moreover, by exploiting
the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others, the
humanity extended to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of
the relations of chattel slavery. In other words, the ease of Rankin's empathic identification is as
much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the
fungibility of the captive body.