K

Blackness constitutes the site of a paradoxical double-bind within the social order –
it is both the organizing principle that makes possible the coherence of the world
and the object of that world’s gratuitous violence – as such, the aff’s wedding to
affirmative potentiality accedes to a form of communicative capitalism which is only
capable of modulatively reproducing the anti-black grammar of civil society
Barber 16 (Daniel Colucciello Barber, researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin, PhD from
Duke University, 2016, “The Creation of Non-Being,” Rhizomes Issue 29, footnotes 1, 2, and 7 included
in curly braces, modified) gz
[1] Anti-blackness operates axiomatically. This is the case, at least, insofar as we speak of what Frank B.
Wilderson, III, has called "the world" (Wilderson 2003: 234).[1] {1. "World" here refers not to reality as such, but
more precisely to the paradigmatic operations by which reality is structured, positioned, and
rendered sensible. Yet this does not mean that one can directly express or pose reality as distinct from
the world, for the world governs the very conditions of possibility for expression or position. Even
purportedly universal terms, such as humanity, social life, and—to invoke the concern of this essay—being itself,
are operations of the world. The Afro-Pessimist thesis, following Wilderson, is that this world
constitutes itself and maintains its coherence, at essence, through anti-blackness: the world has
being insofar as blackness does not. Since the grammar of this world, or the logic of the aforementioned
operations, is so naturalized—enacted and assumed by/from power—that it generally has no need to
appear (much less defend itself), the articulation of reality without the anti-black world must begin as an
articulation against this world.} The aim of this essay is to address the consequences of this axiomatic operation for some rather
classical terms of reference within continental philosophy, such as being, analogy,[2] communication, possibility, and knowledge. {2. Both the
reading of Lazzarato I provide below and my general argument, which revolves around the question of negativity and analogy, are deeply shaped
by—and only conceivable thanks to—the writings of Wilderson, whose claim about analogy is summarized in the following remark, made in
conversation with Hartman: "In my own work, obviously I'm
not saying that in this space of negation, which is blackness,
there is no life. We have tremendous life. But this life is not analogous to those touchstones of cohesion
that hold civil society together. In fact, the trajectory of our life (within our terrain of civil death) is bound
up in claiming—sometimes individually, sometimes collectively—the violence which Fanon writes
about in The Wretched of the Earth, that trajectory which, as he says, is 'a splinter to the heart of the world' and
'puts the settler out of the picture.' So, it doesn't help us politically or psychologically to try to find ways
in which how we live is analogous to how white positionality lives, because, as I think your book suggests, whites
gain their coherence by knowing what they are not" (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 187).} Such terms are the
means by which the world claims to grant itself coherence; they form the grammatical ground, the
structuring condition, of the world. If the "gratuitous violence" of anti-blackness extends into the
very "grammar" of the world (Wilderson 2010: 38, 131),[3] then the aforementioned terms—far from providing
retreat into a "metaphysical" domain unaffected by the historical and material—serve as points for the
articulation of antagonism toward anti-blackness. In fact, the gratuity of such violence—its irreducibility
to purposive meaning—entails a refusal of the coherent ground that these very terms claim to supply.
This is to say that being—or the possibility thereof—grounds itself not through its own coherence, but through
an enactment of power that is staged by anti-black violence. Power precedes grammatical ground. [2]
Maurizio Lazzarato's analysis of contemporary capitalism approaches the anti-blackness analyzed by Wilderson. Lazzarato argues that capitalism
is not grounded in any coherent science of economy, but is an enactment of the power to make indebted beings. It is by way of this emphasis on
power that he links a purportedly secular capitalism to the theological structure of Christianity—that is, to a being that acts gratuitously, or
without ground. Yet Lazzarato, I argue, ultimately wards off an encounter with anti-blackness through reliance on a coherence implicit in "the
indebted man" (Lazzarato 2012: 8). I elaborate this argument by drawing on Gilles
Deleuze's concept of "difference in itself"
(Deleuze 1994: 36-89). This concept, on my reading, ungrounds the purported coherence of being by way of a logically
prior differentiality, which is expressed as non-being. Essential to this argument is the task of articulating
such non-being without conversion to an affirmation of the world. Non-Being: Deleuze Against Affirmation [3]
Deleuze's philosophy has come to be associated with habits of affirmation, where "habits" indicate the
practices or operations by which reality is experientially and experimentally enacted.[4] This association
could be attributed to Deleuze's invocation of concepts such as the rhizome, which appears to advocate
teeming, emergent, multiplicitous movement in excess of all boundaries. In such a landscape of fluidity
and flux, Deleuze's notion of creation then becomes associated with the affirmation of alternative
possibilities. This association may also be attributed to Deleuze's rigorous refusal of the being of
negativity. He contends that negative being plays no role in the determination of reality, that it is in fact an
illusion that conceals the force of differential immanence. Given the centrality of this contention, any association of
Deleuze's thought with habits of affirmation would have to depend on the following claim: the refusal of
negative being entails the refusal of habits of negativity, in favor of habits of affirmation.[5] [4] Yet it is
fundamentally mistaken to conflate the refusal of negative being with the refusal of negative habits. The
call for habits of affirmation is theoretically illegitimate: if all habits are real, and if reality has no
negative being, then all habits—precisely because they are real—do not involve negative being; the reality
that is habituated—regardless of whether this habituation is characterized as affirmative or negative—has
no negative being. If the call for habits of affirmation is therefore not entailed by Deleuze's refusal of negative being, then from where does
this call arise? If habits of affirmation are imperative, then from where does this imperativity draw its
mandate? To begin to answer these questions, one must address the ways in which habits of affirmation are logically
consistent—and ultimately politically complicit—with the contemporary conjuncture of capitalism. [5]
This conjuncture, which has been variously described in terms of "late capitalism," "postfordism," or
"communicative capitalism," is marked by an affirmation of mobility, innovation, fluidity, possibility,
and creativity. Deleuze analyzed this conjuncture in terms of control societies, which he distinguished
from disciplinary societies. Control establishes domination not by setting up in advance strict
boundaries, but rather by a kind of unending encouragement, or motivated permissiveness: control
establishes and expands itself by establishing and expanding possibilities of communication.
Domination "no longer operate[s] by confining people but through continuous control and instant
communication" (Deleuze 1997: 174). Whereas discipline names the prohibition of excessive mobility and
innovation, control names the "modulation" of the possibilities implied in such mobility and
innovation (Deleuze 1997: 179).[6] [6] With control, domination remains not despite, nor in opposition to, but
precisely as possibility, which is modulated through a communicability that is ever more fluid and
receptive in its listening in order to be ever more innovative in its surveilling.[7] {7. The fundamental
insidiousness of control is that it permits and encourages the fluidity, mobility, and possibility implied
by the sheer capacity to narrate. Communicative capitalism does not work by mandating what can and
cannot be narrated, rather it calls for any-narration-whatever, as long as the possibility of narration is
affirmed.} Following Deleuze's analysis of control, habits of affirmation—of multiplicitous possibilities,
or of the possibility of being-otherwise—are not resistant to, but actually constitutive of, control's
modulation. Control is marked by "endless postponement" (Deleuze 1997: 179), meaning that the future—as
that which breaks with the present—never takes place. The present is extended into the future, and so the
future becomes a modulation of the present; an essential incommensurability between present and
future remains unthinkable.[8] Given Deleuze's analysis, it is not by accident that he increasingly experimented
with habits of negativity. In his last book, What is Philosophy? – co-written with Félix Guattari, and published one year after his
analysis of control—one can observe, for instance, his attentiveness to "shame" (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 107), which
was motivated by his reading of Primo Levi, or his indication of agreement with the negative dialectic of
Theodor Adorno.[9] [7] One finds, in the same book, a polemic against communication and a concomitant
positioning of creation as distinct from and incommensurable with the communicative.[10] Simply put,
Deleuze's increased attention to control, or communication, directly corresponds to his increased attention
to the negative—not as being but as experience and experiment, as habit. Thus it is not only that Deleuze's
refusal of negative being cannot be conflated with habits of affirmation, it is also that Deleuze, when
attending to control, attempts to articulate habits of negativity. What is Philosophy? concludes with an
articulation of the No of chaos, the non of thought that enables creation: philosophy must attain "an
essential relationship with the No that concerns it"; philosophy does "not need the No as beginning, or
as the end in which [it] would be called upon to disappear by being realized, but at every moment of [its]
becoming or [its] development" (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 218). [8] The creation named by Deleuze's philosophy
is thus in immanence with the No, and it is this No-creation immanence that begins to articulate
antagonism toward communication: "Creating has always been something different from
communicating" (Deleuze 1997: 175). This divergence between communication and the No of creation is
utter, essential, and irredeemable. There is no possibility of emancipating communication, nor is
there any affirmative basis for creation—for the base is communication. There is nothing to affirm,
and so creation is immanent with the negativity of the non: "The key thing may be to create vacuoles
of noncommunication" (Deleuze 1997: 175). The Reality of Non-Being [9] My argument, drawing on Deleuze, is that the logic of
possibility actually serves to modulatively reproduce the anti-black grammar of the world. Creation,
defined as a break with the presently given world, is not a possibility. It is rather immanent with an
axiomatic No to such possibility, with habits of negativity. [10] This thesis concerns a key problematic that stems from
the Afro-Pessimist analysis of anti-blackness: if blackness stands [is] both within the habitus of modernity, as an
organizing principle, and without this habitus, as a perpetually banished subjectivity, then the very
articulation of blackness would seem to depend on and reproduce such a habitus. In other words, both
being-within and being-without are possibilities governed by modernity's dominative positioning of
blackness. The articulation of blackness is in fact bound by this problematic insofar as one remains within
the ambit of habits of affirmation. In other words, the presumption of affirmation is co-extensive with the
reproduction of the habitus of modernity: that which is presently available for affirmation is
already governed by modernity and its articulation of blackness, and so habits of affirmation
inevitably participate in and reproduce the double-bind in which modernity positions blackness. [11]
Against such reproduction, it is essential to insist on habits of negativity. Such insistence is total: since it
is affirmation as such that entails participation in the being here indexed by modernity, even a modicum
of affirmation mitigates the force enacted by negativity. The power of creation therefore resides
entirely and essentially on the side of negativity—and not at all on the side of affirmation.
Concomitantly, to invoke such power actually entails an unmitigated refusal of habits of affirmation;
affirmation does not name or support, but on the contrary denies, the power of creation. Given the
double-bind in which modernity positions blackness, this is to say that the negativity of the non, in virtue
of its immanence with a force of creation, indexes blackness as a power of non-being, as that which is
without need of—and in fact opposed to—reliance on the affirmative. [12] It remains necessary to outline the
articulation of this immanence of creation and non-being—that is, to theoretically express how an unmitigated insistence on habits of negativity
can be both a refusal of affirmation and an enactment of power. This warrants a return to Deleuze's thought by way of some questions: How can
habits of negativity, articulated via Deleuze's insistence on the non, gain theoretical consistency with his conceptual refusal of negative being? If
negative being is refused, then in what sense can there be insistence on the non? [13] Deleuze argues that "being
is difference itself.
Being is also non-being, but non-being is not the being of the negative . . . non-being is Difference"
(Deleuze 1994: 76-77). This makes clear that negative being is refused in virtue of difference; what is essential is
difference in itself. Hence difference is articulated not as the affirmation of affirmative being, nor even as
the affirmation of being as such. On the contrary, difference is articulated as "non-being": negative
being is refused, but it is refused in favor of non-being. Difference antecedes both positive being and
negative being, thereby displacing their dialectical or conflictual relation. In other words, difference is not
between opposed beings but in itself, autonomous from and antecedent to every being or thing;
difference is real, but precisely as a matter of non-being. Its reality is not the being of a thing, it is no-
thing. [14] Such theorization enables the delinking of creation (as force of non-being, or no-thing) from
affirmation (as possibility of being). Difference, or non-being, marks a real force of creation that is
without, and incommensurable with, being. In virtue of this unanalogizability of non-being with
being, creation is articulated as a force stemming from negativity, and not at all from affirmation:
affirmation is said of being and its possibilization, whereas creation is said of non-being. Habits of
negativity, which antagonize every (positively or negatively described) being, or being as such, are thus
coeval with an insistence on the real force of non-being. [15] This argument can be used to negotiate a
tension between the Afro-Pessimist emphasis on irresolvable negativity and the concern of Black
Optimism to emphasize a power named by blackness: while the former's emphasis on negativity
extends to habits of affirmation as such, this negativity immanently involves—and thus does not
abandon—an insistence on the power of creation. Consequently, the Black Op concern to speak of the
power of blackness may be satisfied entirely within the space of negativity, or social death, on which
Afro-Pessimism insists. Such satisfaction does not then require recourse to qualifications that would
mitigate the negativity of this space, On the contrary, power is immanent to a redoubled negativity, or
a negativity toward both being and the affirmation of the possibility of being-otherwise. [16] Yet even as
Deleuze's philosophical efforts may be deployed by and for the articulation of Afro-Pessimist claims,
these claims vertiginously intensify Deleuze's theorization of non-being: Deleuze theorizes non-being
in terms of a "vertigo" of immanence (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 48), yet blackness is the historical, material
experience of such vertigo. Drawing on a distinction made by Wilderson, this is to say that for Deleuze
non-being is a "subjective vertigo," or a vertigo into which Deleuze's thought makes an entrance,
while blackness is experienced as "objective vertigo," meaning that vertigo is—historically or
materially—always already there (Wilderson 2011: 3). Immanence, or the vertigo of non-being, remains an
object for the thought of Deleuze; blackness is historically or materially the objective reality of non-
being—the very reality of the vertigo of immanence. Consequently, to think non-being according to
blackness entails the reading of Deleuze's theoretical articulation in terms of the operations by which
historical, material power is enacted.

The attempt to historicize violence through a lens of biopolitics assumes that all
history is equal – blackness is defined by loss and cultural obliteration which means
social death exists outside of the sociological registers of Foucault’s analysis
Sorentino 16, Sara-Maria Sorentino is a Ph.D. candidate in the Culture & Theory program at the University of
California, Irvine. Her dissertation examines slavery as an organizing principle for early modern discourses. Nearest
date give is 2016, Rhizomes Issue 29: Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, blackness and the discourses of Modernity,
“The Sociogeny of Social Death: Blackness, Modernity, and its Metaphors in Orlando Patterson,”
http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/sorentino.html#footnote-1, NN
[5] By pairing an understanding of the conditions of possibility for blackness (in an epochal sense) with the conditions of enunciation for
Patterson's concept social death, slavery's centrality to modernity undergoes an exfoliation, and modernity's theoretical, social, and historical
account of itself starts to tremble.[15] In his influential study, Valentin Y. Mudimbe invokes "conditions of possibility," straddling the historical
and the transcendent in the Foucaultian tradition not entirely opposed to Kant, to indicate how "discourses have not only sociohistorical origins
but also epistemological contexts. It is the latter which make them possible and which can also account for them in an essential way."[16] But
what is Patterson's epistemological context grappling with, and how, given the convoluted conjunction of "social" and "death," does it presuppose
questions and answers? Denise Ferreira da Silva, in pursuing a "critique of 'the metaphysics of race,'" writes the Kantian undertones of "condition
of possibility" as specifically relevant for racial knowledge on two grounds: "(a) because there is an expectation that when one uses the word
'race', the addressee knows what the referent is, and (b) most importantly, because no critique of racial subjugation can afford not to investigate
that which renders this 'common' knowing possible."[17] If Silva speaks in a Foucaultian style, searching for "not only the principles and
conditions but also the consequences of knowledge, its political (productive) effects,"[18] Foucault's famous pronouncement of
man, "only a recent invention," "a rift in the order of things," (underlying his engagement with Kant, Hegel and Marx) can
only take us so far. [19] Silva's work pushes further, deeper, haunted by a moment disavowed by
Foucaultian-flavored biopolitics, genealogy or archaeology: "That moment...between the release of the
trigger and the fall of another black body, of another brown body, and another"[20] That moment, the almost
certainly already consummated inverse of Zeno's paradoxical delay, requires us to consider critically racial violence as a theme for theorizing the
political, a thematization of which social death has, in its own way, opened a path.[21] The
question of blackness and the modern
world requires a method of excavating what goes under the heading of "first principles": the first
principles not of an already formed essence or phenomenon, but of the conditions that make any analysis
of "race," and all that it undergirds, possible.[22] Lindon Barrett accentuates the stakes, in his posthumous challenge: "Racial
blackness forms the historical and enabling point of 'dis/integration' for the paradigms of Western
modernity."[23] These first principles, these dis/integrating enablers, can be repeatedly renamed—grammar/impression points (Spillers),
cognitive schema (Brand), governing codes (Wynter)—to ask what the violence of raciality makes of the world. [6] Patterson has spent his career
working his way into an intellectual inhabitation of the problem of slavery. From his book's first line, "There is nothing notably peculiar about the
institution of slavery," we can begin to gauge how Patterson situates himself in a long historiographical debate, a debate only obliquely attentive
to the old/new critical discourse on blackness and death.[24] Invoking Kenneth Stampp's 1956 The Peculiar Institution, itself an intervention on
Ulrich Phillips' antebellum romance, Patterson argues contrapuntally that chattel
slavery in the United States, although
distinct, is not the only existing configuration of slavery, and still less should it be conceived as a
norm.[25] For Patterson, "slavery" is instead ubiquitous—at some distance from our theme of racial violence—and "genuine" slave
societies (Moses Finley's phrasing) span time and place, from Ancient Greece to late Old English society through the European Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, across to the Islamic World and regions of precolonial Africa.[26] From the heights of a global and general perspective
(inauspiciously correlated with the objective purview of mastery), slavery
is defined by way of distinctive features, or
"constituent elements"—gratuitous violence, natal alienation, and general dishonor.[27] Each is triangulated with
facets of power: the "social" threat of physical violence; the "cultural" or "symbolic" capacity to transform "force into right, and obedience into
duty," as Rousseau would have it; and its "psychological" reach to rework the interiority of the enslaved.[28] "Weberian in scope and method,
Durkheimian in boldness and clarity, and vintage Patterson for its ruthless disregard for the sacred cows of specialists of all stripes (in the words
of Lois Wacquant), Slavery and Social Death angles to problematize any ready presupposition of a spectrum of
power.[29] Slavery, argues Patterson, is different in degree (of power) and kind (of coercion), and thus,
"distinctive as a relation of domination."[30] [7] Patterson's "preliminary definition of slavery on the level of personal relations"—
"slavery is the permanent violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons "[31] —is
a general definition of a complex sort, meant to capture different registers of constitutive and continuous
violence.[32] These guiding principles are reflected in the book's organizational schema: the distilled overview of the constituent elements in
the "Introduction;" the first section's extrapolation of "The Internal Relations of Slavery;" the next's, "Slavery as an Institutional Process,"
tracking of the phases of "enslavement, slavery, and manumission" on individual and institutional scales; and the third, "The Dialectics of
Slavery," in which limit cases, in a pseudo-Hegelian fashion, are meant to clarify the true definition of slavery. Patterson
anticipates the
standard historian's critique of social death as dangerously ahistorical, cautioning against what he
elsewhere calls the whirlwind of "social vacuums"[33]: "Even at this most elementary level of personal
relations it should be clear that we are dealing not with a static entity but with a complex interactional
process, one laden with tension and contradiction in the dynamics of each of its constituent elements."[34]
In the "unfolding of this complicated drama known as slavery," contradiction is key: contradictions, seen at the level of personal relations,
become institutionalized, and these institutionalizing modes create habitual pathways for resolving or, more precisely, containing and deferring
tensions.[35] Patterson turns this key more avowedly in an early essay-version of social death by counter-posing an inner dialectic with its outer
one: There is an inner dialectic by which the basic forces of slavery are revealed: master against slave;
power against powerlessness; alienation against disalienation; social death against social life; honour against
dishonour. This inner dialectic, however, works itself out as part of a wider, outer dialectic: that of the dynamics
of the relationship between slavery, seen as a single process, and the total complex of processes which we
call society or the social formation. It is this outer dialectic which, in the last analysis, determines the outcome of the struggle within
the inner dialectic. It determines, for example, whether master or slave wins; whether powerlessness is what it appears to be or something
else.[36] [8] As the heuristic terms of Social Death are always negotiated through the complex dialectic of "the social formation," natal alienation,
gratuitous violence, and general dishonor do not necessarily presume to name the totalizing triumph of power, but a kind of fantasy, a fantasy
situated less in an individual thinker's tool-kit and more in the dense social imagining necessary for slavery's reproduction, of which each and
every analysis is an implicated thoroughfare.
Black bodies are trapped in binary vocabulary—their active becoming is
reminiscent of the twentieth-century white avant-garde that detaches identity from
bodily coding and results in white people deliberately “blackening” themselves as an
attempt to “freak” their identities—not only is this tantamount to blackface which
should be rejected but it also embodies the process of deterritorialization they
critique.
Nealon – ’98 – Professor of English and Philosophy, Penn State University (Jeffrey Thomas Nealon, 1998, Alterity Politics: Ethics and
Performative Subjectivity, Duke University Press, p. 129, edge – malia)

And this brings us back to Deleuze and Guattari's odd claim that even blacks must become-black. As they go on
to clarify, "if blacks must become-black, it is because only a minority is capable of serving as the active
medium of becoming, but under such conditions that it ceases to be a definable aggregate in relation to
the majority" (Thousand, 291). If indeed we all must become-other, this becoming-other presupposes remaining in
a minority status—in a state other than "whole." Becoming-minority is, in other words, a status that "ceases to be a
definable aggregate in relation to the majority" because the majority is itself deterritorialized by the
minority's repetition with a difference.18 As Baraka writes about the specificity of African American cultures, "Without the dissent, the struggle, the outside of the
inside, the aesthetic is neither genuinely Black nor Blue" ("Blues Aesthetic," 109; my italics). The deterritorialization performed by the "Black"

aesthetic or the "Blue[s]" tradition deploys directional, conflicted vectors of becoming—the forceful interruptive
movement of "the outside of the inside," the minority's alteration of the majority. Both blackness and
whiteness are inexorably transformed by the performative movements of becoming-black. / All that having
been said, however, we still seem to find ourselves within a familiarly binary vocabulary: even if it is not exactly
the opposite of majority reterritorialization, minority deterritorialization seems clearly to be the
privileged, good term of active becoming, with the static weight of some chimeric "mainstream" having
been left in the dust. So-called whites, it might seem, must simply abandon their whiteness and become-
black. But, if this is indeed the case, what get iterated in deterritorialization are the stale platitudes of the
twentieth-century white avant-garde, sentiments increasingly translatable into late capital's orientalizing
lingo of advertising: calling for site-specific improvisation—deterritorializing lines of flight—seems merely
a call to "make it new."

Their rhetorical weaponry’s presumed solvency carries weight via their positioning
within the symbolic economy, which by their very nature crowds out the slave’s
grammar of suffering.
Wilderson 2010
Unfortunately, cultural studies that theorizes the interface between Blacks and Humans is hobbled in its attempts to (a) expose power
relationships and (b) examine how relations of power influence and shape cultural practice. Cultural studies insists on a grammar
of suffering which assumes that we are all positioned essentially by way of the symbolic order, what Lacan
calls the wall of language—and as such our potential for stasis or change (our capacity for being oppressed or free) is
overdeter-mined by our "universal" ability or inability to seize and wield discursive weapons. This idea
corrupts the explanatory power of most socially engaged films and even the most radical line of political action
because it produces a cinema and a politics that cannot account for the grammar of suffering of the Black—the Slave. To put it bluntly, the
imaginative labor5 of cinema, political action, and cultural studies are all afflicted with the same theoretical aphasia. They are speechless
in the face of gratuitous violence. This theoretical aphasia is symptomatic of a debilitated ensemble of
questions regarding political ontology. At its heart are two registers of imaginative labor. The first register is that of description, the
rhetorical labor aimed at explaining the way relations of power are named, categorized, and explored. The second register can be characterized as
prescription, the rhetorical labor predicated on the notion that everyone can be emancipated through some
form of discursive, or symbolic, intervention. But emancipation through some form of discursive or
symbolic intervention is wanting in the face of a subject position that is not a subject position—what Marx
calls "a speaking implement" or what Ronald Judy calls "an interdiction against subjectivity." In other words, the Black has sentient capacity but
no relational capacity. As
an accumulated and fungible object, rather than an exploited and alienated subject, the
Black is openly vulnerable to the whims of the world, and so is his or her cultural "production." What
does it mean—what are the stakes—when the world can whimsically transpose one's cultural gestures, the
stuff of symbolic intervention, onto another worldly good, a commodity of style? Frantz Fanon echoes this question
when he writes, "I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of
the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects." He clarifies this assertion and alerts us to the stakes which the
optimistic assumptions of film studies and cultural studies, the counterhegemonic promise of alternative cinema, and the emancipatory project of
coalition politics cannot account for, when he writes: "Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not
permit us to understand the being of the black."6 This presents a challenge to film production and to film studies given their cultivation and
elaboration by the imaginative labor of cultural studies, underwritten by the assumptive logic of Humanism; because if everyone does not possess
the DNA of culture, that is, (a) time and space transformative capacity, (b) a relational status with other Humans through which one's time- and
space-transformative capacity is recognized and incorporated, and (c) a relation to violence that is contingent and not gratuitous, then how do we
theorize a sentient being who is positioned not by the DNA of culture but by the structure of gratuitous violence? How do we think outside of the
conceptual framework of subalternity—that is, outside of the explanatory power of cultural studies—and think beyond the pale of emancipatory
agency by way of symbolic intervention? I
am calling for a different conceptual framework, predicated not on the
subject-effect of cultural performance but on the structure of political ontology, a framework that allows
us to substitute a culture of politics for a politics of culture. The value in this rests not simply in the way it would help us
rethink cinema and performance, but in the way it can help us theorize what is at present only intuitive and anecdotal: the unbridgeable gap
between Black being and Human life. To put a finer point on it, such a framework might enhance the explanatory power of theory, art, and
politics by destroying and perhaps restructuring the ethical range of our current ensemble of questions. This
has profound implications
for non-Black film studies, Black film studies, and African American studies writ large because they are currently entangled
in a multicultural paradigm that takes an interest in an insufficiently critical comparative analysis— that
is, a comparative analysis in pursuit of a coalition politics (if not in practice then at least as a theorizing metaphor) which,
by its very nature, crowds out and forecloses the Slave's grammar of suffering.

Calls for moving beyond the human are symptomatic of Eurocentric

transcendentalism which performs a perspectival distancing from blackness
Jackson 15
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement “Beyond the Human,” Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms, GLQ 21:2
– 3, 2015 by Duke University Press, KB

It is now common to encounter appeals for movement beyond “the human” in diverse scholarly domains, yet the temporal and spatial
connotations of this “beyond,” let alone destinations, are often underexamined. Perhaps the precipitous resurgence of the “beyond” in recent years
is precisely owed to its performative gesture and routinized deployments having become a beguiling habituation, a seductive doxa effectively
eluding the imperative of renewed reflexivity.33 Contra the beguiling appeal of the “beyond,” I would ask: What and crucially whose conception
to become “post” or move
of humanity are we moving beyond? Moreover, what is entailed in the very notion of a beyond? Calls
“beyond the human” too often presume that the originary locus of this call, its imprimatur, its appeal,
requires no further examination or justification but mere execution of its rapidly routinizing imperative. In
the brief space I have here, I want to caution that appeals to move “beyond the human” may actually reintroduce the
Eurocentric transcendentalism this movement purports to disrupt, particularly with regard to the
historical and ongoing distributive ordering of race — which I argue authorizes and conditions appeals to
the “beyond,” maybe even overdetermining the “beyond’s” appeal. I have argued elsewhere that, far too often,
gestures toward the “post” or the “beyond” effectively ignore praxes of humanity and critiques
produced by black people, particularly those praxes which are irreverent to the normative production
of “the human” or illegible from within the terms of its logic. Rather than constitute a potentially
critical and/or generative (human) outer world to that of Man, potentially transformative expressions of
humanity are instead cast “out of the world” and thus rendered inhuman in calls for a beyond that take
for granted Man’s authority over the entire contested field pertaining to matters “human.” 34 Thus
praxes of humanity illegible from within the logic of Man are simply rendered void or made to accord
with Man’s patterned logics by acts of presupposition — any excess or remainder disavowed.35 Moreover,
one cannot help but sense that there is something else amiss in the call to move “beyond the human”: a
refusal afoot that could be described as an attempt to move beyond race, and in particular blackness, a
subject that I argue cannot be escaped but only disavowed or dissimulated in prevailing articulations of
movement “beyond the human.” Calls for movement “beyond the human” would appear to invite
challenges to normative human identity and epistemic authority; one might even say that they insist rather than invite,
calling into question intransigent habits of identification — at least when these challenges are posed in the name of the nonhuman. However,
given that appositional and homologous (even co-constitutive) challenges pertaining to animality,
objecthood, and thingliness have long been established in thought examining the existential predicament
of modern racial blackness, the resounding silence in the posthumanist, object-oriented, and new
materialist literatures with respect to race is remarkable, persisting even despite the reach of antiblackness
into the nonhuman — as blackness conditions and constitutes the very nonhuman disruption and/or
displacement they invite.36 What “the beyond’s” rising momentum largely bypasses is a more comprehensive
examination of the role of race in “the human’s” metaphysics, or the philosophical orientation of Man.
Given Man’s historical horizon of possibility — slavery, conquest, colonialism — the Western metaphysical matrix has race at its center in the
form of a chiasmus: the metaphysics of race (“What is the ‘reality’ of race?”) and the racialization of the question of metaphysics (“Under whose
terms will the nature of time, knowledge, space, objecthood, being, cause and effect come to be defined?”). In other words, the
question of
race’s reality has and continues to bear directly on hierarchies of knowledge pertaining to the nature of
reality itself. According to Man’s needlessly racially delimited terms, the matter of racial being purportedly does the work of arbitrating
epistemological questions about the meaning and significance of the (non)human in its diverse forms, including animals, machines, plants, and
objects. Though the notoriously antiblack pro- nouncements of exalted figures like G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, or Thomas Jefferson (for
instance) mark neither the invention of metaphysics nor its conclusive end, the metaphysical question of race, and that of blackness in particular
as race’s status-organizing principle, marks an innovation in the governing terms of metaphysics, one that would increasingly purport to resolve
Whether machine, plant,
metaphysical questions in terms of relative proximity to the spectral figure of “the African female.”37
animal, or object, the nonhuman’s figuration and mattering is shaped by the gendered racialization of
the field of metaphysics even as teleological finality is indefinitely deferred by the processual nature of
actualization or the agency of matter. Thus, terrestrial movement toward the nonhuman is simultaneously
movement toward blackness, whether blackness is embraced or not, as blackness constitutes the very
matter at hand. The question of the “beyond” not only returns us to the racialized metaphysical terrain of
orders of being, temporality, spatiality, and knowledge — it reveals that we have never left. Put more directly:
precisely what order of metaphysics will we use to evaluate the being of “the human,” its temporal and spatial movement, absence or presence?
The “beyond” marks (racial/ized) metaphysics’ return, its longue durée and spectropoetics, such that race,
particularly blackness, is precisely tasked with arbitrating fundamental questions of orientation. 38 This is the
case even when we turn to mathematics and science for adjudication. I argue that to suggest otherwise disavows both Western
mathematics and science’s discursivity and the (imperial) history of these idioms’ iterability as
discourse.39 While I would not argue that a “physical law,” for instance, could be reducible to the machinations of human language, I am
arguing that when one mobilizes the language of “law” or “properties” it says much about the location of the
speaker and the discursive terms of the meeting of matter and meaning.40 Thus, a call for movement in the
direction of the “beyond,” issued in a manner that suggests that this call is without location, and therefore
with the appearance of incognizance regarding its situated claims and internal limits, returns us to a
Eurocentric transcendentalism long challenged.
The only possible demand is one that calls for the end of the world itself—the
affirmative represents a conflict within the paradigm of America but refuses to
challenge the foundational antagonism that produces the violence that undergirds
the that same paradigm
Wilderson, ’10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American Studies at
UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, “Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.
Antagonisms,”]
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the
structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of
their demands—and, by extension, the grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are
the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw our
attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently
powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world’s capacity to think, act,
and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which
other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the
actions of the world to account but to call the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The
woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was
not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was
articulating a triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers
charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a “being for the captor” (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value is
extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body,
fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she
had
neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—and not its myriad discriminatory
practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest
inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to what does the world attribute the Native
American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us”? Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is
simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that
responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-
political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed
obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the “Savage.” Repair
the demolished subjectivity of the
Slave. Two simple sentences, thirteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global)
antagonisms would be dismantled. An “ethical modernity” would no longer sound like an oxymoron.
From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of
antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights. When pared down to thirteen words and two
sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of
political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and
politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar,
an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive
of
progressive scholars, and the plethora of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is that what can so
easily be spoken is now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so
ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen words not only render their speaker
“crazy” but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning
scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by
radical politics and scholarship were not “Should the U.S. be overthrown?” or even “Would it be
overthrown?” but rather when and how—and, for some, what—would come in its wake. Those steadfast in their
conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of
everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of
SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the
Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and
progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to
tactics and the possibility of “success,” but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could
not make a convincing case—by way of a paradigmatic analysis—that the U.S. was an ethical formation and still
hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and
presidential candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks. One
could (and many did) acknowledge America’s strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical
assessment, but rather remained an assessment of the so-called “balance of forces.” The political discourse of
Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to
this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the
power of Blackness and Redness to pose
the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all—retreated as did White
radicals and progressives who “retired” from struggle. The question’s echo lies buried in the graves of
young Black Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so
many of them have been xrotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of
the academy where the “crazies” shout at passers-by. Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices
that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and
with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a
revolutionary zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement
and the Slave estate’s destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is
no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is
“no” in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in
screenplays and in scholarly prose; but “yes” in the sense that in even
the most taciturn historical moments such as ours, the
grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical
symptoms—it registers in both cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness of the structural antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we
could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the
present, Blackness and Redness manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that
is, as
unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image
composition, and acoustic strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil
through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as
opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positionalities, the
resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even
when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually
having to do with poverty or the absence of “family values”), the non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by
posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontology—or non-ontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in
on the mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is
assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible. Likewise, the grammar of political ethics—the grammar of
assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering—which underwrite Film Theory and political discourse (in this book,
discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from
the mid-1960s to the present) is
also unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an
ontological grammar, a structure of suffering. And the structure of suffering which film theory, political discourse, and
cinema assume crowds out other structures of suffering, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit
of unity mobilized by the political discourse in question. To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological
suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists
themselves may not be aware of the ontological positionality from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-
step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows.
 Case
Their inevitable link turn is garbage – blackness renders their poesis prey to civil
society
Sexton 17 [Jared Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations : (De)fatalizing the
Present, Forging Radical Alternatives]
This chapter thinks through an ambivalence investing the differentiated field of black studies, a meditation on the conditions of an intellectual
practice among those posing the greatest problem for intellectual practice. I have only been able to outline two associated points: 1) the
paradigmatic analysis of afro-pessimism and the black optimism of performance studies relate through a set-theoretic difference rather than
dialectical opposition or deconstruction; 2) afro-pessimism remains illegible – and unduly susceptible to dismissal –
without attending to the economy of enunciation that sustains it and to the discursive-material formation
in which it intervenes. That discursive-material formation is global in scale, approximating the terms of
‘the anti-black world’ (Gordon 2000); that economy of enunciation resists the attenuation of black freedom
struggle against what I introduce as ‘people-of-color-blindness’ (Sexton 2010b). There is a rule of inverse proportion at
work here: how radical a reconstruction you seek relates to how fully you regard the absoluteness of power,
whether you conceive of the constituted power of the slave estate as actively productive or understand it
as a reactive apparatus of capture. Insofar as we understand the time of slavery as a coeval temporality of
past, present, and future, insofar as we understand the truly global scale of slavery as a fundament,
perhaps even the privileged one, of something like a modern epoch as such, then we cannot but
reconstruct the world as we know it, if we are going to remain ‘absolute about abolition’ (Harney and Moten
2013: 82). In short, slavery must be theorized maximally, in ways that rupture dominant understandings of time
and its contingent relations of power, if its abolition is to reach the proper level. The singularity of slavery
is the prerequisite of its universality.4 The ‘colored time’ of the anti-black world entails the endless waiting of an interminable
captivity; that very timelessness is also freedom from the strictures of historical being as progress. That freedom, suffered in the
form of enjoyment, or joy, is the real movement of movements, the free base. Get with it or succumb to
the forces of mitigation that would change the world through a baseless coalition of a thousand tiny
causes. As a way of concluding with anticipation, I’ll ask directly: ‘Are the epigraphs in contradiction? Do we have here two incommensurable
approaches to black studies, or perhaps some other relation?’ Let us assume, with Wilderson, it is the case that every
gesture, every performance of blackness, every act or action, critical or creative, rhetorical or aesthetic, is
haunted by this sense of grammar and ghosts, of a structure and a memory of its (still) coming into being
through and as violence. Does this haunting imply, much less ensure, that there is no, and can be no, fugitive movement of escape, as
Moten has it? Does afro-pessimism fail to hear the resonance of black optimism? Or might something else be at work? Of course, when
Wilderson writes that ‘performance meets ontology,’ he is saying more than that. Though he is attempting
to think the two registers together (the performative and the ontological), he does not deny the
performative in the ontological, but rather insists that performance does not, in fact, have disruptive
power at the level or in the way that it has been theorized to date. More radically still, he suggests this theorization
remains insufficiently elaborated. That, at least, is how I read the animating gesture of the intervention and interlocution.

Their assertion that biopolitics is the organizing logic of contemporary violence is

based off of a Eurocentric Foucaultian analysis that masks the racialized torture of
incarceration.
Rodriguez 2006 [Dylan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside,
Forced Passages pages 170-171]
The prison regime’s twinned technologies of immobilization and bodily disintegration depart drastically
from the virtual and technically disembodied disciplinary technologies of Bentham’s Panopticon or
Foucault’s biopolitical carceral, whose Eurocentric regimes pivot on the relative absence or infrequent
physical application of direct bodily coercion and punishment. The technology of the current punitive
carceral entails a constant, state-structured application of physical and psychological violence, a vectoring
of coercion that generally exceeds conventional notions of torture, encompassing a profoundly
sophisticated form of subjection that constantly reshapes the imprisoned body’s form, content, and
context. Political prisoner Janet Hollaway Africa, imprisoned since 1978 as one of the MOVE Nine,
elaborates how the bodily passage into this relation of direct violence melts away the juridical formality
of “the prison,” establishing the political premises for an abolitionist or antisystemic practice.

The aff is a moment of false deterritorialization which quickly turns into a hatred of
self- a line of flight turned into a line of death which demands the destruction of life
itself- it doesn't fuck up the system, it just fucks you up
James 14
(Robin James- Associate Professor of Philosophy @ UNC Charlotte, From “No Future” to “Delete
Yourself (You Have No Chance to Win)”: Death, Queerness, and the Sound of Neoliberalism, Journal of
Popular Music Studies, Volume 25, Issue 4, p. 506-508)//TR
The queer repetition, looping, and electric buzzing that, in classically liberal regimes, were illegible to
hegemony, and thus opposites or alternatives to it, are, by the 1990s, registered as deviances that are
always already controlled for. Specifically, they’re preprogrammed right into MIDI interfaces, VSTs,
sequencers, samplers, and all sorts of other electronic music media. MIDIs (and other electronic instruments) give easy
access to biopolitical death, in the form of both (i) the black/queer critical strategies of repetition, looping,
and electronic buzzing, and (ii) the ability to use those strategies in ways that mimic biopolitical death.38
They give us access to intensities that are excessively high or excessively low, to what is illegible and imperceptible to
neoliberal hegemony, and thus to what might appear to undermine hegemony’s attempts to manage it.
However, as “MIDIjunkies” warns, this is only a faux subversion: it fucks you up, not hegemony. As
Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, drugs can induce a sort of faux subversion of neoliberal logics of
intensity (in Deleuze’s terms, “control society”). According to them, getting fucked up on drugs mimics the experience of radical critique—what they call
“deterritorialization.” Drugs “change perception,” altering its speed and intensity, and can thus reorganize epistemic and perceptual

frameworks (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 282), making perceptible what was, in hegemonic regimes, imperceptible. Psychedelics do this, amphetamines do
this, even alcohol and caffeine do this. However, Deleuze and Guattari argue that in drug use, “the deterritorializations remain
relative” (Plateaus 285) because highs are finite and everybody comes down sometimes. Human physiology
and drug chemistry are hard limits; drug use happens in “the context of relative thresholds that restrict”
drug use to the “imitation” of deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 284). Drug addiction even further
restricts the possibilities opened up by drug use: addicts go “down, instead of high . . . the causal line,
creative line, or line of flight” opened by drug use “turns into a line of death and abolition” (Deleuze and
Guattari, Plateaus 285). In other words, drugs fuck up junkies, not hegemony; the trick is that hegemony convinces
these “junkies” that their dejection is actually transgressive, even though it is carefully accounted for
and managed. Junkies deviate in ways that are already standardized and accounted for. These losers fail in
hegemony’s terms: as in a video game, losers might have shitty profiles full of losses and deficient in
wins, but they still have a profile that the system tracks. “MIDIjunkies” treats MIDIs as drugs in the
Deleuzoguattarian sense. MIDIs can be used in ways that make artists feel like they’re fucking shit up, subverting
hegemony’s arche, but they do so in very carefully controlled and limited ways. One might think these electronic
 all hardware
tools allow us to intensify repetition and noisiness beyond the limits of human perception or kinesthetic capacity. However,
and software have limits: knobs only go up to 10, so to speak (and however you measure it, potentiometers do have mechanical and
electrical limits). In Deleuzoguattarian terms, MIDIs make planes of consistency within a plane of
organization (i.e., the technological and mechanical limits of the MIDI program, the potentiometers on the control devices, etc.). The
most prominent example of this is the song’s use of apparently unmetered sound. To the casual listener, the last part of the song—
about four minutes in, after the bass drops out and all that’s left are various treble synths—might appear to abandon the song’s solid 4/4 and veer
off into nonmetric noodling (the same noodling, notably, that begins “Delete Yourself”). There is no regular bass or percussion pattern to follow,
so casual listeners could easily loose the downbeat. This section seems to exemplify what Deleuze and Guattari call, “a liberation of
time, Aion, a nonpulsed time for a floating music, as Boulez says, an electronic music in which forms give way to pure
modifications of speed” (Plateaus 267, my emphasis). But these sections are not unmetered. The noodling still falls into four-bar
phrases: every four bars, the musical motive changes slightly. The song itself is only superficially nonmetric. Moreover, most
listeners were not casual—they were fervently dancing, pogoing up and down to the beat and keeping meter with their bodies (in lieu of the bass
and percussion tracks doing it for them).39 This apparent foray into the nonmetric shows that what appears as unregulated
improvisation is in fact possible only because of a very tightly managed foundation. Similar approaches are
found in African American music. For example, in the Moonwalker (1988) version of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth
Criminal,” there is a vocal breakdown that, to the casual listener, is composed of aleatory, nonmetric groans and moans.
As the video’s staging shows, Jackson is in control throughout, carefully orchestrating what looks like unmanaged
chaos (e.g., he keeps time by snapping his fingers or moving his body). As the music in “MIDIjunkies” shows, this apparent transgression of
metric arche isn’t, in fact, a transgression. Drug-induced excesses are, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, ultimately faux
deterritorializations. I think it is important to read “MIDIjunkies” through Deleuze, Guattari, and Bogue not only because ATR had
explicit connections to Deleuzian thought (e.g., Empire’s involvement with Mille Plateaux records), but also because its critique of druggy, free-
floating, meterless time clarifies one of the main limitations of José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of ecstatic queer utopianism. Muñoz theorizes
ecstatic utopianism through both queer/punk performance and through comparisons to MDMA, once commonly referred to as ecstasy (“molly” is
the preferred street name nowadays). For Muñoz, ecstasy—literally ek-stasis, excessive, ornamental, nonfunctional pleasure that transgresses the
limitations of straight time and commodity capitalism— is both a critique of and alternative to Edelmanian negativity. Instead of the negation or
rejection of the future, ecstasy is, as Muñoz explains via Marcuse (1974), “the liberation from time” (133), and specifically from the linear
progressive rationality of “straight” capitalist time (as represented, for example, by Marcuse’s concept of the performance principle).40 Queer
ecstasy is an excessiveness that works, like a drug, as “a surplus that pushes one off course, no longer able to contribute labor power at the proper
tempo” (Muñoz 154). However, what both Deleuze and Guattari and “MIDIjunkies” demonstrate is that this
druggy, irregular temporality is, in neoliberalism, decidedly not queer—it is the
very measure of healthy deregulated economy (of capital, of desire) in which
rigidly controlled background conditions generate increasingly eccentric
foreground events. This deterritorialization is only relative; not even time is
liberated because in neoliberalism, labor power is supposed to be offbeat and
irregular.41 The real junkies here are the ones addicted to classically liberal concepts of death and
resistance as negation—the ones who think “flowers in the dustbin” are actually oppositional, and not the
compost fueling neoliberal biopower. Nonmetrical music is an-archic, and like the Pistols, treats death or
negation in a classically liberal framework. Because neoliberalism always already co-opts death,
randomness, and an-arche, these strategies do not challenge biopolitical hegemonies. Neoliberal
regimes use biopolitical administration to regularize death; a normalized variable, death is not a form of
distortion. The task, then, is to distort death. This is what happens on “Into the Death,” which hyper-intensifies biopolitical or metric
regulation.
Affective investment in the maintenance of sentimental public spheres lubricates the
wheels of liberalism, mobilizing fantasies of collective desires that undergird
neoliberal regimes of governance
Berlant 8 [Lauren Berlant, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, Introduction of THE
FEMALE COMPLAINT: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Duke
University Press: Durham and London, 2008]
Sentimentality: Love, Then Repeat As the preface suggested, the intimate public of femininity has always conjoined the very act of consumption
to a powerful hunger to know and adapt the ways other people survive being oppressed by life. The therapeutic intensity of this
drive is so conventional to sentimentality it comprises a story that barely needs to be told, a promise of
aesthetic recognition and redemption whose consumption is its own reward. Such an economy is an
important part of the sense of belonging an intimate public provides: the cliché and the convention represent
“insider knowledge.” It would be easy to dismiss the social productivity of this kind of reward, as it associates subjective confirmation
with fundamental changes of the sort the privileged rarely want to risk. But the mechanism of sentimental saturation of the intimate
sphere with materials and signs of consumer citizenship has been crucial to what Mark Seltzer has called the “pathological
public sphere” of the contemporary United States, which Karen Halttunen locates in the sensationalism of the late nineteenth
and the early twentieth century.43 The Uncle Tom genealogy is notable precisely because its sensationalism was a politically
powerful suturing device of a bourgeois revolutionary aesthetic. The contradictions evoked by that
phrase will be played out variously throughout each chapter: what links them is the centrality of affective
intensity and emotional bargaining amid structural inequity, and the elaboration and management of
ambivalent attachments to the world as such, the as-suchness of the world.44 I have been speaking of conventions, of
stereotypes, and forms, the diacritics of congealed feeling that characterize the cultural scene of sentimentality: behind this is a desire to see the
sentimental itself as a form—a dynamic pattern—not just a content with scenic themes, like that of weeping, sacrifice, and sanctified death. As
when a refrigerator is opened by a person hungry for something other than food, the
turn to sentimental rhetoric at moments
of social anxiety constitutes a generic wish for an unconflicted world, one wherein structural
inequities, not emotions and intimacies, are epiphenomenal.45 In this imaginary world the sentimental
subject is connected to others who share the same sense that the world is out of joint, without
necessarily having the same view of the reasons or solutions: historically, the sentimental intervention
has tended to involve mobilizing a fantasy scene of collective desire, instruction, and identification that
endures within the contingencies of the everyday. The politico-sentimental therefore exists
paradoxically: it seeks out the monumental time of emotional recognition, a sphere of dreaming and
memory, and translates that sense into an imaginary realm of possible acting, where agency is somehow
unconstrained by the normative conventions of the real as it presents itself; and it holds the real
accountable to what affective justice fantasy has constructed. This is to say that where sentimental
ideology is, so will there be a will to separate and compartmentalize fundamental psychically felt
social ambivalences, so that a sense of potentiality can be experienced enduringly, motivatingly, and even
utopianly. The downside is that, often, all of the forces in play can seem formally equivalent. For example, the
critique of patriarchal familialism that sentimental texts constantly put forth can be used to argue against
the normativity of the family; at the same time, the sacred discourse of family values also sustained within this
domain works to preserve the fantasy of the family as a space of sociability in which flow, intimacy, and
identification across difference can bridge life across generations and model intimate sociability for the
social generally. Likewise, at the same time that bourgeois nationalism promotes a sentimental attachment among strangers that is
routed through the form of the nation, it also abjures the sentimental when the idiom of certain claims is inconvenient.
(Sentimentalists talk about the emotional costs of injustice, not the material ones; the personal impacts of
not changing, not the structural benefits of continuity.) Arguments for rationality and individual affective
and appetitive self-management in the everyday have also been used to build and to critique identity discourses
associated with historically subordinated U.S. populations;46 at the same time sentimental rhetoric is mobilized
to describe everything from the timeless psychic unity of citizens possessing a national identity to the
fragility of normal culture itself when faced with challenges to it .47 Meanwhile, social progressives have for
over a century represented the ordinary effects of structural suffering in tactically sentimental ways—
modes of testimony, witnessing, visual documentation about the personal impact of structural subordination—to critique the
racist/patriarchal/capitalist world; now that same world has assimilated those genres to describe the
psychic effects of feminism/multiculturalism on those who once felt truly free, nationally speaking. What
conclusions can we reach from this jumble of ambitions to use and refuse sentimentality in the political
sphere? That politics, mediated by publics, demands expressive assurance, while political subjectivity is,
nonetheless, incoherent; that ideological incoherence or attachment to contradictory ethics and ways of life is
not a failure but a condition of mass belonging; that ambivalent critique produces domains (such as intimate
publics) to one side of politics that flourish insofar as they can allow the circulation of the open secrets of
insecurity and instability without those revelations and spectacles engendering transformative or strongly
resistant action in the idiom of political agency as it is usually regarded. Tracking mass-mediated norms
of belonging in the affective register and conventions of engendering emotional solidarities helps us to
understand the reproduction of normative life amid serious doubts about the probability that anyone,
except the lucky, will be able to forge durable relations of reciprocity among intimates or strangers; such
fractures produce the complaint as a register not merely of a stuckness but of the conditions of bargaining that allow people to maintain both their
critical knowledge and their attachments to what disappoints.

Their artistic abstraction of a method just re-entrenches collective amnesia – turns

case
Evans and Reid 14. Brad Evans, professor of international relations at the University of Lapland,
Finland and Julian Reid, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Bristol, Resilient
Life, 2014, pg. 21] VR
Postmodernism is often poorly understood. It does not refer to a particular moment in time that allows us to map
out a temporal shift from a pre to post facto of modernity. Neither does it refer to modes of production wherein the term
gains material purchase through the shift from industrialization to immaterial forms of labour and outputs. Postmodernism is a way of
thinking and relating to the world. It has no temporality as such. Neither does it have a distinct materiality as such. Bringing
into question prevailing dogmas, reified assumptions, along with uncompromising holistic claims to truth,
it is unashamedly concerned with opening up the fields of possibility by revealing what is already
there. There is, however, an important caveat that must be addressed here. While we may argue that postmodernism has
been aligned with the creation of new concepts – ‘the event of thinking’, there is nothing to suggest that
what is offered will not be dangerous or appropriated such that what appears to be affirmative
subsequently ends up turning towards more reactive and suffocating means. Indeed, moving beyond
postmodernist dogmatism, which can be as equally stifling as political realism and liberalist
alternatives, there is nothing whatsoever to suggest that our allegiance must be given to a concept or idea
simply because its stakes offer to strike against a particular meta-narrative. Deleuze was fully aware
of the potential for well- intentioned concepts to be maliciously appropriated by imperial forces.
Nietzsche, in particular, he believed, was subjected to these misadventures more than any other. For Deleuze, the
misappropriation of Nietzsche’s concepts extended well beyond the crude falsifications of ‘those abusive
relatives that figure in the procession of cursed thinkers’.35 More maliciously, they suffered from the ‘bad
readings or displacements’ which were derived from ‘arbitrary selections’ of his works. Never in the
history of thought has there been such a fallacious assassination of the messenger. Nietzsche for his part
was fully aware of his own untimeliness. ‘I know my fate’, he once famously stated.36 Deleuze’s work in equal measure has been
subjected to the same arbitrary selections and utilized to rationalize the most abhorrent acts of violence. It
has already been noted how a number of his concepts have been used to help theorize the catastrophic
imaginary of twenty-first-century forms of security governance. Intentionally or not, the problems
Deleuze raised are being directly associated with a security dilemma like no other before witnessed
on earth. Despite this, however, we are yet to truly realize the political significance of their works. If we have
heeded their messages to have become ‘post­modern’ along with the disavowal of structures and limits,
this hasn’t been done with any degree of confidence. That is why, for Peter Sloterdijk, Nietzsche remains the
prophet of the human yet to come.37 One of the more preposterous and dangerous postmodernist
interventions is the demand for a politics of forgetting. We are no doubt aware that truths about the
past can be manipulated to colonize the present. To suggest, however, that we can simply forget some
life-changing event is absurd. How may we even begin to think about eradicating from memory the
violence of Hiroshima or 9/11? Any such suggestions are not only neurologically questionable; they
are ethically compromised as they take us into the most pernicious abstraction. If the past troubles, it is
because the multiplicity of experience is glossed over, not the experience itself. Indeed, as we shall explain, what remains fundamental
to the art of living an affirmative life is the ability to have a distinct confidence in truth. Such an exercise
positively embraces what Foucault termed the history of our present. It pays meticulous attention to the historical moment
so that the contested nature of experience can be excavated from the ashes of catastrophe that
otherwise impose singular reasoning. Not only does conducting any history of the present prove altogether impossible once
forgetting is entertained. More contempo- raneously, it plays directly into the logic of neoliberal rule in which
future-orientated strategies of resilience depend upon forms of collective amnesia. Resilience has a
distinct relationship to the historical as it invokes memories of past traumas. The historical record , however,
is only concerned here with the singular truth of an event as some shared experience of suffering and
eventual resurrection. Out of this narrative comes an explanation of events as something inherently
violent such that the precariousness and vulnerability of human existence is reaffirmed, along with the
need to instigate a new angle of vision in which the particular historical rupture serves to condition the
possibility for more generalizable rule. Here, then, previous forms of human tragedy find strategic
alignment as the need to make us all aware of the sheer contingency of living inscribes a base level
imperative as a matter of biophysical survivability and a metaphysical imperative as a matter of
community under siege. The past therefore impresses upon the present to provide a moral reasoning to future governmental activi- ties as
carried out in the name of a collective, which is defined on account of its radical endangerment. Politically qualified life begins
with the tragedy of its existence – the topos of the encounter – which stems from the arbitrary and
inescapable violence of the world. The only response in such a predicament is to be better conditioned through some form of
exposure to the fact that living is thoroughly dangerous. As Juliette Kayyem, policy adviser on home- land security to the Obama administration
and Harvard academic puts it, what we choose to remember should be guided by ‘less anger’ (especially about distribution of finite resources
which ordinarily makes us more secure through entitlement) and more through a ‘quiet accep­ tance’ of our insecurities: One day it will be
acceptable, politically and publicly, to argue that while homeland security is about ensuring that fewer bad things happen, the real test is that
when they inevitably do, they aren’t as bad as they would have been absent the effort. Only
our public and political response to
another major terrorist attack will test whether there is room for both ideologies to thrive in a nation that
was, any way you look at it, built to be vulnerable.38