1NC

Off
Academia is a pollution of the affirmative projectan inoculation and re-scripting
of the very terms of contestation such that nothing is left but the continued
propagation of social death
Occupied UC Berkeley 9 (The Necrosocial Civic Life, Social Death, and the University of
California, November 2009, Craccum Magazine University of Auckland Student Magazine. Iss. 4, 2012.
http://craccum.ausa.auckland.ac.nz/?p=286) [m leap]
Yes, very much a cemetery. Only here

there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold
for anxiety, humiliation, and debt. The classroom just like the workplace just like the university just like the
state just like the economy manages our social death , translating what we once knew from high
school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social conflict.
Who knew that behind so much civic life (electoral campaigns, student body representatives, bureaucratic
administrators, public relations officials, Peace and Conflict Studies, ad nauseam) was so much social
death? What postures we maintain to claim representation, what limits we assume, what desires we dismiss? And in this moment
of crisis they ask us to twist ourselves in a way that they can hear. Petitions to Sacramento, phone calls to Congress meneven 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 university whether Yudof or some other lackey. These are merely the
personifications of the rule of the dead, the pools of investments, the buildings, the flows of materials into and out of the physical
space of the 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 gothic we are so morbidly aware, we are so practiced at
stomaching horror that the horror is thoughtless. In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never
become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity
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 subcultures

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
and thankfully

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 theaterthe 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 sociallywhich 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.

Bringing outlaw discourse into the open gaze of the academy straight turns the
aff we should leave it to the underground, not bring them into the public
before you vote aff, ask yourself: what does debate and the ballot actually do to
help the Affs method? you can vote negative on presumption and allow
critical outlaw discourses to stay hidden opacity is necessary for emancipation,
the Affimatives transparency must be rejected unyieldingly
Phillips 99 (Professor; Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies. Communication and Rhetorical Studies,
syracuse)
Kendall Rhetoric, Resistance, and Criticism: A Response to Sloop and Ono Philosophy and Rhetoric, \oi.i2, tio. 1,1999
Despite acknowledging the efficacy of out-law discourses. Sloop and Ono assume that the critiques generated and presented by the
out-law community have only minimal effect. The irony, and indeed arrogance, of this assumption is evident when they claim: "There
are cases, however, when, without the prompting of academic critics, out-law discourses serve local purposes at times and at others
resonate within dominant discourses, disrupting sedimented ways of thinking, transforming dominant forms of judgment" (60;
emphasis added). Sloop and Ono seem to suggest that such locally generated critiques are the exception, whereas the political
efficacy of the academic critic is the rule. This seems an odd view, given that the justification for their out-law discourse project is the
lack of politically viable academic critique and the perceived potency of out-law conceptions of judgment. Their suggestion that

out-law communities are in need of the academic critic contradicts not only the already disruptive nature
of existing out-law discourses (the grounds for using out-law discourse), but also the impotence of contemporary
critical discourse (the warrant for studying out-law discourse). By this I do not mean that the critiques and theories generated by
academically instituted intellectuals have not been incorporated into subversive discourses. Just as out-law discourses inevitably
mount critiques of dominant logics, so, too, the perspectives on rhetoric and criticism generated by academics are used in
resistance movements. Feminist critiques of patriarchy, queer theories of homophobia, postcolonial interrogations of race have
found their way into the service of resistant groups. The key distinction I wish to make is that the existence of criticism (academic or
self-generated) in resistance does not necessitate Sloop and Ono's move to a criticism of resistance. What Sloop and Ono fail

to offer is an adequate argument for "taking public speaking out of the streets and studying it in the
classroom, for treating it less as an expression of protest" (Wander 1983, 3) and more as an object for analysis and
reproduction within the political economy of the academy . Philip Wander made a similar charge against Herbert
Wicheln's early critical project, and this concern should remain at the forefront of any discussion aimed at expanding the scope and
function of criticism. Sloop and Ono offer numerous directives for the critic without addressing whether the critic should be
examining out-law discourses in the first place While it is too early to suggest any definitive answer to the question of criticism of
resistance, some preliminary arguments as to why critics should not pursue out-law discourses can be offered: (1) Hidden outlaw discourses may have good reasons to stay hidden. Sloop and Ono specifically instruct us that "the logic of the outlaw must constantly be searched for, brought forth" (66) and used to disrupt dominant practices. But are we to believe that all
out-law discourses are prepared to mount such a challenge to the dominant cultural logic ? Or, indeed, that
the members of out-law communities are prepared to be brought into the arena of public surveillance in

the service of reconstituting logics of litigation? It seems highly unlikely that all divergent cultural groups have developed
equally, or that all members of these groups share Sloop and Ono's "imperial impulse" (51) to promote their conceptions and
practices of justice. (2) Academic critical discourse is not transparent. Here I allude to the overall problem of translation
(see Foucault 1994; Lyotard 1988; Lyotard and Thebaud 1985; Zabus 1995) as an extension of the previous concern. Critical
discourse cannot become the medium of commensurability for divergent language games. Are we to believe that the "use"

of out-law discourse by critics to disrupt dominant practices can fail to do violence to these
diverse/divergent logics? Are out-law discourses merely tools to be exploited and discarded in the pursuit of
returning leftist academic discourse to the center? (3) Perhaps the academic translation of out-law discourse could be
true to the internal logic of the out-law community. And, perhaps the re-presentation of out-law logic within the academic community
will bestow a degree of legitimacy on the out-law community. Nonetheless, the effect of legitimizing out-law discourse is
unknown and potentially destructive. In an effort to siphon the political energy of out-law discourse into

academic practice, we may ultimately destroy the dissatisfaction that serves as a cathexis for these outlaw discourses. It seems possible that academic recognition might take the place of struggle for material
opportunities (see Fraser 1997). But, will academic legitimation create any material changes in the conditions
of out-law communities? I mean to suggest, not that it is better to allow the out-law community to suffer for its cause, but
rather that incorporating the struggle into an (admittedly) impotent academic critique does not offer a prima
facie alternative The concerns raised here are not designed to dismiss Sloop and Ono's provocative essay. The divo-gent critical
logic they outline deserves careful consideration within the critical conmninity, and it is my hope that the concerns I raise may help to
further probleoiatize the relationship between resistance and rhetorical criticism. As I have suggested, my purpose is to use the
provocative nature of Sloop and Ono's project to extend disputes regarding the ends of rhetorical criticism. Diverging perspectives
on the ends of criticism have been categorized by Barbara Wamick (1992) as falling along four general lines: artist, analyst,
audience, and advocate. Leah Ceccarelli (1997) discerns similar categories around the aesthetic, epistemic, and political ends of
rhetorical criticism. The out-law discourse project presents clear ties to the notion of critic as advocate. For Sloop and Ono, the critic
is an interested party, discerning (and at times disputing) the underlying values and forces contained within a discourse. Additionally,
however, the out-law discourse critic is an analyst focusing on the hidden, aberrant texts of the out-law and "render[ing] an
incoherent or esoteric text comprehensible" (Wamick 1992, 233). Now, I am not suggesting that a critic must serve only one function
or that the roles of advocate and analyst are mutually exclusive; rather, these entanglings of power (political ends) and knowledge
(epistemic ends) are inevitable. My concern is that we not neglect the complexity of these entanglements.

Turning covert

out-law discourses into objects of our analyses runs the risk of subjecting them both to the gaze
of the dominant and to the power relations of the academy . As the works of Michel Foucault (especially
presented as extending such noble goals as emancipation and
humanity may endow institutions of confinement and objectification . Any justification for studying out-law discourse
1979, 1980) aptly illustrate, practices

because doing so may extend our political usefulness in the pursuit of emancipatory goals must not obscure the already existing
power relations authorizing such studies. Our attempts to extend our domains of knowledge and expertise (authority) must not be
pursued unrefiexively.

We must exhaust the 1ac through a parasitic act which dooms the system to
crumble under its own weight otherwise, logics of incorporation ensures the
recuperation of juridical domination
Bifo 11
Franco Bifo Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, After the Future, pg.
104-108

Time is in the mind. The essential limit to growth is the mental impossibility to enhance time (Cybertime)
beyond a certain level. I think that we are here touching upon a crucial point. The process of re-composition, of
conscious and collective subjectivation, finds here a new paradoxical way. Modern radical thought has always seen
the process of subjectivation as an energetic process : mobilization , social desire and political
activism , expression, participation have been the modes of conscious collective subjectivation in the
age of the revolutions. But in our age energy is running out , and desire which has given soul to
modern social dynamics is absorbed in the black hole of virtualization and financial games , as Jean
Baudrillard (1993a) argues in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death, first published in 1976. In this book Baudrillard analyzes the
hyper-realistic stage of capitalism, and the instauration of the logic of simulation. Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the
meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to
medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through

its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object : no longer the object
of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. [...] The reality principle corresponds

to a certain stage of the law of value. Today

the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy , and every reality

is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather that
the outdated reality principle. We feed on those forms whose finalities have disappeared. No more ideology, only simulacra. We
must therefore reconstruct the entire genealogy of the law of value and its simulacra in order to
grasp the hegemony and the enchantment of the current system . A structural revolution of value. This genealogy
must cover political economy, where it will appear as a second-order simulacrum, just like all those that stake everything on the real:
the real of production, the real of signification, whether conscious or unconscious. Capital no longer belongs to the order of political
economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated model. The

entire apparatus of the commodity law of

value is absorbed and recycled in the larger apparatus of the structural law of value, this becoming
part of the third order of simulacra. Political economy is thus assured a second life, an eternity, within the confines of an
apparatus in which it has lost all its strict determinacy, but maintains an effective presence as a system of reference for simulation.
(Baudrillard 1993a: 2) Simulation is the new plane of consistency of capitalist growth: financial speculation, for instance, has
displaced the process of exploitation from the sphere of material production to the sphere of expectations, desire, and immaterial
labor. The simulation process (Cyberspace) is proliferating without limits, irradiating signs that go everywhere in the attention

The brain is the market , in semiocapitalist hyper-reality. And the brain is not limitless, the brain
cannot expand and accelerate indefinitely.The process of collective subjectivation (i.e. social recomposition) implies the
market.

development of a common language-affection which is essentially happening in the temporal dimension. The semiocapitalist
acceleration of time has destroyed the social possibility of sensitive elaboration of the semio-flow. The

proliferation of

simulacra in the info-sphere has saturated the space of attention and imagination . Advertising and
stimulated hyper-expression (just do it), have submitted the energies of the social psyche to
permanent mobilization . Exhaustion follows, and exhaustion is the only way of escape : Nothing,
not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation , and it is in this trap that the only chance of a
catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does
challenge of death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death.

when encircled by the

The system must itself

commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide . So hostages are
taken . On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of the
victims is ruled out the hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the terrorist , the hostages death
for the terrorist. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same sacrificial act.
(Baudrillard 1993a: 37) In these impressive pages Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern dialectics of revolution against power,
of the labor movement against capitalist domination, and predicts the advent of a new form of action which will be marked by the
sacrificial gift of death (and self-annihilation). After the destruction of the World Trade Center in the most important terrorist act ever,
Baudrillard wrote a short text titled The Spirit of Terrorism where he goes back to his own predictions and recognizes the emergence
of a catastrophic age. When the code becomes the enemy the only strategy can be catastrophic: all the counterphobic ravings
about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep-seated

complicity, the event would not have had the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy the terrorists
doubtless know that they can count on this unavowable complicity . (Baudrillard 2003: 6) This goes much further
than hatred for the dominant global power by the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global order.
This malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share this orders benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive
power is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twinness), this definitive order: No need, then, for a death drive or a destructive instinct, or even for perverse,
unintended effects. Very logically inexorably the increase in the power heightens the will to destroy it . And it
was party to its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the
suicide of the suicide-planes with their own suicides. It has been said that Even God cannot declare war on Himself. Well, He can .
The West, in position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal, and declared
war on itself. (Baudrillard 2003: 6-7) In Baudrillards catastrophic vision I see a new way of thinking subjectivity: a reversal of the
energetic subjectivation that animates the revolutionary theories of the 20th century, and the opening of an implosive theory of
subversion, based on depression and exhaustion. In the activist view exhaustion is seen as the inability of the

social body to escape the vicious destiny that capitalism has prepared: deactivation of the social energies
that once upon a time animated democracy and political struggle . But exhaustion could also become the
beginning of a slow movement towards a wu wei civilization, based on the withdrawal , and frugal
expectations of life and consumption. Radicalism could abandon the mode of activism, and adopt the

mode of passivity . A radical passivity would definitely threaten the ethos of relentless productivity
that neoliberal politics has imposed. The mother of all the bubbles, the work bubble, would finally deflate .
We have been working too much during the last three or four centuries, and outrageously too much
during the last thirty years. The current depression could be the beginning of a massive abandonment of competition,
consumerist drive, and of dependence on work. Actually, if we think of the geopolitical struggle of the first decade the struggle
between Western domination and jihadist Islam we recognize that the most powerful weapon has been suicide . 9/11

is the most impressive act of this suicidal war, but thousands of people have killed themselves in order to
destroy American military hegemony. And they won, forcing the western world into the bunker of paranoid
security, and defeating the hyper-technological armies of the West both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. The
suicidal implosion has not been confined to the Islamists. Suicide has became a form of political action
everywhere. Against neoliberal politics, Indian farmers have killed themselves. Against exploitation hundreds of workers and
employees have killed themselves in the French factories of Peugeot, and in the offices of France Telecom. In Italy, when the 2009
recession destroyed one million jobs, many workers, haunted by the fear of unemployment, climbed on the roofs of the factories,
threatening to kill themselves. Is it possible to divert this implosive trend from the direction of death, murder, and suicide, towards a
new kind of autonomy, social creativity and of life?I think that it is possible only if we start from exhaustion, if we

emphasize the creative side of withdrawal. The exchange between life and money could be deserted ,
and exhaustion

could give way to a huge wave of withdrawal from the sphere of economic exchange. A

new refrain could emerge in that moment , and wipe out the law of economic growth. The selforganization of the general intellect could abandon the law of accumulation and growth , and start a
new concatenation, where collective intelligence is only subjected to the common good.

We do this through a politics of stealing away we must refuse interpellation and

take back what belongs to the undercommons
Moten and Harney 13 (Stefano Harney, Professor of Strategic Management Education at the Lee
Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University and a co-founder of the School for
Study and Fred Moten, Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke, The University and the
Undercommons, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, pg. 26-28) [m leap]
The Only Possible Relationship to the University Today is a Criminal One . To the university Ill steal,
and there Ill steal , to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only
possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be
true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the
university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment . In
the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can . To abuse its
hospitality , to spite its mission , to join its refugee colony , its gypsy encampment, to be in but not
ofthis is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university . Worry about the university. This is the
injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald
Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive
intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual

came under false pretenses , with bad documents , out of love . Her labor is as necessary as it is
unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings . And on top of all
that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the
university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets
subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong . What is that work and what is its social capacity for both
reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the work of the
university. Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of what Jacques Derrida calls the
onto- /auto-encyclopedic circle of the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the
hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters . The university needs
teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it . It is not teaching then

that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of
teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the
prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and
journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate
students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to
run the Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the course designed to be a new book,
teaching happened. The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually, one should
not teach for food. If the stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the
stage is surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the
sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage self-incurred minority. He tries to contrast it
with having the determination and courage to use ones intelligence without being guided by another. Have the courage to use
your own intelligence. But what would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call the beyond of teaching is
precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance ? And what of those minorities who

refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond2 (that which is beyond the beyond of
teaching), as if they will not be subjects , as if they want to think as objects , as minority ? Certainly,
the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste . But
their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of the Enlightenment .
The waste lives for those moments 102 Moten/Harneybeyond2 teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase
unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower of the Enlightenment truly better than this?
Perhaps the biopower of the Enlightenment know this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this
labor as it must. But even as it depends on these moles, these refugees, they will call them uncollegial,
impractical, naive, unprofessional. And one may be given one last chance to be pragmaticwhy steal when one can have it
all, they will ask. But

if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with

hands full into the underground of the university, into the Undercommons this will be regarded as
theft , as a criminal act . And it is at the same time, the only possible act . In that Undercommons of the
university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualization
of research.

To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that

fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal , matricidal , queer , in the cistern, on the stroll of the
stolen life , the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back , where the commons give refuge,
where the refuge gives commons. What the beyond2 of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not
completing; its about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others , a radical passion
and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of
agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood , and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative
torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the prophecy
in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that predicts its own organization and has
therefore passed, as commons, and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet
can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the Undercommons is arrayed its own
deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the negligence of professionalization, and the
professionalization of the critical academic. The Undercommons is therefore always an unsafe
neighborhood .

Off
This failure of the affirmative is further demonstrated by their faith in dialectics as
a model to illuminate racial discrimination racism has never operated by
exclusion but rather by waves of assimilation the faciality machine marks
deviance through subtle processes of territorialization rather than an a priori
banishment of blackness the affs dyadic understanding of race cannot account
for the infinite proliferation of identities within the faciality machine, ensuring the
reproduction of colonial domination
Saldanha 7 (Arun Saldanha, Associate Professor of Geography, Environment, and Society at
University of Minnesota, Senior Lecturer of Social Sustainability at Lancaster University, 2007,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, pg.194-196)
My disagreement is not with Fanons and Martn Alcoffs insistence on embodiment and emotion, but with their
reliance on a Hegelian notion of recognition to explain encounter. Because of this they tend to treat white
and nonwhite not only as a dyad, but as almost naturally opposed entities . There is, then, little
attention paid to the complicated processes whereby some racial formations become dominant ,
that is, how racial formations emerge from material conditions and collective interactions, which greatly
exceed the spatiality of self versus other. Deleuze and Guattaris concept of faciality is not based on
an intersubjective dialectics enlarged to world-historical scope. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari strongly
distance themselves from phenomenology and psychoanalysis. First of all, for them, it isnt consciousness but
an abstract machine of faciality that arranges bodies into relations of power. And second, faciality constantly
invents new faces to capture deviant bodies, multiplying possible positions far beyond any binaries
such as black/white (though binarization can be an important effect ). That is precisely its strength. There are
thousands of encounters, thousands of trains. Deleuze and Guattari believe facialitys imperialism arose with
institutional Christianity. Being imposed in lands populated by different phenotypes, faciality became a
matter of imperialist racialization. That faciality originated in Renaissance humanism and depictions of Jesus seems
a plausible if one-sided interpretation. It is less relevant than Deleuze and Guattaris unusual theory of contemporary racism: If
the face is in fact Christ , in other words, your average ordinary White Man , then the first deviances, the first
divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second or third category. They are also inscribed
on the [white] wall [of signification], distributed by the [black] hole [of subjectivity]. They must be
Christianized, in other words, facialized. European racism as the white mans claim has never operated
by exclusion , or by the designation of someone as Other : it is instead in primitive societies that the stranger is
grasped as an other. Racism

operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the

White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and
backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes
erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity (its a Jew, its an Arab, its a Negro, its a
lunatic...). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior , there are no people on the outside. There
are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be .5 For Anjunas psy-trance parties, there were
no people on the outside. Locals, domestic tourists, charter tourists, and beggars would join the white Goa freaks on the dance
floor, sometimes even in Nine Bar. In fact, as with the United Colors of Benetton, it will be remembered that the rhetoric of PLUR
demonstrated facialitys inclusivenessthe parties were supposed to be open to all. But immediately, the faciality machine

would place all bodies in relation to the Goa freak standard, both spatiotemporally and subjectively,
measuring their acceptability through increasingly meticulous signs : sociochemical monitoring, scene
savviness, chillum circles, sexual attractiveness. Many nonfreaks felt uneasy being pigeonholed like thisespecially domestic
tourists, who would retreat to the darker corners. The result was viscosity, bodies temporarily becoming impenetrable
more or less. It would seem to me that to understand the intricate hierarchies of racism, a framework that allows

for gradual and multidimensional deviances is preferable to a dialectical model. Faciality also explains
why after colonialism, with television and tourism, there is scarcely place left for any dark others. Everyone is

included; everyone is facialized. At the same time, Euro-American ways of life continue to spread, and
White Man (Elvis Presley, Sylvester Stallone, David Beckham) remains the global standard against which all other
faces are forced to compete. What this account of racism has in common with the Fanonian is that
whiteness is the norm, even in our post-colonial era. Where it differs, however, is that deviance is based not on
lack of recognition or negation or annihilation of the other, but on subtle machinic differentiations and
territorializations . The virtual structures behind racial formations dont look like formal logic (a/not-a) ;
they continually differentiate as actual bodies interact and aggregate. Racism, then, cant be
countered with a Hegelian sublation into the universal.

This relationship of negativity resurrects the most violent forms of humanism by

defining blackness in opposition to civil society and serves only to banish the
positive beauty of blackness that the affirmative attempts to reclaim
Larue 11 (Robert Larue, M.A. in English from the University of Texas at Arlington, MOVING BEYOND
THIS MOMENT: EMPLOYING DELEUZE AND GUATARRIS RHIZOME IN POSTCOLONIALISM,
August 2011, https://dspace.uta.edu/handle/10106/6148)
By trying to uncover a human ontology, humanism underscores the necessity and value of knowing
origins. Origins, to date, have been used as principles by which things, objects, and people can be grouped
and segregated. Questions such as where are your people from? or where are you from? seek origins so that the speaker
can be lumped into a group, which is usually pre-established as either acceptable (Western European) or unacceptable (all
others). While this is a gross oversimplification of categories, it does serve to show how determining ontological roots affects
human society. Not only did Descartes cogito renew a desire to find the origins of human existence, but it set the origins of the
human within the confines of its own mindin the humans ability (or lack thereof) to reason. This practice both set the stage for
understanding existence through a reliance on reason and provided a reasonable justification for an exclusion of all
those beings who, according to the Enlightenment model of the human, could not demonstrate reason .
Since colonized individuals did not effectively demonstrate Enlightenment reason, they were effectively considered outside of
European humanity. Apart from this, setting up this foundation for human existence proves troubling because the very concept of a
foundationstructurally speakingseeks to dislocate bodies from the rest of the world. Foundations set apart, and isolate, all that is
built on their perimeter. It limits what can and cannot be established, killing off all roots--or histories--and establishing itself as the
origin of the order. Ironically, as they convey a desire to unite multiple elements into one single structure (just as the foundation of a
house attempts to bring together all of the parts of the house, from the wood used to construct spaces, to the spaces themselves),

foundations are based on a system of is/is not. Because they are finite regions, they always exclude. Seeking
a foundational humanity, then, sets up an understanding of the human that requires exclusions and
boundaries. So far, this desire for a foundational humanity is what has limited much expansion of the concept of what it means to
be human. In order for humanity to progress beyond the point of a binarized logic of either/or this concept
of a foundation of human existence must be eradicated.
Since its inception, the Cartesian division (of mind and body, or reason and form) has become the
cornerstone for definitions of humanity. However, if, as Bart Simon argues, the revolutionary
Enlightenment narratives of the human reestablished the foundations of the human and challenged an
oppressive feudal order and reenvisioned [sic] man as rational, autonomous, unique, and free (4), it
only did so for a small sector of humanity. As focusing on the feudal order left many other sectors of
humanity untouched and without vision, it served to both turn the human into a product of politics and
economics by expanding the population of humanity based on ownership rights. And, as Susan Bordo
argues, the Cartesian model presents problems for humanity because it is nothing if not a passion for
separation, purification, and demarcation, where the body is separated from the mind (17). Acting as the
scalpel, Descartes reliance--or, perhaps more appropriately, his insistenceon reason further
complicates the question of what is human since, in an attempt to form a unified system of absolute
knowledge (4), the model further divided human existence within the world, and placed humanity further
at odds with the rest of the world (4). Instead of uniting humanity, the Cartesian Man was now limited to
white males who could reason and who could, with this reason, properly make use of the environment; or,
in other words, at this point, another classification of the human was established based on his ability to
subjugate his environment and all that existed (without Enlightenment approved reason) within it.6

Origins became tied to European reason, and, in doing this, denied all non-Europeans access to
ontology . It is from this pointfrom an attempt to enter the body of humanitythat Fanons humanism
seems to stem Fanons cries for seeing the equality of all men in the world (Black Skin 110) based on
their ability to rationalize it (123) show him continually trying to climb onto, and establish residency on this
revolutionary foundation of humanity. By clinging to the already troubled concept of a foundational
humanness, Fanon seems to ignore the fact that this all-inclusive humanity is established on principles
of exclusion and can never be entered as long as the system remains intact. Fanon troubles a potentially
fruitful argument on postcolonial existence because he, as many of his predecessors, attempts to focus
on the origins of postcolonial individualslooking to the ideologies of the colonizer as the point of this
originand, all the while further grounding a postcolonial future within the colonial situation. If
postcoloniality is forever a descendent of colonization, it can never move beyond exclusion because it is
always defined as exclusion . For postcolonialism alone, this is an arduousand perhaps impossible
task. However, by reading postcoloniality as part of what Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call a rhizome
(6), it is possible to break Fanons postcolonial search for reclaiming an origin, and allow for an
understanding of self that does not predicate itself upon the rationalization of existence , but on
the understanding and appreciation of interconnections of existence. In order to move beyond the effects
of colonization, postcoloniality can no longer afford to be seen as a product of colonization or
white European actions. It must be understood on different terms.
While it must be noted that posthumanism much like postcolonialismis an academic endeavor, the
fields importance comes in its insistence that, as Myra Seaman phrases it, there has never been one
unified, cohesive human (246-47). The human derived from European humanism have been nothing
more than, to quote N. Katherine Hayles, a labels knighted upon a fraction of humanity who had the
wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will
through individual agency and choice (286). It is in this attempt to rethink human relationships not only
with the environment but with other human bodies, and ultimately redefine what it means to be human
from a more global perspective that possible strategies for rethinking postcoloniality arise. Because it
emphasizes deterritorializations and reterritorializations (Deleuze and Guattari 10) the rhizome offers a
break from an understanding of the human as a point to be entered. As there are no points or positions
in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root (8) the idea that the human has a point
of origin , and that, in postcoloniality, European culture is the postcolonials point of origin can be
discarded . What, instead, the rhizome makes available are a multiplicity of lines (8) which can be
understood as continuous forms. This is important because, reading postcoloniality as part a rhizome
means understanding that there was existence before, through, and after the events of colonization ,
therefore separating the origins of postcolonial individuals from those of the colonizer. A
separation in this way restores validity to the existence of the postcolonial, removes the concept of
victimhood or victimizationand sets the understanding that not all contact isalthough there may at
times be horrific incidents, or periodsnegative.
In addition to this, since rhizomes are multiplicities (of lines, no less) and seekunlike Fanonto do
away with the concept of unity, since unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to
that of the system considered (overcoding) (8), there no longer exists a need for postcolonial individuals
to desire to ascend the hierarchy established by colonization. Postcoloniality, as a rhizome, no longer
needs to enter into the humanity of the colonizer because, as a rhizome, it is allowedno, it is necessary
to be apart from the other. As a rhizome they remain connected. Moreover, redefining the human in
terms of a posthuman-postcoloniality allows for the possibility of opening all sectors of humanity so that
the human is understood as a nexus rather than a solid form . Still, much work is needed in order to
more fully understand postcoloniality as rhizomatic. As established, postcoloniality includes not only the
physical, political, economic, and social modes of postcolonized individuals, but at the heart of these
modes rests a linguistic model that establishes the presence of individuals. This presence works in two
parts: first it establishes a vacuum in which it can place its subject, and it then institutes them as
European-style individuals.

Our view of race as an assemblage is capable of crafting a view of identity as

continual becoming this active proliferation and constant differentiation is
dependent on phenotype, history, geography, and more and cannot be defined as
solely imposed externally nor defined in isolation from social forces rather it is
an immanent process of emergence which can unshackle itself from fascism and
violence so long as the affirmatives dialectical prison is abandoned
Saldanha 7 (Arun Saldanha, Associate Professor of Geography, Environment, and Society at
University of Minnesota, Senior Lecturer of Social Sustainability at Lancaster University, 2007,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, pg.188-192)
Racial formation has become a widespread term, especially in the United States, to grasp how the reality of race is based not only
on ideology and prejudice, but on institutional practices, divisions of labor, jurisdiction, and education.15 The term has not received
the philosophical attention it deserves. Id like to propose that racial formation should be understood with Deleuzes

ontology and Guattaris concept of the machinic assemblage. Race is machinic . Not stirrups, knights, and courtly
poetry, but skin color, fear, and segregation are components of the machinic assemblage of race . If the
crusaders are important for the feudal assemblage, so are the colonists and migrants for the racial assemblage.
Feudalism and race overlap historically and conceptually, of course. What matters is not perfectly delineating social
machines, but the movements between them . It is movement, of whatever scope, that integrates an assemblage,
perhaps especially race. At one point, Deleuze and Guattari in fact seem to claim that the psychic and nomadic intensities of the
modern period are inherently oriented toward racial formation: The first things to be distributed on the body without organs are
races, cultures and their gods. The fact has often been overlooked that the schizo participates in history; he hallucinates and raves
universal history, and proliferates the races. All delirium is racial, which does not necessarily mean racist. It is not a matter of the
regions of the body without organs representing races and cultures. The full body does not represent anything at all. On the
contrary, the races and cultures designate regions on this bodythat is, zones of intensities, fields of potentials. Phenomena of
individuation and sexualization are produced within these fields. We pass from one field to another by crossing thresholds: we never
stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, and departing becomes as easy as being born or dying.16

Beneath the differences between actual cultural and racial formations, there teems an infinity of
microscopic differences that gradually lock together to produce the distinctions we talk about in
everyday life: this is Dutch, that is German, she looks sub-Saharan, this smells typically Goan. We can now start
comprehending the power of Deleuzes ontology of the virtual discussed in the beginning of this book. On the
enormous body without organs of the human species, tens of thousands of years of migration, miscegenation, culture contact,
isolation, and adaptation have gone into producing local thickenings of differences until more travel and invention dissolve them.

Insofar as phenotypical difference mattered to interaction and power relations, we can speak of racial
formations. Racial and cultural identities emerge. Emergence is not an essentialist concept, because a
population is a social machine: it remains a multiplicity of individuals, practices, and territories . If a
population only is by connecting to other populations and becoming something different, there can be no
static Platonic-type of essence directing it. But neither is emergence an antiessentialist concept, because the
entity is granted a positive force of its own , namely, the entitys virtual capacities, that does not
depend on any negation , but on an active folding in of the exterior to develop the interior. Thinking in
terms of emergence elides being completely for or against essences. It is nonessentialist. Instead of the
antiessentialism and oppositional relationality of many prevalent theories of racism, such as Edward Saids and Frantz
Fanons, a Deleuzian understanding of relation allows for many kinds and scales of difference, and
constant differentiation. From a machinic perspective, race is not something inscribed upon or
referring to bodies, but a particular spatiotemporal disciplining and charging of those bodies
themselves. Bodies collectively start behaving like situationally distinct aggregatesracial formations,
racial clusters. These clusters emerge immanently, without external blueprint , through the corporeal
habits and connections with the environment that bodies necessarily engage in. Racial formations are much
more than discursive categories. This, of course, doesnt preclude coercion. Especially in modern times, racial
formation has gone hand in hand with gross violence and lasting inequality. As seen in Anjuna, racial
clustering emerges through embodiment, face, and location. Each of these points toward the fact that
phenotypical encounter, particularly in a contact zone like Anjuna, is dense with prior historical geographies of
colonialism, religious conversion, and capitalism. The physical characteristics of bodies are made to
matter by processes that exceed what is conventionally called social or even human . The clustering of white

bodies in Anjuna comprised anything from ways of talking, feeling, smoking, dancing, and sunbathing to the mats at parties, fashion,
musical form, law, motorbikes, pharmacies, Ecstasy tablets, Shiva, psytrance Web sites, foreign currency, the Goan press,
airplanes, the sea, the sun, and more. Whiteness emerged corporeally, machinically, ecologically, within the interactions between
the most varied components (biochemical, behavioral, perceptive, hereditary, acquired, improvised, social, etc.).17 In no way
could phenotype be the cause, or in Marxian terms the base, of racial differentiation. But neither was it

incidental. The heterogeneity that is race is strictly irreducible to any of its components . The
conception of race Im suggesting has nothing to do with dividing humans into races. All whites can be
considered one racial formation, but so can the Italians in New York, or Congolese-born naturalized
Belgians. Racial formations comprise multiple spatial scales and continually change over time. My
concept of race is not meant for taxonomic ordering but for appraising the evolving, multilayered,
contested, temporary differentiations between populations . Populations exhibit viscosity, not clear-cut
boundaries. Whatever distinctions we can draw between populations is entirely contingent upon the present
geographic situation. Machinism is a kind of realism, but it understands that reality is far too complicated to be
transparent. Anjuna also showed that local cultural exigencies, such as sociochemical monitoring and a visual economy centered
on style and territory, are also relevant in the differentiating between phenotypes. This was no simple question of othering. There
was an abstract machine that distributed bodies according to degrees of deviance from the virtual pole of
the standard (white) Goa freak. Racial difference is tendential, not dialectical or contradictory . The occurrence of
nonwhite freaks, and charter tourists and backpackers who were not aspiring to freak status, only confirmed the malleability of race.
If I sometimes had difficulties, both while in the field and while writing, in convincingly delineating what was white about the
practices of the Goa freaks, it was because I held on to a model in which race was given rather than an effervescent and largely
implicit effect of myriad physical events.

No body was ever completely part of a racial formation ; no one

actualized the virtual category Goa freak perfectly; there is no such thing as pure whiteness . A Brahmin
often has lighter skin than an Israeli freak. Sometimes domestic tourists dared to dance in Nine Bar even back in 1998. As a
problem for investigation and thought, whiteness becomes interesting precisely there where it becomes

indiscernible, in its estuary, where it flows intoand is disrupted by nationality, gender, subcultural
capital, economic disparity, mysticism, and moral panic . The concepts of viscosity and machinic
assemblage reveal the profoundly geographic imagination that is required to appreciate the materiality of
race. From the perspective of viscosity, as Deleuze noted in his reading of Spinoza, a body such as race can be
mapped with some precision. 18 A machinic geography of race maps the physical connections that
constitute racial differences, and considers language, attitude, feeling, and media representations only in
their properly spatial functioning. Although my ethnography applied the term viscosity only to human bodies, it should be
clear that humans only become viscous through nonhuman things and forces in their midst. When many
bodies become viscous, they together acquire what Deleuze called a kinetic and dynamic dimension, that is, an
aggregates way of holding together, and its capacity to affect and be affected . In the kinetic dimension, freak
viscosity on South Anjuna Beach, for example, was held together through the tan, Goa trance playing in the shacks, and familiarity.
In the dynamic dimension, the viscosity was relatively unaffected by bus tourists, and continued to affect younger freaks with its
mythical aura. Race,

in order to exist at all, must weave together biology, behavior, things, and

circumstances . It sets them free, only to recapture them in racial clusters. Race is always multiplying. It
is the plasticity, the creative potential of race, that is important, not its rigidity . In effect, what holds an
assemblage together is not the play of framing forms or linear causalities but, actually or potentially, its
most deterritorialized component, a cutting edge of deterritorialization .19 Racial difference is oppressive,
but its power lies in continually surpassing itself through devious machinic connectionswhich
means that it can undo itself too .

This proliferation of racial difference is capable of freaking whiteness; a reflexive

process of becoming which refuses to cede creativity to forces of domination
this reclamation of difference as joyful is capable of creating an affective relation
toward race not bound by hegemonic identitarian categories
Saldanha 7 (Arun Saldanha, Associate Professor of Geography, Environment, and Society at
University of Minnesota, Senior Lecturer of Social Sustainability at Lancaster University, 2007,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, pg.197-201)
In no real sense did the hippies become Indians or poor blacks, or prostitutes or trampsor only in a guilty disingenuous sense
but they found their own significance in what they took these groups to be: a significance to be understood against the dominant

society and with respect to their own special awareness, says the ethnographer Paul Willis.11 Seeing blacks, Mexicans, and
Indians as more authentic, because relatively untouched by mainstream white modernity, the counterculture transformed white
modernity by appropriating some of that authenticity. But it is that very appropriation that betrays white privilege and that spawns
new tropes of subcultural (and potentially racist) snobbism. A creative movement turning in on itself, becoming paranoid and
reactionary, is what Guattari called microfascism. Psychedelics clearly turned microfascistic in Anjuna, accompanied as it was by
arrogance, segregation, noise pollution, corruption, exploitation, and psychosis. If whiteness is defined by its lines of

flight, microfascism becomes as interesting to the study of whiteness as Nazism . Psychedelics

travel, music, drugsis

whiteness accelerating, whiteness stuttering: either a deeper entrenchment into

economic and cultural exploitation, or a shedding of privilege , at least here and now. On the whole, the Goa
freaks of Anjuna do not follow the lines of flight of whiteness to critique their own position as whites. In this sense, they were hardly
freaking the racial assemblage. Recall the proposition of Rachel Adams and Leslie Fiedler of appropriating freak as a critical
category: [F]reaks cannot be neatly aligned with any particular identity or ideological position. Rather, freak
is typically used to connote the absence of any known category of identity.... I am drawn to freak because,
like queer, it is a concept that refuses the logic of identity politics, and the irreconcilable problems of
inclusion and exclusion that necessarily accompany identitarian categories.12 A true freaking of whiteness
would grasp its lines of flight not for fascism but for a future where paler-skinned bodies have no
privileged access to economic and cultural capital and to happiness. Freaking whiteness is problembased, coalition-led, and self-critical ; it would try to understand what biophysical and technological
forces subtend it (computers, HIV, floods, radiation). Humanism and cosmopolitanism are severely limited if the
struggle against racism is defined only in human terms. So: race should not be abandoned or
abolished, but proliferated. Races energies are then directed at multiplying racial differences, so as to
render them joyfully cacophonic . What is needed is an affirmation of races virtuality . When racial
formations crumble and mingle like this, the dominance of whiteness in the global racial assemblage is
undermined as the faciality machine finds it increasingly difficult to take hold of bodies . It is not that
everyone becomes completely Brownian (or brown!), completely similar, or completely unique. It is just that
white supremacism slowly becomes obsolete as other racial formations start harboring the same
creativity as whites do now, linking all sorts of phenotypes with all sorts of wealth and all sorts of ways
of life (sedentary, touristic, ascetic). When no racial formation is the standard, race acquires a very different
meaning: The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it
suffers; there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is defined not by its
purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination . Bastard and mixed-blood are
the true names of race.13 When no racial formation is clearly hegemonic, perhaps there will be no need
anymore for the term race. Although there will always be phenotypical variation and relations of power,
perhaps sometime in the future they wont be correlated at all. Unlikely, but possible. Until then, however, there
seems little point in trying to stop talking about race, as antiracists such as Paul Gilroy suggest we do.14 Race is creative, and
we can heed its creativities against itself. Challenging the global faciality machine encompasses the
transformation not just of prejudice, tabloid journalism, and Unesco, but of the pharmaceutical industry, farm
subsidies, seismology, the arms trade, income tax policy, and the I nternational Monetary Fund. In contrast to what
many antiracists and advocates of political correctness prescribe, the sites where the most urgent battles are to be fought are not
culture and language, but trade and health. Freaking whiteness is no easy task. A good start for social scientists,
however, is to acknowledge the persistent materiality of race. It is important that the real barriers to mobility
and imagination that exist in different places be taken into account. Cosmopolitanism has to be invented, not
imposed. Taking responsibility and activism will only follow from both understanding and feeling the
intensive differences that exist between many different kinds of bodies : between a Jew and a black

soldier, between a woman in the Sahel and a woman on Wall Street, between a Peruvian peasant and a
Chinese journalist. Strategies for Anjuna In research from a materialist point of view, there can be no separating politics
and ethics from ontology and science. A short article of mine on the Goa trance scene in the Unesco Courier of July/August 2000
reached a wide range of tourism and youth activists. A German NGO and an Israeli antidrugs officer contacted me for more
information. I sent the dissertation on which this book is based to Panjims Central Library and NGOs such as Goa Desc and Goa
Foundation, from where it made its way to some Goan journalists and a number of interested academics and psytrancers. My
research was never just representation but itself a (small) component in Anjunas machinic assemblage. I was a bit nervous, for
example, about my Friday Balco seminar in Mapusa, just a few miles from Anjuna, and asked Goa Desc not to publish my first
name in the local newspapers. A materialist ethnography accepts that it will have some material effects and tries to foreshadow
them. If the suggestions below seem somewhat unabashed, this is because I was necessarily very much involved in what I was

studying. The

multiplication of race Im proposing should be distinguished from other antiracist strategies. It is neither

antiwhite , nor pro-Indian, nor a simple celebration of hybridity, nor multicultural or universalist.
Machinic antiracism isnt antiwhite because it is aware that the freaky creativities of the white racial
formation can be used against white supremacy . It doesnt take sides in racial politics at all (for Indians,
for minorities, for the poor, against the rich) but asks what needs to happen for there to be sides at all. Machinism
is wary of any identity politics as this tends to hide internal fissures of the identity it seeks to defend. In my
case, the resistance against cultural imperialism in defense of some Goan identity has often been severely limited by a strong
Catholic, nostalgic and middle-class bias, as well as homophobia and conservative moralism.15 Machinism also avoids the easy
reverence for travel and bricolage found in postmodernism and a lot of cultural studies. Mobility and hybridization can be good or
bad. A lack of cosmopolitanism cannot be held against anyone but must be explained. Hailing the transracial inventiveness in
consumer tactics hardly erodes the international division of labor, advertising, and the military-industrial complex that support racial
clustering in the first place. Finally, machinism

does not imply multiculturalism or liberal universalism,

because hoping for horizontal equality (color blindness) and mere tolerance of the other leaves out of
analysis the privileged location of whites from which equality and tolerance are bound to be defined.
Importantly, though, these common antiracist practices arent without their relevance. They just need to be seen as limited in their
effectivity and potentially even reinforcing the intricate system of whiteness they want to attack.

Thinking blackness through ontology traps it within the prison of history

Koerner 12 (Michelle Koerner, Professor of Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley, 2012, Line of
Escape: Gilles Deleuzes Encounter with George Jackson Genre, Volume 44, Number 2)
In The Case of Blackness Moten (2008b: 187) perceptively remarks, What is inadequate to
blackness is already given ontologies . What if we were to think of blackness as a name for an
ontology of becoming ? How might such a thinking transform our understanding of the relation of
blackness to history and its specific capacity to think [its] way out of the exclusionary constructions of
history and the thinking of history (Moten 2008a: 1744)? Existing ontologies tend to reduce blackness to a
historical condition, a lived experience, and in doing so effectively eradicate its unruly character as a
transformative force. Deleuze and Guattari, I think, offer a compelling way to think of this unruliness when
they write, What History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience,
but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self- positing as concept, escapes History
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 110). To bring this relation between blackness and becoming further into the
open toward an affirmation of the unexpected insinuation of blackness signaled by the use of
Jacksons line as an event in its becoming a few more words need be said about Deleuzes method.
The use of Jacksons writing is just one instance of a procedure that we find repeated throughout
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where we constantly encounter unexpected injections of quotations,
names, and ideas lifted from other texts, lines that appear all of sudden as though propelled by their own
force. One might say they are deployed rather than explained or interpreted; as such, they produce
textual events that readers may choose to ignore or pick up and run with. Many names are proposed for
this method schizoanalysis, micropolitics, pragmatics, diagrammatism, rhizomatics, cartography
(Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006: 94) but the crucial issue is to affirm an experimental practice that
opposes itself to the interpretation of texts, proposing instead that we think of a book as a little
machine and ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things does it or does it not
transmit intensities? (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 4).8 Studying how Soledad Brother functions in
Deleuzes books, connecting Jacksons line to questions and historical issues that are not always
explicitly addressed in those books, involves one in this action. And further, it opens new lines where the
intensities transmitted in Jacksons book make a claim on our own practice. This method can be seen as
an effort to disrupt the hierarchical opposition between theory and practice and to challenge some of the
major assumptions of Western Marxism. In an interview with Antonio Negri in the 1990s, Deleuze (1997:
171) clarifies that he and Guattari have remained Marxists in their concern to analyze the ways
capitalism has developed but that their political philosophy makes three crucial distinctions with respect to
more traditional theoretical approaches: first, a thinking of war machines as opposed to state theory;
second, a consideration of minorities rather than classes; and finally, the study of social lines of

flight rather than the interpretation and critique of social contradictions. Each of these distinctions, as
we will see, resonates with Jacksons political philosophy, but as the passage from Anti-Oedipus
demonstrates, the concept of the line of flight emerges directly in connection to Deleuze and Guattaris
encounter with Soledad Brother. The concept affirms those social constructions that would neither be
determined by preexisting structures nor caught in a dialectical contradiction .

MARKED
It names a force that is radically autonomous from existing ontologies, structures, and historical
accounts. It is above all for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari insist that society be thought of not
as a structure but as a machine, because such a concept enables the thinking of the movements,
energies, and intensities (i.e., the lines of flight) that such machines transmit. The thinking of machines
forces us not only to consider the social and historical labor involved in producing society but also the
ongoing potentials of constructing new types of assemblages (agencement). One of the key adversaries
of this machinic approach is interpretation and more specifically structuralist interpretations of society in
terms of contradictions. According to Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987: 293), structuralism persisted in
the submission of the line to the point and as a result produced a theory of subjectivity, and also an
account of language and the unconscious, that could not think in terms of movement and
construction . Defining lines only in relation to finite points (the subject, the signifier) produces a
calculable grid , a structure that then appears as the hidden intelligibility of the system and of society
generally. Louis Althussers account of the ideological State apparatus as the determining structure of
subjectivity is perhaps the extreme expression of this gridlocked position (an example we will come back
to in a later section). Opposed to this theoretical approach, diagrammatism (to invoke one of the terms
given for this method) maps vectors that generate an open space and the potentials for giving
consistency to the latter.9 In other words, rather than tracing the hidden structures of an intolerable
system, Deleuze and Guattaris method aims to map the ways out of it.

Case
The notion self-love is based on a conservative notion of freedom which reifies
neoliberal objectivism
Corey Lee Wrenn 13, adjunct professor of Sociology with Dabney S. Lancaster Community College
and an adjunct professor of Social Psychology with the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, The
Neoliberalism Behind Sexy Veganism: Individuals, Structures, and Choice,
veganfeministnetwork.com/tag/individualism/
Im going to make a radical claim, well, actually its pretty widely accepted in the social sciences: There is no choice. This isnt about
the individual. This is about systems of oppression and social structures that shape our behavior and limit
what choices are available to us based on our social identity. If you are a young, thin, white woman advocating for Nonhuman
Animals in a pornified, hyper-sexualized society, one choice stands out loud and clear: Get naked. Its supposed to be empowering, and we think
maybe it helps animals.
First, Im not really sure why one has to feel sexually empowered when one is advocating against the torture and death of Nonhuman Animals. Why
our movement is keen on making violence a turn on is a little disturbing. It probably speaks something to our tendency to juxtapose women with
violence. The sexualization of violence against women and other feminized social groups like Nonhuman Animals is evidence to the rape culture we
inhabit.
Aside that, however,

choice is often thrown around as a means of deflecting critical thought at

systems of oppression . If its all about your individual choice, only you are responsible, only you are to
blame. Anyone who has a problem with that must be judging you as a person . So often our advocacy is
framed as personal choice, an individual expression. If you arent vegan, thats your choice. If you want to have sex with
vegetables and have it filmed by PETA, thats your choice. This is a co-optation of anti-oppression social activism in
a neo-liberal structure of exploitation .
Neoliberalism is all about freedom: Freedom from government , freedom from regulation, freedom to
buy, freedom to sell, freedom to reach your full potential, etc. Its about individuals out for themselves. This
is how capitalism thrives: many are free to do whatever they want in the name of open markets, but ultimately, that freedom comes at
a cost to those who will inevitably be exploited to pay for that freedom . The ideology of neoliberalism and individualism
works to benefit the privileged when individuals can attribute their success to their own individual hard work (when in reality they had extensive help
from their race, gender, class, physical ability, etc.). It also works to blame those less fortunate for their failure. We call them lazy, stupid, leeches (when
in reality they had extensive barriers placed upon them according to their race, gender, class, physical ability, etc.).
This myth of freedom and meritocracy is actually pretty toxic for social movements. If we fail to recognize how structural barriers impede some, while

When we soak in this neoliberal

poison and start to view social movementsinherently collective endeavors designed to challenge
unequal power structuresas something done by the individual, for the individual , weve lost the fight
right off the bat.
structural privileges benefit others, we will find it difficult to come together as a political collective.

Neoliberalism disproportionately oppresses the margins of society - rendering

entire populations disposable turns the aff
Giroux 12 - Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University (Henry, The Disappearance of
Public Intellectuals, OCTOBER 08, 2012, http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/08/the-disappearance-of-public-intellectuals/)
With the advent of Neoliberalism, we have witnessed the production and widespread adoption within many countries of what
I want to call the politics of economic Darwinsim. As a theater of cruelty and mode of public pedagogy, economic
Darwinism removes economics and markets from the discourse of social obligations and social costs. The
results are all around us ranging from ecological devastation and widespread economic impoverishment to the
increasing incarceration of large segments of the population marginalized by race and class. Economics now
drives politics, transforming citizens into consumers and compassion into an object of scorn. The language of
rabid individualism and harsh competition now replaces the notion of the public and all forms of solidarity not
aligned with market values. As public considerations and issues collapse into the morally vacant pit of private
visions and narrow self-interests, the bridges between private and public life are dismantled making it almost impossible to
determine how private troubles are connected to broader public issues. Long term investments are now replaced by short term
profits while compassion and concern for others are viewed as a weakness. As public visions fall into disrepair, the
concept of the public good is eradicated in favor of Democratic public values are scorned because they subordinate
market considerations to the common good. Morality in this instance simply dissolves, as humans are stripped of any
obligations to each other. How else to explain Mitt Romneys gaffe caught on video in which he derided 47 percent of the people
[who] will vote for the president no matter what?[i] There was more at work here than what some have called a cynical political
admission by Romney that some voting blocs do not matter.[ii] Romneys dismissive comments about those 47 percent of adult

Americans who dont pay federal income taxes for one reason or another, whom he described as people who believe that they are
victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food,
to housing, to you-name-it,[iii] makes clear that the logic disposability is now a central feature of American politics .
As the language of privatization, deregulation, and commodification replaces the discourse of the public good, all things
public, including public schools, libraries, transportation systems, crucial infrastructures, and public services, are
viewed either as a drain on the market or as a pathology.[iv] The corrupting influence of money and concentrated power not
only supports the mad violence of the defense industry, but turns politics itself into mode of sovereignty in which sovereignty now
becomes identical with policies that benefit the rich, corporations, and the defense industry.[v] Thomas Frank is on target when he
argues that Over the course of the past few decades, the power of concentrated money has subverted professions, destroyed small
investors, wrecked the regulatory state, corrupted legislators en masse and repeatedly put the economy through he wringer. Now it
has come for our democracy itself.[vi] Individual prosperity becomes the greatest of social achievements because it allegedly drives
innovation and creates jobs. At the same time, massive disparities in income and wealth are celebrated as a
justification for a survival of the fittest ethic and homage to a ruthless mode of unbridled individualism.
Vulnerable populations once protected by the social state are now considered a liability because they are viewed as
either flawed consumers or present a threat to a right-wing Christian view of America as a white, protestant public sphere. The
elderly, young people, the unemployed, immigrants, and poor whites and minorities of color now constitute a form of
human waste and are considered disposable, unworthy of sharing in the rights, benefits, and protections of a
substantive democracy. Clearly, this new politics of disposability and culture of cruelty represents more than an
economic crisis, it is also speaks to a deeply rooted crisis of education, agency, and social responsibility.

2NC

University

Alt
brokenness
Halberstam 13 (Jack Halberstam, professor of English and Director of the Center for Feminist
Research at USC, 2013, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, pp 5-9) gz
If we do not seek to fix what has been broken , then what? How do we resolve to live with
brokenness , with being broke, which is also what Moten and Harney call debt . Well, given that debt is
sometimes a history of giving, at other times a history of taking, at all times a history of capitalism and given that debt also signifies a
promise of ownership but never delivers on that promise, we have to understand that debt is something that cannot be paid off.
Debt, as Harney puts it, presumes a kind of individualized relation to a naturalized economy that is predicated upon exploitation.
Can we have, he asks, another sense of what is owed that does not presume a nexus of activities like recognition and
acknowledgement, payment and gratitude. Can debt become a principle of elaboration?
Moten links economic debt to the brokenness of being in the interview with Stevphen Shukaitis; he acknowledges that some debts
should be paid, and that much is owed especially to black people by white people, and yet, he says: I also know that what it is

that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It cant be repaired . The only thing we can do is tear
this shit down completely and build something new . The undercommons do not come to pay their
debts, to repair what has been broken, to fix what has come undone .
If you want to know what the undercommons wants, what Moten and Harney want, what black people,
indigenous peoples, queers and poor people want, what we (the we who cohabit in the space of the undercommons)
want, it is this we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by
the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken
part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down
the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the
places that we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones
we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see
differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after the break will be
different from what we think we want before the break and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues from being in
the break.
Lets come at this by another path. In the melancholic and visionary 2009 film version of Maurice Sandaks
Where The Wild Things Are (1963), Max, the small seeker who leaves his room, his home, his family to find the wild beyond,
finds a world of lost and lonely beasts and they promptly make him their king. Max is the first king the wild things have had whom
they did not eat and who did not, in turn, try to eat them; and the beasts are the first grown things that Max has met who want his
opinion, his judgment, his rule. Maxs power is that he is small while they are big; he promises the beasts that
he has no plans to eat them and this is more than anyone has ever promised them. He promises that he
will find ways through and around and will slip through cracks and re-crack the cracks if they fill up . He
promises to keep sadness at bay and to make a world with the wild creatures that roared their terrible roars and gnashed their
terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws. That Max fails to make the wild things happy

or to save them or to make a world with them is less important than the fact that he found them and
he recognized in them the end of something and potentially the path to an alternative to his
world . The wild things were not the utopian creatures of fairy tales, they were the rejected and lost
subjects of the world

Max had left behind and, because he shuttles between the Oedipal land where his mother rules and

the ruined world of the wild, he knows the parameters of the real he

sees what is included and what is left out and he

is now able to set sail for another place , a place that is neither the home he left nor the home to which
he wants to return.
Moten and Harney want to gesture to another place, a wild place that is not simply the left over space that
limns real and regulated zones of polite society; rather, it is a wild place that continuously produces
its own unregulated wildness . The zone we enter through Moten and Harney is ongoing and exists
in the present and, as Harney puts it, some kind of demand was already being enacted, fulfilled in

the call itself . While describing the London Riots of 2011, Harney suggests that the riots and insurrections do not separate out
the request, the demand and the call rather, they enact the one in the other: I think the call, in the way I would understand it, the
call, as in the call and response, the response is already there before the call goes out. Youre already in something. You are
already in it. For Moten too, you are always already in the thing that you call for and that calls you. Whats
more, the call is always a call to dis-order and this disorder or wildness shows up in many places: in
jazz, in improvisation, in noise . The disordered sounds that we refer to as cacophony will always be cast as extramusical, as Moten puts it, precisely because we hear something in them that reminds us that our desire for harmony is arbitrary and
in another world, harmony would sound incomprehensible.

Listening to cacophony and noise tells us that there is a

wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.

And when

we are called to this other place, the wild beyond, beyond the beyond in Moten and Harneys

apt terminology, we

have to give ourselves over to a certain kind of craziness . Moten reminds us that even as
Fanon took an anti-colonial stance, he knew that it looks crazy but, Fanon, as a psychiatrist, also knew not to
accept this organic division between the rational and the crazy and he knew that it would be crazy for him
not to take that stance in a world that had assigned to him the role of the unreal, the primitive and
the wild .

MARKED
Fanon, according to Moten, wants not the end of colonialism but the end of the standpoint from which
colonialism makes sense. In order to bring colonialism to an end then, one does not speak truth to
power , one has to inhabit the crazy, nonsensical, ranting language of the other , the other who has
been rendered a nonentity by colonialism . Indeed, blackness, for Moten and Harney by way of Fanon, is the
willingness to be in the space that has been abandoned by colonialism, by rule, by order . Moten takes
us there, saying of Fanon finally: Eventually, I believe, he comes to believe in the world, which is to say the other
world, where we inhabit and maybe even cultivate this absence, this place which shows up here and now,
in the sovereigns space and time, as absence, darkness, death, things which are not (as John Donne would
say).

The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal . In The Undercommons if we begin anywhere, we
begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you . Citing Gayatri Spivak, Moten and Harney call this
refusal the first right and it

is a game-changing kind of refusal in that it signals the refusal of the choices as

offered . We can understand this refusal in terms that Chandan Reddy lays out in Freedom With Violence (2011) for Reddy, gay
marriage is the option that cannot be opposed in the ballot box. While we can circulate multiple critiques of gay marriage in terms of
its institutionalization of intimacy, when you arrive at the ballot box, pen in hand, you only get to check yes or
no and the no, in this case, could be more damning than the yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as offered .
Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what they term the call to order.

And what

to refuse to call others to order , to refuse interpellation and the

reinstantiation of the law. When we refuse, Moten and Harney suggest, we create dissonance and more
importantly, we allow dissonance to continue when we enter a classroom and we refuse to call it
would it mean, furthermore,

to order , we are allowing study to continue , dissonant study perhaps, disorganized study, but study
that precedes our call and will continue after we have left the room . Or, when we listen to music, we must
refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument ; music is also
the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around
it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when we refuse the call to order the teacher picking up

the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening the noose
we refuse order as the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and
truth.

These kinds of examples get to the heart of Moten and Harneys world of the undercommons

the undercommons is not a

realm where we rebel and we create critique ; it is not a place where we take arms against a sea of
troubles/and by opposing end them. The undercommons is a space and time which is always here . Our
goal and the we is always the right mode of address here is not to end the troubles but to end the
world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed. Moten and Harney
refuse the logic that stages refusal as inactivity, as the absence of a plan and as a mode of stalling
real politics. Moten and Harney tell us to listen to the noise we make and to refuse the offers we receive to
shape that noise into music.

1NR

Faciality

Alt
This process is accessible and practical
Koerner 12 /Michelle, Professor of Comparative Literature @ UC-Berkeley, Line of Escape: Gilles
Deleuzes Encounter with George Jackson Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2 Summer 2011 DOI 10.1215/001669281260183/
Jacksons name always accompanied by the refrain I may run, but all the while that I am, Ill be
looking for a stick appears in both volumes of Deleuzes Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and
Guattari [1972] 1985, [1980] 1987), written with Guattari, and in a short text written in 1977 with Parnet,
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006).5 In each instance,
Jacksons line announces the idea that escape is revolutionary: Good people say that we must not flee,
that to escape is not good, that it isnt effective, and that one must work for reforms. But the revolutionary
knows that escape is revolutionary. . . . What matters is to break through the wall, even if one has to
become-black like John Brown. George Jackson. I may take flight, but all the while I am fleeing, I will be
looking for a weapon. (Deleuze and Guattari 1985 [1972]: 185, 277; my emphasis)6 Affirming the force of
fugitivity to break through the wall (a wall that throughout the book is defined as the limits of capital), this
passage maps two important connections. First, invoking the nineteenth-century American abolitionist
John Brown, the text aligns antiracist militancy with becoming black, a notion that, along with becoming
woman, becoming animal, and becoming imperceptible, emerges in A Thousand Plateaus as a universal
figure of minoritarian consciousness (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 106). In connecting a political
concept of escape with a white abolitionist becoming black, Deleuze and Guattari imply a thinking of
blackness that resonates with what Fred Moten (2008a: 1745) has called blacknesss distinction from a
specific set of things called black. Browns absolute commitment to end slavery in the raid at Harpers
Ferry emerges as an event that affirms, to quote Moten (ibid.: 1746) again, that everyone whom
blackness claims, which is to say everyone, can claim blackness. A second connection directly quotes
Soledad Brother and introduces a crucial element into thinking of escape as a revolutionary idea.
Jacksons line I may run . . . announces that fugitivity, rather than simply being a renunciation of action,
already carries with it an active construction: a line of flight composes itself as a search for a weapon.7
Disrupting the opposition of flight or fight that has often troubled the political understanding of fugitivity,
Jacksons line affirms a politics where escape is always already a counterattack. What we encounter
here, quite rare in the work of a European philosopher, is a political concept produced in connection with
both nineteenth-century abolitionism and the resistance to what Jackson termed the neo-slavery of the
American prison system a concept of resistance that affirms a force of becoming black or, more
precisely, a blackness of becoming.