Fugitivity Negativebeffjr

File Notes
The stuff under case turns is all very good, and its at the
top of the file for a reason. None of it has a lot of evidence
designed for extension but theres also some purpose to that,
toobetter to read one or two deep pieces of evidence and
engage the 2ac than to pile up cards on what should be an
analysis-oriented debate.
There are also 1nc cards to challenge the various methods of
fugitive poetics (poems, narratives, music, hip hop,
performance, etc.) Given the number of affs that utilize some
form of hip hop, there are additional extensions to that for the
block at the bottom of the file, though I would encourage you
to be thoughtful about why the evidence youre reading which
indicts hip hop broadly applies to the specific art form/song
the 1ac is utilizing.
Theres a pretty solid topicality section, two very good
separate critiques (counter gazing and a loosely formed Ballot
K, where the safe spaces evidence is one of the better cards
in the file), a couple links to different K affs and two CPs that
advocate what might loosely be thought of as PICs.

Case Turns**

Grammar of Suffering K
The affirmatives positioning of violence as central to the slave
reinscribes a grammar of suffering as a standard for others to
live up to, further entrenching antiblack violence within the
academy
McKittrick, 2014 Professor of Gender Studies @ Queen's University in
Kingston Ontario. Peter Hudson interviewing Katherine McKittrick. (Katherine; The
Geographies of Blackness and Anti-Blackness: An Interview with Katherine
McKittrick; Online PDF;
http://www.katherinemckittrick.com/download/hudson_mckittrick.pdf; DOA: 7/6/15 ||
NDW)
There are always two things on my mind when I am researching and writing about blackness, black geographies, and practices of

the repetitive circulation of anti-blackness, from past to present and back;

and, the ways in which we take up racial violence in our academic work. I am
concerned with the ways our analyses of histories and narratives and stories and
data can actually honour and repeat and cherish anti-black violence and black
death. If our analytic source of blackness is death and violence, the citation of
blacknessthe scholarly stories we tellcalls for the repetition of death and violence. Spatially, then,
the plantation folds over into the prison which expresses its carceral underpinnings
within the urban and which are mapped onto the tourist island and back again to
the plantation and forward to asymmetrical and racist residential patterns that keep
the poorest poor on our planet in slums. Analytically, there seems no way out, except to
name these repetitionseven in their continuities and rupturesand ask those who are the foci of
these analyses, poor black people, to live up to a version of humanness that they
are necessarily excluded from. Put differently, the system itself does not change:
plantation logic steadies different kinds and types of racial violence; and, our
analyses honour the violence by naming it (as wrong and unjust) and asking the condemned
to escape violence and join to the very system that thrives on anti-blackness! This is
the Fanonian predicament that underwrites the academy: the subhuman is invited
to become human on terms that require anti-black sentiment. So, for me, one way to
dislodge this kind of analytic thinking is to both expose its naturalness (of course
violence is wrong and unjust, but why is naming it naturally at the heart of our
academic conclusions!), to draw attention to black thinkers that provide deliberate
commentary on the ways in which blackness works against the violence that defines
it (so here I look to the work of Wynter among many many others, Audre Lorde, Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, as well as a whole range
of black creative thinkers and musicians), and to demand that this deliberate commentary be
central to how we think about and organize the planet and our futures. It is a lofty
demand! But I do think, following Wynter, that transatlantic slavery provided the
conditions through which we all, in different ways, came to a new world view; and
this history of the human, if re-historicized on the terms thinkers like Wynter lay out, is also one that
provided the conditions through which many black subjectivities articulated an anticolonial practice that did not (and cannot and does not) envision the emancipatory
terms of teleological democratic-abolitionfor it is this system, these terms, that
guarantees and profits from and repeats anti-black violence.
violence:

Slavery Images K
Spectacular images of black suffering only serve to re-create
racial domination through exaggerated instances of power.
Only a realization of mundane forms of violence are capable of
addressing the reality of antiblackness.
Hartman, 1997 - Professor of African American literature and history at
Columbia University (Saidiya V.; Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America; Book; Pg. 42; DOA: 7/7/15 || NDW)
The parade of shackled bodies to market captured not only the debasements of
slavery but also its diversions. Yet the convergence of pleasure and terror so striking in the humiliating exhibitions
and defiling pageantry of the trade was also present in "innocent amusements. The slave dancing a reel at the
big house or stepping it up lively in the come similarly transformed subjugation into
a pleasing display for the master, albeit disguised , to use Pierre Boutdieu's terms, by the "veil of
enchanted relationships." These gentler forms" extended and maintained the relations
of domination through euphemism and concealment. Innocent amusements
constituted a form of symbolic violence--that is, a form of domination which is
exercised through the communication in which it is disguised. When viewed in this light. the
most invasive forms of slavery's violence lie not in these exhibitions of "extreme
suffering or in what we see but in what we dont see. Shocking displays too easily
obfuscate the more mundane and socially endurable forms of terror. 92 ln the benign
scenes of plantation life (which comprised much of the Southern and, ironically. abolitionist literature of slavery)
reciprocity and recreation obscure the quotidian routine of violence. The bucolic scenes of
plantation life and the innocent amusements of the enslaved. contrary to our expectations, succeeded not in mollifying terror but in

Rather than glance at the most striking spectacle with

revulsion or through tear-filled eyes, we do better to cast our glance at the more
mundane displays of power and the border where it is difficult to discern domination
from recreation. Bold instances of cruelty are too easily acknowledged and
forgotten, and cries quieted to an endurable hum. By disassembling the "benign" scene, we
confront the everyday practice of domination, the nonevent, as it were. Is the scene
of slaves dancing and fiddling for their masters any less inhumane than that of
slaves sobbing and dancing on the auction block? If so, why? Is the effect of power any less
prohibitive? Or coercive? Or does pleasure mitigate coercion? Is the boundary between terror and pleasure
clearer in the market than in the quarters or at the "big house"? Are the most
enduring forms of cruelty those seemingly benign? Is the perfect picture of the
crime the one in which the crime goes undetected? If we imagine for a Inoment adusky fiddler
assuring and sustaining its presence.

entertaining at the big house, master cutting a figure among the dancing slaves, the mistress egging him on with her laughter, what
do we see?

Plantation K
The 1ACs focus on the plantation creates memory images of
the black body as silent, suffering, and perpetually violated.
The plantation becomes a site of racialized violence that we
run from but never stop talking about, reinforcing its violence
and shutting out any possibility of reform
McKittrick, 2013 Professor of Gender Studies @ Queen's University in
Kingston Ontario. (Katherine; Plantation Futures; Essay; Pg. 8-10; DOA: 7/6/15 ||
NDW)
It is the descriptive statement identifying black geographies as dead spaces of absolute otherness that has prompted my return to

in my research the plantation is cast as the penultimate site of

black dispossession, antiblack violence, racial encounter, and innovative resistance.
Indeed, it is the plantation that was mapped onto the lands of no one and became
the location where black peoples were planted in the Americasnot as members
of society but as commodities that would bolster crop economies.28 Within this
geographic system, wherein racial violence is tied to the administration of economic growth, the protean
capabilities of black humanness are lived.29 As I note in Demonic Grounds, the plantation is
often defined as a town, with a profitable economic system and local political and
legal regulations.30 The plantation normally contains a main house, an office, a carriage house, barns, a slave auction
the plantationprecisely because

block, a garden area, slave quarters and kitchen, stables, a cemetery, and a building or buildings through which crops are prepared,
such as a mill or a refinery; the plantation will also include a crop area and fields, woods, and a pasture. Plantation towns are linked

This is a
meaningful geographic process to keep in mind because it compels us to think
about the ways the plantation became key to transforming the lands of no one into
the lands of someone, with black forced labor propelling an economic structure that
would underpin town and industry development in the Americas. With this in mind, the
plantation spatializes early conceptions of urban life within the context of a racial
economy: the plantation contained identifiable economic zones; it bolstered economic and social growth along transportation
to transportrivers, roads, small rail networksthat enable the shipping of crops, slaves, and other commodities.

corridors; land use was for both agricultural and industrial growth; patterns of specialized activitiesfrom domestic labor and field
labor to blacksmithing, management, and church activitieswere performed; racial groups were differentially inserted into the local
economy, and so forth.31 In Cabin, Quarter, Plantation, Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsberg examine the architecture and landscape
of plantation towns in North America, adding to the racial economy by noticing the hand of enslaved workers in transforming

the efforts of pro-slavery agents [in shaping] environments that

facilitated control and surveillance of slaves' activities [,] slaveholders adapt[ing] old building types
and develop[ing] new ones with the purpose of employing architecture to subjugate and
control their human chattel.32 These featuresthe economy, the landscape, the architecturego
hand in hand with different kinds and types of racial violence, what Saidiya Hartman
describes as scenes of subjection: the mundane terror of plantation life; the
brutalities perpetuated under the rubric of pleasure, paternalism, and property; the
suffering, rape, and depersonalization ; the brutal exercise of power that gave form to resistance.33 While
plantations differed over time and space, the processes through which they were
differentially operated and maintained draw attention to the ways racial
surveillance, antiblack violence, sexual cruelty, and economic accumulation identify
the spatial work of race and racism. In many senses the plantation maps specific black geographies as
identifiably violent and impoverished, consequently normalizing the uneven production of space. This normalization can
unfold in the present, with blackness and geography and the past and the present enmeshing to uncover contemporary
sites of uninhabitablity. Yet to return to the plantation, in the present, can potentially invite
(literally) the land[,]

unsettling and contradictory analyses wherein: the sociospatial workings of

antiblack violence wholly define black history; this past is rendered over and done
with, and the plantation is cast as a backward institution that we have left behind;
the plantation moves through time, a cloaked anachronism, that calls forth the
prison, the city, and so forth. These contradictions keep in place , to borrow from Kara Keeling,
common memory images that are habitually called forth to construct blackness as
silent, suffering, and perpetually violated, just as it attempts to erase the ways
antiblack violence is enacted in the present. 34 Put differently, this kind of analytical
framework is unsettling because it simultaneously archives the violated black body
as the origin of New World black lives just as it places this history in an almost
airtight time-space continuum that traces a linear progress away from racist
violence. Within this framework there is an underlying push to seek consolation in naming
violence. This carries with it an expectation that the road to recovery is an evolution
toward a mode of humanness that is produced through inequities. I am not
suggesting that we forget violence or that the practice of returning to the brutalities
of plantation life is unethical. I am suggesting that when the lands of no one were
transformed by plantocracy logics, firming up racial hierarchies of humanness, the question of
encounter is often read through our present form of humanness, with spaces for us
(inhabited by secular economically comfortable man and positioned in opposition to
the underdeveloped impoverished spaces for them) being cast as the locations the
oppressed should strive toward. In this formulation three curiosities arise: the enslaved who were
planted in the Americas, and their sense of place, are cast as normally lifeless, over
and done with, ungeographic, and left behind; our contemporary struggles with
racial violence and blackness are denied a context; and the mythical-biological
Darwinian contours of our reading practices reveal that the fittest is a mode of
being human we strive toward. These curiosities, as usual, are articulated alongside the discourse that things have
gotten better because time has progressed. What if the plantation offered us something else? What
if its practices of racial segregation, economic exploitation, and sexual violence
mapped not a normal way of life but a different way of life? What if we
acknowledged that the plantation is, as Toni Morrison writes, a space that
everybody runs from but nobody stops talking about, and thus that it is a persistent
but ugly blueprint of our present spatial organization that holds in it a new future?35
Finally, if this conceptualization is possible, how might contemporary expressions of
racial and spatial violence and black city geographies be grappled with anew?

The negative posits the plantation not as a historical instance

of imperialism, but rather proof of its unfinished nature. We
must recognize the plantation not as a site of death, but one of
life and struggle, to allow for new understandings of what
black life could entail. Only this approach is capable of
transgressing current cycles of pain and misery that structure
black existence.
McKittrick, 2013 Professor of Gender Studies @ Queen's University in
Kingston Ontario. (Katherine; Plantation Futures; Essay; Pg. 12-15; DOA: 7/6/15 ||
NDW)
So, what kind of future can the plantation give us? If black geographies are conceptualized as mutually
constitutive of broader geographic processes, how does Wynter's framework allow us to grapple with
historically present practices of racial exclusion without condemning the most
marginalized to spaces of absolute otherness? I conclude by turning to Dionne
Brand's long poem Inventory, reading it as a creative work that intervenes in the
commonsense teleology of racial violence. Extending decolonial politics and
decolonial thinkingthe coalitional effort to understand decolonization and
modernity as unfinished projectsI identify Inventory as a text of decolonial poetics:
this poetics dwells on postslave violences in order to provide the context through
which black futures are imaginable.40 The decolonial work of Inventory, therefore,
does not lie in archiving and naming violence; the decolonial work of Inventory lies
in the analytical possibilities that arise from reading casualty-data as soldered to the
creative. With my prior discussion in mind, I consider Inventory to be a creative work that is
produced outside the realms of normalcy, one that rejects the rules of the system
that profits from racial violence and in this envisions a future where a corelated
human species perspective is honored. It is as the text turns itself toward its reader that the possibilities of
corelatedness emergegiving the plantation a different analytical future. Inventory has seven parts.
Part 1 begins, We believed in nothing.41 From there, Brand takes her reader to several locations, from the hopeful
disappointments of the civil rights movement to the mourning of singer Nina Simone and activist Marlene Green. The poem moves
from the criminalized black Canadian urban space, the Toronto neighborhood Jane and Finch, to fingerprinted travelers. Here Brand
also writes the streets of Cairo, Baghdad, and Darfur. Across these streets and narratives we are able to track Stevie Wonder's innercity blues, Miami houses clamped to the earth, John Coltrane's Stellar Regions, unremitting malls, and the science-fiction tales of
democracy, New Orleans storm shutters, and bombs. Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the 1960s, and the invasion of Iraq make difficult
appearances throughout the long poem. In part 3, the narrator sits by the television, weeping, counting bombs and bomb deaths: a
fire bomb in Nashville, a bomb at a football stadium, twenty-three killed by a suicide bomb, eight killed by a suicide bomb, two men
and a child by a car bomb, bomb-filled shoes:

eight hundred every month

for the last year,
and one hundred
and twenty in a brutal four days
things, things add up.(52)

Inventory is a difficult textit is difficult because it documents, in an empirically

poetic sense, our unbearable world. It is difficult because it is an intelligible and
exhausting list of despair:

She's afraid of killing someone today,

picked up laundry, ate pasta,
and a citrus tart,
bought a book, drove a street. (76)

Brand's long poem could easily be identified as a tabulation of urbicidal acts:

Consider then the obliteration of four restaurants,

the disappearance of sixty taxis each with one passenger
of four overcrowded classrooms, one tier of a football stadium,
the sudden lack of, say, cosmeticians
.
vanished, two or three hospital waiting
rooms, the nocturnal garbage collectors gone. (78)

Indeed, the long poem draws the reader to the violent acts, the despair, and the
hopelessness that make the poet's inventory possibleone can mathematically
calculate, and gather, death:

still in June,
in their hiatus eight killed by suicide bomb at
bus station, at least eleven killed in Shula at
restaurants, at least fifteen by car bomb. (25)

If Inventory can be read as a systemic tabulation and enumeration of racial

violence and death, it might also be read as speaking for life. More specifically,
Inventory documents and undoes the aforementioned linear progress toward
unending death. Perhaps Brand's poetic inventories can reveal what Kenneth Hewitt
calls the mortality of place. In his work on area bombing, Hewitt identifies the connectedness

of biological human life and place: Places share the problems of survival and
mortality in our biological existence. Just as biological life may be called a set of
activities intended to resist death, so our place and the world are at least partly a
means to resist psychosocial and cultural dissolution.42 One way of disclosing the
mortality of place is through expressive texts such as Brand's Inventory. These
narratives, texts that would otherwise be considered ungeographic and politically detached from the empirical work of city
plans, bear witness to the destruction of place by invoking the stakes of human
struggle. The reading-work Inventory asks us to do might not simply be to consume
transparent enumeration but rather to engage cooperative human efforts and turn
the practice of accounting for the brutalities of our world toward the reader. Reading the
textour grief will dry lakes (61)demands the reader register the data by asking why the
poet would acknowledge, make plain, and versify this data. To turn to decolonial
poetics produced by diasporic communities who have survived violent displacement
and white supremacy allows us to identify unseen and uncharted aspects of city life
and, in doing so, depict city death not as a biological end and biological fact but as
a pathway to honoring human life and what W. E. B. Du Bois called our sorrow songs
the expression[s] of human experience that have been neglected, misunderstood, despised.43 Brand's long poem
suggests that black perspectives on the city reveal spaces of absolute otherness, so
often occupied by the racially and economically condemned, are geographies of
survival, resistance, creativity, and the struggle against death . In other words, we might
read the poem not as a text that tracks a linear progression toward death but rather
as the creative consequences of the plot and the plantationa conception of the
city imbued with a narrative of black history that is neither celebratory nor dissident
but rooted in an articulation of city life that accepts that relations of violence and
domination have made our existence and presence in the Americas possible as it
recasts this knowledge to envision an alternative future. Inventory demands ethical
engagement. Brand's work often refuses a commitment to our present order of things; she writes geography and her own
political affiliations to space, as assertions of humanness rather than tacked to one side of an insider/outsider world.44 This
positioning of the poet is important, because it refuses to venerate the comforts of us/them paradigms as Brand herself writes cities

This is, at least to me, a radical politics in that it

asks not simply that we track future-misery but that we witness our difficult present
in order to think both the plantation and the city differently. Read without certain
nation-affiliation, read without the profits of witnessing enumerated deaths, read as
decolonial poetics that remembers antiblack violence and couples this with the Iraq
Body Count Project, news feeds and birds flying from tree to tree, the city deaths compiled in Inventory require being
and other spaces anew vis--vis her black diasporic history.

read through a different register. The lists and catalogues, the dead and dying, might be read as a way to identify that acts of
genocidal and ecocidal violence, to return to Wynter, should in no instance be taken as the index of what the empirical reality of
our social universe is.45 The aesthetics Brand provides us with in Inventory can thus be imagined as a route to noticing how the
normalization of body counts and city deaths in fact disclose the ways our present systems of urban planning and its attendant
modes of city lifethe normally good cities and the normally bad citieseffectively bind us to a process of morally geographic

Brand's poetics uncover

the normalizing work that human death and city death can do when they are cast as
an index of how human life is constituted. It follows, then, that Brand's long poem
might be read as an inventory that calls into question the grounds through which
urbicide is made possible and commonsense. Read in this way, what the decolonial
poetics of Inventory demand is that we, its readers, be held accountable for the
deadly moral codes that regulate, profit from, and conceptualize spaces of absolute
otherness as they are inhabited by the unsurviving. The body count that frames
much of Inventory800 every month for the last year, 120 in four daysis thus also about survival and
superiority and inferiority, where place mortality is cast as disadvantageous. Put differently,

human life, or a new math-space, where the calculus of human actions and
cooperative human efforts encounter poetry to reinvent the unambiguous dead-end
culmination that is so often coupled with analyses of violence (2152). Working with
Inventory requires honoring and living city life differently. The difficult poem
demands imagining cities and global struggles, plantation pasts and futures, as
predicated on all-of-human-lifeeven in deathand the work of survival. Here, we
envision a life on the edge, a geography that demands you stay alive yet threatens
your physiology, a spatial politics of living just enough, just enough for the city: this
is a political location that fosters more humanly workable, and alterable, geographic
practices.

Suffering K
The affirmative is a form of damage-centered research which
puts the slave in a matrix of pain and suffering. This focus
shuts out any other potential for the slave and reentrenches
the suffering it claims to critique
Tuck and Yang 14 (Eve Tuck professor of educational studies and coordinator
of Native American Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, K
Wayne Yang professor of ethnic studies at UC San Diego, R-Words: Refusing
Research, https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-RWords_Refusing-Research.pdf)
educational research and much of social
science research has been concerned with documenting damage, or empirically
substantiating the oppression and pain of Native communities, urban communities,
and other disenfranchised communities. Damage-centered researchers may
operate, even benevolently, within a theory of change in which harm must be
recorded or proven in order to convince an outside adjudicator that reparations
are deserved. These reparations presumably take the form of additional resources,
settlements, affirmative actions, and other material, political, and sovereign
adjustments. Eve has described this theory of change 1 as both colonial and flawed,
because it relies upon Western notions of power as scarce and concentrated,
and because it requires disenfranchised communities to position themselves as
both singularly defective and powerless to make change (2010). Finally, Eve has
observed that won reparations rarely become reality, and that in many cases,
communities are left with a narrative that tells them that they are broken.
Similarly, at the center of the analysis in this chapter is a concern with the fixation
social science research has exhibited in eliciting pain stories from communities
that are not White, not wealthy, and not straight. Academes demonstrated
fascination with telling and retelling narratives of pain is troubling, both for its
voyeurism and for its consumptive implacability. Imagining itself to be a voice,
and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised (Simpson, 2007, p. 67,
emphasis in the original) is not just a rare historical occurrence in anthropology and related
fields. We observe that much of the work of the academy is to reproduce stories of
oppression in its own voice. At first, this may read as an intolerant condemnation of the academy, one
Elsewhere, Eve (Tuck, 2009, 2010) has argued that

that refuses to forgive past blunders and see how things have changed in recent decades. However, it is our view

many individual scholars have chosen to pursue other lines of inquiry than
the pain narratives typical of their disciplines, novice researchers emerge from
doctoral programs eager to launch pain-based inquiry projects because they believe
that such approaches embody what it means to do social science. The collection of
pain narratives and the theories of change that champion the value of such
narratives are so prevalent in the social sciences that one might surmise that they
are indeed what the academy is about. In her examination of the symbolic violence of the
academy, bell hooks (1990) portrays the core message from the academy to those on the margins as thus: No
need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about
yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to
know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in
that while

such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I
am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now
at the center of my talk. (p. 343) Hookss words resonate with our observation of how much of social
science research is concerned with providing recognition to the presumed voiceless,
a recognition that is enamored with knowing through pain. Further, this passage describes the
ways in which the researchers voice is constituted by, legitimated by, animated by the
voices on the margins. The researcher-self is made anew by telling back the story
of the marginalized/subaltern subject. Hooks works to untangle the almost
imperceptible differences between forces that silence and forces that seemingly
liberate by inviting those on the margins to speak, to tell their stories. Yet the forces
that invite those on the margins to speak also say, Do not speak in a voice of
resistance. Only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a
wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain (hooks, 1990, p. 343). The costs of
a politics of recognition that is rooted in naming pain have been critiqued by recent
decolonizing and feminist scholars (Hartman, 1997, 2007; Tuck, 2009). In Scenes of Subjection, Sadiya
Hartman (1997) discusses how recognizing the personhood of slaves enhanced the
power of the Southern slaveowning class. Supplicating narratives of former slaves
were deployed effectively by abolitionists, mainly White, well-to-do, Northern
women, to generate portraits of abuse that ergo recognize slaves as human (Hartman,
2007). In response, new laws afforded minimal standards of existence, making
personhood coterminous with injury (Hartman, 1997, p. 93), while simultaneously
authorizing necessary violence to suppress slave agency. The slave emerges as a
legal person only when seen as criminal or a violated body in need of limited forms
of protection (p. 55). Recognition humanizes the slave, but is predicated upon her
or his abjection. You are in pain, therefore you are. [T]he recognition of
humanity require[s] the event of excessive violence, cruelty beyond the limits of the
socially tolerable, in order to acknowledge and protect the slaves person (p. 55).
Furthermore, Hartman describes how slave-as-victim as human accordingly establishes
slave-as-agent as criminal. Applying Hartmans analysis, we note how the agency of Margaret
Garner or Nat Turner can only be viewed as outsider violence that humane society
must reject while simultaneously upholding the legitimated violence of the state
to punish such outsider violence. Hartman asks, Is it possible that such recognition
effectively forecloses agency as the object of punishment . . . Or is this limited
conferral of humanity merely a reinscription of subjugation and pained existence?
(p. 55).

Stealing K
The 1ac advocates a means of flight, of abandoning surrender,
of becoming fugitive. Its an academic theorization of a
narrative that has been repeated for centuries; that the target
must escape the gaze of the captor to achieve freedom.
This oversimplified view infantilizes targets and real avenues
of resistance, such as strategically stealing from and utilizing
surveillance their oversimplification overlooks alternative
fugitive strategies that can be reappropriated as more
effective challenges to authority and control.
Goffman, 14 Sociology Prof @ UW-Madison, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an
American City, p 105-107 BR
From these examples, we can see that young men and women around 6th street
sometimes reappropriate the intense surveillance and the looming threat of
prison for their own purposes. Even as women endure police raids and
interrogations, and suffer the pain of betraying the man they'd rather protect, they
occasionally make use of a man's "go to jail" card to protect him from what they
perceive to be mortal danger. In anger and frustration at men's bad behavior, they
can sometimes use men's precarious legal status to control them, to get back at
them, and to punish them for any number of misdeeds. In doing so, they get men
taken into custody, not for the crimes or violations the police are concerned with,
but for personal wrongs the police may not know or care about.
Perhaps more remarkably, the young men who are the targets of these systems of
policing and surveillance occasionally succeed in using the police, the courts, and
the prisons for their own purposes. They may check themselves into jail when they
believe the streets have become too dangerous, transforming jail into a safe haven.
When they come home from jail or prison, they may turn the bail office into a kind
of bank, storing money there for specific needs later on, or using those funds as
collateral for informal loans. Young men even turn their fugitive status into an
advantage by invoking a warrant as an excuse for a variety of unmet
obligations and personal failings.
In these ways, men and women in the neighborhood turn the presence of the
police, the courts, and the prisons into a resource they make use of in
ways the authorities neither sanction nor anticipate. Taken together, these
strategies present an alternative to the view that 6th street residents are
simply the pawns of authorities, caught in legal entanglements that constrain
and oppress them.

They cant say stealing is a bad countermethod their primary

intellectual force and aff author
Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, and
Harney, Singapore Management University professor, 2004 (Fred
and Stefano, The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses, Social Text,
Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2004, p. 101-102, ProjectMUSE, IC)
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.

A2 Perms
The permutation failswe must begin out-from-outside, a
space distinct and away from the relations of same and
other
Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2004
(Fred, Knowledge of Freedom, The New Centennial Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2004,
p. 281, ProjectMUSE, IC)
The point, here, is that those critiques which pay descriptive and prescriptive
attention to singularity and totality while responsibly confronting the horrific effects
of singularist totalization must be acknowledged and assimilated. But the fact that
they offer only choked and strained and silenced articulations of the wholethat
which allows our aspirations for equality, justice, freedommeans they must be
improvised. The various discourses that are informed by identity theories open the
possibility for such improvisation in their directions toward other philosophical or
anti-philosophical or antephilosophical modes of thought and representation. But it
is precisely in the thought of the other, the hope for another subjectivity and an
other ontology, that the metaphysical foundations and antilibertarian implications of
the politico-philosophical tradition to which identity theories attempt to respond are
replicated and deepened. Improvisationand thus the possibility of describing and
activating an improvisational wholeis thereby foreclosed. I want to offer here
another chorus of ensembleby way of what/whom youll come to know as Uncle
Toliveras something out-from-outside, other than the other or the same,
something unbound by their relation or nonrelation, and situated at an opening onto
the site of the intersection of the knowledge of language (as prayer, curse, narrative
[rcit or recitation]) and the knowledge of freedom (as both a negative function of
the experience of oppression and the trace of an innate endowment that serves to
bridge the gap between experience and knowledge . . .). (Chomsky 1986, xxvxxvi)

Method Answers1nc

Poems1nc
The affirmative interpretation of intersubjective meaning is
empty signification that closes down other potentialities for
meaning
Fernando 10 --- Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, Research Fellow at the Centre
for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
(Jeremy, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, ATROPOS PRESS, pg 146-147)//RAW
Not only do we have face an absolute blindness in terms of the moment when death encounters death, we are also

faced with the problem of who is recounting this moment, recalling this unrecallable moment,
and testifying to what is essentially un-testifiable . For even though every testimony requires an
uncertainty, a potentiality of fictionotherwise it would just be fact, and knowledge this moment of death
remains blind from testimony due to the fact that in order to testify, one has to have
experienced it, and if one is dead, there is no testimony that can be uttered . Hence,
this testimony, this remembering of the event of his death, can only be uttered from this position of impossibility,
this position of being living and dead at the same time, as a living-dead where one is not in either state but in a
duality, of being both self and other at the same time, of being both the 'I' and the ' he', the duality embodied in the

archipassivity, which is the "neuter and a certain neutrality of the 'narrative voice' , a voice
"young man." There is an echo of this living-dead in what Jacques Derrida says of Maurice Blanchot and

without person, without the narrative voice from which the 'I' posits and identifies itself."7 For if the "young man" is
always already potentially both the ''I" and the "he" at the same time, then the "young man"

is a signifier,

signifying nothing more than the fact that it is signifying:

and this is hinted at, near the end of

the tale, when the narrative voice utters, "I am alive. No, you are dead."8 It is not so much that there are two selves
in this utterance for the same self cannot be both alive and dead but that there is always already an otherness
within the self, an otherness of which nothing can be said. This is why all the narrative voice can say is, "I know, I
imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence":9 all that can be said
about this " unanalyzable feeling" is that which is imagined, recalled as fiction, testified to; a statement that will
and can only remain unverifiable, and ultimately unknowable. Hence, the utterance, "I am alive. No, you are dead,"

utterance without referent, without any possibility of reference: and by extension all that can be said
about death is through an imaginative gesture: the instant of death is the instant in which death
is uttered, but it is nothing more or less than an utterance. It is this "unanalyzable
state of death that continues to haunt us, and unsettle us. For if it is undefinable and
remains always in the realm of the imagination not only can one not be certain about death, it is
always already in full potentiality. And like the problem that Vladimir and Estragon face in never being able to
tell if and when Godot comes, we face the same dilemma : we would not know even if death is
staring us in the face.
is an

-- A2 We Dont Interpret
The affirmatives refusal to engage in even a subjective
interpretation of poetry constitutes a withdrawal from life
itself. Only intersubjective meaning can continue the
conversation.
Fernando 10 --- Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, Research Fellow at the Centre
for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
(Jeremy, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, ATROPOS PRESS, pg 219-220)//RAW

In all of this, there is always already an echo of the strange pairing of despair and
hope in the Beckettian formulation of not being able to go on, but yet having to at the same
time. We also hear this strange paradox resound in Wolfgang Schirmacher's wonderful response to aporia, one
that he formulates in his deceptively simple maxim of 'Just Living'. This is not a over-arching philosophy to life - one

All you
can ever do is choose, respond, livelive your life as a concept, life in general, will
take care of itself. In other words, in order to live life, you have to actually distance
yourself, at least momentarily, from life as an idea, and actually be ambivalent to
life. When one is asked, 'how to live', the only answer which is at best a provisional response is you just do.
And perhaps it is in this ambivalence towards the answer of having to come up with a provisional
answer whilst knowing that it is only provisional at the same time that allows one
to maintain a proper distance as it were, towards the answer, towards a final
solution.
that frames, guides, or attempts to be a framework - but the exact opposite; it is a response to life itself.

Refusing to call anything into relationality destroys all

difference.
Fernando 10 --- Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, Research Fellow at the Centre
for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
(Jeremy, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, ATROPOS PRESS, pg 221)//RAW
The significance of this exposure, this ambiguity, comes to light if we recall Jean Baudrillard and his lamentation

possibility of metaphor is disappearing in every sphere ."25 This

disappearance as he posits, is due to the "viral loss of determinacy" ;26 that of
transparency, of utter and absolute exchangeability; in other words, when everything is like everything
else and one can no longer distinguish between objects any longer. It is this lack of distance between
objects that results in them disappearing in to each other, into meaninglessness. For,
the very name for this ambivalence, this 'proper distance' itself, is metaphor. It is metaphor
that allows us to name, to call, and to witness . And it is also metaphor that doesn't allow the
names to sink into one another, doesn't allow names to equate with each other, prevents
them from disappearing in to utter nothingness.
that "the

This is solipsism and a precondition for genocidal violence

Fernando 10 --- Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, Research Fellow at the Centre
for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
(Jeremy, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, ATROPOS PRESS, pg 223-224)//RAW

the chuckle lies not an ironic distance that is indifferent to anything and
everything. That would be a position of utter and absolute non-response ; what Slavoj Zizek
For, in

'Western Buddhism'. This is an attitude of ' I am above and beyond all

of this, and nothing will affect me', a dangerous game that has been played so many
times in history by despots, governed by a single Idea, dismissing any singularity as
a mere blip in their path, to be over-looked, and discounted. One is hard pressed to find a
more fitting - and frightening - figure for 'Western Buddhism' than Heinrich Himmler.28
{28 Himmler (in)famously carried a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita with him at all times, claiming that like the
warrior Arjuna, he was simply doing his duty without attachment to his actions .} Moreover,
it is of no coincidence that many fascist regimes were ' inspired' by perverted
versions of Buddhism. 'Western Buddhism': an anthropocentric gesture as there is
no other that is in relation to the self; not only is the self the centre of the world ,
there is no other in this world. By definition, every other has already been excluded.
has so aptly termed

Apparently most of them seemed to have completely overlooked - effaced - the fact that in Buddhism, the self is
completely absent as well; the self is absolutely other to itself.

Narratives1nc
Trading autobiographical narrative for the ballot commodifies
ones identity and has limited impact on the culture that one
attempts to reform when autobiographical narrative wins,
it subverts its own most radical intentions by becoming an
exemplar of the very culture under indictment
Coughlin 95associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. (Anne,
REGULATING THE SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER
SCHOLARSHIP, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1229)
Although Williams is quick to detect insensitivity and bigotry in remarks made by
strangers, colleagues, and friends, her taste for irony fails her when it comes to reflection
on her relationship with her readers and the material benefits that her
autobiographical performances have earned for her. n196 Perhaps Williams should be more
inclined to thank, rather than reprimand, her editors for behaving as readers of autobiography invariably do. When
we examine this literary faux pas - the incongruity between Williams's condemnation of her editors and the
professional benefits their publication secured her - we detect yet another contradiction between the outsiders' use
of autobiography and their desire to transform culture radically. Lejeune's characterization of autobiography as a

autobiography is a lucrative commodity. In our culture,

members of the reading public avidly consume personal stories , n197 which surely explains why
first-rate law journals and academic presses have been eager to market outsider narratives. No matter how
unruly the self that it records, an autobiographical performance transforms that self
into a form of "property in a moneyed economy" n198 and into a valuable
intellectual [*1283] asset in an academy that requires its members to publish. n199 Accordingly,
we must be skeptical of the assertion that the outsiders' splendid
publication record is itself sufficient evidence of the success of their
endeavor . n200
"contract" reminds us that

Certainly, publication of a best seller may transform its author's life, with the resulting commercial success and

While
writing a successful autobiography may be momentous for the individual author,
this success has a limited impact on culture. Indeed, the transformation of
outsider authors into "success stories" subverts outsiders' radical
intentions by constituting them as exemplary participants within
contemporary culture, willing to market even themselves to literary and academic consumers. n203
What good does this transformation do for outsiders who are less
fortunate and less articulate than middle-class law professors? n204 Although they style
themselves cultural critics, the [*1284] storytellers generally do not reflect
on the meaning of their own commercial success, nor ponder its
entanglement with the cultural values they claim to resist . Rather, for the most
part, they seem content simply to take advantage of the peculiarly American license, identified by
Professor Sacvan Bercovitch, "to have your dissent and make it too." n205
academic renown. n201 As one critic of autobiography puts it, "failures do not get published." n202

Even if their best intention is to resist the liberal subject,

autobiography is understood by its consuming audience as the
assertion of the classic autonomous subject this subverts the
political potential of performance by rendering ones
experience legible to the terms of liberalism. This recreates
the violence of liberalism that is the root of Western conquest
Coughlin 95associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. (Anne,
REGULATING THE SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER
SCHOLARSHIP, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1229)
The outsider narratives do not reflect on another feature of autobiographical discourse that is perhaps the most
significant obstacle to their goal to bring to law an understanding of the human self that will supersede the liberal
individual. Contrary to the outsiders' claim that their personalized discourse infuses law with their distinctive

those
who participate in autobiographical discourse speak not in a different voice, but in a
common voice that reflects their membership in a culture devoted to liberal
values. n206 As Sacvan Bercovitch puts it, American cultural ideals, including specifically the mythic connection
experiences and political perspectives, numerous historians and critics of autobiography have insisted that

between the "heroic individual ... [and] the values of free enterprise," are "epitomized in autobiography." n207 In his
seminal essay on the subject, Professor Georges Gusdorf makes an observation that seems like a prescient warning

practice of writing
one's own self reflects a belief in the autonomous individual, which is "peculiar to
Western man, a concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest of
the [*1285] universe and that he has communicated to men of other cultures; but those men will thereby have
to outsiders who would appropriate autobiography as their voice. He remarks that the
about

been annexed by a sort of intellectual colonizing to a mentality that was not their own." n208 Similarly, Albert

autobiographical performances celebrate

the Western ideal of individualism, "which places the self at the center of its world ."
Stone, a critic of American autobiography, argues that

n209 Stone begins to elucidate the prescriptive character of autobiographical discourse as he notes with wonder
"the tenacious social ideal whose persistence is all the more significant when found repeated in personal histories of
Afro-Americans, immigrants, penitentiary prisoners, and others whose claims to full individuality have often been

Precisely because it appeals to readers' fascination with

the self-sufficiency, resiliency and uniqueness of the totemic individual privileged by liberal
political theory, there is a risk that autobiographical discourse is a fallible, even coopted, instrument for the social reforms envisioned by the outsiders . By
denied by our society." n210

affirming the myths of individual success in our culture, autobiography reproduces the [*1286] political, economic,
social and psychological structures that attend such success. n211 In this light, the outsider autobiographies
unwittingly deflect attention from collective social responsibility and thwart the development of collective solutions
for the eradication of racist and sexist harms. Although we may suspect in some cases that the author's own sense
of self was shaped by a community whose values oppose those of liberal individualism, her decision to register her
experience in autobiographical discourse will have a significant effect on the self she reproduces. n212 Her story
will solicit the public's attention to the life of one individual, and it will privilege her individual desires and rights
above the needs and obligations of a collectivity. Moreover, literary theorists have remarked the tendency of

Even where the autobiographer

self-consciously determines to resist liberal ideology and represents her life story as
the occasion to announce an alternative political theory, " the relentless individualism of the genre
subordinates" her political critique. n213 Inevitably, at least within American culture, the personal
autobiographical discourse to override radical authorial intention.

narrative engrosses the readers' imagination. Fascinated by the travails and triumphs of the developing

readers tend to construe the text's political and social observations

only as another aspect of the author's personality. Paradoxically, although
autobiographical self,

autobiography is the product of a culture that cultivates human individuality, the genre seems to make available
only a limited number of autobiographical protagonists. n214 Many theorists have noticed that when an author
assumes the task of defining her own, unique subjectivity, she invariably reproduces herself as a character with
whom culture already is well-acquainted. n215 While a variety of forces coerce the autobiographer [*1287] to

conform to culturally sanctioned human models, n216 the pressures exerted by the literary market surely play a

The autobiographer who desires a material benefit from her performance

must adopt a persona that is intelligible, if not enticing, to her audience. n217 As I will
illustrate in the sections that follow, the outsider narratives capitalize on, rather than
subvert, autobiographical protagonists that serve the values of liberalism.
significant role.

-- A2 Metaphors
Metaphors fail
Dillon 13 assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of
Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality
Studies from the University of Minnesota. (Stephen, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender,
and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State ,A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA , May
2013 //SRSL)
writes: And from the first letter to
the last, nothing has been willed, written or composed for the sake of a book, yet
here is a book, tough and sure, both a weapon of liberation and a love poem. In this
case I see no miracle except the miracle of truth itself, the naked truth revealed. 527
In his afterword to George Jacksons Soledad Brother, Jean Genet

I return to this quote because it sums up the project of Fugitive Life. It can be easy to overlookor indeed to erase
and ignorethe truth produced by those forced to inhabit the time of slow death and spaces of social death.
Fugitive Life has argued that there is a truth that lies within what has been erased, destroyed, and rendered
invisible. Many of the writings examined throughout this project are documents that are not supposed to exist.
Some were written on toilet paper and smuggled out of prisons. Some were spoken through glass walls and
composed by lawyers. Some were written on the run from forces seeking the authors capture. And some were

If we are to understand the forms of

power we find ourselves inhabited by and that have given rise to what I am calling
the neoliberal- carceral state, we must look to spaces and times of expulsion,
disappearance, and incapacitation for the diagnosis and the cure. Indeed, if history is more
simply written by people who were never meant to survive.528

than a flash or revelation, if it is a piling up, if time does not pass but accumulates, then one must be able to search
the wreckage, but also see what was destroyed along the way. In Fugitive Life, I have tried to search what has been
left behind, forgotten, and erased in an attempt to comprehend neoliberalism and the prison in ways that open new
lines of thought when considering the unprecedented economic and penal changes of the last forty years. In the

This field attempts to

study incarceration in ways that do not naturalize the prison, criminality, or the
prisoner. In her keynote address at the National Womens Studies Association in
2009, Angela Davis critiqued the formation of this subfield. For her, there is a
danger of becoming attached to ones object of research. To institutionalize the
object of ones research means the objects existence must continue for the field to
survive. My understanding of this subfield is that it is part of a much larger
intellectual endeavor and grassroots movement that is attempting to remove the
prison from our social, cultural, and political horizons. Although I recognize Daviss
warning (it is akin to Judith Butlers critique of womens studies in her article
Against Proper Objects) I do not see a contradiction in studying something even as one is
last two decades, a new field has emerged that calls itself Critical Prison studies.

working to destroy the very object of study. One certainly needs to be cautious, but caution is required in any
scholarly and political project. Pitfalls, traps,e and opportunities for collusion abound. However, I do think there is a
danger in Critical Prison studies becoming divorced from the insights, theories, and concerns produced by people in
prison and people targeted by the police. This is why Genets insight is so crucial. Fugitive Life has shown that the
theories of incarceration now central to what is becoming Critical Prison studies were first articulated by imprisoned
black feminists, underground feminist writing groups, and queer activists on the run in the 1970s. If scholars of the
prison are to truly understand the convergence of neoliberalism and the prison, reckoning with and further
exploring this rich body of work is of the utmost importance. Simply put, Critical Prison studies must be intimately
connected to the concerns and epistemologies of prisoners and former prisoners. There is another critical warning
embedded in Daviss speech. There is a danger in Critical Prison studies mistaking the end of the prison for the end
of power. Fugitive Life positions the prison as site from which to advance the study of power; the object is
important, but not essential. The prison could disappear tomorrow and the forms of power that gave rise to its reign
could live on in other forms. Indeed, this is one of the lessons of the Control Unit at Lexington. The Lexington unit
was shut down, but a new unit opened up in Florida, another in California, another in Colorado, and on and on. All
the while the Federal Prison at Marion has held prisoners in isolation since 1972. The end of Lexington was a

symptom that could have been misunderstood as a solution. Daviss writing from prison addresses the problem of
mistaking the prison for power when confronting and theorizing the politics of incarceration. In the 1971 essay
Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation, Davis argues that the sole purpose of the police was to
intimidate blacks and to to persuade us with their violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our

Davis theorizes the violence of police and prisons as pervasive and

unrelenting. Throughout the essay, Davis names the complicity between an antiblackness as old as liberal freedom and new forms of penal and policing
technologies that emerged in the 1970s in response to political upheaval and
insurrection. Davis calls for the abolition of what she terms the law-enforcementjudicial-penal network in addition to arguing for the construction of a mass
movement that could contest the victory of fascism.530 Yet, in line with the political
lives.529

imaginaries at the time, Davis wanted more than an end to the prison and the violence of the police. Like other
early black feminist writing, Davis did not just call for the overthrow of one form of state power so that a new one
may take its place. Instead, Davis implied that the social order itself must be undone. For Davis, the prison was not
the primary problem. The prison was made possible by the libidinal, symbolic, and discursive regimes that
actualized the uneven institutionalized distribution of value and disposability along the lines of race, gender, and
sexuality. Davis called for the total epistemological and ontological undoing of the forms of knowledge and
subjectivity that were produced by the racial state. In short, hope, for Davis, meant that the prison could not have a
future, and more so, that a world that could have the prison would need to end as well. This insight of Daviss is
why Critical Prison studies must engage queer of color and feminist of color scholarship. The critique of the prison
advanced by many scholars of the prison does not comprehend the forms of devaluation that render poor women of
color and queer people of color vulnerable to the power that makes the prison possible. As I have been arguing
through Fugitive Life, the prison is more than an institution, more than cement and steel walls, more than razor
wire. In her 1979 essay, Coming of Age: A Black Revolutionary the Black Panther and Black Liberation Army
member Safiya Bukhari described this when she wrote, The maturation process is full of obstacles and

had to say
that, even though nothing as spectacular takes place in the maturation process of
the average black woman.531 Like the writings of Assata Shakur and Davis,
Bukhari argues that everyday life in the free world mimicked and replicated her
experience of incarceration. For her, black womens lives are a story of humiliation,
degradation, deprivation, and waste that [starts] in infancy and [lasts] until death,
but unlike stories of spectacular repression and brutality in the prison, the
forms of subjection and subjugation black women experience are so banal
that metaphors fail to describe them.532 For Bukhari, the Greek myth of the Minotaurs maze
entanglements for anyone, but for a black woman it has all the markings of a Minotaurs maze. I

describes the impossibility of escape that confronts black women and other people surrounded by capitalism, white
supremacy, and sexism. Yet the analogy fails because the impossibility of escape is not isolated to a maze or a
prisonit describes the mundane contours of the world. Bukhari, Davis, and Shakur are three women who have all
been prisoners and fugitives, and their critiques of the prison and neoliberalism emerged from these two symbiotic
positionalities. The fugitive and the prisoner are figures we can turn to as the sites of an immanent critique of the
states policing and penal powersfigures produced by those same formations. As fugitives and prisoners, Davis,
Shakur, and Bukhari could see what they could not see beforeinvisible things became glaring in an absence they
no longer inhabited, and what had always been visible became strange and unfamiliar. Running away was a tactic
that challenged the power of the neoliberal-carceral state, yet it also opened up new formations of knowledge and

Yet, like Jennys flight from the police and the regulatory power of knowledge
in American Woman, Davis, Shakur, and Bukhari were not only forced to flee the
police and disappear into the world of the underground; they have also been
fugitives from normative modes of thought. They were always trying to flee the
forms of knowledge constitutive of the racial state, the prison, heteronormativity,
and new formations of global capital. For all three, there might not be a way out, but
that does not mean you stay put. In his correspondence with Barbara Smith, the
white anti-racist and anti- imperialist political prisoner David Gilbert describes the
imperative to escape through his transcription of a poem to Smith written by the
Turkish political prisoner Nazim Hikmet, Its This Way. I stand in the advancing
light, my hands hungry, the world beautiful. My eyes cant get enough of the trees - theyre so
politics.

hopeful, so green. A sunny road runs through the mulberries, Im at the window of the prison infirmary. I cant smell
the medicines- carnations must be blooming nearby. Its this way: being captured is beside the point, the point is
not to surrender.533 Even though Gilberts body is immobilized, and will be until he dies, he remains committed to

This is the lesson of the fugitive, a lesson Critical

Prison studies must grasp if the affects, desires, discourses, and ideas central to the
prison are to end along with its cages, corridors, and guard towers. The prisons end
must exceed the institution. The fugitive can lead the way. Even if escape is
impossible, we still have to run.
producing modes of thought that take flight.

Music1nc
Musical performance cannot act as vehicle for resistance it
operates through a circular logic: one starts with identifying
the groups that are hegemonic and the groups that are
marginal and then simply valorizes the practices of those
groups without rigorously researching and debating the
material political conditions that produce poverty, racism, and
violence. This undermines political agency by offering the
false hope that engaging in the practices that become the
markers of identity is political while remaining elusive
whenever one is pressed to define the conditions of oppression
that one opposes and whenever one is challenged to defend
the substantive politics that might actual redress those
conditions.
Gitlin 97sociology, Columbia (Todd, The anti-political populism of cultural
studies, Dissent; Spring, Vol. 44, Iss. 2; p 77, ProQuest)
From the late 1960s onward, as I have said, the insurgent energy was to be found in
movements that aimed to politicize specific identities-racial minorities, women,
gays. If the "collective behavior" school of once-conventional sociology had grouped
movements in behalf of justice and democratic rights together with fads and
fashions, cultural studies now set out to separate movements from fads, to take
seriously the accounts of movement participants themselves, and thereby to restore
the dignity of the movements only to end up, in the 1980s, linking movements with
fads by finding equivalent dignity in both spheres, so that, for example, dressing like
Madonna might be upgraded to an act of "resistance" equivalent to demonstrating
in behalf of the right to abortion, and watching a talk show on family violence was
positioned on the same plane. In this way, cultural studies extended the New Left
symbiosis with popular culture. Eventually, the popular culture of marginal groups
(punk, reggae, disco, feminist poetry, hip-hop) was promoted to a sort of
counterstructure of feeling, and even, at the edges, a surrogate politics-a sphere of
thought and sensibility thought to be insulated from the pressures of hegemonic
discourse, of instrumental reason, of economic rationality, of class, gender, and
sexual subordination. The other move in cultural studies was to claim that culture
continued radical politics by other means. The idea was that cultural innovation was
daily insinuating itself into the activity of ordinary people. Perhaps the millions had
not actually been absorbed into the hegemonic sponge of mainstream popular
culture. Perhaps they were freely dissenting. If "the revolution" had receded to the
point of invisibility, it would be depressing to contemplate the victory of a
hegemonic culture imposed by strong, virtually irresistible media. How much more
reassuring to detect "resistance" saturating the pores of everyday life! In this spirit,
there emerged a welter of studies purporting to discover not only the "active"
participation of audiences in shaping the meaning of popular culture, but the
"resistance" of those audiences to hegemonic frames of interpretation in a variety

of forms-news broadcasts (Dave Morley, The `Nationwide ' Audience, 1980);

romance fiction (Janice Radway, Reading the Romance, 1984); television fiction
(Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, The Export of Meaning, 1990; Andrea Press, Women
Watching Television, 1991); television in general (John Fiske, Television Culture,
1987); and many others. Thus, too, the feminist fascination with the fictions and
talk shows of daytime "women's television"-in this view, the dismissal of these
shows as "trivial," "banal," "soap opera," and so on, follows from the patriarchal
premise that what takes place within the four walls of the home matters less than
what takes place in a public sphere established (not coincidentally) for the
convenience of men. Observing the immensity of the audiences for Oprah Winfrey
and her legions of imitators, many in cultural studies upended the phenomenon by
turning the definitions around. The largely female audiences for these shows would
no longer be dismissed as distracted voyeurs, but praised as active participants in
the exposure and therefore politicizing of crimes like incest, spousal abuse, and
sexual molestation. These audiences would no longer be seen simply as confirming
their "normality" with a safe, brief, well bounded, vicarious acquaintanceship with
deviance. They could be understood as an avant-garde social movement. Above all,
in a word, cultural studies has veered into populism. Against the unabashed elitism
of conventional literary and art studies, cultural studies affirms an unabashed
populism in which all social activities matter, all can be understood, all contain cues
to the social nature of human beings. The object of attention is certified as worthy
of such not by being "the best that has been thought and said in the world" but by
having been thought and said by or for "the people"-period. The popularity of
popular culture is what makes it interesting-and not only as an object of study. It is
the populism if not the taste of the analyst that has determined the object of
attention in the first place. The sociological judgment that popular culture is
important to people blurs into a critical judgment that popular culture must
therefore be valuable. To use one of the buzzwords of "theory," there is a "slippage"
from analysis to advocacy, defense, upward "positioning." Cultural studies often
claims to have overthrown hierarchy, but what it actually does is invert it. What
now certifies worthiness is the popularity of the object, not its formal qualities. If the
people are on the right side, then what they like is good. This tendency in cultural
studies-I think it remains the main line-lacks irony. One purports to stand foursquare for the people against capitalism, and comes to echo the logic of capitalism.
The consumer sovereignty touted by a capitalist society as the grandest possible
means for judging merit finds a reverberation among its ostensible adversaries.
Where the market flatters the individual, cultural studies flatters the group. What
the group wants, buys, demands is ipso facto the voice of the people. Where once
Marxists looked to factory organization as the prefiguration of "a new society in the
shell of the old," today they tend to look to sovereign culture consumers. David
Morley, one of the key researchers in cultural studies, and one of the most
reflective, has himself deplored this tendency in recent audience studies. He
maintains that to understand that "the commercial world succeeds in producing
objects. . . which do connect with the lived desires of popular audiences" is "by no
means necessarily to fall into the trap . . . of an uncritical celebration of popular
culture." But it is not clear where to draw the line against the celebratory tendency
when one is inhibited from doing so by a reluctance to criticize the cultural

dispositions of the groups of which one approves. Unabashedly, the populism of

cultural studies prides itself on being political. In the prevailing schools of cultural
studies, to study culture is not so much to try to grasp cultural processes but to
choose sides or, more subtly, to determine whether a particular cultural process
belongs on the side of society's angels. An aura of hope surrounds the enterprise,
the hope (even against hope) of an affirmative answer to the inevitable question:
Will culture ride to the rescue of the cause of liberation? There is defiance, too, as
much as hope. The discipline means to cultivate insubordination. On this view,
marginalized groups in the populace continue to resist the hegemonic culture. By
taking defiant popular culture seriously, one takes the defiers seriously and furthers
their defiance. Cultural studies becomes "cult studs." It is charged with surveying
the culture, assessing the hegemonic import of cultural practices and pinpointing
their potentials for "resistance." Is this musical style or that literary form "feminist"
or "authentically Latino"? The field of possibilities is frequently reduced to two: for
or against the hegemonic. But the nature of that hegemony, in its turn, is usually
defined tautologically: that culture is hegemonic that is promoted by "the ruling
group" or "the hegemonic bloc," and by the same token, that culture is "resistant"
that is affirmed by groups assumed (because of class position, gender, race,
sexuality, ethnicity, and so on) to be "marginalized" or "resistant." The process of
labeling is circular, since it has been predetermined whether a particular group
is, in fact, hegemonic or resistant. The populism of cultural studies is
fundamental to its allure, and to the political meaning its adherents find there, for
cultural studies bespeaks an affirmation of popularity tout court. To say that popular
culture is "worth attention" in the scholarly sense is, for cultural studies, to say
something pointed: that the people who render it popular are not misguided when
they do so, not fooled, not dominated, not distracted, not passive. If anything, the
reverse: the premise is that popular culture is popular because and only because
the people find in it channels of desire pleasure, initiative, freedom. It is this
premise that gives cultural studies its aura of political engagement-or at least
political consolation. To unearth reason and value, brilliance and energy in popular
culture is to affirm that the people have not been defeated. The cultural student,
singing their songs, analyzing their lyrics, at the same time sings their
praises. However unfavorable the balance of political forces, people succeed
in living lives of vigorous resistance! Are the communities of African-Americans
or AfroCaribbeans suffering? Well, they have rap! (Leave aside the question of
whether all of them want rap.) The right may have taken possession of 10 Downing
Street, the White House, and Congress-and as a result of elections, embarrassingly
enough!-but at least one is engage in cultural studies. Consolation: here is an
explanation for the rise of academic cultural studies during precisely the years when
the right has held political and economic power longer and more consistently than
at any other time in more than a half century. Now, in effect, "the cultural is
political," and more, it is regarded as central to the control of political and
economic resources. The control of popular culture is held to have become decisive
in the fate of contemporary societies-or at least it is the sphere in which opposition
can find footing, find breathing space, rally the powerless, defy the grip of the
dominant ideas, isolate the powers that be, and prepare for a "war of position"
against their dwindling ramparts. On this view, to dwell on the centrality of popular

culture is more than an academic's way of filling her hours; it is a useful certification
of the people and their projects. To put it more neutrally, the political aura of
cultural studies is supported by something like a "false consciousness" premise: the
analytical assumption that what holds the ruling groups in power is their capacity to
muffle, deform, paralyze, or destroy contrary tendencies of an emotional or
ideological nature. By the same token, if there is to be a significant "opposition," it
must first find a base in popular culture-and first also turns out to be second, third,
and fourth, since popular culture is so much more accessible, so much more porous,
so much more changeable than the economic and political order. With time, what
began as compensation hardened-became institutionalized-into a tradition. Younger
scholars gravitated to cultural studies because it was to them incontestable that
culture was politics. To do cultural studies, especially in connection with identity
politics, was the politics they knew. The contrast with the rest of the West is
illuminating. In varying degrees, left-wing intellectuals in France, Italy, Scandinavia,
Germany, Spain and elsewhere retain energizing attachments to Social Democratic,
Green, and other left-wing parties. There, the association of culture with excellence
and traditional elites remains strong. But in the Anglo-American world, including
Australia, these conditions scarcely obtain. Here, in a discouraging time, popular
culture emerges as a consolation prize. (The same happened in Latin America, with
the decline of left-wing hopes.) The sting fades from the fragmentation of the
organized left, the metastasis of murderous nationalism, the twilight of socialist
dreams virtually everywhere. Class inequality may have soared, ruthless
individualism may have intensified, the conditions of life for the poor may have
worsened, racial tensions may have mounted, unions and social democratic
parties may have weakened or reached an impasse, but never mind. Attend to
popular culture, study it with sympathy, and one need not dwell on unpleasant
realities. One need not be unduly vexed by electoral defeats. One need not be
preoccupied by the ways in which the political culture's center of gravity has moved
rightward-or rather, one can put this down to the iron grip of the established media
institutions. One need not even be rigorous about what one opposes and
what one proposes in its place. Is capitalism the trouble? Is it the particular form
of capitalism practiced by multinational corporations in a deregulatory era? Is it
patriarchy (and is that the proper term for a society that has seen an upheaval in
relations between women and men in the course of a half-century)? Racism?
Antidemocracy? Practitioners of cultural studies, like the rest of the academic left,
are frequently elusive. Speaking cavalierly of "opposition" and "resistance"
permits-rather, cultivates-a certain sloppiness of thinking, making it possible to
remain "left" without having to face the most difficult questions of political
selfdefinition. The situation of cultural studies conforms to the contours of our
political moment. It confirms-and reinforces-the current paralysis: the
incapacity of social movements and dissonant sensibilities to imagine effective
forms of public engagement. It substitutes an obsession with popular culture for
coherent economic-political thought or a connection with mobilizable populations
outside the academy and across identity lines. One must underscore that this is not
simply because of cultural studies' default. The default is an effect more than a
cause. It has its reasons. The odds are indeed stacked against serious forward
motion in conventional politics. Political power is not only beyond reach, but

functional majorities disdain it, finding the government and all its works
contemptible. Few of the central problems of contemporary civilization are seriously
contested within the narrow band of conventional discourse. Unconventional
politics, such as it is, is mostly fragmented and self-contained along lines of racial,
gender, and sexual identities. One cannot say that cultural studies diverts energy
from a vigorous politics that is already in force. Still, insofar as cultural studies
makes claims for itself as an insurgent politics, the field is presumptuous and
misleading. Its attempt to legitimize the ecstasies of the moment confirms the
collective withdrawal from democratic hope. Seeking to find political energies
in audiences who function as audiences, rather than in citizens functioning as
citizens, the dominant current in cultural studies is pressed willy-nilly toward an
uncritical celebration of technological progress. It offers no resistance to the
primacy of visual and nonlinear culture over the literary and linear. To the contrary:
it embraces technological innovation as soon as the latest developments prove
popular. It embraces the sufficiency of markets; its main idea of the intellect's
democratic commitment is to flatter the audience. Is there a chance of a modest
redemption? Perhaps, if we imagine a harder headed, less wishful cultural studies,
free of the burden of imagining itself to be a political practice. A chastened, realistic
cultural studies would divest itself of political pretensions. It would not claim to
be politics. It would not mistake the academy for the larger society. It would be less
romantic about the world-and about itself. Rigorous practitioners of cultural studies
should be more curious about the world that remains to be researched and
changed. We would learn more about politics, economy, and society, and in the
process, appreciate better what culture, and cultural study, do not accomplish.
If we wish to do politics, let us organize groups, coalitions, demonstrations,
lobbies, whatever; let us do politics. Let us not think that our academic work is
already that.

The 1ACs use of music as a means of dissent exposes their

discourse to those who should not hear it-- hipster critics who
only wish to be subversive so they can claim they are--while
preventing wide-spread movements
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
"Although functioning as a support for the totalitarian order, fantasy is then at the same time the
leftover of the real that enables us to 'pull ourselves out,' to preserve a kind of distance from the sociosymbolic network. When we become crazed in our obsession with idiotic enjoyment, even totalitarian
manipulation cannot reach us" (128). Zizek's example here is precisely popular music, the

inane ditty that anchors the fantasy, that runs endlessly in one's head; what one wishes to add
here is the criterion of force, of intensity, of sound so loud that, even though it is a cultural
product from top to bottom, it nonetheless enfolds the audience and isolates it
within the symbolic order. The intensity of loud drowns out the Other. It is the limit
of the symbolic, its null point, experienced in the very onslaught of its signs . Perhaps
we could appropriate a Lacanian term for this fantastic volume that goes beyond fantasy: the

*sinthome.*

Zizek calls it "subversive," but that, unfortunately, is to offer it to those

who wannabe subversive, to see themselves seen as subversives, to be (to
fantasize being) political agents in an older and ever more current sense.^26^ Let
us nonetheless pursue the concept for a moment.

Hip Hop1nc
Hip hop is inevitably marketed to white consumers- turns black
culture into a commodity that can be tossed away
-Card can also be used as an alt- diaspora movement

Hartigan 5- prof of anthropology @ UT, PhD from University of California, Santa

Cruz
(John, South Atlantic Quarterly 104.3, Summer, Culture against Race: Reworking
the Basis for Racial Analysis)
Gilroys stance is largely polemical, but his critique is
thoroughgoing, as is his call to reject this desire to cling on to race and go on
stubbornly and unimaginatively seeing the world on the distinctive scales that it has
specified. In spite of powerful, novel efforts to fundamentally transform racial analysis
such as the emergence of whiteness studies or analyses of the new racism
Gilroy is emphatic in demand[ing] liberation not from white supremacy alone,
however urgently that is required, but from all racializing and raciological thought , fromracialized
seeing, racialized thinking, and racialized thinking about thinking (40). In contrast to Visweswaran
and, interestingly, voicing concerns over cultural politics that resonate with Dominguezs critique Gilroy
sees a host of problems in black political cultures that rely on essentialist
approaches to building solidarity (38).14 Nor does he share Harrisons confidence in making racism
One might be tempted to assume that

the centerpiece of critical cultural analysis. Gilroy plainly asserts that the starting point of this book is that the era
of New Racism is emphatically over (34).

A singular focus on racism precludes an attention to

the appearance of sharp intraracial conflicts and does not effectively address the
several new forms of determinism abroad (38, 34). We still must be prepared to give
effective answers to the pathological problems represented by genomic racism, the
glamour of sameness, and the eugenic projects currently nurtured by their confluence (41). But the
diffuse threats posed by invocations of racially essentialized identities (shimmering in the
glamour of sameness) as the basis for articulating black political cultures entails an
analytical approach that countervails against positing racism as the singular focus of
inquiry and critique.15 From Gilroys stance, to articulate a postracial humanism we must disable
any form of racial vision and ensure that it can never again be reinvested with
explanatory power. But what will take its place as a basis for talking about the dynamics of belonging and
differentiation that profoundly shape social collectives today? Gilroy tries to make clear that it will not be culture,
yet this concept infuses his efforts to articulate an alternative conceptual approach. Gilroy conveys many of the
same reservations about culture articulated by the anthropologists listed above. Specifically, Gilroy cautions that
the culturalist approach still runs the risk of naturalizing and normalizing hatred and brutality by presenting them
as inevitable consequences of illegitimate attempts to mix and amalgamate primordially incompatible groups (27).
In contrast, Gilroy expressly prefers the concept of diaspora as a means to ground a new form of attention to
collective identities. As

an alternative to the metaphysics of race , nation, and bounded

culture coded into the body, Gilroy finds that diaspora is a concept that
problematizes the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging (123). Furthermore,
by focusing attention equally on the sameness within differentiation and the
differentiation within sameness, diaspora disturbs the suggestion that political and
cultural identity might be understood via the analogy of indistinguishable peas
lodged in the protective pods of closed kinship and subspecies (125). And yet, in a manner similar
to Harrisons prioritizing of racism as a central concern for social inquiry, when it comes to specifying what diaspora
entails and how it works,

vestiges of culture reemerge as a basis for the coherence of this

new conceptual focus. When Gilroy delineates the elements and dimensions of diaspora, culture provides
the basic conceptual background and terminology. In characterizing the Atlantic diaspora and its
successor-cultures, Gilroy sequentially invokes black cultural styles and postslave cultures
that have supplied a platform for youth cultures , popular cultures, and styles of dissent far from
their place of origin (178). Gilroy explains how the cultural expressions of hip-hop and rap,
along with other expressive forms of black popular culture, are marketed by the
cultural industries to white consumers who currently support this black culture
(181). Granted, in these uses of culture Gilroy remains critical of absolutist
definitions of culture and the process of commodification that culture in turn
supports. But his move away from race importantly hinges upon some notion of
culture. We may be able to do away with race, but seemingly not with culture.
Rap and hip hop are tools to be exploited by corporations- images of rap
as a platform just entrench racism
Kitwana 2- fellow at the Jamestown Project, think tank @ Harvard
(Bakari, The Hip Hop Generation, p. 9-11)
Let us begin with popular culture and the visibility of Black youth within it. Today,
more and more Black youth are turning to rap music, music videos, designer
clothing, popular Black films, and television programs for values and identity. One
can find the faces, bodies, attitudes, and language of Black youth attached to slick
advertisements that sell what have become global products, whether its Coca-Cola
and Pepsi, Reebok and Nike sneakers, films such as Love Jones and Set it Off, or
popular rap artists like Missy Elliot and Busta Rhymes. Working diligently behind the
scene and toward the bottom line are the multinational corporations that produce,
distribute, and shape these images. That Black youth in New Orleans, Louisiana,
and Champaign, Illinois, for example, share similar dress styles, colloquialisms, and
body language with urban kids from Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City is not
coincidental. We live in an age where corporate mergers, particularly in media and
entertainment, have redefined public space. Within this largely expanded public
space, the viewing public is constantly bombarded by visual images that have
become central to the identity of an entire generation. Within the arena of popular
culture, rap music more than anything else has helped shape the new Black youth
culture. From 1997 to 1998, rap music sales showed a 31 percent increase, making
rap the fastest growing music genre, ahead of country, rock, classical, and all other
musical forms. By 1998 rap was the top-selling musical format, outdistancing rock
music and country music, the previous leading sellers. Rap musics prominence on
the American music scene was evident by the late 1990s- from its increasing
presence at the Grammys (which in 1998, for example, awarded rapper Lauryn Hill
five awards) to its pervasiveness in advertisements for mainstream corporation like
AT&T, The Gap, Levis, and so on. Cultural critic Cornel West, in his prophetic Race
Matters (Beacon Press, 1993), refers to this high level of visibility of young blacks,
primarily professional athletes and entertainers, in American popular culture as the
Afro-Americanization of white youth. The Afro-Americanization of white youth has
been more a male than female affair given the prominence of male athletes and the

cultural weight of male pop artists. This process results in white youth-male and
female- imitating and emulating black male styles of walking, talking, dressing and
gesticulating in relations to others. The irony in our present moment is that just as
young black men are murdered, maimed, and imprisoned in record numbers, their
styles have become disproportionately influential in shaping popular culture.
Whereas previously the voices of young Blacks had been locked out of the global
ages public square, the mainstreaming of rap music now gave Black youth more
visibility and a broader platform than we ever had enjoyed before. At the same
time, it gave young Blacks across the country who identified with it and were
informed by it a medium through which to share a national culture. In the process,
rap artists became the dominant public voice of this generation. Many have been
effective in bringing the generations issues to the fore. From NWA to Master P,
rappers- through their lyrics, style, and attitude- helped to carve a new Black youth
identity into the national landscape. Rappers access to global media and their use
of popular culture to articulate many aspects of this national identity renders rap
music central to any discussion of the new Black youth culture. The irony in all this
is that the global corporate structure that gave young Blacks a platform was the
driving force behind our plight.

Hip hop reinforces stereotypes-gives racism a green card

Kitwana 2- fellow at the Jamestown Project, think tank @ Harvard
(Bakari, The Hip Hop Generation, p. xxi)
A final obstacle is the unprecedented influence Black youth have achieved through
popular culture, especially via the hip-hop phenomenon. Young Blacks have used this
access, both in pop film and music, far too much to strengthen associations between
Blackness and poverty, while celebrating anti-intellectualism, ignorance, irresponsible
parenthood, and criminal lifestyles. This is the paradox: given hip-hops growing influence,
these Birth of a Nation- styled representations receive a free pass from Black
leaders and organizations seeking influence with the younger generation. These depictions
also escape any real criticism from non-Black critics who , having grown tired of the race card,
fear being attacked as racist. Void of open and consistent, criticism, such widely distributed incendiary
ideas (what cultural critic Stanley Crouch calls the new minstrelsy) reinforce myths of Black
inferiority and insulate the new problems in African American culture from
redemptive criticism.

Performance 1nc
Performance is not a mode of resistance it gives too much
power to the audience because the performer is structurally
blocked from controlling the (re)presentation of their
representations. Appealing to the ballot is a way of turning
over ones identity to the same reproductive economy that
underwrites liberalism
Phelan 96chair of New York University's Department of Performance Studies
(Peggy, Unmarked: the politics of performance, ed published in the Taylor & Francis
e-Library, 2005, 146-9)
146
Performances only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved,
recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of
representations of representations : once it does so, it becomes something
other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the
economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own
ontology. Performances being, like the ontology of subjectivityproposed here, becomes itself through
disappearance.

The pressures brought to bear on performance to succumb to thelaws of the

reproductive economy are enormous. For only rarely in this culture is the now to
which performance addresses its deepest questions valued. (This is why the now is supplemented
and buttressedby the documenting camera, the video archive.) Performance occursover a time which will not be repeated. It can be

The document of a performance then is

only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present.
performed again, butthis repetition itself marks it as different.

The other arts, especially painting and photography, are drawnincreasingly toward performance. The French-born artist Sophie
Calle,for example, has photographed the galleries of the Isabella StewartGardner Museum in Boston. Several valuable paintings
were stolen fromthe museum in 1990. Calle interviewed various visitors and membersof the muse um staff, asking them to describe
the stolen paintings. She then transcribed these texts and placed them next to the photographs of the galleries. Her work suggests
that the descriptions and memories of the paintings constitute their continuing presence, despite the absence of the paintings

Calle gestures toward a notion of the interactive exchange between the art
and the viewer. While such exchanges are often recorded as the stated goals of museums
and galleries, the institutional effect of the gallery often seems to put the masterpiece
under house arrest , controlling all conflicting and unprofessional
commentary about it. The speech act of memory and description (Austins constative utterance) becomes a
themselves.
object

performative expression when Calle places these commentaries within the

147
representation of the museum. The descriptions fill in, and thus supplement (add to, defer, and displace) the stolen paintings. The
factthat these descriptions vary considerablyeven at times wildlyonlylends credence to the fact that the interaction between the
art objectand the spectator is, essentially, performativeand therefore resistantto the claims of validity and accuracy endemic to
the discourse of reproduction. While the art historian of painting must ask if thereproduction is accurate and clear, Calle asks where
seeing and memoryforget the object itself and enter the subjects own set of personalmeanings and associations. Further her work
suggests that the forgetting(or stealing) of the object is a fundamental energy of its descriptiverecovering. The description itself
does not reproduce the object, it ratherhelps us to restage and restate the effort to remember what is lost. Thedescriptions remind
us how loss acquires meaning and generatesrecoverynot only of and for the object, but for the one who remembers.The
disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; itrehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs
alwaysto be remembered.
For her contribution to the Dislocations show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1991, Calle used the same idea but this
time she asked curators, guards, and restorers to describe paintings that were on loan from the permanent collection. She also

asked them to draw small pictures of their memories of the paintings. She then arranged the texts and pictures according to the
exact dimensions of the circulating paintings and placed them on the wall where the actual paintings usually hang. Calle calls her
piece Ghosts, and as the visitor discovers Calles work spread throughout the museum, it is as if Calles own eye is following and
tracking the viewer as she makes her way through the museum.1 Moreover, Calles work seems to disappear because it is dispersed
throughout the permanent collectiona collection which circulates despite its permanence. Calles artistic contribution is a kind
of self-concealment in which she offers the words of others about other works of art under her own artistic signature. By making
visible her attempt to offer what she does not have, what cannot be seen, Calle subverts the goal of museum display. She exposes
what the museum does not have and cannot offer and uses that absence to generate her own work. By placing memories in the
place of paintings, Calle asks that the ghosts of memory be seen as equivalent to the permanent collection of great works. One
senses that if she asked the same people over and over about the same paintings, each time they would describe a slightly different
painting. In this sense, Calle demonstrates the performative quality of all seeing.
148

Performance in a strict ontological sense is nonreproductive . It is this quality which makes

performance the runt of the litter of contemporary art. Performance clogs the smooth machinery of
reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital. Perhaps nowhere
I

was the affinity between the ideology of capitalism and art made more manifest than in the debates about the funding policies for
the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).2 Targeting both photography and performance art, conservative politicians sought to
prevent endorsing the real bodies implicated and made visible by these art forms. Performance implicates the real through the
presence of living bodies. In performance art spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no left-overs, the gazing
spectator must try to take everything in. Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibilityin a maniacally charged present
and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control. Performance
resists the balanced circulations of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends. While photography is vulnerable to charges of
counterfeiting and copying, performance art is vulnerable to charges of valuelessness and emptiness. Performance indicates the
possibility of revaluing that emptiness; this potential revaluation gives performance art its distinctive oppositional edge.3 To attempt
to write about the undocumentable event of performance is to invoke the rules of the written document and thereby alter the event
itself. Just as quantum physics discovered that macro-instruments cannot measure microscopic particles without transforming those
particles, so too must performance critics realize that the labor to write about performance (and thus to preserve it) is also a labor
that fundamentally alters the event. It does no good, however, to simply refuse to write about performance because of this
inescapable transformation. The challenge raised by the ontological claims of performance for writing is to re-mark again the
performative possibilities of writing itself. The act of writing toward disappearance, rather than the act of writing toward
preservation, must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself. This is the project of
Roland Barthes in both Camera Lucida and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. It is also his project in Empire of Signs, but in this
book he takes the memory of a city in which he no longer is, a city from which he disappears, as the motivation for the search for a
disappearing performative writing. The trace left by that script is the meeting-point of a mutual disappearance; shared subjectivity is
possible for Barthes because two people can recognize the same Impossible. To live for a love whose goal is to share the Impossible
is both a humbling project and an exceedingly ambitious one, for it seeks to find connection only in that which is no longer there.
Memory. Sight. Love. It must involve a full seeing of the Others absence (the ambitious part), a seeing which also entails the
acknowledgment of the Others presence (the humbling part). For to acknowledge the Others (always partial) presence is to
acknowledge ones own (always partial) absence. In the field of linguistics, the performative speech act shares with the ontology of
performance the inability to be reproduced or repeated. Being an individual and historical act, a performative utterance cannot be
repeated. Each reproduction is a new act performed by someone who is qualified. Otherwise, the reproduction of the performative
utterance by someone else necessarily transforms it into a constative utterance.4

149
Writing, an activity which relies on the reproduction of the Same(the three letters cat will repeatedly signify the four-legged furry
animalwith whiskers) for the production of meaning, can broach the frame of performance but cannot mimic an art that is

the strange process by which we put words in

each others mouths and others words in our own, relies on a substitutional
economy in which equivalencies are assumed and re-established.
Performance refuses this system of exchange and resists the circulatory economy
fundamental to it. Performance honors the idea that a limited number of
people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value
which leaves no visible trace afterward . Writing about it necessarily cancels the
tracelessness inaugurated within this performative promise. Performances
independence from mass reproduction, technologically, economically, and linguistically, is
its greatest strength. But buffeted by the encroaching ideologies of capitaland reproduction, it frequently devalues
nonreproductive. Themimicry of speech and writing,

this strength. Writing aboutperformance often, unwittingly, encourages this weakness and falls inbehind the drive of the

Performances challenge to writingis to discover a way for repeated words to

become performative utterances, rather than, as Benveniste warned, constative utterances.
document/ary.

Topicality

T-Version**
Multiple topical versions of the aff that prove the aff can
discuss both institutionalized racism and how Blacks have
responded (i.e. fugitivity)welfare searches, stop-and-frisk,
public housing surveillance, stop-and-sniff, motor vehicle
stops, etc., are all topical policy proposals that solve
Bailey, Chicago-Kent law assistant professor, 2014 (Kimberly D.,
Watching Me: The War on Crime, Privacy, and the State, University of California
Davis Law Review, Vol. 47, January 2014,
http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=3395&context=fac_schol, p. 1555-1561, IC)
Scholars have documented the fact that the poor and people of color continue to
have the least amount of privacy in our society and, therefore, they are still the
most vulnerable to more extreme state social control policies.101 Some argue that
welfare is still a means of regulating the sexual behavior of many poor, single
women.102 Indeed, many women currently must participate in mandatory paternity
proceedings in order to be entitled to benefits, and many jurisdictions impose family
caps, which limit cash benefit increases for any children conceived while the mother
is receiving welfare benefits.103 Recipients of state funded prenatal care often have
to endure highly embarrassing and intrusive questions about their parenting history,
criminal history, immigration status, contraceptive use, and finances, which
middleand upper-class women simply do not have to endure.104 Furthermore, the
Supreme Court has held that welfare recipients are not entitled to Fourth
Amendment rights when it comes to searches in their homes.105 Social workers can
stop by and search a recipients home and interview her with no warning or warrant.
As will be discussed more fully below, the privacy invasions that result from current
criminal justice policies also contribute to greater social control of poor people of
color because of the chilling effects they have on selfdetermination, freedom of
association, and freedom of expression.
In addition to making poor people of color more vulnerable to oppressive state
social control, the war on crime has also created serious dignitary harms. When the
state curtails privacy, it sends a powerful message: an individual cannot be trusted
to use his privacy in legitimate ways.106 For example, parents tend to give their
children less privacy because they do not yet trust that the children have the
maturity and wisdom not to make choices that could potentially harm themselves or
others. Likewise, one reason we limit the privacy of prisoners is because their past
acts suggest that we cannot trust them not to engage in criminal and potentially
dangerous activities, at least for a set period of time. The lack of trust expressed by
the state through the war on crime, therefore, at best resembles a form of
paternalism; at worst, it resembles a form de facto criminalization of individuals
simply because they are poor and of color.107 These individuals logically conclude
that the state does not respect them nor does it view their identities and viewpoints
as equal to those of white and wealthier citizens.108

B. The War on Crimes Impact on Individual Privacy

1. Stops-and-Frisks and Motor Stops
The myopic focus of the war on drugs on arrest and conviction rates, combined with
the racialized view of illegal drug use, creates an environment where police officers
feel free to subject poor urban African-Americans and Latinos to intrusive stops-andfrisks on a daily basis.109 In 2011, 84% of stops-and-frisks conducted in New York
were on African-Americans and Latinos.110 Eighty-eight percent of these stops did
not result in an arrest or a summons being given.111 Contraband was found in only
2% of these stops.112 In other words, although the vast majority of residents of
poor urban neighborhoods are law-abiding citizens, many of them still have to
tolerate these intrusions.113 Indeed, particularly for young, African-American and
Latino males, they are a regular part of life.114 For example, between January 2006
and March 2010, the police stopped 52,000 individuals in an eight-block minority
area in Brooklyn.115 This amounted to an average of one stop per resident per
year.116 The average increased to five stops per person for males fifteen to thirtyfour years of age.117
Some of those who have been stopped by the New York Police Department describe
a hornet-like invasion where they are barraged with questions such as wheres the
weed? and wheres the guns?118 These exchanges are sometimes laced with
profanity, racial epithets, and name-calling like immigrant, old man, or
bro.119 Other exchanges are more polite where the police officer asks whether
they can talk with the individual; asks him a series of questions such as what he is
doing, where he lives, and whether he has anything on him; and then lets the
individual go.120 In either type of exchange, the subjects of these stops often
report feeling intruded upon and humiliated.121 A college student from Brooklyn
describes, They talk to you like youre ignorant, like youre an animal.122
Another man from Queens describes feeling belittled, even though he once
experienced a more polite exchange.123 Individuals often feel shame after these
interactions and fear that others who witness the stop-andfrisk will assume that
they are criminals.124 Even young children are not immune from this practice. One
New Yorker reporters,
Theres a junior high school [where] almost all the kids are either of Arabic [sic]
descent or Latino. There [were] days when youd see all these little kids lined up,
with their legs spread, holding [onto] the wall, and the cops are going through their
pockets and stuff. Its just like a terrible, disgusting, horrible thing to see.125
Furthermore, police often engage in abusive and inappropriate behaviors via the
stop-and-frisk including forcibly stripping individuals down to their underclothing in
public, inappropriate touching, physical violence and threats, extortion of sex,
sexual harassment and other humiliating and degrading treatment.126 Objecting
to inappropriate touching can lead to a charge of resisting arrest.12
What is most striking about this practice is that residents of particular communities
have had to modify their everyday activities in order to lessen the risk associated
with police encounters.128 New Yorkers of color describe refraining from wearing

stereotypical ethnic clothing and hair styles to make themselves less likely to be
accosted by the police.129 They also describe taking public transportation and
avoiding walking altogether to avoid encounters with law enforcement on the
street.130 Others describe how young people have to stay indoors and cannot play
outside.131 Adults feel like they cannot sit on the porch or go to the store or
interact with their neighbors.132
The police have particularly focused on public housing sites for heightened
surveillance,133 but the city of New York also has a special program, Operation
Clean Halls, which involves private buildings.134 Under this program, owners of
private buildings sign contracts with the New York Police Department, which allows
the police to patrol these buildings.135 African-Americans and Latinos are
disproportionately stopped by police as part of this program.136
In order to avoid the accusation of trespassing, many New Yorkers report always
carrying identification or a piece of mail verifying that they live in a particular
building.137 Some report that residents of a building may even have to produce a
lease in order to avoid arrest.138 For many, they daily must endure police inquiries
of, Do you live here?139 New Yorkers report that they also carry pay stubs to
prove that they have a legitimate source of income.140
In Chicago, police cars patrol public housing projects and when they stop, every
young African-American man in the area automatically places his hands against the
car and spreads his legs to be searched.141 This automatic reflex to assume the
position happens in poor communities of color across the nation,142 and it
underscores how constant police presence and surveillance have become woven
into the everyday fabric of poor, urban life. It is not surprising, therefore, that
residents in these communities describe this constant presence as a type of
military occupation143 or outside prison.144
A variation of the stop-and-frisk is the stop-and-sniff. New York police officers will
stop individuals drinking from cups in public.145 They then ask to sniff the contents
of the individuals cup to see if it contains alcohol.146 If it smells like alcohol, they
are issued a summons for public drinking.147 The penalty for the offense is small at
twentyfive dollars per ticket, but the real purpose for these stops is to have an
excuse to check to see if an individual has any outstanding warrants.148 As is the
case with stop-and-frisk practices, residents are angry and resentful when police
officers demand to sniff the contents of their cups.149 Furthermore, one judge
found that 85% of the summonses that were issued during one month in Brooklyn
were to AfricanAmericans and Latinos.150
Just as is the case with stops-and-frisks, motor vehicle stops are a numbers
game.151 As a result, tens of thousands of innocent individuals are pulled over
every year as part of the war on drugs.152 Unfortunately, a disproportionate
number of these individuals are African-American and Latino.153 Indeed, many are
familiar with the terms driving while black or driving while brown, which refer to
the disproportionate effects of traffic stops on African-Americans and Latinos.154
Some New Yorkers report that they avoid driving altogether and opt for public
transportation in order to avoid these confrontations.155

Surveillance**
Surveillance mattersit is part and parcel to the creation of
the Black as criminal and lesserinstitutional engagement is
necessary to change it
Brucato, former Union College adjunct professor, 2014 (Ben,
Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy: From Slave Catchers to Petty
Sovereigns, ResearchGate, Theoria, December 2014,
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ben_Brucato/publication/269998697_Fabricating
_the_Color_Line_in_a_White_Democracy_From_Slave_Catchers_to_Petty_Sovereigns/l
inks/5564740608ae6f4dcc99eb45.pdf, p. 48, IC)
In 1721, the first agency in the U.S. that looked anything like modern police was
given its mandate: prevent Black insurrection. This mandate has remained core to
U.S. police ever since. Nothing more profoundly explains the persistence in racial
outcomes of policing than this genetic moment, as throughout the nearly 300 years
since, all reforms to the institution have managed to retain this imperative, when
not in directive then certainly in practice. The historical practices of police in
fulfilling this mandate have not only shaped contemporary policing, but also
established that Black insurrection is to be prevented through constant proximity of
police to communities of colour, intensive surveillance, routine harassment and
violent terror by agents of the state and white citizens. Nonetheless, specific
political and juridical adaptations have directed these activities. Since
Reconstruction, the line between the symbols 'young Black male' and 'criminal' is
difficult to draw. The two categories practically define one another. It is through the
surveillance and physical violence of police that the symbolic violence of this
identity is made functional, reliable and durable.
Police, by virtue of this mandate, is the strong blue thread that weaves together the
white race and the state, forming a barrier to full political inclusion of non-whites. As
such, this institution represents a key point of strategic intervention to weaken the
centuries-old white democracy. Just as race has been a primary point of tension that
has been central to every political shift in U.S. history, the peculiar institution of U.S.
police has been profoundly implicated in these processes. The institution has both
shaped these events and been shaped by them.

State key**
Identity is not constructed in isolation from political norms,
but rather, is constructed by institutionsrecognizing how the
state interacts with the formation of identities is key
Hayward, Washington University in St. Louis political science
associate professor, and Watson, Washington University in St.
Louis doctoral student, 2010 (Clarissa and Ron, Identity and Political
Theory, Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, Vol. 33, Issue 1, January
2010, http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1064&context=law_journal_law_policy, p. 31-33, IC)
This is not our view. Political theory, we want to suggest in the final sections of this
Article, can and should continue to contribute to work on the role of the state in
identity politics. Indeed, some of the most important work on this topic in recent
years has been by theorists who are beginning to shift the terms of the debate.98 To
frame identity politics normative-political problem in terms of state recognition
in terms of its benefits or its burdensis a mistake, their claim is. Although Taylors
work in the early 1990s performed the critically important task of drawing attention
to the limits of toleration and initiating a conversation about other state responses
to identity politics, his languageindeed, the very logic of recognition misleads.
The term recognition, along with much of the debate about identity that has been
conducted using that term, implies, erroneously, that states merely react tothat
they acknowledge the existence or truth of (or, alternatively, refuse to
acknowledge)racial, national, ethnic, gendered, and other collective identities.99
But states never simply recognize (or refuse to recognize) identities. Instead, they
play a crucial role in producing and reproducing them. States strongly shape
national identities, for example, through citizenship law and family law.100 States
strongly shape racial, ethnic, and gender identities, as well. They institutionalize
them in legal norms and in policies, for example, in census categories, and in the
case of race in the United States, in racial zoning laws and explicitly racist federal
housing policies.101 States vest some, but not other, identities with public
significance by distributing resources and opportunities along group lines.102 They
thus influence how citizens identify, and incentivize people to organize and mobilize
as members of particular groups.
States construct identities, in other words, even before people advance political
claims in their names, shaping group boundaries, group norms, and group practices,
through laws, policies, and political institutions. What is more, when people press
claims in the name of identity, state responses to those claims never simply
acknowledge [identitys] existence or truth (or fail to). Instead, they actively
produce and reproduce identity. Recall Charles Taylors example of the proposed
Meech amendment to the Canadian constitution. Even Taylor would acknowledge
that the Canadian state changes Quebecois culture when it gives French-speaking
parents the right to educate their children in English.103 Indeed, the force of the
example is his claim that the state changes culture when it acts to transform a

linguistic tradition that comprises an important element of a particular identity. We

want to underscore, however, that even if the Meech amendment had passedif
the Canadian state had legally enabled the Quebecois to restrict parents
educational choicesstate actors still would have shaped Quebecois culture. They
would not (as Taylor suggests) merely have enabled the survival of authentic
traditions and practices. Instead, they would have lent the coercive force of the
state to those who would perpetuate the linguistic status quo, helping them prevail
against those who would challenge and change what it means to be Quebecois.
Similarly, when the U.S. enabled the Santa Clara Pueblos to exclude from
membership the children of women who marry outside the tribe, it lent the coercive
force of the state to those who favored a particular set of membership rules. It
helped some tribal members prevail in their struggle against othersothers who
challenged, and who hoped to change, those rules. As Sarah Song shows in her
insightful analysis of this case, the U.S. shaped Pueblo identity, and it did so in ways
that reproduced and reinforced the patriarchal norms of the larger society.104
To be clear, our claim is not that a different outcome in the Martinez case would
have constituted state non-intervention. To the contrary, we want to underscore
that identity groupsthose collectivities which people experience as deeply
constitutive of their personal identitiesrarely, if ever, define themselves
independently and consensually. Members of groupsalong with those
nonmembers who vie for membershipstruggle and negotiate with one another to
create and re-create group boundaries and group norms. They do so in interaction
with other groups, and in interaction with the major institutions of their political
society. In Songs words, cultures are not entities that exist prior to social and
political interactions but rather are created in and through them.105

Even negative state action is still constructive in terms of

identitycontesting the terms in which identity are
established is key
Hayward, Washington University in St. Louis political science
associate professor, and Watson, Washington University in St.
Louis doctoral student, 2010 (Clarissa and Ron, Identity and Political
Theory, Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, Vol. 33, Issue 1, January
2010, http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1064&context=law_journal_law_policy, p. 33-34, IC)
Song characterizes the latter claim as a modest constructivist view. This view
does not imply, she writes, that cultures are always radically heterogenous and
contested.106 We suspect most theorists writing on identitystrong
multiculturalists, liberal multiculturalists, and Foucaultians alikewould accept as
noncontroversial this modest constructivism. Still, the constructed and contested
nature of identity is obscured when the normative-political debate is framed in
terms of recognition. A case in point is Kymlickas reasoning with respect to
Martinez. He endorses the U.S. Supreme Court decision, not on the grounds that

gender-biased membership rules are good rules.107 (Recall, he specifically cites

these rules as an instance of internal restrictionan identity harm, to use the
language introduced in Part IV). Instead, Kymlicka endorses the decision on the
grounds that it refrains from interven[ing] forcibly to compel the Pueblo council to
respect [female members] rights.108 He supports state accommodation of the
Santa Clara Pueblos, in other words, because he worries state intervention is
coercive.
The trouble with his reasoning (and with similar reasoning by others) is that
accommodation is a form of interventiona form that enables and promotes
coercion. When state actors enable some tribal members to discriminate against
others, when they enforce genderbiased property rights (or any property rights, for
that matter), when they distribute educational opportunities and basic resources,
such as housing and medical care and education, in ways that reproduce and
reinforce some particular set of normsany particular set of norms they intervene
in, and they help to shape, identity. At the same time, they coerce those who
contest the particular norms they enforce.
Kymlickas reasoning would be sound, of course, if the answer to the question, Who
are the Santa Clara Pueblos? were settled and stableif there existed some
obvious and unproblematic definition of the tribes (authentic) traditions and of its
(true) boundaries. The very fact that this case arose, however, is evidence there is
not. Any conceivable state action, including accommodation and other forms of
recognition, contributes to identity-construction. It does not simply acknowledge
[identitys] existence or truth, but rather makes identity, in some particular,
contestable form.

The state is never a neutral actor in the formation of identity

this necessitates the politicization of identity. Utilizing the
state for nondominatory practices such as the defense of
rights is net good and doesnt link to any offense that doesnt
link to the status quo
Hayward, Washington University in St. Louis political science
associate professor, and Watson, Washington University in St.
Louis doctoral student, 2010 (Clarissa and Ron, Identity and Political
Theory, Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, Vol. 33, Issue 1, January
2010, http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1064&context=law_journal_law_policy, p. 36-38, IC)
States are not, as Wendy Brown reminds us, neutral arbiters of injury.111 They
cannot recognize identity without helping construct it. Nor can they construct
identity in ways that are noncontroversial. But that does not mean every
conceivable state construction of identity is equivalent, or that political theorists
should refuse to address the question, How should states construct identity? If
state actors necessarily make and remake identity, we want to argue in this final

Part, they should do so in ways that render identitarian norms, boundaries, and
practices as responsive as possible to those they affect. To construct identity
democratically is a matter, less of recognizing it, than promoting nondomination,
by which we mean that state of power relations in which all participants are
enabled, and equally so, to challenge and change, or alternatively to defend, their
terms.112
Nondomination in identity politics has at least three important dimensions. First, in
every multicultural and socially stratified political society, it has an inter-group
dimension, since in such societies relations of power tend to follow group lines.
Second, whenever group boundaries are controversial, whenever group practices
are internally contested and relations of power within groups hierarchical,
nondomination has an intra-group dimension. Third and finally, nondomination has a
systemic dimension, since people are unfree when subjected to social, yet
impersonal forms of power, such as the power of norms that are deeply entrenched
(for instance, because naturalized or sacralized).113
States should construct and reconstruct identity, our view is, with a view to
promoting inter-group, intra-group, and systemic nondomination. In some cases,
promoting nondomination along the first (inter-group) dimension may require the
very political institutions multiculturalists recommend. It may require various forms
of group rights, for instance, or even relatively broad powers of group selfgovernment. The aim, however, is not to protect and preserve cultures, but to
reverse significant identity-based forms of domination.
Promoting nondomination along the second (inter-group) dimension typically will
require defining and protecting a wide range of individual rights. Intra-group
nondomination requires rights to exit, to cite one important example. It requires
individual political rights that ensure effective participation in the processes through
which group boundaries and norms are defined. The aim, however, is not to
promote individual autonomy, but to reduceideally to eliminatethe arbitrary
exercise of power by some group members over others.114
Promoting nondomination along the third (systemic) dimension requires state action
to ensure the malleability of group norms and group boundaries: to ensure their
responsiveness, that is, to the human subjects whose lives they govern. To be sure,
it may be the casecontra some theorists of agonistic democracythat in a
given social context it would be infelicitous to destabilize a particular identitarian
practice.115 Even still, that practice should be in principle open to challenge and
change. The institutions that best promote this systemic form of nondomination are
procedurally democratic institutions that foster contestatory forms of political
engagement in which people critique and defend, and sometimes transform, the
groups with which they identify.

Institutions Good
Shifting to their politics is a way to dodge fundamental
collective debates with the hegemonic forces that underwrite
oppression training an incapacity to engage with institutional
power sets activism up to fail against the organized forces of
political control the aff is a modern day Nero who fiddles the
night away as Rome burns down around him
Chandler 7 Researcher @ Centre for the Study of Democracy, Chandler. 2007.
Centre for the Study of Democracy, Westminster, Area, Vol. 39, No. 1, p. 118-119
This disjunction between the human/ethical/global causes of post-territorial political
activism and the capacity to 'make a difference' is what makes these individuated
claims immediately abstract and metaphysical there is no specific demand or
programme or attempt to build a collective project. This is the politics of
symbolism. The rise of symbolic activism is highlighted in the increasingly popular
framework of 'raising awareness' here there is no longer even a formal
connection between ethical activity and intended outcomes (Pupavac 2006).
Raising awareness about issues has replaced even the pretense of taking
responsibility for engaging with the world the act is ethical in-itself. Probably the
most high profile example of awareness raising is the shift from Live Aid, which at
least attempted to measure its consequences in fund-raising terms, to Live 8 whose
goal was solely that of raising an 'awareness of poverty'. The struggle for
'awareness' makes it clear that the focus of symbolic politics is the individual and
their desire to elaborate upon their identity to make us aware of their 'awareness',
rather than to engage us in an instrumental project of changing or engaging with
the outside world. It would appear that in freeing politics from the constraints
of territorial political community there is a danger that political activity is freed
from any constraints of social mediation(see further, Chandler 2004a). Without
being forced to test and hone our arguments, or even to clearly articulate
them, we can rest on the radical 'incommunicability' of our personal
identities and claims you are 'either with us or against us'; engaging with those
who disagree is no longer possible or even desirable. It is this lack of desire to
engage which most distinguishes the unmediated activism of post-territorial political
actors from the old politics of territorial communities, founded on struggles of
collective interests (Chandler 2004b). The clearest example is old representational
politics this forced engagement in order to win the votes of people necessary for
political parties to assume political power. Individuals with a belief in a collective
programme knocked on strangers' doors and were willing to engage with them, not
on the basis of personal feelings but on what they understood were their potential
shared interests. Few people would engage in this type of campaigning today;
engaging with people who do not share our views, in an attempt to change their
minds, is increasingly anathema and most people would rather share their
individual vulnerabilities or express their identities in protest than attempt to argue
with a peer. This paper is not intended to be a nostalgic paean to the old world of
collective subjects and national interests or a call for a revival of territorial state-

based politics or even to reject global aspirations: quite the reverse. Today, politics
has been 'freed' from the constraints of territorial political community
governments without coherent policy programmes do not face the constraints of
failure or the constraints of the electorate in any meaningful way; activists, without
any collective opposition to relate to, are free to choose their causes and ethical
identities; protest, from Al Qaeda, to anti-war demonstrations, to the riots in France,
is inchoate and atomized. When attempts are made to formally organize
opposition, the ephemeral and incoherent character of protest is immediately
apparent.

Clash is Nice
In order for clash to occur, debate must follow the set rules. The objective of the
affirmative is to present a case that defends the resolution in order to be fair and
educational for both sides.

Idea 05 [October 10, 2005, Idea (International Debate Education Association, develops, organizes and promotes debate and debate-related
activities in communities throughout the world. IDEA acts as an independent membership organization of national debate clubs, associations, programs,
and individuals who share a common purpose: to promote mutual understanding and democracy globally by supporting discussion and active citizenship
locally.), Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate, online, http://idebate.org/sites/live/files/standards/documents/rules-cross-examination.pdf, RaMan]

Introduction Like other forms of debate, Cross-Examination (C-X or Policy) Debate

focuses on the core elements of controversial issue. Cross-Examination Debate develops
important skills, such as critical thinking, listening, argument construction, research,
note-taking and advocacy skills. Cross-Examination Debate is distinct from other formats, with the exception of Parliamentary
I.

Debate, in its use of a two-person team. Cross-Examination Debate also places emphasis on questioning or cross-examination between constructive

, Cross-Examination Debate typically rewards intensive use of

evidence, and is more focused on content than on delivery. II. Rules of Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate
speeches. While specific practices vary

This section highlights the important rules that govern the Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate format. Because these rules focus on the goals and
procedures of debate, they do not include all that might be considered, from a strategic perspective, principles of effective debate. A. Resolutions and

he topic for Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate is typically called a

"resolution" or "proposition." Different types of propositions may be used in a Cross-Examination (Policy) Debate, but policy
propositions tend to be the most common. Different leagues, organizations or individual tournaments may use a
particular resolution for a particular debate. So that clash might occur in a debate, debaters
should engage in research on both sides of the topic. Research is primarily
the job of debaters. Teachers and coaches may conduct research in order to improve their job performance and to facilitate the
Preparation T

learning of their students, but should limit the amount of research they conduct for debaters. B. Interpretation of the Resolution Cross-Examination (Policy)

One team takes the affirmative position and is

responsible for defending and supporting the resolution . The other team takes the negative and is
responsible for refuting the affirmative, which may be done in a variety of strategic ways. The affirmative team is
responsible for the initial interpretation of the resolution, and for
presenting a case that defends and supports the resolution. The negative
team may challenge this interpretation if they believe the affirmative
team's interpretation is unreasonable. 2 1. Arguing a Case for the Resolution The objective of
the affirmative team is to construct and present a case that defends and
supports the resolution. An adequate case (one that meets a certain burden of proof) depends on what type of proposition is
debated. Individual topics and tournaments determine what burden is required. 2. Arguing Against the Resolution The
objective of the negative team is to refute the affirmative case, which, by extension,
is an argument against the resolution. Depending on the topic and the type of proposition, the negative may have a
Debate involves two teams, each consisting of two people.

variety of possible strategies available when refuting the affirmative case. C. Rules During the Debate 1. In-Round Research is Prohibited Topic research
must be completed prior to the beginning of a debate. Once the debate begins, the participants may not conduct research via electronic or any other
means. No outside person(s) may conduct research during the debate and provide it directly or indirectly to the debaters. Debaters, however, are allowed
to use a dictionary to determine the meaning of English words. 2. Citations are Mandatory Debaters may cite or refer to any public information. When
doing so, they should be prepared to provide complete source documentation to the opposing team and to the judge, upon request. A team's
documentation of cited material must be complete enough so that the opposing team and the judge can locate the information of their own. Ordinarily,
such documentation would include the name of an author (if any), the name and date of a publication, the URL of a Web site (if the information was
retrieved electronically), and a page number (if

Counter Gazing K

Counter Gazing K1nc

We endorse a strategy of counter-gazing instead of evading
the watchfulness of our masters, we must confront it. Only this
radical act is capable of asserting black subjectivity, and
opening up spaces of political and social resistance to
structures of antiblackness.
Hooks, 1992 - English professor and senior lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the
University of Southern California. (Bell; The Oppositional Gaze; Book; Pg. 115-116;
http://www.umass.edu/afroam/downloads/reading14.pdf; DOA: 7/10/15 || NDW)
When thinking about black female spectators, I remember being punished as a child for staring , for
those hard intense direct looks children would give grown-ups, looks that were seen as confronta- tional, as gestures of resistance,
challenges to authority. The "gaze" has always been political in my life. Imagine the terror felt by the child
who has come to understand through repeated punishments that one's gaze can be dangerous. The child who has learned so well to
look the other way when necessary. Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents, "Look at me when I talk to you." Only, the child

There is power in looking. Amazed the first

time I read in history classes that white slave- owners (men, women, and children)
punished enslaved black people for looking , I wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze had
informed black parenting and black spectatorship. The politics of slavery, of racialized power relations,
were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze. Connecting this strategy of domination
is afraid to look. Afraid to look, but fascinated by the gaze.

to that used by grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up, I was pained to think that there was no absolute

Years later, reading Michel Foucault,

I thought again about these connections, about the ways power as domination
reproduces itself in different locations employing similar apparatuses, strategies,
and mechanisms of control. Since I knew as a child that the dominating power
adults exercised over me and over my gaze was never so absolute that I did not
dare to look, to sneak a peep, to stare dangerously, I knew that the slaves had
looked. That all attempts to repress our/black peoples' right to gaze had produced in
us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By
courageously looking, we defiantly declared: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to
change reality." Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to
manipulate one's gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it,
opens up the possibility of agency. In much of his work, Michel Foucault insists on describing
domination in terms of "relations of power" as part of an effort to challenge the
assumption that "power is a system of domination which controls everything and
which leaves no room for freedom." Emphatically stating that in all relations of
power "there is necessarily the possibility of resistance," he invites the critical
thinker to search those margins, gaps, and locations on and through the body where
agency can be found. Stuart Hall calls for recognition of our agency as black spectators in his essay "Cultural Identity
and Cinematic Representation." Speaking against the construction of white representations of
blackness as totalizing, Hall says of white presence: "The error is not to
conceptualize this 'presence' in terms of power, but to locate that power as wholly
external to us-as extrinsic force, whose influence can be thrown olf like the serpent
sheds its skin. What Franz Fanon reminds us, in Black Skin, White Mask, is how power is inside as well as outside: ...the
difference between whites who hadioppressed black people and ourselves.

movements, the attitudes, the glances or the Utner nxed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was

Now the fragments have been put

together again by another self. This "look," from--so to speak-the place of the Other,
indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened I burst apart.

fixes us, not only in its violence, hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of
its desire. Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we
see. The "gaze" has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people
globally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a
critical gaze, one that "looks" to document, one that is oppositional. In resistance
struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating
"aware- ness" politicizes "looking" relations--one learns to look a certain way in
order to resist.

2nc Solvency
Counter gazing challenges structures of privilege and creates a
possibility for agency the alternative is the first step to
constructing social hierarchies
Farough 04 [Steven D, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Assumption
College. The Social Geographies of White Masculinities, pages 253-254.
http://crs.sagepub.com/content/30/2/241.short accessed 7/10/15]//kmc
It is also important to consider the agency of those marginalized by racial inequality.
In Black Looks, bell hooks (1992) notes the racialized politics of looking back at those in
position of power. This seemingly innocuous act highlights the exploitative relations of power
for those in privileged standpoints . To gaze upon someone constitutes an
interrogation, a right for the gazer to survey the gazed . Hooks (1992) points out that the
entitlement of whites to gaze upon blacks is a deeply structured practice throughout
U.S. history. However, when African Americans gaze back this produces
violent or defensive reactions among whites because their privileged
standpoint is exposed. Such a gaze is deeply gendered as well. John Berger
(1972) notes the gendered structure of sight where men are allowed to look at
women as objects; between men the gaze is structured through rituals intended to
mark dominance and deference (Connell 1987). The right to gaze also plays out in a
spatial context where the public sphere is more often occupied by men and
structured by the male gaze (Connell 1987). However, the structure of racialized
and gendered sight that positions white men as those who posses the
right to gaze can fail in certain contexts. In geographies where whites are
the numerical minority, the power to gaze can be reversed by the traditionally
oppressed group. This reversal of the gaze can have the effect of
transforming the sense of self of those in privileged positions . bell hooks calls
this the oppositional gaze. She notes: That all attempts to repress our black peoples right to
gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an
oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: Not
only will I stare. I want my look to change reality. Even in the worse circumstances of
domination, the ability to manipulate ones gaze in the face of structures of
domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency . (Hooks
1992:116; emphasis added) It is this possibility of looking back that marks white male bodies in a way that

The structures of power

work through the oppositional gaze, exposing what is more readily
invisible or repressed in the spaces of the everyday life of some white
men, and thus changing reality. Those within positions of domination can feel disoriented. ...
produces anxiety, fear, and anger among those in positions of privilege.

[T]he movements, the attitudes, the glances of the Other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution
is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments

This look, from so to speak the place of the

Other, fixes us, not only in its violence, hostility and aggression, but in the
ambivalence of its desire. (Fanon; quoted from hooks 1992:116) In this field of vision, Fanon provides a
have been put together again by another self.

reading of the paranoia of counter surveillance; that white men can feel fear that the others might look back and
retaliate.

Fanons quote addresses a Lacanian understanding of the limits of a sense of

self in relation to the other that there are conditions where the production of a
sovereign sense of self comes into a context where it must address the privileged

production of its own existence (Brennan 1993). Yet the political economy of this
visual form of exchange is deeply rooted in the specifics of spatial context
and social interaction.

Countergazing forces consciousness in the object of the gaze,

thats the only way to give a voice to those who remain
invisible in societyfugitivity is unable to solve without a
concrete form of resistance against the state
Schreiber, 96, Ph.D. in literature, University of Colorado (Evelyn, Reader, text,
and subjectivity: Toni Morrison's Beloved as Lacan's gaze Qua object, George
Washington University Literature Review, Vol. 30, Iss. 3, p. 445
http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 231174378?pq-origsite=gscholar//RF)
As a white reader of Morrison's narrative, on the other hand, the text's anamorphic
vision allows me to "know too much" (Zizek 44), and my ego begins to dissolve as my
subject status splinters. Readers in this position experience themselves as objects
when they realize that the African-American text is gazing at them, signifying
something about themselves. In Morrison's texts, the fantasy object (the exotic other)
cripples the subject by gazing back. While some readers (certainly some of his
contemporaries) are threatened by Faulkner's texts, Morrison's montage technique
creates anxiety by revealing a Lacanian piece of the real through the menacing gaze of
the other. Zizek explains how Hitchcock's tracking shot zeros in on an anamorphic spot, or
something that sticks out. His movement from montage to tracking closes in on the gaze,
causing anxiety in the viewer. Lacan posits that the essence of the gaze is a "gratuitous
showing, [causing] . . . some form of `sliding away' of the subject" (Four Fundamental 7576). Thus, in the movement from montage to tracking, Hitchcock, and, I suggest, Morrison,
zero in on the gaze to create anxiety in the viewer/reader. Zizek calls this gaze the
"Hitchcockian blot" (88), the gaze of the other that reduces the viewer/reader to object. Like
Hitchcock, Morrison creates this gaze by moving from a montage of differing perspectives
and points in time to focus on the uncanny often in the form of "inhuman" behavior-the
unspeakable-thereby fissuring the text. In this way, Morrison succeeds in giving voice to
the unspoken, those "invisible [repressed] things [that] are not necessarily `not-there"'
("Unspeakable" 11).

2nc Sequencing/A2 Perm

The act of countergazing and surveilling those who surveilled disrupts
status quo production of knowledge and alters dominant discourse
our advocacy is a prerequisite to any discussion of the historical
implications of fugitivity and surveillance
Buzinde, Ph.D., University of Illinois, and Osagie, 11 Professor at Penn State
11, (Christine and Iyunolu, Fugitive subjectivity, travel writing, and the gaze,
William Wells Brown, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf /
10.1080/09502386.2010.545425)
Similarly, African-Americans adopted gazes that were substantially different from
those of their white counterparts (Schueller 1999, p. x); such differences existed
between and within social subgroupings as well. Some adopted a surface gaze, a
surveillance of sorts (Urry 1990), which, although lacking in depth, allowed the
viewers to maintain a certain superior sense of self that was aligned with dominant
societal discourses. Such strategies of seeing were captured in travel narratives and they
allowed writers to offer accounts that resonated with the reading public. Others adopted
what MacCannell (2001) refers to as the second gaze, in which the viewer sought for the
unseen behind the details (p. 33) a strategy that affirmed the writers sense of self.
Arguably, notions of identity, race, and class merge to influence the gaze and its
narrativized forms within the travelogue. Scholars have examined the various ways Anglo
writers interpreted the world in their travelogues. However, far less scholarship has been
conducted on the accounts by nineteenth century African-American travel writers. Perhaps
this lacuna in the literature is attributable to the fact that travel was seen as a privilege
mostly afforded to Anglos and often denied to Blacks. Gilroy (1993) argues th at black

writers and thinkers were ignored, poorly addressed, or undertheorised because of

the ethnohistorical racism of the West (pp. 56). Gilroys (1993) mission in Black Atlantic
was to promote Blacks as agents with cognitive capacities and an intellectual history (p.
6). Gilroy and a new generation of scholars are taking seriously the need to focus on
less discussed non canonical texts and authors (Gifra-Adroher 2000, p. 21). Fish (2004)
has also examined travelogues by black and white women who traveled during the
nineteenth century. Schuellers (1999) recovery of David Dorrs 1858 publication, A Colored
Man Round the World, and her provocative introduction, is a worthy first step to enliven
academic interest in marginal writers of the nineteenth century. Hotz (2006) has also

revisited fugitive slave travel writing by William Grimes, Moses Roper, and Frederick
Douglass. Much of this work provides insights into pivotal moments in history (GifraAdroher 2000) and highlights the tensions and conflicts underlying early U.S. history and
culture (Hotz 2006, p. 11). However, further investigation is needed to understand how
slaves, whose identities were contested, appropriated and engaged in tourism (by definition
an activity in freedom) while their personal freedom was in doubt.

Only confrontation can solve and move black bodies from the
margins of society and disrupt dominant power structures
Schreiber, 96, Ph.D. in literature, University of Colorado (Evelyn, Reader, text,
and subjectivity: Toni Morrison's Beloved as Lacan's gaze Qua object, George
Washington University Literature Review, Vol. 30, Iss. 3, p. 445
http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 231174378?pq-origsite=gscholar//RF)
Thus, we can look at Morrison's Beloved as a performative representation of the
gaze through the signification of black culture. This articulation of culture and
history from the point of view of the marginalized and through the cultural
embodiment of the gaze of the other reinscribes that culture and the Other. Consider
Beloved as a montage of differing realities, of the multiple identities within the text.
Morrison's montage reveals points of fissure, or the real, on a phallic level, just as
Hitchcock's tracking shot captures differing aspects of reality. Morrison's text is a cultural

manifestation of multiple constituencies that disrupt or overturn dominant cultural

views of blacks as absent or negated. The retelling of the story, in pieces, by different
narrators and from different points in time, confronts the reader with the gaze(s) of the
Other, moving that Other from object to subject and thus threatening the subject
position of the reader.

A2 Gets Shut Down

Counter gazing causes those in a structure of power to
question their status helps realize privilege and move away
from stereotypes of identity
Farough 04 [Steven D, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Assumption
College. The Social Geographies of White Masculinities, pages 255-256.
http://crs.sagepub.com/content/30/2/241.short accessed 7/10/15]//kmc **note: he
refers to the subject being interviewed**
it is not just that some of my
respondents are afraid of robbery or being beaten up in urban spaces, it is also
the experience of being looked at that exposes them as privileged. In this
section I will specifically explore the narratives of three white men to highlight the
inter-relationship between the oppositional gaze, social geography, and identity
transformation. For instance, consider Jesse, an urban raised, working class white
man who offers his interpretation of being stared at. You know, when I go into the ghetto and I
see them, you know, in the morning hanging out, ten people ... and I honestly felt that they hated
us more than we hated them, you know. Jesse specifies this perceived
hate though staring. I mean, I mean, I was on the bus a couple weeks ago. You know,
and this black kid was looking at me. Younger kid, 19 or 20. So he is staring at me. And I
you know how you just know that someone is looking at you . [Int: Right, yeah.] He is
staring at me, hes looking at me in the eyes. So I looked at him, and Im
saying to myself if I turn away from them, hes going to think, like, you
know, he punked me. You do know what Im saying? [Int: Right.] So, Im staring at him,
staring at him, staring at him. So he says, what are you looking at? I said,
nothing. I said, Im not looking at anything. And I just wanted I just
wanted to say something to him. Because I just wanted to take it out on
him. [Int: umm hmm.] But he was just smart enough and walked away. But Ive had
other run ins. They are definant. They are defiant people. I mean, you know
I dont allow other people to do this. Racist how I look at it. But I see it,
man, all the time, you know? (emphasis added) Jesse notes that the stare was
rooted in a context of defiance. In this narrative he argues that the young black
man on the bus engaged in a scrutinizing stare. Jesse believes that this stare is
racist, a look of contempt toward a white man . Also rooted in this staring contest was the
production of masculinity in an urban context. As Connell (1987) notes, hegemonic forms of
masculinity are not only defined in relation to femininities, but is also
produced by marginalizing other men. According to Connell (1987) the prolonged stares and
Consistent with hooks (1992) oppositional gaze, I found that

verbal exchange are produced by the historical connection between public space and the entitlement of being a

Eye contact between men can evoke a sense of defending ones right
to the public sphere. In this ritual, who ever looks away first is interpreted
as deferring to the other man. Yet in the context of staring Jesses
interpretation makes references to racialized and gendered social power.
Jesse notes that he could not stop staring, otherwise he would lose in
the visual exchange. The narrative ends with anger They are defiant. They are defiant people... Racist
man.

is how I look at it. Jesses ending comments of African Americans being defiant and racist in this narrative are
important because it moves his specific experience with a young black man on a bus to a more general account of

racialized and gendered social power.

Jesse interprets the gaze as a stare that is

sending a message of hatred toward white people, an oppositional gaze.
The stare clearly makes Jesse angry. In this context the stare implicitly reminds him of
his white masculinity, and thus makes it impossible to feel as if separate
from racialized and gendered forms of social power. Subsequently Jesses
narrative maps an emotionally frustrating experience, one that not only addresses
the potential for physical conflict but one that lays the foundation of how he
positions himself as a white man in structural and discursive space as well. As a
result, Jesses racialized and gendered narrative leads him into a subsequent story
where he provides an implicit class-based analysis, one that places his biography in
relation to the context he lives and his standpoint as a white man. Geographically, Jesse
lives in a part of Boston that he feels has a large population of African Americans. He also believes that whites are
not privileged in this area. In fact whites are the new recipients of discrimination. In another part of the interview,
Jesse notes that whites have been helping out blacks for too long. The following narrative makes the point more
apparent.

A2 Ignores Slavery
The countergaze creates anxiety in the audienceforcing
consciousness and reflection on the position of the slave
Schreiber, 96, Ph.D. in literature, University of Colorado (Evelyn, Reader, text,
and subjectivity: Toni Morrison's Beloved as Lacan's gaze Qua object, George
Washington University Literature Review, Vol. 30, Iss. 3, p. 445
http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 231174378?pq-origsite=gscholar//RF)
Morrison's text creates this unhomeliness for the reader in the points where the real
emerges, producing for the reader a sense of unease in the shift from object to subject
when the traditional object-Other-becomes subject. Points of fissure in the narrative,
the places where pieces of the real emerge, signify the gaze of the Other and point to the
nullity of the reader's own subjectivity. These locations in the text exemplify Lacan's
statement that "[t]he message, our message, in all cases comes from the Other[,] . . . `from
the place of the Other"' ("Of Structure" 186). These varying points in the text, materialized
through shifts in perspective, create a bombardment-the montage-of pieces of the real. And
it is in these fissures that the characters perceive their own object positions so as to claim
their subjectivity. Morrison consciously opens Beloved in medias res so that the

reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign . ...

Snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another, from any place to
another, without preparation and without defense .... One of its purposes is to keep
the reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world while being
supplied a controlled diet of the incredible political world.

Ballot K

Brown
Resistance via the ballot can only instill an adaptive politics of
being and effaces the institutional constraints that reproduce
structural violence
Brown 95prof at UC Berkeley (Wendy, States of Injury, 21-3)
For some, fueled by opprobrium toward regulatory norms or other mo- dalities of domination, the language of "resistance"
has taken up the ground vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom. For others, it is the discourse of
empowerment that carries the ghost of freedom's valence 22. Yet as many have noted, insofar as resistance is
an effect of the regime it opposes on the one hand, and insofar as its practitioners often
seek to void it of normativity to differentiate it from the (regulatory) nature of
what it opposes on the other, it is at best politically rebellious; at worst, politically amorphous.
Resistance stands against, not for; it is re-action to domination, rarely willing to admit to a desire for it,
and it is neutral with regard to possible political direction . Resistance is in no way constrained to a
radical or emancipatory aim. a fact that emerges clearly as soon as one analogizes Foucault's notion of resistance to its companion terms in Freud or
Nietzsche. Yet in some ways this point is less a critique of Foucault, who especially in his later years made clear that his political commitments were not
identical with his theoretical ones (and un- apologetically revised the latter), than a sign of his misappropriation. For Foucault, resistance marks the
presence of power and expands our under- standing of its mechanics, but it is in this regard an analytical strategy rather than an expressly political one.

resistance is never in a position of

exteriority to power. . . . (T]he strictly relational character of power relationships . . .
depends upon a multiplicity of points of resis- tance: these play the role of
adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations .*39 This appreciation of the extent to which
resistance is by no means inherently subversive of power also reminds us that it is only by
"Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet. or rather consequently, this

recourse to a very non-Foucaultian moral evaluation of power as bad or that which is to be overcome that it is possible to equate resistance with that
which is good, progressive, or seeking an end to domination. If popular and academic notions of resistance attach, however weakly at times, to a
tradition of protest, the other contemporary substitute for a discourse of freedomempowermentwould seem to correspond more closely to a tradition

The language of resistance implicitly acknowledges the extent to

which protest always transpires inside the regime; empowerment, in contrast,
registers the possibility of generating ones capacities , ones self-esteem, ones life course, without
capitulating to constraints by particular regimes of power. But in so doing, contemporary discourses of empowerment
too often signal an oddly adaptive and harmonious relationship with
domination insofar as they locate an individuals sense of worth and capacity in the
register of individual feelings, a register implicitly located on some- thing of an other worldly
plane vis-a-vis social and political power . In this regard, despite its apparent locution of
resistance to subjection, contem- porary discourses of empowerment partake strongly of
liberal solipsismthe radical decontextualization of the subject characteristic of 23 liberal discourse that is key to the fictional
sovereign individualism of liberalism. Moreover, in its almost exclusive focus on subjects
emotionalbearing and self-regard, empowerment is a formulation that converges with a
regimes own legitimacy needs in masking the power of the regime . This is not to suggest that
of idealist reconciliation.

talk of empowerment is always only illusion or delusion. It is to argue, rather, that while the notion of empowerment articulates that feature of freedom

contemporary
deployments of that notion also draw so heavily on an undeconstructed subjectivity that
they risk establishing a wide chasm between the (experience of)
empowerment and an actual capacity to shape the terms of political,
social, or economic life. Indeed, the possibility that one can feel
empowered without being so forms an important element of legitimacy
for the antidemocratic dimensions of liberalism .
concerned with action, with being more than the consumer subject figured in discourses of rights and eco- nomic democracy,

Safe Spaces**
The affirmatives focus on the struggle of the slave parades
this space to be one of safety. This claim only serves to further
reinforce the violent exclusion that makes educational spaces
possible, precluding the possibility of real political resistance.
McKittrick, 2014 Professor of Gender Studies @ Queen's University in
Kingston Ontario. Peter Hudson interviewing Katherine McKittrick. (Katherine; The
Geographies of Blackness and Anti-Blackness: An Interview with Katherine
McKittrick; Online PDF;
http://www.katherinemckittrick.com/download/hudson_mckittrick.pdf; DOA: 7/6/15 ||
NDW)
On twitter, you (depressingly, brilliantly) wrote, Ive never glimpsed safe teaching (and learning) space. It is a white fantasy that
harms. Im wondering if you could expand on that as it pertains to the Black student in Canada? How does such a vexed space

I wonder a lot about why the classroom should be safe.

It isnt safe. I am not sure what safe learning looks like because the kinds of questions that need to
inform your own pedagogical practice?Yes.

be (and are) asked, across a range of disciplines and interdisciplines, necessarily attend to violence and sadness and the struggle for

How could teaching narratives of sadness ever, under any circumstances, be

safe!? And doubled onto this: which black or other marginalized faculty is safe in the
academy, ever? Who are these safe people? Where are they? But there is also, on top of this all, an
underlying discourse, one that emerges out of feminism and other identity discourses that assumes
that the classroom should be safe. This kind of safe space thinking sometimes
includes statements on course outlines about respect for diversity and how the
class (faculty? students?) will not tolerate inappropriate behavior: racism, homophobia,
sexism, ableism. This kind of hate-prevention is a fantasy to me. It is a fantasy that
replicates, rather than undoes, systems of injustice because it assumes, first, that
teaching about anti-colonialism or sexism or homophobia can be safe (which is an injustice
to those who have lived and live injustice!), second, that learning about anti-colonialism or sexism
or homophobia is safe, easy, comfortable, and, third, that silencing and/or removing
bad and intolerant students dismantles systems of injustice. Privileged students
leave these safe spaces with transparently knowable oppressed identities safely
tucked in their back pockets and a lesson on how to be aggressively and
benevolently silent. The only people harmed in this process are students of colour ,
faculty of colour, and those who are the victims of potential yet unspoken intolerance. I call
this a white fantasy because, at least for me, only someone with racial privilege would
assume that the classroom could be a site of safety ! This kind of privileged person sees the classroom
as, a priori, safe, and a space that is tainted by dangerous subject matters (race) and unruly (intolerant) students. But the
classroom is, as I see it, a colonial site that was, and always has been, engendered
by and through violent exclusion! Remember Jamaica Kincaids Lucy?! How wretched are those daffodils!?! I
am not suggesting that the classroom be a location that welcomes violence and
hatefulness and racism; I am suggesting that learning and teaching and classrooms
are, already, sites of pain. We cannot protect or save ourselves or our students by
demanding silence or shaming ignorance or warning the class that difficult
knowledge is around the corner (as with trigger momentsthe moment when the course director or teaching
life.

assistant says: look out, I need to acknowledge a trigger moment that will make you uncomfortable: we are going to talk about

All of this, too, also recalls the long history of silencingsubalterns not
speaking and all of that. Why is silencing, now, something that protects or enables
whiteness!)

safety? Who does silence protect and who does silence make safe and who does
silence erase? Who has the privilege to demand tolerance? In my teaching, although this is a day-to-day skirmish for me
because the site where we begin to teach is already white supremacist , I try very hard to create
classroom conversations that work out how knowledge is linked to an ongoing struggle to end violence and that, while racist or

we need to
situate these practices within the wider context of colonialism and anti-blackness.
This is a pedagogy wherein the brutalities of racial violence are not descriptively
rehearsed, but always already demand practical activities of resistance, encounter,
and anti-colonial thinking.
homophobic practices are certainly not encouraged or welcome, when they do emerge (because they always do!)

A2 Challenge Oppression
The claim that oppression should be the basis for winning a
debate round is a pretty good example of our link argument--the ballot is not a tool of emancipation, but rather a tool of
revenge---it serves as a palliative that denies their investment
in oppression as a means by which to claim the power of
victory
Enns 12Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University (Dianne, The Violence of
Victimhood, 28-30)
Guilt and Ressentiment We need to think carefully about what is at stake here. Why is this perspective appealing,
and what are its effects? At first glance, the argument appears simple: white, privileged women, in their theoretical
and practical interventions, must take into account the experiences and conceptual work of women who are less
fortunate and less powerful, have fewer resources, and are therefore more subject to systemic oppression. The
lesson of feminism's mistakes in the civil rights era is that this mainstream group must not speak for other
women. But such a view must be interrogated. Its effects, as I have argued, include a veneration of the other, moral
currency for the victim, and an insidious competition for victimhood. We will see in later chapters that these effects
are also common in situations of conflict where the stakes are much higher. We witness here a twofold appeal:

otherness discourse in feminism appeals both to the guilt of the privileged and to the
resentment, or ressentiment, of the other. Suleri's allusion to embarrassed privilege exposes the
operation of guilt in the misunderstanding that often divides Western feminists from women in the developing

The guilt of those who feel themselves deeply

implicated in and responsible for imperialism merely reinforces an imperialist
benevolence, polarizes us unambiguously by locking us into the categories
of victim and perpetrator, and blinds us to the power and agency of the
other. Many fail to see that it is embarrassing and insulting for those identified as
victimized others not to be subjected to the same critical intervention and held to
the same demands of moral and political responsibility . Though we are by no means
equal in power and ability, wealth and advantage, we are all collectively responsible
for the world we inhabit in common. The condition of victimhood does not absolve one of moral
responsibility. I will return to this point repeatedly throughout this book. Mohanty's perspective ignores the
possibility that one can become attached to one's subordinated status, which
introduces the concept of ressentiment, the focus of much recent interest in the injury caused by racism
world, or white women from women of color.

and colonization. Nietzsche describes ressentiment as the overwhelming sentiment of slave morality, the revolt

ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values. 19 The

sufferer in this schema seeks out a cause for his suffering a guilty agent who is susceptible to
suffering someone on whom he can vent his affects and so procure the anesthesia
necessary to ease the pain of injury. The motivation behind ressentiment, according to Nietzsche, is the
that begins when

desire to deaden, by means of a more violent emotion of any kind, a tormenting, secret pain that is becoming
unendurable, and to drive it out of consciousness at least for the moment: for that one requires an affect, as savage
an affect as possible, and, in order to excite that, any pretext at all. 20 In its contemporary manifestation, Wendy

ressentiment acts as the righteous critique of power from the

perspective of the injured, which delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting
sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the injury of social subordination. Identities are fixed
in an economy of perpetrator and victim , in which revenge, rather than
power or emancipation, is sought for the injured, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer
Brown argues that

does. 21 30 Such a concept is useful for understanding why an ethics of absolute responsibility to the other
appeals to the victimized. Brown remarks that, for Nietzsche, the source of

the triumph of a morality

rooted in ressentiment is the denial that it has any access to power or

contains a will to power. Politicized identities arise as both product of and reaction
to this condition; the reaction is a substitute for action an imaginary revenge,
Nietzsche calls it. Suffering then becomes a social virtue at the same time that the sufferer
attempts to displace his suffering onto another. The identity created by ressentiment, Brown
explains, becomes invested in its own subjection not only through its discovery of
someone to blame, and a new recognition and revaluation of that subjection, but also through the
satisfaction of revenge . 22 The outcome of feminism's attraction to theories of difference and
otherness is thus deeply contentious. First, we witness the further reification reification of the very
oppositions in question and a simple reversal of the focus from the same to the
other. This observation is not new and has been made by many critics of feminism, but it seems to have made no
serious impact on mainstream feminist scholarship or teaching practices in women's studies programs. Second, in

the other has been

uncritically exalted, which has led in turn to simplistic designations of marginal, othered status and,
ultimately, a competition for victimhood. Ultimately, this approach has led to a new moral code in which
the eagerness to rectify the mistakes of white, middle-class, liberal, western feminism,

ethics is equated with the responsibility of the privileged Western woman, while moral immunity is granted to the
victimized other. Ranjana Khanna describes this operation aptly when she writes that in the field of transnational

the reification of the other has produced separate ethical universes in

which the privileged experience paralyzing guilt and the neocolonized,
crippling resentment. The only overarching imperative is that one does not
comment on another's ethical context. An ethical response turns out to be a
nonresponse. 23 Let us turn now to an exploration of this third outcome.
feminism,

A2 Change Debate
Their speech act doesnt spill over to change anything but
their own minds
a. Structural constraints
Atchison and Panetta 9 *Director of Debate at Wake Forest University and
**Director of Debate at the University of Georgia (Jarrod, and Edward,
Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Issues for the Future, The
Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed., 2009, p. 317-334)
The first problem that we isolate is the difficulty of any individual debate to
generate community change. Although any debate has the potential to create
problems for the community (videotapes of objectionable behavior, etc.), rarely doesany one
debate have the power to create community-wide change. We attribute thisineffectiveness
tothe structural problems inherent in individual debates and the collective forgetfulness of
the debate community. The structural problems stem from the current tournament format
that has remained relatively consistent for the past 30 years. Debaters engage in
preliminary debates in rooms that are rarely populated by anyone other than the
judge. Judges are instructed to vote for the team that does the best debating, but the
ballot is rarely seen by anyone outside the tab ulation room. Given the limited number of
debates in which a judge actually writes meaningful comments, there is little
documentation of whatactually transpiredduring the debate round. During the period when judges
interact with the debaters, there are often external pressures (filing evidence, preparing
for the next debate, etc.) that restrict the ability of anyoneoutside the debate to pay attention to
the judges justification for their decision. Elimination debates do not provide for a much
better audience because debates still occur simul- taneously, and travel schedules
dictate that most of the participants have left by the later elimination rounds. It is
difficult for anyone to substantiate the claim that asking a judge to vote to solve a
community problem in an individual debate with so few participants is the best
strategy for addressing important problems.

b. Competition
Atchison and Panetta 9 *Director of Debate at Wake Forest University and
**Director of Debate at the University of Georgia (Jarrod, and Edward,
Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Issues for the Future, The
Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed., 2009, p. 317-334)
The debate community has become more self-reflexive and increasingly invested in attempting to address the
problems that have plagued the community from the start. The degrees to which things are considered problems
and the appropriateness of different solutions to the problems have been hotly contested, but some fundamental
issues, such as diversity and accessibility, have received considerable attention in recent years. This section will
address the debate as activism perspective that argues that the appropriate site for addressing community
problems is individual debates. In contrast to the debate as innovation perspective, which assumes that the
activity is an isolated game with educational benefits, proponents of the debate as activism perspective argue
that individual debates have the potential to create change in the debate community and society at large. If the
first approach assumed that debate was completely insulated, this perspective assumes that there is no substantive

using individual
debates to create community change is an insufficient strategy for three reasons. First,
individual debates are, for the most part, insulated from the community at large. Second,
insulation between individual debates and the community at large. From our perspective,

individual debates limit the conversation to the immediate participants and the
judge, excluding many important contributors to the debate community. Third, locating the
discussion within theconfines of a competition diminishes theadditional potential for
collaboration, consensus, and coalition building .

A2 Inclusive Curriculum Good

Inclusion in the debate space is a empty act of tolerance that
ensures that nothing really changes
Zizek 8Institute for Social Sciences, Ljubljana (Slavoj, The Prospects of Radical
Politics Today, Intl Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 5;1)
ellipses in orig
Let us take two predominant topics of to day's American radical academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism is

postcolonial studies" tend to translate it into the multiculturalist

problematic of the colonized minorities' "right to narrate" their victimizing
experience, of the power mechanisms which repress "otherness," so that, at the
end of the day, we learn that the root of postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance
toward the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our intolerance toward the
"Stranger in Ourselves," in our inability to confront what we repressed in and of
ourselves. The politico-economic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed
into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to confront its inner traumas ... The
true corruption of American academia is not primarily financial, it is not only
that they are able to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included up to a point), but
conceptual: notions of "European" critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of Cultural Studies chic. My personal
experience is that practically all of the "radical" academics silently count on the long-term
stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a
surprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is a thing they are gen uinely horrified of, it
is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environment of the "symbolic
classes" in the developed Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct zeal
when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against
their own innermost identification, a kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is:
"Let's talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change to
make sure that nothing will really change!" Symptomatic here is the journal October: when you ask one of
undoubtedly crucial; however, "

the editors to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, that October in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic
analyses of modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past ... With regard to this radical
chic, the first gesture toward Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game straight and are honest in their

pseudo-radical academic Leftists who adopt toward

the Third Way the attitude of utter disdain , while their own radicality ultimately
amounts to an empty gesture which obligates no one to any thing
determinate. II. From Human to Animal Rights We live in the "postmodern" era in which truth claims as such are dismissed as an
acceptance of global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the

expression of hidden power mechanisms as the reborn pseudo-Nietzscheans like to emphasize, truth is a lie which is most efficient in asserting our will to
power. The very question "Is it true?" apropos of some statement is supplanted by another question: "Under what power conditions can this statement be

What we get instead of the universal truth is a multitude of perspectives, or, as it

is fashionable to put it today, of "narratives" not only of literature, but also of politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives,
stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee
the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully
coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and
possibility to tell his/her story. The two philosophers of today's global capitalism are the two great Left-liberal "progressives,"
uttered?"

Richard Rorty and Peter Singer honest in their respective stances. Rorty defines the basic coordinates: the fundamental dimension of a human being is
the ability to suffer, to experience pain and humiliation consequently, since humans are symbolic animals, the fundamental right is the right to narrate
one's experience of suffering and humiliation.2 Singer then provides

Link Supplement

LIslamophobia
Theres no church in the wild
Halberstam, 13 (Judith Halberstam, also known as Jack Halberstam, is the
Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University
of Southern California. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study:
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten)
Like all world-making and all world-shattering encounters, when you enter this book
and learn how to be with and for, in coalition, and on the way to the place we are
already making, you will also feel fear, trepidation, concern, and
disorientation. The disorientation, Moten and Harney will tell you is not just
unfortunate, it is necessary be- cause you will no longer be in one location
moving forward to another, instead you will already be part of "the
"movement of things" and on the way to this "outlawed social life of
nothing."The movement of things can be felt and touched and exists in
language and in fantasy, it is flight, it is motion, it is fugitivity itself.
Fugitivity is not only es- cape, "exit" as Paolo Virno might put it, or "exodus" in the
terms of- fered by Hardt and Negri, fugitivity is being separate from settling. It is
a being in motion that has learned that "organizations are obstacles to
organising ourselves" (The Invisible Committee in The Coming In- surrection) and
that there are spaces and modalities that exist separate from the logical,
logistical, the housed and the positioned. Moten and Harney call this mode a
"being together in homelessness" which does not idealize homelessness nor
merely metaphorize it. Homeless- ness is the state of dispossession that
we seek and that we embrace: "Can this being together in homelessness,
this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, this undercommon
appositionality, be a place from which emerges neither self-consciousness
nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from
somewhere on the other side of an unasked question?" I think this is what
Jay-Z and Kanye West (another collaborative unit of study) call "no church in the
wild." For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, we must make common cause with
those desires and (non) positions that seem crazy and unimaginable: we
must, on behalf of this alignment, refuse that which was first refused to us
and in this refusal reshape desire, reorient hope, reimagine possibility and
do so separate from the fantasies nestled into rights and respectability.
Instead, our fantasies must come from what Moten and Harney citing
Frank B. Wilderson III call "the hold": "And so it is we remain in the hold, in
the break, as if entering again and again the broken world, to trace the
visionary company and join it." The hold here is the hold in the slave ship
but it is also the hold that we have on reality and fantasy, the hold they
have on us and the hold we decide to forego on the other, preferring instead
to touch, to be with, to love. If there is no church in the wild, if there is
study rather than knowledge production, if there is a way of being together
in brokenness, if there is an undercommons, then we must all find our way to
it. And it will not be there where the wild things are, it will be a place where

refuge is not necessary and you will find that you were already in it all
along.

LNeolib
The affirmatives politics of cultural performance withdrawal
themselves from resistance, allowing for excessive
consumption without restraint, strengthening systems of
neoliberalism. Only direct confrontation solves.
Goldberg, 2007 - Director of the University of California Humanities Research
Institute. (David T.; Neoliberalizing Race; Article; Pg. 21-23;
http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1013&context=maccivicf; DOA: 7/10/15 || NDW )
It follows that the individualizing of discrimination and exclusion, and the
slipperiness as well as ghost-like quality of racial terms, make it an often thankless,
even burdensome task to point out racist discrimination. Critics of racisms are
viewed as akin to whistleblowers and often treated analogouslyas spoil sports, or
paranoid, or just plain delusional, seeing wrong by invoking terms the prevailing
social order claims to reject. Racist exclusions accordingly become unreferenced
even as they permeate sociality. They are often unrecognizable because society
lacks the terms of characterization or engagement. When recognizable, however,
they are more often than not in deep denialthe ghost in the machine of neoliberal
sociality. There are two further considerations barely discernible in the preceding
line of analysis. The history of racial configuration is profoundly linked in its
emergence, elaboration, and expression, to death and violence, variously
articulated. Fred Moten has noted that black social life is one angled towards death,
both physical and social. Blackness, historically conceived, is being-towardsdeath. One could perhaps generalize the point without diminishing the particular
and quite pressing exemplification of the principle embodied in the modern histories
of blackness. The intense modern experience of any group that has been conjured
principally as the object of racial configuration will find its sense of self mediated, if
not massaged and managedin short, threatenedthrough its relation to death.
What traces do the voluminous legacies of racially prompted death and violence
leave in the making and making over, the remaking, of racially marked communities
imagining themselves anew? Different minoritized groups react to this mediation
in different ways. For Jews, the slogan Never Again, articulated by Emil
Fackenheim as the 614th biblical commandment, internalizes a vigilant
aggressiveness expressed as survival at almost any cost. Radical Muslim political
theology rationalizes the violence of its response to what Philomena Essed
revealingly identifies as humiliation in terms of the lure of a liberatory reward in the
afterlife. American Indians suffer the liquidation of their interests, first in the
melancholy of disaffected sociality and in some regional states more recently in the
turn to con-ventional electoral politics. Blacks respond variously to their persistent
minority status and repeated (often spotlighted) invisibility. One type of response
includes a turn to an insistent visibility of cultural performance, sometimes
celebrating a counter-violence in the wake of a persistent challenge to selfconfidence. Another reaction is racially driven political organizing, by assimilating or
integrating as best as conditions allow, or (as in the case of Latin America) by an

effort to amalgamate through mixing. All responses have decidedly varying results.
In each instance, the valence of death lingers, if only as a negative dialectic,
modulating the inevitable melancholy or aggressiveness vying for the sense and
sensibility the group comes to have of itself. Virtually every dominant structural or
policy response by the state to this relational, racially inscribed being-towardsdeath that insists on what I have characterized as Euro-mimesis once more
minoritizes the contributions and concerns of the historically diminutized and
devalued. These responses thus reinscribe the racially excluded as secondary social
citizens, as burdens of state largesse. The state suppresses their contributions in
their own right to state formation or social reconstruction while silencing the terms
of reference for even registering such contributions. In short, they offer both the
precursor and perfect exemplification of neoliberal commitment to consumption
sans the source of production, to pleasure denuded of guilt, excess unrestricted by
constraint, fabrication unanchored from fact. Anti-racist social movements mobilize
for greater social recognition, access, equality, and protection from discrimination
when focused on race as the principal organizing feature. They will more likely
succeed in enabling greater recognition than produce any significant material
benefits or dramatic social improvements, as Michael Hanchard has demonstrated
in the case of Brazils Moviemiento Negro. Vigorous access, equality, and diminished
discrimination require ongoing, relentless, scaled social challenge and change
around residential improvements and interraciality, significantly better educational
opportunities from the earliest age, steady employment, and public recognition and
general enforcement of the importance of antidiscrimination regimes. The ongoing
tensions between anti-racist transformation, racelessness, socio-class divisions,
persistent debilitations, and variations on the devastations of everyday life reveal in
their ambivalence and ambiguity the enormous challenges to face down a half
millennium of periodically renewed racial rule.

Invisibility PIC

Note
Kind of like the Mann K but instead of saying dont do the
plan/get invested in producing a new episteme/academic
approach, this K/advocacy says we should do that but do it on
the low low

1NC
Complete invisibilitynot fugitivity, but a step beyondthats
the only way to create insurrection
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, (The Coming Insurrection,
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
We cant even see where an insurrection would begin anymore. Sixty years of
pacification, of suspended historical upheavals; sixty years of democratic anesthesia,
of managed events have weakened our ability to abruptly perceive whats real, to
understand the meaning of the resistance going on in the current war... Weve got to
rediscover that ability of perception first. Theres no reason to get indignant about the fact
that a law as notoriously unconstitutional as the Everyday Security Law47 has been in force
for the past five years, or to protest against the total implosion of the whole legal
framework. Organize accordingly instead. Theres no reason to engage in one citizens

collective or another, in one extreme- left impasse or another, in the latest

communitarian imposture. All the organizations that claim to contest the present
order themselves have all the puppetry of the form, morals and language of
miniature States about them. None of the old lies about doing politics differently
have ever contributed to anything but the indefinite extension of Statist
pseudopodia48. Theres no reason to react to the news of the day, but to understand each
information given as an operation carried out on a hostile battlefield full of strategies to
decode, an operation aiming precisely to stir up some certain reaction or another among
some group of people or another, and to see that operation itself as the real news contained
within the apparent news. Theres no more reason to expect or wait for anything to
expect that it will all blow over, that the revolution will come, a nuclear apocalypse or
a social movement. To wait anymore is madness. The catastrophe isnt coming; its
here. Were already situated within a civilizations movement of collapse. And we have to
take part in it. To stop waiting means to enter into insurrectionary logic in one way or
another. It means to begin to hear, once again, in the voices of our rulers, that

trembling of terror thats never really left them. Because to govern has never meant
anything but to hold back, by a thousand subterfuges, the moment when the crowd
will string you up and every act of government is nothing but another way to keep
from losing control over the population. 47 An ensemble of anti-terrorist legislation
passed a few months after September 11th. 48 A temporary protrusion of the surface of
an amoeba for movement and feeding. The starting point for us is one of extreme
isolation and extreme powerlessness. Everything about the insurrectionary process
still remains to be built. It may be that nothing seems more unlikely than an
insurrection; but nothing is more necessary

Obvi theres no advocacy textthats the point

2NC Overview
The counterplan is the only mechanism for complete
invisibility. Thats the only way to solve the impacts of the 1AC
and create social changes. Their offense is based on the fact
that those who need to understand will. If thats true,
complete invisibility solves 100% of the aff while avoiding any
risk of state cooption.
Only complete invisibility brings activists together without
exposing intentions to outsiders
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, (The Coming Insurrection,
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
An encounter, a discovery, a huge strike movement, an earthquake : every event produces

truth by changing our way of being in the world. Conversely, an official report that is
indifferent to us, that leaves us unchanged, that engages nothing, doesnt even
deserve to be called a truth anymore. Theres a truth underlying every gesture,
every practice, every relationship, and every situation. Our habit is to elude it, to
manage it, which produces the characteristic distractedness of the majority of people these
days. In fact, everything is linked. The feeling that youre living in a great lie is also a truth.
But you have to not let that go, and start from there, even. A truth isnt a view on the world;
a truth is something that keeps us tied to it in an irreducible way . A truth isnt something

you hold but something that holds you. It makes and unmakes me, its my
constitution and destitution as an individual; it distances me from a lot, but brings me
closer to those who feel it too. An isolated being attached to it will unavoidably
meet a few fellow creatures. In fact, every insurrectional process starts from a truth
that refuses to be given up. In Hamburg, in 1980, a handful of the occupants of a
squatted house decided that they would only be expelled over their dead bodies. The whole
neighborhood was besieged by tanks and helicopters; days were filled with street battles,
monster demonstrations and the mayor at last gave in. Georges Guingouin, the first
French resistance fighter in 1940 had nothing but the certitude that he refused the Nazi
occupation. At the time, the Communist Party called him just some madman living in the
woods; and they kept on thinking that way until 20,000 of those madmen living in the
woods liberated Limoges.

2NC Solvency
Community connections are necessary to combat structures of
poweronly the CP solves
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, (The Coming Insurrection,
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
Communes come into being when people find themselves, understand each other,
and decide to go forth together. The commune itself makes the decision as to when it
would perhaps be useful to break it up. Its the joy of encounters, surviving its obligatory
asphyxiation. Its what makes us say we, and what makes that an event. Whats strange
isnt that people who agree with each other form communes, but that they remain
separated. Why shouldnt communes proliferate everywhere? In every factory, every
street, every village, every school. At last the true reign of the committees of the base!
We need communes that accept being what they are, where they are; a multitude of
communes, replacing societys institutions: family, school, union, sports club, etc. We
need communes that, outside of their specifically political activity , arent afraid to
organize themselves for the material and moral survival of all their members and all
the lost ones that surround them. Communes that dont define themselves as
collectives tend to do by whats within them and whats outside of them, but by the
density of the connections at their core. Communes not defined by the persons that
make them up, but by the spirit that animates them. A commune is formed every time a
few people, freed of their individual straitjackets, decide to rely only on themselves and pit
their strength against the reality. Every wildcat strike is a commune; every house occupied
collectively on a clean-cut foundation is a commune; the action committees of 1968 were
communes, as were the runaway slave villages in the United States, or even Radio Alice in
Bologna in 1977. Every commune needs to be based on itself. It needs to bring the question
of needs to an end. It needs to smash all political subjection and all economic dependency,
and degenerates in milieus whenever it loses contact with the truths that founded it. There
are all kinds of communes now that arent waiting to have the numbers, or the resources, or
much less the right moment which never comes to get organized.

2NC Method Comparison

Even simple acts of resistance are able to challenge dominant power
structuresthe only question you have to answer is which form of
resistance is better able to prevent fragmentation and failure
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, (The Coming Insurrection,
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
The commune is the elementary unit of resistance reality. An insurrectionary
upswing perhaps means no more than a multiplication of communes, their
connections to each other, and their articulation. In the course of events , either the
communes will melt into entities of a larger scale, or they will break up into
fractions. Between a band of brothers and sisters tied together in life and in death, and
the meeting of a multiplicity of groups, committees, gangs, to organize supplies and
self- defense in a neighborhood, or even in a whole region in revolt, there is only a
difference of scale; they are all communes. All the communes can only tend towards
self-sufficiency in food and feel that money within them is a derisory thing, out of place
there. The power of money is that it forms connections between those who have no
connections, connects strangers as strangers and thus, by making all things equivalent
through it, gets everything into circulation. But the price of moneys capacity to tie
everything together is the superficiality of those ties, where lies are the rule. Distrust is the
foundation of the credit relationship. Because of this the reign of money must always be the
reign of control. The practical abolition of money will only be accomplished by the expansion
of the communes. Each commune in its expansion, however, must take care not grow

beyond a certain size, after which it would lose contact with itself and almost
unavoidably give rise to a dominant class within it. And the communes will prefer to
split up, to spread themselves better that way, and simultaneously to prevent such
an unfortunate problem. The uprising of Algerian youth that set all Kabylia aflame in
spring 2001 managed to retake almost the whole territory, attacking the armed police,
the courthouses, and all the representations of the State, and generalizing the riot until they
caused the unilateral retreat of the forces of order, until they physically prevented the
elections from being held. The movements strength was in the diffuse

complementarity of multiple constituents who were only very partially represented

in the endless and hopelessly masculine assemblies of the village committees and
other popular committees. The face of the communes of the still trembling Algerian
insurrection was those blazing, helmeted youths, throwing bottles of gasoline at the riot
cops from a Tizi Ouzou rooftop; it was the mocking smile of an old resistance fighter draped
in his burnoose; it was the energy of the women of a mountain village still growing food and
raising animals in the traditional way, in spite of and against everything, without which the
blockades of the regions economy would never have been so repetitive or so systematic.

2NC A2 Perm
The CPs opacity is key to localized movementsinstead of
occupying a compromised space like the debate community,
we should become the territory itself
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, (The Coming Insurrection,
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
More and more reformists have started talking these days about the approach of
peak oil, and about how in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we will need
to re-localize the economy, encourage regional supply lines, short distribution circuits,
give up having easy access to imports from far away lands, etc. What they forget is that
the nature of everything thats done locally in economic matters is that its done
under the table, in an informal manner; that this simple ecological measure of relocalizing the economy implies either total freedom from state control, or total submission to
it. The present territory is the product of many centuries of police operations. The
people have constantly been pushed back -- out of their fields, then out of their streets,
then out of their neighborhoods, and finally out of their building lobbies , in the demented

hope that all life could be contained within the four sweating walls of a private
existence. The territorial question isnt the same for us and for the State. For us its
not about holding onto it. Rather its a matter of creating density in the communes, in
our circulation, and in our solidarity, to such a point that the territory becomes
incomprehensible and opaque to all authority. Its not a question of occupying, but
of being the territory. Every practice brings a territory into existence the territory of
the deal, or of the hunt; the territory of childs play, of lovers, of a riot; the territory of
farmers, ornithologists, or gleaners. The rule is simple: the more territories there are
superimposed on a given zone, the more circulation there is between them, and the less
Power will find footholds. Bistros, print shops, sports arenas, vague terrains, second-hand
book stalls, building rooftops, improvised street markets, kebab shops, garages, could all
easily be used for purposes other than their official ones if enough complicities can be found
there. Local self-organization, superimposing its own geography over the States

cartography, jams it and annuls it, and produces its own secession.

Any risk of potential visibility or cooption outweighs a solvency

deficitonly we solve freedom of action
The Invisible Committee 7, group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, (The Coming Insurrection,
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]//RF)
In a demonstration, a unionist pulls the mask off an anonymous protester who had
just broken a window: Assume responsibility for what youre doing instead of hiding
yourself. To be visible is to be out in the open that is, above all to be vulnerable.
When the leftists of all nations continually make their cause more visible whether
that of the homeless, of women, or of immigrants in the hope that it will get taken care of,

theyre doing exactly the opposite of what they ought to. To not be visible, but
rather to turn to our advantage the anonymity weve been relegated to, and with
conspiracies, nocturnal and/or masked actions, to make it into an unassailable

attack-position. The fires of November 2005 offer a model. No leader, no demands, no

organization, but words, gestures, complicities. To be nothing socially is not a
humiliating condition, the source of some tragic lack of recognition (to be recognized:
but by who?), but on the contrary is the precondition for maximum freedom of action.
Not signing your name to your crimes, but only attaching some imaginary acronym
people still remember the ephemeral BAFT (Tarterets53
Anti-Cop Brigade) is a way to
preserve that freedom. Obviously, one of the regimes first defensive maneuvers was to
create a suburban slum subject to treat as the author of the riots of November 2005. Just
take a look at the ugly mugs of those who are someone in this society if you want help
understanding the joy of being no one. Visibility must be avoided. But a force that gathers
in the shadows cant escape it forever. Our appearance as a force has to be held back until
the opportune moment. Because the later we become visible, the stronger well be. And

once weve entered the realm of visibility, our days are numbered; either well be in
a position to pulverize its reign quickly, or it will crush us without delay.

AT: Perm
Double bind---either the perm is unable to solve or it severs--1% risk of a link to the net benefit taints the perm because
there is a real tradeoff between visibility and invisibility--severance is a voting issue because it justifies aff
conditionality and sets a precedent.
INCLUDING ANY ELEMENT of the visible strategy of the 1AC
ONLY RISKS short-circuiting the radical potential of the
counterplan by making protest visible. Invisibility is a
precondition for freedom of action
The Invisible Committee 7 [an anonymous group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, in the book The Coming Insurrection published by Semiotext(e) (attributed to the Tarnac
Nine by the French police), http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]

Stay invisible. Put anonymity on the offense. In a demonstration, a unionist pulls the mask
off an anonymous protester who had just broken a window: Assume responsibility for what youre
doing instead of hiding yourself. To be visible is to be out in the open that is, above all

to
be vulnerable. When the leftists of all nations continually make their cause more
visible whether that of the homeless, of women, or of immigrants in the hope
that it will get taken care of, theyre doing exactly the opposite of what they ought to.
To not be visible, but rather to turn to our advantage the anonymity weve been relegated
to, and with conspiracies, nocturnal and/or masked actions, to make it into an unassailable
attack-position. The fires of November 2005 offer a model. No leader, no demands, no
organization, but words, gestures, complicities. To be nothing socially is not a humiliating
condition, the source of some tragic lack of recognition (to be recognized: but by who?), but
on the contrary is the precondition for maximum freedom of action . Not
signing your name to your crimes, but only attaching some imaginary acronym people still remember
the ephemeral BAFT (Tarterets AntiCop Brigade) is a way to preserve that freedom. Obviously, one of
the regimes first defensive maneuvers was to create a suburban slum subject to treat as the author
of the riots of November 2005. Just take a look at the ugly mugs of those who are someone in this
society if you want help understanding the joy of being no one.

Mann KTop

Mann KTop 1NC Shell

The 1ACs endorsement of a politics of fugitivity relies on the
power of the undercommons to reshape intellectual and social
culture their bringing attention invites either attack or
apathy from the dominant episteme its not about the
accuracy of their 1ac, its the strategy it produces its a false
hope to those who are already targets
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
Apocalyptic cults and youth gangs, garage bands and wolfpacks, *colleges* and phalansteries,
espionage networks trading in vaporous facts and networks of home shoppers for illicit goods;
monastic, penological, mutant-biomorphic and anarcho-terrorist cells; renegade churches, dwarf
communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units, paranoid think
tanks, unregistered political parties, sub-employed workers councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac
fanclubs, acned anorexic primal hordes; zombie revenants, neo-fakirs, defrocked priests and detoxing
prophets, psychedelic snake-oil shills, masseurs of undiagnosed symptoms, bitter excommunicants,
faceless narcissists, ideological drag queens, mystical technophiles, sub-entrepreneurial dealers,
derivative *derivistes*, tireless archivists of phantom conspiracies, alien abductees, dupe attendants,
tardy primitives, vermin of abandoned factories, hermits, cranks, opportunists, users, connections,
outriders, outpatients, wannabes, hackers, thieves, squatters, parasites, saboteurs; wings, wards,
warehouses, arcades, hells, hives, dens, burrows, lofts, flocks, swarms, viruses, tribes, movements,
groupuscules, cenacles, isms, and the endlessly multiplied hybridization of variant combinations of all
these, and more.... Why this stupid fascination with stupid undergrounds ? What is it

about these throwaway fanzines and unreadable rants , these neo-tattoos and recycled
apocalypses, this mountainous accumulation of declassified factoids, these bloody smears, this
incredible noise? Why wade through these piles of nano-shit? Why submit oneself to these hysterical
purveyors, these hypertheories and walls of sound? Why insist on picking this particular species of nit?

Why abject criticism, whose putative task was once to preserve the best that has
been known and thought, by guilty association with so fatuous, banal, idiotic,
untenable a class of cultural objects ? Why not decline, not so politely, to participate in the tiny
spectacle of aging intellectuals dressing in black to prowl festering galleries and clubs where,
sometime before dawn, they will encounter the contemptuous gaze of their own children, and almost
manage to elide that event when they finally produce their bilious reports, their chunks of cultural
criticism? No excuse, no justification: all one can put forward is an unendurable habit

of attention, a meager fascination, no more or less commanding than that hypnosis one enters in
the face of television; a rut that has always led downward and in the end always found
itself stuck on the surface; a kind of drivenness, if not a drive; a *critique*, if you can forgive such
a word, that has never located any cultural object whose poverty failed to reflect its own; a rage to find
some point at which criticism would come to an end, and that only intensified as that end-point
receded and shrunk to the size of an ideal. Then if one must persist in investigating these

epi-epiphenomena, perhaps compelled by some critical fashion (no doubt already out of vogue),
perhaps merely out of an interminable immaturity, why not refer the stupid underground
back to all the old undergrounds, back to the most familiar histories ? Why not cast it
as nothing more than another and another and another stillborn incarnation of an
avant-garde that wallows in but doesn't quite believe its own obituaries, and that one has
already wasted years considering? Why not just settle for mapping it according to the old

topography of center and margin, or some other arthritic dichotomy that , for all their
alleged postness, the discourses we are about to breach always manage to drag along behind them?
Why not simply accede to the mock-heroic rhetoric of cultural opposition (subversion,

that, after a generation of deconstructions, we still don't have the

strength to shake; or to the nouveau rhetoric of multiplicity (plurality, diversity, etc.), as if all one
resistance, etc.)

needed was to add a few more disparate topic headings to break the hold of a One that, in truth, one
still manages to project in the very act of superceding it? Nothing will prevent usindeed nothing
can save us--from

ransoming ourselves again and again to the exhausted mastery of

these arrangements; nothing will keep us from orienting ourselves toward every
difference by means of the most tattered map s. But at the same time we must entertain-doubtless the right wordthe sheer possibility that what we encounter here is not just one more
margin or one more avant-garde, however impossible it will be to avoid all the orders and terms
attendant upon those venerable and ruined cultural edifices. We must remain open to the possibility
that this stupid underground poses all the old questions but a few more as well, that it might suggest
another set of cultural arrangements, other topographies and other mappings, however unlikely that
might be. In any case, whatever vicarious attractions the stupid underground offers the

bored intellectual groping for a way to heat up his rhetoric, if not his thought, whatever else we
might encounter here, it is important to insist that you will not find these maps laid out
for your inspection, as if on an intellectual sale table, and rated for accuracy and charm. No
claim is being staked here; no one is being championed, no one offered up on the critical auction block
as the other of the month. There is nothing here to choose; all the choices have already been made.
One can only hope, in what will surely prove an idle gesture, to complicate cultural space

for a moment or two, for a reader or two, to thicken it and slow one's passage
through it, and, as always, to render criticism itself as painful and difficult as possible .
Indeed, let us suggest that this tour of the stupid underground is above all else
designed--according to a certain imaginary, a certain parody, the curve of a perfectly distorted
mirror--not to give us an opportunity to rub elbows with the natives and feel some little thrill of
identification with them, but to expose to criticism its own stupidity, its impossibility,

its
abject necessity. Why go there at all? To pursue a renunciation of culture past the limit,
where it precisely leaves us behind, where criticism can no longer observe it, no longer
recuperate it; and at the same time to witness the turning-back and collapse of the
critical into the very form and function of everything it would seek to distance and
negate: a double negation that will end up what else?--reinvesting in the stupidity of
culture. No venture could be more idiotic. Shades have been distributed, the bus is leaving,
our stupid-critical theme-park tour is about to begin.

The affirmative will try to claim they are genuine and garner a
no link argument, but that isnt the question. Its a question of
the fact that the intellectual position sustains the system that
they critique.
Mann 96 [ January 1996, Paul Mann (Professor at Pomona College), The Nine Grounds of
Intellectual Warfare, online, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.196/mann.196, RaMan]

The position is surrounded by a border, a margin. This circular, flat earth topography
mirrors larger discursive models, which still map everything in terms of centers, lines of defense, and
antagonistic margins. It is little wonder that questions of colonialism have become so pressing in
current critical practice: here too we encounter an oblique phenomenalization of the discursive device.

Modern critical production consistently sees itself as a matter of hegemonic centers

(e.g., defenses of tradition) and marginal oppositions . But insofar as one wishes to retain

this topography of margins and centersand in the end there might not be much to recommend itit
might be better to see the marginal force as a function and effect of the center, the very means by
which it establishes its line of defense. Military commanders might be unlikely to deploy

their most troublesome troops along their perimeter, but in intellectual warfare the
perimeter is marked out and held primarily by troops who imagine themselves in
revolt against headquarters. This is the historical paradox of the avant-gardes: they believe they
are attacking the army for which they are in fact the advance guard. The contradiction does not
dissolve their importance, it marks their precise task: the dialectical defense and
advance of discursive boundaries. It might therefore indicate the fundamental
instability of cultural positions, but it does nothing to support the strictly
oppositional claims of marginal forces, which is why postcolonial criticism remains a
colonial outpost of an older critical form. Without exception, all positions are
oriented toward the institutional apparatus. Marginality here is only relative and
temporary: the moment black studies or womens studies or queer theory conceives
of itself as a discipline, its primary orientation is toward the institution. The fact that
the institution might treat it badly hardly constitutes an ethical privilege. Any
intellectual who holds a position is a function of this apparatus; his or her
marginality is, for the most part, only an operational device. It is a critical commonplace
that the state is not a monolithic hegemony but rather a constellation of disorganized and fragmentary
agencies of production. This is often taken as a validation for the political potential of

marginal critical movements: inside-outside relations can be facilely deconstructed,

andcritics can still congratulate themselves in their resistance, but the contrary is
clearly the case. The most profitable intellectual production does not take place at the center (e.g.,
romance philology), where mostly obsolete weapons are produced; the real growth industries are
located precisely on the self-proclaimed margins. It will be argued that resistance is still

possible, and nothing I propose here argues against such a possibility. I wish only to
insist that effective resistance will never be located in the position, however
oppositional it imagines itself to be. Resistance is first of all a function of the
apparatus itself. What would seem to be the transgressive potential of such institutional agencies
as certain orders of gender criticism might demonstrate the entropy of the institution, but it does
nothing to prove the counterpolitical claims of the position. Fantasies of resistance most often

serve as mere alibis for collusion. Any position is a state agency, and its relative marginality is a
mode of orientation, not an exception. Effective resistance must be located in other tactical forms.

We should silence their criticism and maintain secrecy by

keeping the alternative invisible in order to avoid co-option
from circulation and display.
Mann 99 [ 1999, Paul Mann (Professor at Pomona College), Masocriticism, Obtained through the
University of Michigan Library Database, E-Book, pg. 106-107, RaMan]
Even so, the first chapter, the text of a lecture entitled the Afterlife of the Avant-Garde, follows from
my last book, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, and serves as a further introduction to the present
body of essays. The chief project of the earlier book was to develop an analysis of the discursive
economy in which the productions of both the avant-garde and its critics inevitably and indifferently
circulate. Every manifesto, every exhibition, every review, every monograph, every

attempt to take up or tear down the banner of the avant-gardes in the critical arena,
every attempt to advance the avant-gardes claims or to put them to rest: no

matter what their ideological strategy or stakes, all end up serving the white
economy of cultural production. It is, finally, circulation alone that matters. Even the
critique, in recent years, of the structure of this economythe critique of the
museum and gallery, for instance, in the work of Broodthaers and Haackeends up
recuperated, displayed, and circulated for profit . More than the way iconoclasm becomes
tradition and the new becomes old, it is this increasing phenomenalization of the mechanism by means
of which the discursive economy whites out ideological differences and collapses critical distance that
constitutes the death of the avant-garde, announced in hundreds of obituaries during the past thirty
years. The death of the avant-garde is not an end to its production, which continues

unabated, but a theory-death, the indifferent circulation of its products in a critical

atmosphere in which the very idea of cultural opposition is increasingly problematic,
and no less so for being ever more shrilly proclaimed. The current, renewed interest
in oppositional art often functions only by forgetting that such opposition recycles
avant-garde methods and stances recuperated and discredited decades ago. In those
instances where a more postmodern critical art and art criticism try to salvage the tasks of cultural
opposition without repeating the mistakes of the avant-garde, with a more self-critical sense of the
cultures extraordinary ability to recuperate opposition, we still find, beneath the rhetorya ic (spaces
of contestation, gaps and fissures, etc.), artworks for sale and journal articles for academic
symposia and curricula vitarum. If it remains necessary to oppose what Peter Burger

identified as the institution of art, all of the critical means for doing so seem
rather to further its interests, and without releasing us from the necessity of
opposition. The dilemma of the necessary-impossible one encounters here haunts all of the present
essays: they occupy a perspective from which the impossibility of criticism is
precisely as pressing as its necessity. That, in brief, is where the argument of Theory-Death
leaves off, and where the first essay in this volume begins. What is the relationship between
this recuperative economy and death, between the death of the avant-garde and
death as it is theorized, for instance, in the late Freud? What would it mean for criticism to
imagine a writing or an art that had undergone a kind of second death, a death no longer for display
and description but one that passed entirely from the screens and relays of the discursive economy?

What if there were an avant-garde that was no longer committed to throwing itself
on the spears of its enemies but operated in utter secrecy? What if the very history of
cultural recuperation led us to imagine that some segment of what had once been the avant-garde
must finally have learned from its mistakes and extended its trajectory into silence and invisibility? I t

might be necessary then to turn that silence and invisibility back against the critical
project; it might be necessary to inflict that silence on ones own discourse and
suffer it as a kind of wound, a mark of utter insufficiency, and a way to bind oneself
to the surrogate forms of its absent object. This act of turning the force of criticism
against itself should not be mistaken for productive self-criticism. It is the
autoaggressive trace of a death drive that no longer has anything to do with
biological instincts (if it ever did), perhaps only with writing itself , the incipient form of
the masocriticism pursued in this book, which is explored most directly and schematically in the title
essay. That essay proceeds, moreover, through the books most characteristic strategy: it describes

masocriticism by performing it, a theatricalism that is, after all, one of masochisms
most distinctive traits.

2NC Must Read

The affirmative only recreates the relationship between
marginalized and hegemon and drains meaning from criticism
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
In what one could call, not without historical cause if perhaps too casually, the standard modernist
map, the relation between hegemonic center and oppositional margin is more or less

constant. Marginal groups are suppressed almost to the point of invisibility , or at least
to a theoretical *position* of "silence"; centers might seem to disintegrate, and parties consigned
to the margin in one generation might rise to power in the next; one even speaks of multiple "sites"
(all women are marginalized, although caucasian women are more likely to occupy a hegemonic
position in relation to women of color; one can be white-male but gay, straight-female and Asian, etc.);
but the general structure of center and margin remains in a sort of hypertense steady state.^1^ The

limited exclusion of the margin constitutes the center's defining boundary . Margins
exist insofar as they are held in an orbit, placed at the constitutive limit of whatever
power the center consigns itself. We are hardly breaking any new ground in stating that this
dialectical topography underlies almost all of our cultural criticism, often in the most
tacit manner; it has been exceedingly difficult for anyone to propose more sophisticated models. It is
here that we find the first relevance of the stupid underground. While it readily lends
itself to this topographical reduction, it cannot be simply constrained to an orbit.

It is deployed--but

by what force? by some hegemonic "Power" or by another, undetermined order of cultural physics?--a s

a means of carrying every mode of cultural activity past its limits, to its termination. At
times this termination seems merely symbolic, as they say: an end-point that might indeed be fatal but
is nonetheless reflected back into the cultural economy as a series of still quite spectacular and
profitable images. The death of painting as a mode of painting, etc. And yet the trajectory of the

stupid underground also begins to make the notion of the margin rather uncertain.
One is reminded of the blank spaces at the edges of archaic, flat-earth maps, the monsters that lurk
past the edges of the world. Cartoonish monsters, hardly worthy of a child's nightmare, and yet
marking the place of an unimaginable destruction, of the invisible itself. Not marginal spaces, strictly
speaking, since they cannot be mapped, since they are precisely beyond the limit: but at the same
time an extra-cartographic reach that is preserved as a kind of threat, if you will, or seduction, if you
would rather, to the very adventure of marginality. The stupid underground is not only the

the very image--quite critical, in its way--of the

imminent and perhaps immanent suicide of every marginal project, a suicide that is not
a demonstration, a gesture accompanied by notes to the Other, but the most rigorous
renunciation of the symbolic order.^2^ We move from the masterpiece to avant-garde artnewest post-avant-garde, it is also, beyond that,

against-art to non-art (folk, *brut*, etc.) to the end of art (autodestructive art, art strikes) to the most
vigilant refusal, a refusal that never puts itself on display at all; from mainstream rock to punk to
industrial music to experiments in subsonic effects generators (Survival Research Laboratory, Psychic
TV, Non) to utter silence; from rock-tour T-shirts to skinhead fascist costuming to criminal disguise and
disappearance from every spectacle and every surveillance; from sexually explicit art to pornography
and soft or "theoretical" S/M (masocriticism itself) to hardcore consensual sadism and masochism to
pedophilic aggression to the consequent "knowledge" of the most violent sexuality carried out in the
strictest secrecy.^3^ The stupid underground is the immanence and extension *to

of becoming-sound, becoming-animal, becoming-libidinal,

becoming-machine, becoming-alien, becoming-terror; it is the exhilarating velocity
fatality and beyond*

through cultural space of this fatal and yet never simply terminal movement. We should also
note that even as one pursues these trajectories, the underground lends this Deleuzian
rhetoric of becoming-X its most abiding cultural form: becoming-%cliche%, becomingstupid. In the stupid underground any innovation can be, at one and the same time,
utterly radical and worthless in advance. The trajectory past %cliche% is at stake here as
well, a trajectory that takes us not into further innovation but into repetition itself: the
repetition of a cultural adventure long after its domestication, but as if it were still
an adventure. The trajectory is thus seldom a straight line into the beyond, a singular line of flight
through becoming-imperceptible, into the invisible. The complexity of these movements
suggests four trajectories, or four dimensions of the trajectory as such: to the apotheosis
of stupidity, as sublime becomes ridiculous as if without transition; to the violent limit of the
tolerable, the very limit of recuperability; to disappearance past the boundary of cultural
representation, a disappearance so critical that it gives the lie to every other form of
criticism; and to what turns out, in the very midst of an innovative frenzy, to be stupid
repetition, an autonomous, automatic repetition that drains cultural forms of every
meaning, even that of parody: the stupefying force of repetition, which, we are told, is the very
trace of the death drive.

2NC LinkResistance
Strategies of resistance fail and only help to proliferate the
discourse of their opposition
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
What was once called nihilism has long since revealed itself as a general, integral
function of a culture that, in all its glorious positivism, is far more destructive than
the most vehement no. Nothing could be more destructive, more cancerous, than
the positive proliferation of civilization (now there's a critical cliche), and all the forms of
opposition have long since revealed themselves as means of advancing it. As for the
ethos of "resistance": just because something feels like resistance and still manages to
offend a few people (usually not even the right people) hardly makes it effective. It
is merely *ressentiment* in one or another ideological drag. And how can anyone still be deluded by
youth, by its tedious shrugs of revolt? Even the young no longer believe their myth, although they are
quite willing to promote it when convenient. Punk nihilism was never more than the nihilism of the
commodity itself. You should not credit Malcolm McLaren with having realized this just because he was
once pro-situ. All he wanted was to sell more trousers without boring himself to death; indeed he is
proof that the guy with the flashiest *ressentiment* sells the most rags. And if he wasn't bored, can he
be said to have advanced the same favor to us?

2NC LinkBreak from SQ

Attempts to disprove status quo discourse sustain an objective truth
that harms resistance and results in the evacuation of criticism
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
What animates the stupid underground is not merely heroic madness or libidinal ideology or
a drooping IQ *against* reason, although we still have to listen to all of that repeated, precisely, past
the point of endurance; it is something like stupid intelligence, the manic codification of the
inane,

the willingness to pursue, absolutely at the risk of abject humiliation,

absolutely at the risk of making oneself a perfect fool, lines of inquiry that official
intelligence would rather have shut down. The dismissal of some dubious scientific
fact or method by official intelligence is taken as a clear sign that the powers that
be are hiding something important, and that by this very means assumes the status of truth.
Enormous labors will be devoted to unlocking its secrets and locating it in a
worldview that is as logical as it is laughable, and that sustains the force of truth in
large part by giving the lie to official truth. Reactive research, parody of science. Or of the
mission of art and cultural commentary. Once it was crucial to separate high and low, art and kitsch,
for the very good of the human spirit; then one tried to "transgress" these distinctions, without quite
managing to get rid of them. But to copy comic books on vast canvases or laminate a few thriftshop
tchotchkis and exhibit them in a major museum is not what used to be called a critical gesture, no
matter what the catalogues say. It is not a critical reflection on the commodification of

art, but a means of rendering the very distance required for such reflection null and void;
not a "deconstruction" (sic) of the institution of art but the evacuation of criticism
itself. In this zone, criticism is stupid, hence only stupidity can be critical. The illogic
of this proposition cannot entirely eliminate its force. We are caught up in culture's inability to purge
itself of the inanity utterly native to it. The patent stupidity of certain postmodern works of

art, and of the commentary that tags along behind them, is a symptom of a virulent
truth that infects everything and everyone, the holy blood of Van Gogh, Cezanne at his
sublime labors, the Sistine Chapel englobing a void, empty frame after empty frame, vast libraries of
special pleading, the whole dumb hollow of culture.

2NC LinkMusic
The 1ACs use of music as a means of dissent exposes their
discourse to those who should not hear it-- hipster critics who
only wish to be subversive so they can claim they are--while
preventing wide-spread movements
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
"Although functioning as a support for the totalitarian order, fantasy is then at the same time the
leftover of the real that enables us to 'pull ourselves out,' to preserve a kind of distance from the sociosymbolic network. When we become crazed in our obsession with idiotic enjoyment, even totalitarian
manipulation cannot reach us" (128). Zizek's example here is precisely popular music, the

inane ditty that anchors the fantasy, that runs endlessly in one's head; what one wishes to add
here is the criterion of force, of intensity, of sound so loud that, even though it is a cultural
product from top to bottom, it nonetheless enfolds the audience and isolates it
within the symbolic order. The intensity of loud drowns out the Other. It is the limit
of the symbolic, its null point, experienced in the very onslaught of its signs . Perhaps
we could appropriate a Lacanian term for this fantastic volume that goes beyond fantasy: the
*sinthome.* Zizek calls it "subversive," but that, unfortunately, is to offer it to

those
who wannabe subversive, to see themselves seen as subversives, to be (to
fantasize being) political agents in an older and ever more current sense.^26^ Let
us nonetheless pursue the concept for a moment.

2NC Alt
The aff is neither a subversion of the status quos politics nor
an intelligent movement for change. The stupid
underground posits itself as valuable knowledge production,
without any ability to solve.
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
We have witnessed so many spectacles of critical
intelligence's dumb complicity in everything it claims to oppose that we no longer
have the slightest confidence in it. One knows with the utmost certainty that the most intense
criticism goes hand in hand with the most venal careerism , that institutional critiques
bolster the institution by the mere fact of taking part in their discourse, that every position
is ignorant of its deepest stakes. Each school of critical thought sustains itself by its
stupidity, often expressed in the most scurrilous asides, about its competitors, and a sort of
willed blindness about its own investments, hypocrisies, illusory truths. And one can
Intelligence is no longer enough.^5^

count on each critical generation exposing the founding truths of its predecessors as so much smoke
and lies. Thought, reading, analysis, theory, criticism has transported us to so many Laputas that we
should hardly be surprised to encounter a general--or perhaps not general enough--mistrust of
intelligence as such. What is most "subversive" now is neither critical intelligence nor

romantic madness (the commonplace is that they are two sides of the same Enlightenment coin)
but the dull weight of stupidity, spectacularly elaborated, and subversive only by
means of evacuating the significance of everything it touches --including the romance of
subversion itself. To abandon intelligence because it has been duplicitous or built such
grandly inane intellectual systems might seem to be throwing the baby out with the
bathwater, but if rejecting intelligence is rejecting too much, never underestimate
the stupid exhilaration of *too much*; and flying babies are a nicely stupid image, quite
suitable for a record cover. Let us insist that we are not arguing for poetic madness breaking out of the
prison of reason, nor for the philosophical acephalism of Bataille and his university epigones, still
helplessly playing out the dialectic of the enlightenment. The rationalization of unreason is not much of
a remedy; that is why we took the trouble to diagnose the recuperation and critical evacuation of
Bataille. What confronts us in the stupid underground is also the rationalization of

unreason, but it is accompanied by a much more naked idiocy, sheer stupidity posing
as value, as the last truth of culture, value without value, and an irresistible lure for
suicidal reason. That is, for us, the valueprecisely worthless--of the expansive, aggressively
sophomoric network of the Church of the SubGenius, of these exaggerated revolutionary claims for
a few noisy CDs and nipple piercings, o r of the posturing of the so-called Hakim Bey: "I am all too

well aware of the 'intelligence' which prevents action. Every once in a while however I have
managed to behave as if I were stupid enough to try to change my own life. Sometimes I've
used dangerous stupifiants like religion, marijuana, chaos, the love of boys. On a few occasions I have
attained some degree of success."^6^ The only undergrounds that surface any more are

moronic: cross-eyed obfuscators, cranks, latahs ,^7^ deadly-serious self-parodists,

adolescent fraternities of deep thinkers riding the coattails of castoff suits. What
animates the stupid underground is not merely heroic madness or libidinal ideology or a drooping IQ
*against* reason, although we still have to listen to all of that repeated, precisely, past the point of
endurance; it is something like stupid intelligence, the manic codification of the inane, the willingness

to pursue, absolutely at the risk of abject humiliation, absolutely at the risk of making oneself a perfect
fool, lines of inquiry that official intelligence would rather have shut down. The dismissal of some
dubious scientific fact or method by official intelligence is taken as a clear sign that the powers that be
are hiding something important, and that by this very means assumes the status of truth. Enormous
labors will be devoted to unlocking its secrets and locating it in a worldview that is as logical as it is
laughable, and that sustains the force of truth in large part by giving the lie to official truth. Reactive
research, parody of science. Or of the mission of art and cultural commentary. Once it was crucial to
separate high and low, art and kitsch, for the very good of the human spirit; then one tried to
"transgress" these distinctions, without quite managing to get rid of them. But to copy comic books on
vast canvases or laminate a few thriftshop tchotchkis and exhibit them in a major museum is not what
used to be called a critical gesture, no matter what the catalogues say. It is not a critical reflection on
the commodification of art, but a means of rendering the very distance required for such reflection null
and void; not a "deconstruction" (sic) of the institution of art but the evacuation of criticism itself. In
this zone, criticism is stupid, hence only stupidity can be critical. The illogic of this proposition cannot
entirely eliminate its force. We are caught up in culture's inability to purge itself of the inanity utterly
native to it. The patent stupidity of certain postmodern works of art, and of the commentary that tags
along behind them, is a symptom of a virulent truth that infects everything and everyone, the holy
blood of Van Gogh, Cezanne at his sublime labors, the Sistine Chapel englobing a void, empty frame
after empty frame, vast libraries of special pleading, the whole dumb hollow of culture.

The fact that the aff chooses to bring the conversation into the
debate space at all inherently causes its failure. The alt, an
underground beneath the underground, is the only way to
solve the impacts of the 1AC
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
We have mapped the stupid underground as the capital of the culture of
resentment, of a strict, self-indulgent, and self-evacuating reactivity, lamely
proposing "new" models and modes of existence that nonetheless can never be
entirely reduced to the dialectics of recuperation, and that, even as they sacrifice
themselves to such a facile criticism, gather their critics into a suffocating embrace and
cancel critical distance itself. But there is more at stake than this peculiar and essential
contradiction. Here we will follow the line of what Deleuze and Guattari call
*becoming-imperceptible* toward an underground beneath the underground, one
that does not make itself available to the critic's screens, a strange disappearance
from discourse, from both recuperation and its stupid collapse, an *ars moratorii,* a
withdrawal or disengagement from the discursive economies than render null and
void a thousand pretensions to resistance and subversion, an embryonic turning away, an
internal exile (in all the complex associations of that interiority), a secret that the critic must finally
postulate precisely in the absence of all evidence. If, in one sort of analysis, as we have noted,
everything now is coming up signs, everything is rendered instantly spectacular, simulacral, obscene,
we must assume that there are at least a few who have learned their lesson, a few for

whom the lacerating parodies of the stupid underground no longer suffice, a few
who have cancelled all bets and turned themselves out, declined any further reactivity and
gone off the map. We should note here that, for Nietzsche, the *man of ressentiment* is a man of
secrets, one who is "neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul
*squints;* his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as
*his* world, *his* security, *his* refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how to forget, how to

wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble."^36^ For Zizek, too, this overt obedience
and covert refusal is the mark of a cynical reason that is the proper product of enlightenment reason
itself. Kant's opening of free liberal argument conceals a deeper obedience to the law,

one that is not so much reversed as extended by the cynic: "we know there is no
truth in authority, yet we continue to play its game and to obey it in order not to
disturb the usual run of things ."^37^ This, for us as for Zizek, is in fact the normative model of
criticism, and it is found most of all in the very place where Kant situated it: faculties of liberal arts,
philosophy departments, and so on. Critical distance is belied by the deep obedience

epitomized in the discursive economy itself, in the consistent material forms by

which intellectual commodities are produced and exchanged whatever their ideological
claims to difference; at the level of the intellectual product , there is clearly no difference
between the strictest radical and the wooliest conservative. The stupid
underground is attractive to criticism because it is a mirror in which criticism can
see itself as it is, as a secret order of cynics, even if it does not always recognize itself
there, even if the convenience of its denials drowns out its truth, shining through like the
truth of the analysand.

Their aff is a double turn--It requires visibility to solve the

impacts of the 1ac and cause social change while it uses the
discourse of fugitivity in order to advocate for invisibility--their
attempt to be anti-political links them to politics itself which
affirms state-oriented politics to give the aff meaning---only
complete invisibility solves
Tsianos et al. 8 (Vassilis, teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg,
Germany, Dimitris Papadopoulos teaches social theory at Cardiff University, Niamh
Stephenson teaches social science at the University of New South Wales. Escape
Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century Pluto Press)

imperceptible politics does not necessarily differ from or oppose other

prevalent forms of politics, such as state-oriented politics, micropolitics, identity
politics, cultural and gender politics, civil rights movements, etc. And indeed
imperceptible politics connects with all these various forms of political engagement
and intervention in an opportunistic way: it deploys them to the extent that they
allow the establishment of spaces outside representation ; that is, spaces which do not
In this sense

primarily focus on the transformation of the conditions of the double-R axiom (rights and
representation) but on the insertion of new social forces into a given political terrain. In the previous
chapter we called this form of politics outside politics: the politics which opposes the representational
regime of policing. Imperceptibility is the everyday strategy which allows us to move and to act below
the overcoding regime of representation. This everyday strategy is inherently anti-

theoretical; that is, it resists any ultimate theorisation, it cannot be reduced to one
successful and necessary form of politics (such as state-oriented politics or
micropolitics, for example). Rather, imperceptible politics is genuinely empiricist,
that is it is always enacted as ad hoc practices which allow the decomposition of
the representational strategies in a particular field and the composition of events
which cannot be left unanswered by the existing regime of control. If imperceptible
politics resists theorisation and is ultimately empiricist, what then are the criteria

for doing imperceptible politics? There are three dimensions which characterise
imperceptible politics: objectlessness, totality, trust. Firstly, imperceptible politics is
objectless, that is it performs political transformation without primarily targeting a
specific political aim (such as transformation of a law or institution, or a particular
claim for inclusion, etc). Instead imperceptible politics proceeds by materialising its
own political actions through contagious and affective transformations. The object
of its political practice is its own practices. In this sense, imperceptible politics is
non-intentional - and therein lies its difference from state-oriented politics or the
politics of civil rights movements, for example - it instigates change through a
series of everyday transformations which can only be codified as having a central
political aim or function in retrospect. Secondly, imperceptible politics addresses the totality of
an existing field of power. This seems to be the difference between imperceptible politics and
micropolitics or other alternative social movements: imperceptible politics is not concerned with
containing itself to a molecular level of action; it addresses the totality of power through the social
changes which it puts to work in a particular field of action. The distinction between molar and
molecular (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 275) has only analytical significance from the perspective of
imperceptible politics. In fact imperceptible politics is both molar and molecular, because by being local
situated action it addresses the whole order of control in a certain field. Imperceptible politics is located at
the heart of a field of power and at the same time it opens a way to move outside this field by forcing
the transformation of all these elements which are constitutive of this field. In this sense,
imperceptible politics is a driving force which is simultaneously both present and absent. We described
this in the previous chapter by exploring the importance of speculative figurations for the practice of
escape. On the everyday level of escape (a level we called in this chapter imperceptible politics)
speculative figuration can be translated into trust. This is the third characteristic of imperceptible

politics; it is driven by a firm belief in the importance and truthfulness of its actions,
without seeking any evidence for, or conducting any investigation into its practices.
This is trust. Imperceptible politics is driven by trust in something which seems to
be absent from a particular situation. Imperceptible politics operates around a void,
and it is exactly the conversion of this void into everyday politics that becomes the
vital force for imperceptible politics.

Movements are coopted from within or externally targeted for

eradication as soon as they become visible---only the alt
ruptures politics
The Invisible Committee 7 [an anonymous group of French professors, phd candidates,
and intellectuals, in the book The Coming Insurrection published by Semiotext(e)
(attributed to the Tarnac Nine by the French police),
http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf ]

Whatever angle you look at it from, there's no escape from the present. That's
not the least of its virtues. For those who want absolutely to have hope, it knocks down every
support. Those who claim to have solutions are proven wrong almost immediately.
It's understood that now everything can only go from bad to worse. "There's no future for
the future" is the wisdom behind an era that for all its appearances of extreme normalcy has come
to have about the consciousness level of the first punks. The sphere of political representation
is closed. From left to right, it's the same nothingness acting by turns either as the big

changing up their discourse according to the

latest dispatches from the information service. Those who still vote give one the impression
shots or the virgins, the same sales shelf heads,

that their only intention is to knock out the polling booths by voting as a pure act of protest. And we've
started to understand that in fact its only against the vote itself that people go on voting.

Nothing we've seen can come up to the heights of the present situation; not by far.
By its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more 'grown up' than all those squabbling amongst
themselves to govern it do. Any Belleville chibani 1 is wiser in his chats than in all of those puppets
grand declarations put together. The lid of the social kettle is triple-tight, and the pressure inside wont
stop building. The ghost of Argentinas Que Se Vayan Todos 2 is seriously starting to haunt the ruling
heads. The fires of November 2005 will never cease to cast their shadow on all

consciences. Those first joyous fires were the baptism of a whole decade full of promises. The
medias suburbs vs. the Republic myth, if its not inefficient, is certainly not true. The fatherland was
ablaze all the way to downtown everywhere, with fires that were methodically snuffed out. Whole

streets went up in flames of solidarity in Barcelona and no one but the people who
lived there even found out about it. And the country hasnt stopped burning since. Among the
accused we find diverse profiles, without much in common besides a hatred for existing society; not
united by class, race, or even by neighborhood. What was new wasnt the suburban revolt, since that
was already happening in the 80s, but the rupture with its established forms. The assailants werent
listening to anybody at all anymore, not their big brothers, not the local associations assigned to help
return things to normal. No SOS Racism which only fatigue, falsification, and media omert

could feign putting an end. The whole series of nocturnal strikes, anonymous attacks,
wordless destruction, had the merit of busting wide open the split between politics
and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious weight of this assault which made no
demands, and had no message other than a threat which had nothing to do with
politics. But youd have to be blind not to see what is purely political about this
resolute negation of politics, and youd certainly have to know absolutely nothing about the
autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years. Like abandoned children we burned the
first baby toys of a society that deserves no more respect than the monuments of Paris did
at the end of Bloody Week 5 -- and knows it. Theres no social solution to the present
situation. First off because the vague aggregate of social groupings, institutions, and
individual bubbles that we designate by the anti-phrase society has no substance ,
because theres no language left to express common experiences wit h. It took a half4

century of fighting by the Lumires to thaw out the possibility of a French Revolution, and a century of
fighting by work to give birth to the fearful Welfare State. Struggles creating the language in which
the new order expresses itself. Nothing like today. Europe is now a de-monied continent that sneaks off
to make a run to the Lidl 6 and has to fly with the low-cost airlines to be able to keep on flying. None

of the problems formulated in the social language are resolvable . The

retirement pensions issue, the issues of precariousness, the youth and their violence can
only be kept in suspense as long as the ever more surprising acting out they thinly cover gets
managed away police-like. No ones going to be happy to see old people being wiped out at a
knockdown price, abandoned by their own and with nothing to say. And those whove found

less
humiliation and more benefit in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not give
up their weapons, and prison wont make them love society. The rage to enjoy of the
hordes of the retired will not take the somber cuts to their monthly income on an empty stomach, and
will get only too excited about the refusal to work among a large sector of the youth. And to conclude,

no guaranteed income granted the day after a quasi-uprising will lay the
foundations for a new New Deal, a new pact, and a new peace. The social sentiment is
rather too evaporated for all that. As their solution, theyll just never stop putting on
the pressure, to make sure nothing happens, and with it well have more and more
police chases all over the neighborhood. The drone that even according to the police

did fly over Seine-Saint-Denis 7 last July 14 th is a picture of the future in much more
straightforward colors than all the hazy images we get from the humanists. That they
indeed

took the time to clarify that it was not armed shows pretty clearly the kind of road were headed down.
The country is going to be cut up into ever more air-tight zones. Highways built along the border of the
sensitive neighborhoods already form walls that are invisible and yet able to cut them off from the
private subdivisions. Whatever good patriotic souls may think about it, the management of
neighborhoods by community is most effective just by its notoriety. The purely metropolitan

portions of the country, the main downtowns, lead their luxurious lives in an ever
more calculating, ever more sophisticated, ever more shimmering deconstruction.
They light up the whole planet with their whorehouse red lights, while the BAC 8 and the private
security companies -- read: militias -- patrols multiply infinitely, all the while
benefiting from being able to hide behind an ever more disrespectful judicial front.
The catch-22 of the present, though perceptible everywhere, is denied everywhere. Never
have so many psychologists, sociologists, and literary people devoted themselves to it,
each with their own special jargon, and each with their own specially missing
solution. Its enough just to listen to the songs that come out these days, the trifling new French
music, where the petty-bourgeoisie dissects the states of its soul and the K1Fry mafia 9 makes its
declarations of war, to know that this coexistence will come to an end soon and that a decision is
about to be made. This book is signed in the name of an imaginary collective. Its editors are not its
authors. They are merely content to do a little clean-up of whats scattered around the eras common
areas, around the murmurings at bar-tables, behind closed bedroom doors. Theyve only determined a

few necessary truths, whose universal repression fills up the psychiatric hospitals and the
painful gazes. Theyve made themselves scribes of the situation. Its the privilege of radical
circumstances that justice leads them quite logically to revolution. Its enough just to say
what we can see and not avoid the conclusions to be drawn from i

2NC Turns Case

Underground strategies of resistance ignore history and can
never provide change
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,
http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
The stupid underground is marked by the simultaneous critical understanding of the
fatality of recuperation and a general indifference to the fact; it ignores what it knows,
and knows it. It acts as though it forgets, until it virtually forgets, what it always recalls. It
responds to every critical reminder, even those it throws at itself, with a *So what, fuck
you.* But this very feigned stupidity, this posture of indifference to its own persistent critical
knowledge, is the trace of another trajectory. For if the euphoria of punk nihilism is entirely the
nihilism of the commodity, by this same means, at certain unpredictable moments, it represents the
possibility of nihilism turned loose, driven suicidally mad, *ressentiment* pushed to the brink of the
reactive and becoming force. Inane energy, brute energy, energy without reason, without support,
even when it is caught up in what otherwise poses as a critical project. This is not to say that the
euphoric frenzy of the punk or skinhead is the sign of something new and vital: the energy

released by the stupid underground is never anything more than an effect of its
very morbidity. It is marketed as novelty, but that is not its truth. Nor will it ever constitute
a base for opposition: it cannot be yoked to any program of reform, nor serve any
longer the heroic myth of transgression. It is merely a symptom of order itself.
Everything has been recuperated, but what is recuperated and put to death returns, returns
ferociously, and it is the return of its most immanent dead that most threatens every form of order. The
repressed does not come back as a living being but as the ghost it always was, and not to free us but
to haunt us. It returns as repetition; when we see it in the mirror, as our mirror, we pretend not to
recognize it. The fury of the punk or skinhead is the fury of this stupid repetition, and it is far more
destructive than the most brilliant modernist invention. It ruins everything and leaves it all still in
place, still functioning as if it mattered, never relieving us of its apparition, never pretending to go
beyond it, draining it of value without clearing it away. That is why one cannot dismiss it

according to the logic of the new, whereby the only admissible revolutionary force
must conform to the movement of progress and innovation. The rhetoric of
innovation is parroted by the stupid underground, because it still obeys the
superficial form of the avant-garde. But it obeys it long after it is dead, and as if that
death didn't matter, as if history had never occurred in the first place, as if
everything retro just suddenly appeared, in all its original vacuity. As if it were even better,
more powerful, once it is dead, so long as one insists that it is and pretends that it isn't. It is the blind
repetition of every exhausted logic far past the point of termination that generates the most virulent
negation. The stupid persistence of the dead has taken the place of the critical.

The affirmatives belief that they can cure society of

problems causes the same impacts they desperately attempt
to solve
Mann, 95, professor of English, Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz (Paul, May, Stupid
Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture, vol. 5,

http://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/english/faculty/paulmann.aspx//RF)
The stupid underground can be mapped onto a familiar and perhaps quite objectionable
psychotopography: it is a zone of the repressed of culture and thus, according to this model, both a
pathological site giving rise to all sorts of pathogenic surface effects, and a
therapeutic matrix, a place where impacted energies may be guided toward a proper sublimation.
The stupid underground presents itself as both a symptom of the disease of capital
and an indication of the direction of its cure. But in the stupid underground, as in so
many other sites, the direction of the cure often leads back into the disease; or the
cure itself turns out to be nothing more than a symptom. For instance, in the terms of
one standard hypothesis, the stupid underground reproduces the pathology of Other, of
the Symbolic order, in the very attempt to avoid it, like the alcoholic's prodigal son
who is so repelled by his father's disease that he can only end by becoming an
alcoholic himself; at the same time, it is a kind of paranoid rechanneling of obsessions
and defenses, a way to reconceive the social world by means of , indeed as a
psychosis. Perhaps merely the critical equivalent of lining your hat with aluminum foil to protect
yourself from alien radiation or government microwave transmissions (often: the same thing); perhaps
a more radical form of schizoanalytic political action.

AT: Perm
Double bind---either the perm links or it severs---the link
debate determines how you view perm solvency---1% risk of a
link taints the perm because there is a real tradeoff between
visibility and invisibility---severance is a voting issue because
it justifies aff conditionality and sets a precedent.
INCLUDING ANY ELEMENT of the political strategy of the 1AC
ONLY RISKS short-circuiting the radical potential of the
alternative by making protest visible. Invisibility is a
precondition for freedom of action
The Invisible Committee 7 [an anonymous group of French professors, phd candidates, and
intellectuals, in the book The Coming Insurrection published by Semiotext(e) (attributed to the Tarnac
Nine by the French police), http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf]

Stay invisible. Put anonymity on the offense. In a demonstration, a unionist pulls the mask
off an anonymous protester who had just broken a window: Assume responsibility for what youre
doing instead of hiding yourself. To be visible is to be out in the open that is, above all

to
be vulnerable. When the leftists of all nations continually make their cause more
visible whether that of the homeless, of women, or of immigrants in the hope
that it will get taken care of, theyre doing exactly the opposite of what they ought to.
To not be visible, but rather to turn to our advantage the anonymity weve been relegated
to, and with conspiracies, nocturnal and/or masked actions, to make it into an unassailable
attack-position. The fires of November 2005 offer a model. No leader, no demands, no
organization, but words, gestures, complicities. To be nothing socially is not a humiliating
condition, the source of some tragic lack of recognition (to be recognized: but by who?), but
on the contrary is the precondition for maximum freedom of action . Not
signing your name to your crimes, but only attaching some imaginary acronym people still remember
the ephemeral BAFT (Tarterets AntiCop Brigade) is a way to preserve that freedom. Obviously, one of
the regimes first defensive maneuvers was to create a suburban slum subject to treat as the author
of the riots of November 2005. Just take a look at the ugly mugs of those who are someone in this
society if you want help understanding the joy of being no one.

WE ARE POLITICS YOU ARE POLICING the logic of your system

is broken, and we must escape it lest we fall back into the
same traps of reinforcing the minoritization of graffiti groups
within a majoritarian framework that forces them to consent to
the will of US policy community who will appropriate their
consent for oppression. ONLY a politics which refuses the trap
of political representation has the possibility of emancipation
-- this is a prior question and STARTING POINT is key
Tsianos et al. 8 Vassilis, teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, Dimitris Papadopoulos teaches social
theory at Cardiff University, Niamh Stephenson teaches social science at the University of New South Wales. Escape Routes: Control
and Subversion in the 21st Century Pluto Press

To escape policing and start doing politics necessitates dis-identi- fication - the
refusal of assigned, proper places for participation in society. As indicated earlier,
escape functions not as a form of exile, nor as mere opposition or protest, but as an interval
which interrupts everyday policing (Ranciere, 1998). Political disputes - as distinct from
disputes over policing - are not concerned with rights or repre sentation or with the
construction of a majoritarian position in the political arena. They are not even
disputes over the terms of inclusion or the features of a minority. They occur prior to
inclusion, beyond the terms of the double-R axiom, beyond the majority-minority duality.
They are disputes over the existence of those who have no part (and in this sense they are disputes
about justice in a Benjaminian sense of the word, Benjamin, 1996a). Politics arises from the

emergence of the miscounted, the imperceptible, those who have no place within
the normalising organisation of the social realm. The refusal of represen tation is a
way of introducing the part which is outside of policing, which is not a part of
community, which is neither a minority nor intends to be included within the
majority. Outside politics is the way to escape the controlling and repressive force
of contemporary politics (that is of contemporary policing); or else it is a way to change
our senses, our habits, our practices in order to experiment together with those who
have no part, instead of attempting to include them into the current regime of
control. This emergence fractures normalising, police logic. It refigures the
perceptible, not so that others can finally recognise one's proper place in the social
order, but to make evident the incommensurability of worlds, the
incommensurability of an existing distribution of bodies and subjectivities with the
principle of equality. Politics is a refusal of representation. Politics happens beyond,
before representation. Outside politics is the materialisation of the attempt to occupy this space
outside the controlling force of becoming majoritarian through the process of representation. If we
return to our initial question of how people contest control, then we can say that
when regimes of control encounter escape they instigate processes of naming and
representation. They attempt to reinsert escaping subjectivities into the subjectform. Outside politics arises as people attempt to evade the imposition of control
through their subsumption into the subject-form. This is not an attempt simply to
move against or to negate representation. Nor is it a matter of introducing pure potential and
imagination in reaction to the constraining power of control. Rather, escape is a constructive
and creative movement - it is a literal, material, embodied movement towards

something which cannot be named, towards something which is fictional. Escape is

simultaneously in the heart of social transformation and outside of it. Escape is always here because it
is non-literal, witty and hopeful.

A2: Aff is a prereq

Their arguments artificially construct us as dependent on the
necessity of their advocacy ultimately depoliticizes us
Hershock '99, East-West Center, 1999. [Changing the way society changes,
Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 6, 154; http://jbe.gold.ac.uk/6/hershock991.html]

The trouble is that, like other technologies biased toward control, t he

more successful legislation

becomes, the more it renders itself necessary. Because it aims at rigorous definition -- at
establishing hard boundaries or limits -- crossing the threshold of legislative utility means
creating conditions under which the definition of freedom becomes so complex as to
be self-defeating. Taken to its logical end, legally-biased social activism is thus liable
to effect an infinite density of protocols for maintaining autonomy, generating a
matrix of limits on discrimination that would finally be conducive to what might be
called "axiological entropy" -- a state in which movement in any direction is equally
unobstructed and empty of dramatic potential. Contrary to expectations, complete
"freedom of choice" would not mean the elimination of all impediments to
meaningful improvisation, but rather an erasure of the latter's conditions of
possibility. The effectiveness and efficiency of "hard," control-biased technologies depend on our
using natural laws -- horizons of possibility -- as fulcrums for leveraging or dictating changes in the
structure of our circumstances. Unlike improvised contributions to changes taking place in our
situation, dictating the terms of change effectively silences our situational partners. Technological

authority thus renders our circumstances mute and justifies ignoring the
contributions that might be made by the seasons or the spiritual force of the
mountains to the meaning -- the direction of movement -- of our ongoing patterns of
interdependence. With the "perfection" of technically-mediated control, our wills
would know no limit. We would be as gods, existing with no imperatives, no external
compulsions, and no priorities. We would have no reason to do one thing first or
hold one thing, and not another, as most sacred or dear. Such "perfection" is,
perhaps, as fabulous and unattainable as it is finally depressing. Yet the vast
energies of global capital are committed to moving in its direction, for the most part
quite uncritically. The consequences -- as revealed in the desecration and
impoverishing of both 'external' and 'internal' wilderness (for instance, the
rainforests and our imaginations) -- are every day more evident. The critical
question we must answer is whether the "soft" technologies of legally-biased and
controlled social change commit us to an equivalent impoverishment and
desecration. The analogy between the dependence of technological progress on natural laws and
that of social activism on societal laws is by no means perfect. Except among a scattering of
philosophers and historians of science, for example, the laws of nature are not viewed as changeable
artifacts of human culture. But for present purposes, the analogy need only focus our attention on the
way legal institutions -- like natural laws -- do not prescriptively determine the shape of all things to
come, but rather establish generic limits for what relationships or states of affairs are factually
admissible. Laws that guarantee certain "freedoms" necessarily also prohibit others.

Without the fulcrums of unallowable acts, the work of changing a society would
remain as purely idealistic as using wishful thinking to move mountains. Changing
legal institutions at once forces and enforces societal reform. By affirming and
safeguarding those freedoms or modes of autonomy that have come to be seen as

generically essential to 'being human', a legally-biased social activism cannot avoid

selectively limiting the ways we engage with one another. The absence of coercion
may be a basic aim of social activism, but if our autonomy is to be guaranteed both
fair and just, its basic strategy must be one of establishing non-negotiable
constraints on how we co-exist. Social activism is thus in the business of striking
structural compromises between its ends and its means -- between particular
freedoms and general equality, and between practical autonomy and legal
anonymity. By shifting the locus of freedoms from unique persons to generic citizens -- and in
substantial sympathy with both the Platonic renunciation of particularity and the scientific discounting
of the exceptional and extraordinary -- social activist methodology promotes dramatic

anonymity in order to universally realize the operation of 'blind justice'. Much as

hard technologies of control silence the contributions of wilderness and turn us
away from the rewards of a truly joint improvisation of order, the process of social
activism reduces the relevance of the always unique and unprecedented terrain of
our interdependence. This is no small loss. The institutions that guarantee our
generic independence effectively pave over those vernacular relationships through
which our own contributory virtuosity might be developed and shared -relationships out of which the exceptional meaning of our immediate situation might
be continuously realized. In contrast with Buddhist emptiness -- a practice that entails attending
to the mutual relevance of all things -- both the aims and strategies of social activism are
conducive to an evacuation of the conditions of dramatic virtuosity, a societal
depletion of our resources for meaningfully improvised and liberating intimacy with
all things.

Misc A2 Hip Hop XTs

Policy Making Key

Policy making focus is keythe only way to learn about how to
institute change is through analysis of real life political
problems and solutionship hop narratives do nothing
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 42-44, DavidK]

We can do better than that kind of politics. There is an old joke in which someone is looking within
the light cast by a streetlight for a dollar bill they dropped. Someone asks why they are looking there when they
dropped the dollar bill a block away, and they say "the light's better here." The politics of hip-hop is exactly like

Being oppositional feels good and makes for good rhymes spit over great beats.
But meanwhile, black people's lives are improving in ways that have nothing do with
sticking up their middle fingers. They are overcoming in the real America, the only
America they will ever know. The hip-hop ethos, ever assailing the suits, cannot even see
any of this, because it is all about that upturned middle finger. The beat is better
over here. But what about the great things going on where there is no beat? Hip-hop, quite simply,
doesn't care. Why would it? It's music. Too often for it to be an accident, I have found that people making
big claims about the potential for hip-hop to affect politics or create a revolution
have mysteriously little interest in politics as traditionally understood, or political change as it
actually happens, as opposed to via dramatic revolutionary uprisings. Rehashing that too many
black men are in prison, they know nothing about nationwide efforts to reintegrate
ex- cons into society. Whipping up applause knocking Republicans, they couldn't
cite a single bill making its way through Congress related to the black condition (and
there are always some). They are not, really, political junkies at all. The politics that they
intend when referring to its rela tionship to hip-hop is actually the personal kind: to
them, politics is an attitude. Attitude alone will do nothing for that ex-con. Efforts
that help that ex-con are sustained in ongoing fashion quite separately from
anything going on in the rap arena or stemming from it. This means that if we are really
interested in moving forward, then in relation to that task, hip-hop does not merit serious
interest. Hip-hop is a style, in rhythm, dress code, carriage, and attitude. But there is style and there is substance. Hip-hop's style, however much it makes the neck snap, is ill-conceived to create
substance for black people or anyone else.
this.

Failure to have a concrete policy option we can debate against guarantees

that oppression continues and efforts for change backfire
Steve 07

(Anonymous member of Black Block and Active Transformation who lives in East Lansing, MI, Date
Last Mod. Feb 8, http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/global/a16dcdiscussion.htm, DavidK)
What follows is not an attempt to discredit our efforts. It was a powerful and inspiring couple of days. I feel it is
important to always analyze our actions and be self-critical, and try to move forward, advancing our movement.

The State has used Seattle as an excuse to beef up police forces all over the
country. In many ways Seattle caught us off-guard, and we will pay the price for it if
we don't become better organized. The main weakness of the Black Block in DC
was that clear goals were not elaborated in a strategic way and tactical leadership was not
developed to coordinate our actions. By leadership I don't mean any sort of authority, but some coordination beside

the call of the mob. We were being led around DC by any and everybody . All someone would do
is make a call loud enough, and the Black Block would be in motion. We were often lead around by Direct Action

We were therefore
used to assist in their strategy, which was doomed from the get go, because we had
none of our own. The DAN strategy was the same as it was in Seattle, which the DC police learned how to
Network (DAN - organizers of the civil disobedience) tactical people, for lack of our own.

police. Our only chance at disrupting the IMF/WB meetings was with drawing the police out of their security
perimeter, therefore weakening it and allowing civil disobedience people to break through the barriers. This needs
to be kept in mind as we approach the party conventions this summer. Philadelphia is especially ripe for this new
strategy, since the convention is not happening in the business center. Demonstrations should be planned all over
the city to draw police all over the place. On Monday the event culminated in the ultimate anti-climax, an arranged
civil disobedience. The civil disobedience folks arranged with police to allow a few people to protest for a couple
minutes closer to where the meetings were happening, where they would then be arrested. The CD strategy needed
arrests. Our movement should try to avoid this kind of stuff as often as possible. While this is pretty critical of the
DAN/CD strategy, it is so in hindsight. This is the same strategy that succeeded in shutting down the WTO
ministerial in Seattle. And, while we didn't shut down the IMF/WB meetings, we did shut down 90 blocks of the

the lack of
strategy problem is a general problem within the North American anarchist movement. We get
caught up in tactical thinking without establishing clear goals. We need to elaborate
how our actions today fit into a plan that leads to the destruction of the state and
capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy. Moving away from strictly tactical
thinking toward political goals and long term strategy needs to be a priority for the
anarchist movement. No longer can we justify a moralistic approach to the latest outrage running around like chickens with their heads cut off . We need to prioritize developing the
American government on tax day - so we should be empowered by their fear of us! The root of

political unity of our affinity groups and collectives, as well as developing regional federations and starting the
process of developing the political principles that they will be based around (which will be easier if we have made
some headway in our local groups). The NorthEastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC) is a good

The
strategies that we develop in our collectives and networks will never be blueprints set in stone. They will
be documents in motion, constantly being challenged and adapted. But without a
specific elaboration of what we are working toward and how we plan to get there,
we will always end up making bad decisions. If we just assume everyone is on the
same page, we will find out otherwise really quick when shit gets critical . Developing
example of doing this. They have prioritized developing the political principles they are federated around.

regional anarchist federations and networks is a great step for our movement. We should start getting these things
going all over the continent. We should also prioritize developing these across national borders, which NEFAC has
also done with northeastern Canada. Some of the errors of Love and Rage were that it tried to cover too much
space too soon, and that it was based too much on individual membership, instead of collective membership. We
need to keep these in mind as we start to develop these projects. One of the benefits of Love and Rage was that it

a forum among a lot of people to have a lot of political discussion and try to
develop strategy in a collective way. This, along with mutual aid and security, could be the priorities of
provided

the regional anarchist federations. These regional federations could also form the basis for tactical leadership at
demonstrations. Let me first give one example why we need tactical teams at large demos. In DC the Black Block
amorphously made the decision to try to drive a dumpster through one of the police lines. The people in front with
the dumpster ended up getting abandoned by the other half of the Black Block who were persuaded by the voice of
the moment to move elsewhere. The people up front were in a critical confrontation with police when they were
abandoned. This could be avoided if the Black Block had a decision making system that slowed down decision
making long enough for the block to stay together. With this in mind we must remember that the chaotic,
decentralized nature of our organization is what makes us hard to police. We must maximize the benefits of
decentralized leadership, without establishing permanent leaders and targets. Here is a proposal to consider for
developing tactical teams for demos. Delegates from each collective in the regional federation where the action is
happening would form the tactical team. Delegates from other regional federations could also be a part of the
tactical team. Communications between the tactical team and collectives, affinity groups, runners, etc. could be
established via radio. The delegates would be recallable by their collectives if problems arose, and as long as clear
goals are elaborated ahead of time with broader participation, the tactical team should be able to make informed
decisions. An effort should be made to rotate delegates so that everyone develops the ability. People with less
experience should be given the chance to represent their collectives in less critical situations, where they can
become more comfortable with it. The reality is that liberal politics will not lead to an end to economic exploitation,
racism, and sexism. Anarchism offers a truly radical alternative. Only a radical critique that links the oppressive

nature of global capitalism to the police state at home has a chance of diversifying the movement against global

In order for the most oppressed people here to get involved the movement
must offer the possibility of changing their lives for the better. A vision of what
"winning" would look like must be elaborated if people are going to take the risk with
tremendous social upheaval, which is what we are calling for. We cannot afford to give the old
anarchist excuse that "the people will decide after the revolution" how this or that
will work. We must have plans and ideas for things as diverse as transportation, schooling, crime
prevention, and criminal justice. People don't want to hear simple solutions to complex questions,
that only enforces people's opinions of us as naive. We need practical examples of what
we are fighting for. People can respond to examples better than unusual theory . While we
capitalism.

understand that we will not determine the shape of things to come, when the system critically fails someone needs

If we are not prepared for

that we can assume others will be prepared to build up the state or a new state.
to be there with anti-authoritarian suggestions for how to run all sorts of things.

Revolution Fails
Hip-hop is too anti-establishment to result in political change.
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 85-86, DavidK]

in 2004, P. Diddy spearheaded a voter registration campaign and called

it "Vote or Die." Never mind how little came of it. As far as Nas was concerned, it
was a sellout operation. Here was Nas's considered opinion: Hip-Hop is not Vote or Die.
That's not Hip-Hop. No disrespect to Diddy and Russell and them those are my heroesbut Hip-Hop is not
Vote or Die . . . Hip-Hop is anti-establishment. Ice Cube and them were always that way. In order for
Check this out:

Hip- Hop to change our point of view, it means for us to have a candidate that understands Hip-Hop. If you say

hip-hop politics
denies the legitimacy of the way America operates and always willi.e., real
politics. Hip- hop stands outside of the political establishment, seeking a brand-new
day. Nas has no reason to think that politics of that brand has the slightest chance
of helping the black people he raps about. The only way a recreationally radical
stance such as his makes any kind of sense is that hip-hop is not about politics at all
it is about being oppositional regardless of the outcome. This is why the Hip-Hop Revolution never
seems to actually happen, and never could.
Vote or Die then you are saying it's all good that Anheuser-Busch supports Vote or Die. So,

No revolutionhip hop has tried and failed for more than 25 years
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 100-101, DavidK]

Something interesting about the Hip-hop Revolution is that , like the uprising of the proletariat
that Marxists predicted, it seems to be ever in the future. We move ever fur ther into the
future in real life, but never any closer to that marvelous time when hip-hop
becomes "a political tool" and starts improving lives. It's been a while now. For example, the
1989 "Self Destruction" video speaking against black-on-black violence is now a period piece, and the rate of

It's been a quarter of a century since writers

first got excited about the "political potential" of this music. It's not as if writers today
homicides among black teens remains appalling.

excited about hip-hop's "political potential" are referring to a music that emerged only ten years ago, not long

Writers were depicting rap as possibly sparking a political

revolution a quarter of a century ago, in the era of Hill Street Blues, Michael Jackson's Thriller, and
enough to expect results just yet.

the Rubik's Cube; when VCRs were a new luxury item; the media was abuzz with profiles of "yuppies" and
"preppies"; e-mail, laptops, CDs, the Internet, and cell phones did not exist; most people had never had sushi or

It's been a long, long time. What's

taking so long? Think even about the "conscious" hip-hop tracks that take a break
from the fist-in-the-air posture and urge the black community to look inward . Take,
Thai food; and Madonna was the girl singing that new hit "Holiday."

say, the "Skinz" track on Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth's Mecca and the Soul Brother, which one could justifiably have
thought of as a positive message in 1992. It urges black people to use condoms, which would be especially

One may well have listened to "Skinz" in

1992 and thought that maybe hip-hop of the conscious kind might forge a revolution
in black communities in terms of responsibility for sexual behavior. The thing is,
though, that 1992 was more than a decade and a half ago. No revolution yet. Teen
germane nowadays with the AIDS crisis in black communities.

pregnancy rates are down since then, yes, but it'd be hard to say that the "Skinz" or any of the other rap tracks
addressing similar themes is the reason for that. And really, pregnancy rates are just down a tad, not enough to

women having babies as

teenagers remains very common and perfectly ordinary. Dream now of hip-hop
creating some kind of revolution, and consider that people had the exact same
dream fifteen years agoand started having it ten years be fore that. Do we really
have any reason to suppose that revolution is more likely to happen now than in 1992?
Could it not be that this music is not, in the America we live in and know, going to create a revolution at all? Is the
idea that hip-hop is "revolutionary" an actual engagement with real ity, or is it, like so
many of the routines in the music itself, such as the gunplay and recreational misogyny, a pose? Black
America needs more than an attitude dressed up as an intention.
create any noticeable sea change in black communities where, obviously,

We dont need a revolution, we need a blueprint for political change

McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 130-133, DavidK]

A question that must be asked is also just what a black revolution would even be
about today. Certainly black America has serious problems. However, a revolution
does not consist solely of howling grievances. For a revolutionary effort to be worth anyone's time,
the demands have to be ones that those being revolted against have some way of
fulfilling. In one episode of the animated version of Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks, there is an articulate
depiction of the idea that black people need to Rise Up as a group and Make Demands. Huey, whose bitter frown is
as ingrained in his design as a vapid smile is on Mickey Mouse, imagines that Martin Luther King comes back to life
and inspires a revolution in black America, graphically indicated as hordes of blacks swarming the gates at the
White House. "It's fun to dream," Huey concludes, the idea being that black people know what to rise up against,
but that they would run up against the heartless moral cesspool that is AmeriKKKa, where, say, "George Bush

what would the people at the gates , if attended

demand? Fifty years ago, the demands were obvious: dismantle Jim Crow. And
since then, a lot more has been given : affirmative action, the transformation of welfare from a stingy
doesn't care about black people." But the question is:
to,

program for widows to an open- ended dole for any unmarried woman with children (done largely as riot insurance
in the late 1960s, called for by leftist activists including black ones) ... I could go on. Soyes,

black America
still has problems. Yes, there is still racism. But what is it that the White House
should do now, in 2008, that is staring everyone in the face but hasn't happened
because white people just "don't care" and the black community has failed to
"demand" it? What? Precisely? I am not implying that what needs to happen is black people getting
acquainted with those "bootstraps" we hear so much about. But the problems are not the kind that
could be solved by simply buckshotting whitey with the usual cries of "racism." Would
the people at the gates be calling for inner city schools to get as much money as schools in leafy white suburbs? If
they did, they would see the same thing that has happened when exactly that was done in places like New Jersey
and Kansas City: nothing changes. Obviously something needs to be done about the schools. But what, of the sort

How many of the shouters would know

about poor black kids kicking academic butt in KIPP schools? Or in other charter
that should be shouted through the White House fence?

schools filled with kids there because of oh dearvouchers, in Ohio and Florida? Let's face
itmost of the people at that fence would draw a blank on what KIPP schools even
were, much less the good that vouchers are doing. Some revolution. Would the
people at the gates be calling for police forces to stop beating up on young black
men and sometimes killing them? Well, that's a legitimate concern. But the
revolution on that is already happening, in every American city making concerted
efforts to foster dialogue between the police and the street. We're not there yet, but things
are better. Anyone who says that the shooting death of Sean Bell in 2006 in New York was
evidence that nothing had changed since the death of Amadou Diallo in 1998 knows
little of what the relationship between the police and black people was like in New York
and so many other places before the nineties. In 1960, the death of Amadou Diallo would have made the local
papers only, for one day, and, even in those papers, on some back page. It wouldn't have been considered
important news. Going through newspapers of that era, one constantly comes across stories about things that
happened to "Negroes," on page A31, that today would be front-page breaking news.

We are blissfully past

that America. And back to the main point: what could the White House do to prevent things like the Diallo and
Bell incidents? What simple, wave-the-wand policy point would make it so that never again would a young black

The
relationship between police forces and black people is not as simple as something
that could be changed by storming through a gate , which is obvious from how persistent that
man be killed by the police in dicey circumstances where everybody lost his head for a minute or so?

problem has been despite profound changes on so many other fronts.

No Social Change
Note: This card uses the F-word

Hip hop isnt a good avenue for social changeit is too radical
and insulated as art.
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 10-12, DavidK]

I
"politics" of hip-hop has to tell us about where to go after we erupt with
the idle, reactive eruption of Fuck. And where does hip-hop tell us to go? Boiling down the
"revolutionary" statements by rappers of all kinds and their band of chroniclers, one
gleans a manifesto that goes roughly like this: The Civil Rights, revolution only took
us halfway. Some lucky ducks rose into the middle class , there are more blacks in the movies
If the message of this supposedly revolutionary music is just "Fuck!" the message is weak. Fuck! is tap water.

am concerned with

what the

and on TV, and some blacks have risen high in the governmentalthough they are merely apologists for

Still, vast numbers of black people remain poor and/or in jail, and the
reason is that white people are holding them down. Racism remains black America's main
AmeriKKKa.

problem, and the solution is for whites to finally come to a grand realization that there is still work for them to do. In
the sixties the white man only took one hand off our necks. The job of the informed black person is to rage against
the machine, with the plan of forcing the white man to take that other hand off. Otherwise, we can expect little of

That way of looking at black America's problems is

considered as obvious by a great many people as the sky is blue. I, however, believe that it
is mistaken, for reasons I will present. Hip-hop's politics are sincere, but its propo nents are
unaware that these politics are a dead end. Yet my implication is not that the alternative is "Pull
black America except what it is.

ourselves up by our own bootstraps." There is a third way. The manifesto would go something like this: Black
America's politics must be about helping people be their best within the American system as it always will be,
divorced of romantic, unfeasible notions of some massive transformation of basic procedure along the lines of what
happened in the sixties. If that sounds strange or vaguely unexciting, this is only because a hangover from the
victories of the sixties has conditioned so many of us to think that the only significant change is the kind that
makes for good TV (and has a catchy beat). I, for one, am quite excited about the prospects of black America right

any sense of black politics implying that we must seek some kind of
dramatic rupture with current reality is a black politics that can go nowhere, misses
opportunities to forge real change in the real world, and misses changes already
going on. Hip-hop, with its volume, infectiousness, and the media-friendly array of celebrities it has created,
is a primary conduit of this "revolutionary" brand of black politics , held about up as
enlightenment to a black America notoriously conflicted as to how to move ahead. This is dangerous and
retrograde. We are infected with an idea that snapping our necks to black men
chanting cynical potshots the Powers That Be in surly voices over a beat is a form of
political engagement. We are taught that this is showing ourselves to have broad horizons. On the
contrary, this music has less to teach us than we are told. Hip-hop fans ridicule
critics of the music as taking the violence and misogyny too seriously. "It's just
music," they often saybut then at the same time, thrill to people talking about
hip-hop as political and revolutionary. In fact, they too are taking hip-hop too seriously.
Hip- hop presents nothing useful to forging political change in the real world. It's all
about attitude and just that. It's just music. Good music, but just music.
now. However,

Their focus on revolutionary split divorces focus from avenues that can
lead to real progressivism
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 12-13, DavidK]

The fashionable pretense otherwise discourages seri ous progressive thought of the
kind that the old Civil Rights heroes who made our America possible would recognize. It clouds our eyes
and ears with a dream vision of black America spitting verses so fierce and true that
white America once again realizes that black people are America's biggest problem ,
gets down on its knees, begs forgiveness, sheds all vestiges of racist bias, and starts coughing up. Folks, that's
never going to happen again. That vision has no hope of coming true, and I will explain
why. It's not only that there will be no hip-hop revolution. There will be no revolution
at all. And yet there is no reason to see this as a message of hopelessness. Black
America has all reason at this moment to be hopeful , and I will show why. What we can be
hopeful about is that change will hap pen. Not rupture, but change. Slow but sure.
Faster than just fifteen years ago, even, but overall, slowly. Mesmerized by the idea that the only
meaningful change in black America will be abrupt, dramatic, and will leave whitey
with egg on his facethat is, "hip-hoperatic"we miss signs of real change right under our
noses, unable to see that anything is going on worth our support and participation.
We will not be satisfied just proving that we know life isn't fair. We will not rest until
we are actually moving something.

Black/White Binary Bad

The paranoid us versus them dichotomy of hip hop prevents
instituting any meaningful change
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 37-39, DavidK]

In terms of how rappers address social and political issues relevant to solving black
America's biggest problems, we also see that attitude alone has pride of place over
sincere interest in making a difference. The leading cause of death for black
Americans aged twenty- five to forty-four is not gunfire but AIDS. Every year these days, two-thirds of
new AIDS cases are black women. How does rap, so "political" and "revolutionary,"
approach this? For every rap urging people to use condoms , such as "Skinz" on Pete Rock and
C. L. Smooth's Mecca and the Soul Brother, there are two reminding us that AIDS was foisted
upon blacks by whites to sterilize us. You hear this again and again in hip-hop: Kanye West pulls it in
the "Heard 'Em Say" opener to his Late Registration, such a gorgeous piece of work, but tainted in his tossing this

Why? Because airing that paranoid us-against-them

analysis makes for better hip-hop than the truth that seri ous scientists are devoting
their careers to, which is that AIDS infected humans through a monkey bite. No one could even begin to make
street-corner BS off as if it were simple fact.

a case that the scientists working out the details on this are closet racists blowing a smoke screen. Nor would

what is front
and center in hip-hop's take on AIDS is belliger ence, because it fits the hip-hop
"feel." Belligerence is what makes the music good. But in this case, the belligerence is based on a
dopey cartoon street myth, spread by books and pamphlets that sway readers under the impression that
anybody want to write a rap about people getting AIDS from a monkey bite. And that is because

what is printed must be true, especially if it appeals to their gut instincts (one thinks of the anti-Western fundamentalist Muslims fond of conspiracy theories about the West who earnestly defend their claims by saying "It's on
the Internet!"or, in fact, Amiri Baraka saying the same thing in defending his claim that the attack on the Twin

the fist in the air has pride of place, because that, in

but what about the black women living with nausea,
diarrhea, and exhaustion from their sickness? Constructive politics: use condoms.
Attitude: whites cooked up AIDS and spread it among black people while Church's Chicken
was injecting a serum into their drumsticks to sterilize them. I'm sorry, but this is not politics for a peo ple with any respect for themselves in a literate, post- Enlightenment society.
Towers was known in advance by Israelis). Again,
itself, is the soul of the music. Fine,

Hip Hop Bad Violence Turn

Depictions of violence, drugs, and brutality in hip hop may not
be universal but it pervades the genre and means that the
music cannot be a strategy for change
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 30-32, DavidK]

I know there is conscious rap that urges clean living , and we'll get to conscious rap in the next
chapter, but the overall tendency is clear: using and even selling drugs is a huge part
of the hip-hop soundscape. On Guerillas in tha Mist, Ice Cube's character in his guest shot "All on My
Nutsac" is even a dealer. "All on My Nutsac" is, in itself, one of the best things on the album, a fun duet with J-Dee.

how constructive is a message like that? Is the rev olution going to be that all
young black men start selling drugs? The simple reason that things like community
policing and employment counseling don't make it into hip-hop is that they wouldn't
be as much fun to rap about, or to listen to. That's because the sound and the attitude
of hip-hop is all about noisewonderful, raucous noise. Noise lends itself to rapping about
the po-po, complete with gunshots laced into the track, the sound of prison doors
clanking shut, sirens, the sound of a gun cocking , etc. Guns and clicks sound good
set to rap music because the beats already sound kind of like guns, and gunshots
are inherently dramatic. Think, say, of the tight and right "Careful" (the "click click" one) from the Wu-Tang
Clan's The W. But does anyone think that fighting the police , even on a "symbolic" level, is how
to solve black people's problems with them? It's one thing to enjoy Tupac's cartoon idea of black
men rising up against the police with their hands on their gats. But what about real life? Isn't it, rather, that
this metaphorical solution is only so attractive to hip-hop fans because the notion of
fighting the police lends itself well to young men "spraying" lyrics in a
confrontational tone over sharp, loud rhythmic pat terns? Again and again, rappers
calling themselves "serious" pull things that spell nothing useful for us here in the
world outside of rap albums, but make perfect sense if we see the main goal as being confrontational
But still,

and only that. In his N.W.A. days, for example, Ice Cube thought of himself not as a gangsta rapper but as a
"reality" rapper. Thus the reality in "Fuck tha Police" on Straight Outta Compton, where Ice Cube assails the police
but admits gang membership. Did he want more young black men to join gangs? Of course not. He was just making

how are things

going with the uprising in question? Four years after Straight Outta Compton was
released, there was, in fact, a black uprising right in South Central L.A.the riots after the acquittal of
the officers who subdued Rodney King. It is now agreed by those of all persuasions that it led to no political
change of any importance.
a statement to the Powers That Be that because of injustice, we niggaz are going to rise. But

Hip hop fails as a revolutionit entrenches violence that prevents success

McWhorter 03-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
Lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John H, City Journal, How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back, Summer 2003, http://www.cityjournal.org/html/13_3_how_hip_hop.html, DavidK]

Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a
revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. They couldnt be more wrong. By
reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks
that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly authentic response to a
presumptively racist society, rap retards black success. The venom that suffuses rap
had little place in black popular culture indeed, in black attitudesbefore the 1960s. The
hip-hop ethos can trace its genealogy to the emergence in that decade of a black
ideology that equated black strength and authentic black identity with a militantly
adversarial stance toward American society. In the angry new mood, captured by Malcolm Xs
upraised fist, many blacks (and many more white liberals) began to view black crime and
violence as perfectly natural, even appropriate, responses to the supposed
dehumanization and poverty inflicted by a racist society. Briefly, this militant spirit,
embodied above all in the Black Panthers, infused black popular culture, from the plays of LeRoi Jones to
blaxploitation movies, like Melvin Van Peebless Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song, which celebrated
the black criminal rebel as a hero. But blaxploitation and similar genres burned out fast. The memory
of whites blatantly stereotyping blacks was too recent for the typecasting in something like Sweet Sweetbacks
Baadasssss Song not to offend many blacks. Observed black historian Lerone Bennett: There is a certain grim
white humor in the fact that the black marches and demonstrations of the 1960s reached artistic fulfillment with
provocative and ultimately insidious reincarnations of all the Sapphires and Studds of yesteryear. Early rap mostly
steered clear of the Sapphires and Studds, beginning not as a growl from below but as happy party music. The first
big rap hit, the Sugar Hill Gangs 1978 Rappers Delight, featured a catchy bass groove that drove the music
forward, as the jolly rapper celebrated himself as a ladies man and a great dancer. Soon, kids across America were
rapping along with the nonsense chorus: I said a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie, to the hip-hip hop, ah you dont
stop the rock it to the bang bang boogie, say up jump the boogie, to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat. A string of
ebullient raps ensued in the months ahead. At the time, I assumed it was a harmless craze, certain to run out of

rap took a dark turn in the early 1980s, as this bubble gum music gave way to a
gangsta style that picked up where blaxploitation left off. Now top rappers began to
write edgy lyrics celebrating street warfare or drugs and promiscuity. Grandmaster Flashs
steam soon. But

ominous 1982 hit, The Message, with its chorus, Its like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep
from going under, marked the change in sensibility. It depicted ghetto life as profoundly desolate: You grow in the
ghetto, living second rate And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate. The places you play and where you stay
Looks like one great big alley way. Youll admire all the numberbook takers, Thugs, pimps and pushers, and the big
money makers.

Hip hope glamorizes ghettos as a ruthless war zone and entrenches the nihilistic
belief that poverty is inescapable
McWhorter 03-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley, Lecturer @
Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing Editor
@ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in American Culture [John H, City Journal, How
Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back, Summer 2003, http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_3_how_hip_hop.html, DavidK]

The idea that rap is an authentic cry against oppression is all the sillier when you
recall that black Americans had lots more to be frustrated about in the past but
never produced or enjoyed music as nihilistic as 50 Cent or N.W.A. On the contrary, black
popular music was almost always affirmative and hopeful. Nor do we discover music
of such violence in places of great misery like Ethiopia or the Congounless its
imported American hip-hop. Given the hip-hop worlds reflexive alienation, its no surprise that its
explicit political efforts, such as they are, are hardly progressive. Simmons has founded the HipHop Summit Action Network to bring rap stars and fans together in order to forge a bridge between hip-hop and
politics. But HSANs policy positions are mostly tired bromides. Sticking with the long-discredited idea that urban
schools fail because of inadequate funding from the stingy, racist white Establishment, for example, HSAN joined
forces with the teachers union to protest New York mayor Bloombergs proposed education budget for its supposed

lack of generosity. HSAN has also stuck it to President Bush for invading Iraq. And it has vociferously protested the
affixing of advisory labels on rap CDs that warn parents about the obscene language inside. Fighting for rappers
rights to obscenity: thats some kind of revolution! Okay, maybe rap isnt progressive in any meaningful sense,
some observers will admit; but isnt it just a bunch of kids blowing off steam and so nothing to worry about? I think
that response is too easy. With music videos, DVD players, Walkmans, the Internet, clothes, and magazines all

hip-hop an accompaniment to a persons entire existence, we need to take it more seriously. In fact, I
is seriously harmful to the black community. The rise of nihilistic rap
has mirrored the breakdown of community norms among inner-city youth over the
last couple of decades. It was just as gangsta rap hit its stride that neighborhood
elders began really to notice that theyd lost control of young black men, who were
frequently drifting into lives of gang violence and drug dealing. Well into the
seventies, the ghetto was a shabby part of town, where , despite unemployment and rising
illegitimacy, a healthy number of people were doing their best to keep their heads
above water, as the theme song of the old black sitcom Good Times put it. By the eighties, the
ghetto had become a ruthless war zone , where black people were their own worst enemies. It
would be silly, of course, to blame hip-hop for this sad downward spiral, but by
glamorizing life in the war zone, it has made it harder for many of the kids stuck
there to extricate themselves. Seeing a privileged star like Sean Combs behave like
a street thug tells those kids that theres nothing more authentic than ghetto
pathology, even when youve got wealth beyond imagining.
making

would argue that it

Hip hop represents a narrow, commodified vision of urban life where

criminal activity and patriarchal norms are celebrated.
Ali 09-Staff Writer @ The Washington Examiner, writers @ the magazine empower, specializes in social
awareness and activism [Aisha, The Examiner, Hip-hop meets its ultimate fate: Hip-hop surrenders to capitalism,
May 4, 2009, http://www.examiner.com/dc-in-washington-dc/hip-hop-meets-its-ultimate-fate-hip-hop-surrenders-tocapitalism-dollar-dollar-bill-ya-ll, DavidK]

hip-hop has been surviving on life support. Therefore, it was no surprise

when Nas finally pronounced its death with Hip Hop Is Dead in 2006. Yet, Nas CD title said
nothing different than what hip-hop critics had been saying for years: hip-hop has suffered a fatality. With its
brain-dead music in mass production, life has disappeared from much of hip-hop
music. During hip-hops prime, the eighties and early nineties, some of hip-hops most popular artists created
For many years,

groundbreaking, socially-conscious music, sans lyrical content based on materialism, sex, and violence, which has
dominated airwaves during the late nineties and millennia. Public Enemy, Arrested Development, and A Tribe Called
Quest, along with individuals like KRS-One, created positive-minded, Afrocentric, stimulating hip-hop music. Now,

hip-hop artists mostly create music exploiting ways of ghetto life: the body
count tied to a burner; the amount of hos in a repertoire; the riches acquired,
mostly through ill-gotten gains; and/or how icy a person is. Of course, the biggest
debate has been the influence hip-hop music has had on youths. During my childhood and
mainstream

adolescence, which were the eighties and early nineties, hip-hop music was diverse. Throughout this time frame,
male youths were offered a varied range of hip-hop role models to admire, such as Chuck D, Big Daddy Kane, Too
Short, or Doug E. Fresh. It was almost as if record labels and artists were saying, You can get with this, or you can
get with that" remember those lyrics? When regarding choices female youths had, there was Roxanne, Queen
Latifah, Mc Lyte, Salt-N-Peppa and Spinderella, Yo-Yo, Da Brat, and Smooth amongst others. The images of female
hip-hop artists varied: there were female rap vixens, while others had a you-better-R-E-S-P-E-C-T-me-or-getslapped tomboyish persona. In the eighties and early nineties, women were not all portrayed as sex symbols, and
those that were not, were still able to achieve popularity and success. This delivered a message to female youths
that a strong, intelligent, and witty female, who held herself in high esteem, could be successful and gain respect

not based on looks. Although the appearances of Salt-N-Peppa and Spinderella were more seductive, they still made
meaningful songs: Lets Talk About Sex, which cautions youths against having unprotected sex and educates the
public on AIDS awareness; Expression, which encourages youths to be comfortable in their own skin; Aint
Nuthin but a She Thing, which promotes feminism; and Its None of Your Business, which combats sexism. Of
course, there was Smooth, The Female Mack, who represented those females that wanted to prove males could
be outwitted at the art of pimpin. Yet, for the most part, many of these hip-hop female artists, who started out as
teenagers themselves, seem to have fought earnestly to be respected in hip-hop, which was and still is a male-

when female youths look to female hip-hop artists as role

models, all that is primarily seen is women half- or completely naked, spewing out
just as crass lyrics as their male counterparts. The efforts hip-hop female predecessors made to
prevent their followers from struggling to be respected, now seems to have been in vain. The rap divas of
today leave much to be desired. As hip-hop became less diversified, options youths
had for role models lessened. Hip-hop artists, who do not fit the pop artist mold, find themselves
steadily trying to make their way up from the underground from whence they heavily dwell. Distinguishing
one's self from the norm in modern hip-hop, which endorses violence, defames
females, and boasts about riches not only takes courage, but may also prove
detrimental to ones career. With majority of hip-hop lyrics being misogynistic,
violent, and materialistic, it is almost taboo to speak of more cerebral issues in
songs without being considered soft or on some other [expletive]. As Kanye West
dominated industry. Now,

once said during a MTV interview, Anything opposite of hip-hop is considered gay in the hip-hop community a

If
youre a male who grew up in the suburbs rather than in the hood, youre
considered soft, which equals gay. If a male wears fitted shirts and pants that
dont sag off his derrire so the whole world can see his goods, then he is considered soft, which equals
gay. This very perception is what often forces youths , especially black male if not strongminded, to pursue a life of crime in order to appear hard to his peers. There is a
huge overrepresentation of criminal aspects of black youth culture in videos and
songs. Although there are always news reports exposing youth criminal activity, there is a percentage of youths
not on the streets slinging rocks nor shooting their peers and robbing elders. There are many black
youths who are honor roll students and have honest jobs. However, these kids are
not represented in music, as youths with such lifestyles as a topic would not sell
music. Nevertheless, the pressure felt from peers and the media can potentially cause youths, who do not wish to
statement with which I totally concur, especially when concerning the hip-hop socialization of black male youths.

engage in such dangerous lifestyles, to falsely portray a gangster to feel accepted. Sadly, even grown men attempt
to falsely portray themselves as gangsters, as many rappers have been ousted for perpetuating a false thuggish
persona to meet record sale quotas little do black male youths know who want to emulate this lifestyle: the
mansion, Escalade, and ice are rented until these artists make enough money to pay off their record companies for
loaning these material goods to them to fit the image that will bring in millions.

AT Conscious Hip Hop

Even if they do not play offensive music, their defenses of the
political potential of music means that they need to defend the
genre.
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 33-35, DavidK]

A point I should make before we go on: there are some who will object that if I am
trying to make a point about politics and rap, then I should address only the likes of
either Public Enemy back in the day or Talib Kweli now, and leave out the more
commercial acts in between like N.W.A. I reject that argument. Rap's fans, including
its academic ones, refer constantly to rappers in general when proposing that there
is something political about the music. Writers like Nelson George, Tricia Rose, Michael Eric Dyson,
William Van DeBurg, Imani Perry, Robin Kelley, Cheryl Keyes, Bakari Kitwana, and others do not primly
restrict their arguments to the albums only the buffs and fanatics know. They, while
well aware that some rappers like Lil Jon are largely irrelevant as "conscious" goes, are referring to hip-hop
in general. And this is because most of even the mainstream rap pers have their
"conscious" moments. These cuts are now even cliches, formulas, just like the ones about guns and
bitches. A rapper who wants to be taken seriously is almost required to dip into the
"conscious" well at least one or two times per album. The Wu-Tang Clan came up with cuts like "Can It All Be So
Simple?" and "Tearz"; then there are always tracks like Das EFX's "Can't Have Nuttin'," Ludacris's "Hopeless," and
Young Jeezy's "Dreamin'," or Ice Cube saluting Afrika Bambatta and Public Enemy at the end of AmeriKKKa's Most
Wanted. This means that this book is not flawed in addressing rappers like Jay-Z and The Game as well as Pete Rock

A book on whether hip-hop is useful politics that left out the rappers the
world loves the most would make no sense, since they constantly toss their two
cents in on what they think of as politics. Making sense about what rap means for
black politics requires, then, bringing Jadakiss into the discussion as well as KRS-One.
and Mos Def.

Upon which, I will.

AT Policing
Even if they are right about police brutality being a status quo
problemhip hop politics leaves no blueprint change
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 27-28, DavidK]

while we're on the police, the relationship between them and young black men is
an especially urgent issue in the black community. This one issue , in fact, grounds the
whole conception of hip-hop as politics. Much of the rea son hip-hop is now
considered significant rather than infectious is that so many rappers have had so much to
say about police brutality. But the question is how useful is what they have said in
terms of helping to change the situation? Hip-hop is supposedly going to lead to a
revolution: things are going to be really different. Has hip-hop given any indication of this in
terms of what it has to say about the cops? Let's take Da Lench Mob's Guerillas in tha Mist as an
example, although countless other recordings would serve equally well. The general message of Guerillas in
tha Mist is that blacks need to, somehow, fight the policeor at least, get back at them
with attitude. In "Lost in tha System," J- Dee is in court before the judge and "He added on another year 'cause
And

I dissed him / Now here I go gettin' lost in the system." The diss in question was a suggestion that the judge suck
upon his penis. This is typical of the attitude toward the police and the criminal justice system on a great many rap
albums, including ones celebrated as among the best recordings of all time such as Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most

But if the idea is that hip-hop is "political" in the sim ple message that
relations between police forces and young black men are often rough, then this is a
highly static form of politics, especially if what we get over twenty-five years is
endless variations on that same message. That there is felt to be a need to air this "political"
Wanted.

message over so much time suggests that the problem is not an easy one to resolvei.e., that simply

complaining about it to a beat does not have a significant effect. It would seem that
effective engagement with this issue would require more than mere complaint.
Especially if we're talking about some kind of revolution. Yet all we get year after
year for two decades and a half from rappers is "the police hate us, so hate them back" while "hiphop intellectuals" cheer from the sidelines that this is politics. Yet this is a "politics" that has nothing
to do with doing somethingor even suggesting what might be done. If this
posturing is a "politics" black America should be proud of, then black America is accepting
nothing as something: stasis as progress, gesture as action.

Capitalism Links
The use of hip hop as a strategy for activism fails because it is
inevitably coopted by capitalismvoices wont be heard
Coates 07-senior editor @ The Atlantic, staff writer @ TIME, B.A. @ Howard University [Ta-Nehisi, TIME
Magazine, Hip-hops down beat, August 17, 2007, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,16536391,00.html, DavidK]

When the political activist Al Sharpton pivoted from his war against bigmouth radio man Don Imus to a war on badmouth gangsta rap, the instinct among older music fans was to roll their eyes and yawn. Ten years ago, another
activist, C. Delores Tucker, launched a very similar campaign to clean up rap music. She focused on Time Warner
(parent of TIME), whose subsidiary Interscope was home to hard-core rappers Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur. In
1995 Tucker succeeded in forcing Time Warner to dump Interscope. Her victory was Pyrrhic. Interscope flourished,

the genre
exploded across the planet, with rappers emerging everywhere from Capetown to
the banlieues of Paris. In the U.S. alone, sales reached $1.8 billion. The lesson was
Capitalism 101: rap music's market strength gave its artists permission to say what
they pleased. And the rappers themselves exhibited an entrepreneurial bent unlike
that of musicians before them. They understood the need to market and the
benefits of line extensions. Theirs was capitalism with a beat. Today that same market is
launching artists like 50 Cent and Eminem and distributing the posthumous recordings of Shakur. And

telling rappers to please shut up. While music-industry sales have plummeted, no genre has fallen harder than rap.
According to the music trade publication Billboard, rap sales have dropped 44% since 2000 and declined from 13%
of all music sales to 10%. Artists who were once the tent poles at rap labels are posting disappointing numbers. JayZ's return album, Kingdom Come, for instance, sold a gaudy 680,000 units in its first week, according to Billboard.
But by the second week, its sales had declined some 80%. This year rap sales are down 33% so far. Longtime rap
fans are doing the math and coming to the same conclusions as the music's voluminous critics. In February, the
filmmaker Byron Hurt released Beyond Beats and Rhymes, a documentary notable not just for its hard critique but
for the fact that most of the people doing the criticizing were not dowdy church ladies but members of the hip-hop
generation who deplore rap's recent fixation on the sensational. Both rappers and music execs are clamoring for
solutions. Russell Simmons recently made a tepid call for rappers to self-censor the words nigger and bitch from

a debate about profanity and misogyny obscures a

much deeper problem: an artistic vacuum at major labels . "The music community has to get
more creative," says Steve Rifkin, CEO of SRC Records. " We have to start betting on the new and
the up-and-coming for us to grow as an industry. Right now, I don't think anyone is
taking chances. It's a big-business culture." It's the ultimate irony. Since the 1980s, when
Run-DMC attracted sponsorship from Adidas, the rap community has aspired to be big business.
By the '90s, those aspirations had become a reality. In a 1999 cover story, TIME reported that
with 81 million CDs sold, rap was officially America's top-selling music genre . The boom
their albums. But most insiders believe that

produced enterprises like Roc-A-Fella, which straddled fashion, music and film and in 2001 was worth $300 million.

It produced moguls like No Limit's Master P and Bad Boy's Puff Daddy, each of whom in
2001 made an appearance on FORTUNE's list of the richest 40 under 40. Along the way,
the music influenced everything from advertising to fashion to sports.

Hip hop has become commoditized and voices have been co-opted and
manipulated by capitalism
Philosog 11-[Philosog, Concerning Hip Hop, Capitalism, and Politics, March 2, 2011,
http://philosog.com/Jonesing/concerning-hip-hop-capitalism-and-politics/, DavidK]

current hip hop is the commoditized reflection of corporate profit

mongering. Corporations with their financiers manipulate the message by manipulating
the artist into making music that will sell the fastest which often means appealing to
the lowest common denominator. The hip hop that used to be balanced is now tilted
in the most banal direction. In the past for every Kool G. Rap there was a KRS One, for every N.W.A. there
was a X-Clan. Now there is only Young Money and gangsterism and criminality with no
Native Tounges to balance the situation. Hip hop then is taken from something that
could be a force for good into a form of audible junk food , feeding people stuff that is no good
Simply stated,

for them. Group conflict is the context for the black political agenda. Capitalism is the context for American politics.
Merging group conflict and capitalist development, merging the black political agenda and American politics, we are

Capitalism creates a stratified, divided

society where the labor of the many is exploited to enrich the few. The once pure
hip hop of the Cold Crush and the Treacherous Three was introduced into a system of economic
development that at its heart produces an exploited and alienated workforce. Cultural
product like hip hop is reduced to something to be bought and sold to merely to
generate profit, social justice issues be damned.
able to intelligently discuss the morass that is hip hop.

The get rich or die trying mentality of hip hop has led to it becoming a
forum to be dominated by capitalist beliefs consistent with the neoconservative agenda
Johnson 08-Professor of Economics and Geography @ the Coggin College of Business, University of Florida,
PhD in Economics @ University of Alabama, B.S. in Economics and Mathematics @ the University of Alabama, writes
for the Journal of Pan-African Studies, specializes poverty and inequality in Urban and Regional Economics
[Christopher, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Danceable Capitalism: Hip-Hops Links to Corporate Space, June
2008, Volume 2, Number 4, pg. 91, http://www.jpanafrican.com/docs/vol2no4/2.4_Danceable_Cap.pdf, DavidK]

Black Nationalist sentiment within popular hip-hop has faded , but the
message of Black capitalism has (not surprisingly) increased over the last decade. To discount the
It is true that

validity of capitalist sentiment one would have to ignore the rise of prosperity ministries within the Black church,
the increase in Black business ownership, and the high percentage of Black college students enrolled in business

An assimilationist embrace of European capitalist practice has coexisted (if

with programs based wholly within the African American
community. Rapper 50 Cents message of get rich or die trying is based in a long
history of capitalist struggle, one that fits very comfortably within the conservative
and neoconservative orientation of American economics and politics in the last
quarter century. There is no shortage of messages within hip-hop at present. What is in short supply is a
diversity of theoretical frameworks from which to choose. Individualistic pursuit of capital and
pleasure has replaced most notions of community in the Pop Era. The Pop Era that
followed was a success for a few Black entrepreneurs such as Sean Combs, Russell Simmons,
Master P, Dr. Dre, and 50 Cent. They were able to further aid in the commodification of the
music resulting in great financial rewards for themselves, and thus their commercial success
was pointed to as a triumph for the Black music artist, although their individual financial gains
seldom trickled down to other hip-hop artists affiliated with them.
programs.

uncomfortably at times)

Capitalism forces any political meaning in rap to the way side and dictates
what artists can and cannot say
Ali 09-Staff Writer @ The Washington Examiner, writers @ the magazine empower, specializes in social
awareness and activism [Aisha, The Examiner, Hip-hop meets its ultimate fate: Hip-hop surrenders to capitalism,
May 4, 2009, http://www.examiner.com/dc-in-washington-dc/hip-hop-meets-its-ultimate-fate-hip-hop-surrenders-tocapitalism-dollar-dollar-bill-ya-ll, DavidK]

the suits behind the corporate desks are the real pimps . This is an organized crime model
at its best. As hip-hop became more influential and accepted in pop mainstream,
capitalism dominated how artists were to portray themselves to gain enough
popularity needed to control airwaves. However, capitalism cannot be only associated
with todays hip-hop, as it has been a dominating factor. Old school rappers in hip-hop spoke of
So,

escaping impoverished conditions through money gained from their record sales as dope emcees. If capitalism
was the killer of hip-hop, then it was suicidal. In Paid In Full, one of my favorite old school hip-hop joints by Eric
B and Rakim, along with Dont Sweat The Technique, Rakim describes a situation of a young, stickup kid, who
realized this path led to a dead end, ultimately deciding to use his lyrical talents as a positive means to gain the
materialistic lifestyle desired. Now, whether Rakim is referring to himself, another individual, or just a fictional
character in a hypothetical situation is debatable; yet, the fact remains this song discusses materialism, just as
songs today. Although Rakims style and talent is greater than 95 percent of mainstream rappers today, this song

hip-hop songs today that discuss materialism not to

mention, many emcees or rappers were decked out in thick, gold rope chains and
the freshest Adidas warm-up suits and Kangol bucket hats. While hip-hop was inherently
and others like it, still paved way to

political and originators intentions were righteous, as hip-hop began as a story of marginalized people with limited
resources in underserved communities, explicit, hardcore attempts to be political, while occasionally entertaining,
had a superfluous impact. The end result: f ollowers

wanted to top the next hip-hop artist as

being the most controversial, as many hip-hop artists wanted to hoard attention
from consumers, which led to mega records sales which in turn led to mega bucks,
stemming from lyrics based on materialism, violence, and sex. Raps degradation from its
glorious past has been attributed to the rise of the crack epidemic in urban communities during the mid eighties.
Due to the heavy influence of the crack trade, the values of many black youths have disintegrated. Much of the
materialism, misogyny, violence, and the absolute die-hard mentality for trivial things derive from the crack era and
its music. This mentality paired with struggles against discrimination, racism, and unparalleled poverty when

The lifestyle of fast money becomes

the resolution to many problems youths experience in underserved communities,
especially since hip-hop music glorifies this lifestyle and youths very seldom think of
the dire consequences related to a life of organized crime and fast living. This image
became heavily enforced and more visible during the nineties with the introduction of NWA. N WAs albums
explicitly dealt a hardcore lifestyle of violence, drugs, and sex, and when sales
exploded based on black and white teenagers the themes in rap songs became darker and
edgier. With the introduction of crack music, politically conscious groups like Public Enemy were
pushed aside, as record labels became hungrier to match enormous sales of NWAs
monetary success. From this moment onward, record labels primarily pursued individuals
that could replicate the winning style: money, hos, and violence. The West Coast rap
compared to other races, is a disastrous mix for black youths.

offered a new twist that many people had not heard. The mega success of Suge Knights Death Row Records, the
music empire that manufactured Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, dominated the new direction in which hip-hop was to go,

these same negative images began to

dominate hip-hop. In a sense, hip-hop became the images opposers had branded for this genre at its
inception a lifestyle of violence. Yet, at its inception, hip-hop was used as a means of expression against
injustices and poverty, education, and an outlet to relieve tension (feel-good, party music). Giant record
companies have profited huge selling ghetto culture to the American mainstream , as
the drug trade has dominated the ghettos. Many record companies lack creativity of past producers,
as this became the archetype for success. Simultaneously,

So instead, they sink to the lowest common

denominator for a fast buck. However, the problems extend beyond record labels. Hip-hop artists
also share the blame, as they very seldom dare to be different. Artists want to get paid so badly
they are reluctant to push the bar.
which were able to cultivate and build new.

Cede the Political Link

Hip hop is so anti-establishment that it fails to produce viable
visions for social change.
McWhorter 08-PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @ UC-Berkeley,
lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @ NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Contributing Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on Hip Hop in
American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 26-27, DavidK]

Tupac thought that welfare had always offered payments for kids on an open-ended
basis, and that the problem was just that there had always been some small-minded people like Brenda's mother.
Tupac would likely have laughed along with most blacks at the welfare office's
posted slogan in Eddie Murphy's Claymation series The PJs about life in the projects: "Keeping You in
the Projects Since 1965." But if he was aware of Bill Clinton's promise in 1992 to end
"welfare as we know it," he likely thought of it as covertly racist this was the standard
position at the time among people of his leftist politics. Like so many, he likely had never considered
the cognitive dissonance between laughing at that sign in The PJs and resisting
welfare reform. Becausefor him there was no dissonance at all. Rap is about
dissing. You diss the "poverty pimps" at the welfare office who want to keep people
on welfare in order to keep themselves employed ("Word!") and you diss white
congressmen who want to time-limit welfare ("Word!"). That's hip-hop's "politics." To
Tupac, then, Brenda was, as a poor black girl, "invisible" to America, and otherwise just up against the seamier side
of human nature in the family circle sense. That's the hip-hop way of looking at things: anti-establishment, angsty.

just as KRS-One today cannot see the death of welfare as we knew it as good
news for the black employment situation, the hip-hop way of looking at things could not
perceive, in 1991, what one of Brenda's [the] main sociopolitical problems was: welfare as
we knew it. In 1991, welfare as we knew it was every bit as important to the fate of
Tupac's people as the police and how he got treated at stores now and then (as he chronicled in "I Don't
Give a Fuck" on the same album 2Pacalypse Now). I'm well aware that welfare reform would not, let's face
it, make much of a rap track. I am aware of one cut that makes a kind of stab at it, "She's Alive," on
But

OutKast's smashing Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, actually weaving in interview clips with single mothers doing
their best. But that one cut is just an exception, as are the handful of others in the whole body of hip-hop that one

Overall, welfare reform is quite low on rappers' list of what is relevant

to the black condition. It isn't spiky enough. It wouldn't make music that would sell.
Fine. But that means that hip-hop politics, once again, misses the action.
might smoke out.

Gender Links
NOTE: this could also work as a good link to the cap K

Hip hop is a sphere for gendered violence where women are a

secondary class and are objectified to serve the male narrative
women are silenced
Smith 08-Professor Constitutional Law, Criminal law, and criminal procedure @ Florida State School of Law, J.D.
@ Howard University School of Law, B.A. @ Spellman College [Nareissa, Feminist Law Professors, Hip Hop,
Capitalism, and Taking Back the Music, December 9, 2008, http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=4419, DavidK]

the development of hip hop has led to female rappers being

reduced to beautiful, talented moons orbiting around their male counterparts.
However, I believe that capitalism and sexism are very much to blame for this
development. How does capitalism come into play? What hip hop critics might not know that hip
hoppers have known for some time is that rap was not always this way. Rap music used to have a rich
diversity. You had some people that made party records, like LL Cool J, others, like KRS-ONE and Public Enemy,
Weiner is correct that

which educated while they entertained, some that made gangsta rap, some, like D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince,
that made us laugh, and some that just said whatever they felt. And that was the point there was a time in hip
hop where one could pretty much say anything. See, in the time period I am discussing, record labels still hadnt
figured out how to make money off of hip-hop. Because there was not yet any set formula, creativity reigned, and
songs about anything and everything imaginable were made. That meant that all comers including women could

But unfortunately, the industry eventually figured it out. The

formula has become to take whatever rapper is popular at the moment, and have
each rapper copy that person. Currently, the model is some version of a guy that has
been shot multiple times, sold drugs, or been shot multiple times while selling
drugs. The exceptions to this rule such as Kanye West and Outkast are dealt with by marketing them primarily
as pop acts. For female emcees, it means no place at the table the reservation has been
cancelled. While hip hop has always celebrated the masculine, this new
hypermasculinity is difficult for a female emcee to realistically portray. If 50 Cent
gets shot nine times, it proves hes not only a man, but a strong man, a really
REAL man almost a superman. If a woman gets shot nine times, it proves . . . what
exactly? The fact that the question is so difficult to answer speaks volumes about
how violent women and violent men are portrayed in our society. Male violence is tacitly
accepted, almost encouraged, but female aggression is a no-no. Even black women,
who are usually considered less feminine than their counterparts , will find it hard to pull out of
that difficult binary. So, old stereotypes such as Lil Kims oversexed Jezebel are rehashed ad
infinitum as a proxy for hypermasculinity. But its a poor facsimile. In fact, the intersection of capitalism
and sexism has had another interesting effect on women in hip hop. First, the sexism As Weiner states, there
have always been women in hip hop first, as stand-alone acts, then, as the kid sister or
apprentice to a male rapper. But now, women in rap are even further marginalized.
The only women that one sees in rap videos these days (so I hear, as I refuse to watch anymore)
are so called video vixens, scantily clad women whose sole purpose in her
objectification is to serve the male gaze and narrative around her. So I ask: if the
current iteration of hip hop is predicated on women being objects as opposed to
subjects, and is predicated on removing any independent agency, where is the place for a woman to
speak of her own authority or at all? Moreover, the capitalism plays a role in sustaining the
vixen role, and not just in the usual sex sells fashion. The African American female form
find a place at the table.

has been commodified for centuries. In the 1880s, Ms. Sarah Baartman was taken around the world and displayed

as the Hottentot Venus. Her buttocks and genitalia were prominently displayed. She was an object of fascination
and curiosity. There is a wonderful YouTube video essay that chronicles the relationship between Sarah Baartman
and the young women in todays videos better than my words ever could. The comparison is startling, but the

the bodies of women of color are to be fetishized and objectified for

any paying customer. Thus, I find it completely unsurprising that the female emcees that have any success
in the current climate try to put their own spin on this narrative. Women of color were and are a large
part of the hip hop fans base. We are trying to take back the music, as Essence
Magazine calls its campaign on the issue. But until the current keepers of the castle decide that
this particular formula of hip hop has lost its flavor, women will continue to be
further marginalized for the near and perhaps distant future.
politics are the same

Capitalism has transformed the message of hip hop from real to one of
misogyny and sexismwe have to reject it
Ciaccio 04-Professor @ University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee [Nichali, ZNet, Hip Hop, Gender, Race, and
Capitalism, June 5, 2004, http://www.zcommunications.org/hip-hop-gender-race-and-capitalism-by-nichali-ciaccio,
DavidK]
Mark Anthony Neal was insightful to point out that the industry thrives on sexism, and that asking artists
to promote a feminist vision would be asking them to drop their contracts and start selling far fewer records. After

radical acts like the Coup are, despite their vision, small players in the industry as a whole. Yet
clearly by playing this game, the major artists are responsible for proliferating
sexism the potency of which alters the mores of huge segments of the youth
population. This insight turns our attention to an issue fundamentally important if
we want to address the pervasiveness of sexism in hip-hop and society in general:
the role of capitalism in not just reinforcing but actively promoting the dominant
views (which are, at this time, reactionary towards women, the LGBTQ community, etc). Acting according to
all,

demand, major record companies produce and distribute music that people will buy. So as long as music is
produced via a demand system and sexism continues to exist, so will its presence in music. With the exception of
extremely rare artists who have both attained a national audience and are brave enough to challenge their base, it

artists lack the capacity to change the system themselves without a large
change in the consumer base. In lieu of some form of direct censorship (or indirect, in the case of Walseems

Mart, whose "family-based" approach to music has artists censoring themselves out of fear of losing a huge
market)-which I am personally opposed to-there is little chance that the industry itself will change this paradigm on

artists
actively promote misogynistic viewpoints. They aren't simply passive elements of
capitalism but participants whose voice greatly influences youth opinion and
continue to reinforce the same views in new generations of music listeners and
makers. By making sexism part of their image they aren't just allowing it to become
acceptable among youth groups but setting a standard by which youth are supposed to
treat each other as a prerequisite for acceptance. Thus challenging the sexism in hip-hop and
rap requires not only looking at sexism writ large in society but how capitalism
continues to promote it. Developing a larger, dynamic and holistic strategy to this problem means
addressing distribution as well as the product itself. Sexism cannot be cured without
understanding its influence on, and how it is influenced by, capitalism. Building a thoughtful and
its own. On the other hand, as spokespeople for hip-hop and (in some cases, worldwide) celebrity-idols,

dynamic radical theory requires addressing every issue of oppression. This means looking at the interactions not
only between capitalism and sexism, but politics and racism as well. In this case, there are a few things we can do
to make small changes in the system now, but the effects of which become larger over time. First, we can promote
the activities of students like those of Spelman Colleg e, whose level of consciousness can alter youth

When it comes down to it, what really influences behavior

is not the celebrities themselves but whether or not our peers accept us. If positive
visions can grow, very understandable fears of non-acceptance could fall apart. This
consciousness in a dramatic way.

challenges both predominant gender views and the consumer base of major
corporations-and we know how much they fear the vacillation of youth opinion (as is
seen in their struggles to control it).

Hip hop objectifies women as sexual objects

Weiner 08-music, movies, and pop culture writer @ Slate, writer @ the New York Times [Jonah, Slate, Ladies! I Cant Hear
You! No, Really, I Cant Hear You! November 6, 2008, http://www.slate.com/id/2203360/pagenum/2, DavidK]

If the pervasive spirit of female rap's early days was defiance, the mid-'90s gave rise to a sort of
radical compliance. In their porno-grade raps, Lil' Kim, Foxy Brown, and Trina offered
themselves up almost as grotesques, inhabiting lewd sexual fantasies almost to the point of
caricature. Kimwho offset constant demands for cunnilingus with a famous brag about "how I make a Sprite can disappear in
my mouth"was the best of these, and the only pop star in history to serve as muse to both Notorious B.I.G. and Marc Jacobs. Her
take-no-shit attitude appealed to hardened hip-hop fans, while her hypersexualized camp made her a gay icon. Hip-hop

femininity is often described in binary: Women are either "independent"they pay their own bills and,
conveniently, ask men for nothingor they are hos. Lil' Kim made the case for the independent ho. (Sometimes another
option, cited in the case of confident female rappers, appears: lesbian.) So why has female hip-hop made so few
lasting inroads over 30 years? For one thing, what most of the women mentioned above have in common is that their
music rebuts and responds to guy-spun gender narratives. One effect of this is to make female
rap seem second class, occurring outside the "real," "primary" work of hip-hop canon building, even
as it argues for first-class citizenship. When we hear the word rappers, we think of black males; they're what feminists
would call hip-hop's unmarked category. This makes tough going for pretenders outside of this category, and it's meant that many of

the identities that female comers have carved for themselvesBoss' gangsta bitch, Kim's badass nympho, or,
recently, Lil' Mama's lunchroom alpha girlhave registered as one-offs or fads. (We see the same thing with white
rappers, whether it's the Beastie Boys' nerdy boogie or Eminem's white-trash horror-core.)