Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr Note
A2 Disconnected Narrative
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- A2 Interpretation Bad
- Poetry eludes capture – an (enigmatic) gift
- A2 Ks of 1ac Authors
- A2 Music Fails
- A2 No Safe Spaces**
- **note—also in unintelligibility good
- A2 Suffering/Slavery Reps Bad
A2 Disconnected NarrativeThe aesthetics of fugitivity is a refusal of ‘convention’ in favor of lived experience—it is through the refusal to be limited that black writing can strive for liberation and consciousness that transcends temporalityBradley, Emory assistant professor, and Marassa, Duke graduate student, 2014 (Rizvana and Damien-Adia, “Awakening to the World: Relation, Totality, and Writing from Below,” Discourse, Vol. 36, No. 1, Winter 2014, p. 119-121, ProjectMUSE, IC) Black writing, in the example of the slave narrative and Baquaqua’s general exemplification of its complex registers, thus demonstrates the ways in which black writing proceeds toward liberation through fugitivity rather than transparency and mastery. Hortense Spillers has asserted that “black writers, whatever their location . . . , retool the languages they inherit,” opening the way to a “logological refashioning”34 of writing. In observing Baquaqua’s multiple literacies, there is a grammatology of black writing that is called into being that unmasters the conventions of writing for the sake of tradition. The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua is a text that surpasses the conditions of its own documentary evidence: the fullness and fragmentary incompleteness of origins held forth even in the biographer’s own name, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, seem to suggest a trespassing of the injunctions and prohibitions of nomenclature. Baquaqua’s text is of “a life” irreducible to the converging ideas and exigencies that shape the slave narrative as abolitionist text. Its narrative precedes and extends beyond the horizon of any singular readership. The narrative is of “a life” in the sense of Gilles Deleuze’s formulation of “pure immanence” as “a life and nothing else.”35 If, as Frantz Fanon argues, “Black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes,”36 Baquaqua’s writing is a life/writing that reflects this immanent fold of black consciousness. Baquaqua’s biography opens a sacred geometry of black life that gathers Islam, Christianity, and other African faith practices into the fold of his diasporic life, producing a vertiginous subtext, a submerged textuality or invisible ink that flows through all black letters. The traces, trails, bereavements, and victories woven together in the recitations, annotations, recollected letters, and disparate tellings of Baquaqua’s auto/biography conjure the ontological complexity that Wole Soyinka describes in Myth, Literature, and the African World as the “fourth stage”: “the no man’s land of transition between . . . the ancestor’s [past], the present [of] the living, and the future of the unborn” with the invisible forces, divinities, or “orishas.”37 Together, these modes of experience form the totality of cosmic life reflected in black consciousness. This cosmic totality in the Yoruba worldview is reflective of larger patterns of African thought and belief throughout the archipelago, wherein social life consists of a dynamic cosmic environment that comprises the “total spiritual community of living and dead.”38 The immanent gesture of black writing glimpses the spiritual totality that obtains between ancestors, texts, and black writers and extends through a distribution and sharing of sacred resources among poets, philosophers, and fugitives. In this view, The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua is a constellation of more than just a life, as it constellates a set of cartographic, poetic, and historiographical resources that have grounded and extended the fugitive passage of black letters through underground networks, railroads, and communities. To echo Jacques Derrida, within the communities gathered by black writing, we “[learn] to live . . . in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce, of ghosts, [spirits, and ancestors]. . . . And this being-with specters would also be . . . a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.”39 Black writing emerges from this cosmic milieu as an ecological signature of a people formed from the refusal of structured limitations—a people given forth from the ocean to the geographic path, way, or movement of archipelago in a sociality beyond the ken of social life. A2 GitmoThe concept of “there but not” is especially consistent with Guantanamo--Guantánamo is an exception to the presumably normal procedures that constitute the domestic. It is the spectacular terror contrasted to the normal operations of law and power within the formal boundaries of the United StatesDillon 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) In the last decade, a critique of the carceral systems deployed in the “war on terror” has become central to debates across a number of disciplines about sovereignty, biopolitics, and the state of exception. For example, in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler argues that the forms of detention inaugurated at Guantánamo Bay created a new form of state sovereignty manifested by the suspension of the law. At Guantánamo and elsewhere, the suspension of the rule of law produces collusion between biopolitical forms of governance and the will of the sovereign. In this way, the extra-legal “new war prison” redefines Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between sovereignty and governmentality so that “sovereignty emerges within the field of governmentality” where it is defined as the power to withdraw and suspend the law. 435 Thus, sovereignty is a ghostly but forceful presence within new forms of racialized population management. This suspension of the law also produces a new mode of sovereignty that means that the bodies of detainees act as the raw material for the production of a new form of power.436 The danger of indefinite detention, according to Butler, is that it creates the condition of possibility for the exercise of indefinite extra-legal state power. As she puts it, “Indefinite detention thus extends lawless power indefinitely.”437 The state of emergency is not spatially and temporally contained, but rather, rushes toward a never-ending future. The future is produced as a time beyond the safety and security of the law. In this way, indefinite detention is not an exception to the norm, but is central to redefining the norm in the present and the future. This rupturing of the norm by the exception renders the human beings detained at Guantánamo into “animated flesh,” producing “humans who are less than chattel” and who embody what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.”438 Butler’s critique is deeply indebted to the work of Agamben, who argues that indefinite detention is a mode of biopolitical power where the law envelopes the bodies of captives through its own suspension.439 This situation creates a “legally unnamable and unclassifiable being” whose only historical analog are Jewish people under the Nazi regime.440 In this “zone of indifference” no law is the law.441 The new war prison derealizes the humanity of its captives who might otherwise belong to a community of laws and recognition.442 This creates “populations that are not regarded as subjects, humans who are not conceptualized with in the frame of a political culture in which human lives are underwritten by legal entitlements, law, and so humans who are not humans.”443 The law defines the human and so to be outside the boundaries of the law is to be exposed to a form of illegal barbarism that renders one inhuman. The law is central to Butler’s concern with Guantánamo and to her understanding of the carceral apparatuses used in the “war on terror.” As she writes, “[W]hereas we expect the prison to be tied to law—to trial, to punishment, to the rights of prisoners—we see presently an effort to produce a secondary judicial system and sphere of non-legal detention that effectively produces the prison itself as an extra-legal sphere.”444 In Butler’s theory, the forms of social death, sovereignty, and governmentality produced at Guantánamo are the result of the absence of the law. The law is a site of security and safety, and its undoing opens up unprecedented spaces of living death and extra-legal terror. Critically, this break with space, subjectivity, and normative modes of power is also a break with time. Guantánamo, for Butler, has created a time that is unfamiliar, backwards, and archaic. As she writes, “The historical time that we thought was past turns out to structure the contemporary field with a persistence that gives the lie to history as chronology.”445 The appearances of sovereignty at Guantánamo are “anachronistic resurgences” that confound normative conceptions of temporality. Diana Taylor tells a similar story about time and torture, one where “we have embarked on an extrajuridical power trip with no limits and no foreseeable end” because we have taken a road we should not have walked.446 By entering a time that is endless and anachronistic, Guantánamo marks a departure from the norm. The torture performed there “crosses the limit” and “suspends the rules” so that Guantánamo becomes a space of aberration and a time of distortion, confusion, and illegibility.447 In this way, Guantánamo is not only a break with the law, but also with time. It rewrites the time of chronological progress in favor of Ian Baucom’s “time as accumulation.”448 The irrationality and barbarism of the past resurges in this space beyond the law. A past that is not a past returns in the space of exception. And like the backward march of time, the norm undoes itself in a process of reversal and suspension so that it too returns to an otherworldly place once left behind. For Butler and many others, Guantánamo is an exception to the presumably normal procedures that constitute the domestic. It is the spectacular terror contrasted to the normal operations of law and power within the formal boundaries of the United States. Such understandings of Guantánamo as a monstrous aberration from the domestic have been common among scholars, activists, and journalists. The arguments advanced by Butler and Agamben have not gone without criticism. Joshua Comaroff argues that “it is not the exceptional, the supra- or extralegal that defines Guantánamism, but rather its conditional existence within the law, the intentional contortions made possible by…spatial and temporal contradictions inherent in the judicial system.”449 Guantánamo is not outside the law; rather, it is made possible by the law and the law’s ability to contort its application through “spatialtemporal disarticulations” that open up new possibilities of legal action.450 For Comaroff, it is not Guantánamo that is a “non-place,” it is Agamben’s theory that is ahistorical and ageographical in its effacement of Guantánamo’s colonial history and location.451 Nassir Hussain similarly argues that at Guantánamo one does not find not an emptying out of law but an “abundant use of technical distinctions, differing regulations, and multiple invocations of authority.”452 If Guantánamo is understood as a space outside the law, then the presumed solution is the application of more laws and regulations. Yet, Guantánamo is not a space of suspensions, outsideness, and exclusions—it is a space of hyperlegality. It operates on a continuum where the norm and exception have become indistinguishable and “points to a desire for and an attempt at a zone that operates not as an exception but as a parallel in a modern administrative legality.”453 And as Hussain and others observe, among the detainees held in Guantánamo, there are people who have been declared non–enemy combatants, but due to their stateless status continue to be imprisoned in Guantánamo, as they would in any immigration jail in the United States.454 Thus, the space of domestic detention and incarceration provides a genealogy of the forms of terror and violence that operate as the norm at Guantánamo and elsewhere. The control unit is one such space. Unprecedented as the legal machinations employed at Guantánamo may seem, as Colin Dayan documents, they rely on the last thirty years of Supreme Court decisions that have abolished the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.”455 Further, as Dayan and Caleb Smith argue, the social, civic, and biological death produced in the “new war prison” is also central to the institutionality of the domestic prison. From its inception as an institution of humanity, civilization, and reform, its designers understood the prison as a place of “deliberate mortification.”456 Early prison reformers in the 18th and 19th centuries specifically designed the prison as a place where human beings would be rendered civically and socially dead—both dead to the law in that they were divested of any rights and dead to the social world in that they were severed from its affective ties. Stripped of citizenship and subjectivity, the prisoner became a specter, an “animate corpse” in the eyes of the law.457 In the words of 18th century reformers, the prison was a “living tomb,” a “space of terror” and “ghostly half- life.”458 Before the 1970s, the goal of incarceration was to rehabilitate the captive. But to be reborn, one first had to be spiritually and legally killed in the name of reanimation. The reformer Benjamin Rush described the convict as one who “was lost and is found— was dead and is alive.”459 Dehumanization is not an exception to the rehabilitative intentions of confinement; it is the sole purpose of the modern prison, making death central to the spatial and temporal politics of incarceration. Death, physic disintegration, and the undoing of subjectivity are built into the discursive and material architecture of the prison. This is more than a metaphor; countless prisoners over the last three centuries recount how the prison produces claustrophobia, chronic rage, panic, depression, blindness, hallucinations, weight loss, dizziness, and heart palpitations. These states of psychic and physical duress made it so the walls of the prison whisper, scream, vibrate, and close in; cement, steel, and space become animated by the necropolitical institutionality of the prison. For example, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, inmates in Soledad prison “composed inside and smuggled out” handwritten poems, essays, and letters in order to construct a book titled, Words From the House of the Dead. Many of the authors understood themselves as trying to breach a dividing line between the living and the living dead. One essay in particular, “How to Develop a Mentally Unhealthy Individual,” describes how the prison apprehends “subjects” engaging in non-normative behaviors (“loving a prostitute,” using drugs, or other “insidious behaviors”) because they are a threat to the social order.460 The prison abolishes “his identity and future” and then systematically produces psychic debility and incapacity in the form of mental illness. The prisoner, forgotten by the world they threatened, lives a “half-life” of mind-numbing repetition and “omnipresent” control, regulation, “punishment and degradation.”461 When George Jackson wrote in 1970 that “capture is the closest thing to being dead that one is likely to experience in this life,” he was not being hyperbolic.462 He was articulating the historical fact that the modus operandi of the temporality of incarceration, and the prison itself, is to produce premature death. This process is not exceptional to the operation of the norm—it is how the norm comes into being. In the words of Smith, “prisoners do not occupy a zone of exile outside the circle of juridical and philosophical humanity: the prison that holds them is one of the primary sites through which the very idea of modern humanity is imagined and contested.”463 Like slavery and settler- colonialism, the prison is a foundational site for the reproduction of liberalism’s freedom. The criminal, like the slave, was already dead, expelled outside the realm of legal and extra-legal concern, empathy, and embrace. The diseased body of the criminal had to be expunged from civil society and “once expelled became the visible record of the sacrifice on which civilization maintained itself.”464 It is crucial to note that this process did not occur outside the law, but was a manifestation of the killing power of the law itself. The convict was buried alive by the law, forced to live a death in life within the tomb of the prison. Smith describes this when he writes, “Perhaps more than any other institution, the prison manifests the power of the law to disfigure and kill those within it circle of rights.”465 The prisoner, though a living and breathing being, is dead—buried by the crushing weight of the law.466 In short, prisoners do not need to be protected by the law from lawlessness, because the law is what renders them dead. The construction of the prison as a space of death and the prisoner as the living dead arose out of Enlightenment conceptions of humanity and natural rights that called for the abolition of gratuitous public executions in favor of the sterility and isolation—the humanness—of the prison. Humanity and rights are not the potential saviors of the prison’s dead, they are the technologies needed to turn the living into walking ghosts. Civil society’s future rested on the prisoner’s expulsion from humanity—this is the life of the prison and it is central to the answer of why and how Guantánamo can exist. It is crucial to remember, as I outlined in chapter one, that the modes of civil and social incapacity that live within the law and the prison were invented under the legal structures of chattel-slavery. The power of Dayan’s work (and its significance to my project in this chapter) is that she charts a set of legal and extra-legal mechanisms that connect the slave to the prisoner, the prisoner to the detainee, and the detainee to the slave. The Supreme Court’s decisions concerning the Eighth Amendment over the last thirty years (that have been foundational to the Bush administration’s torture memos) summoned the spirit of slavery and civil incapacitation so that old laws were given new life.467 In the post-1970s era, legal terms governing the forms of violence that could be exacted on the bodies of enslaved people returned to justify and legalize torture in the U.S. prison system and later, under the “war on terror.” In the 1980s, legal terms like “decency,” “legitimacy,” and “basic human needs,” which justified civil incapacity and social death under slavery, became legal technologies to justify, extend, and invent forms torture in the United States and beyond. Within this framework, as long as the body was not bruised, personhood and the mind could be decimated. The legal nullification of personhood that created the slave became foundational to the category of the prisoner and now envelopes and makes possible the non-human human that is the detainee.468 This is crucial to comprehending the systems of power I am trying to outline between neoliberalism, the prison, and slavery, and now in this chapter, “the war on terror.” As I have been arguing throughout, 1970s feminist, queer, and anti-racist activists offer a rich anticipatory genealogy for mapping these forgotten and unthinkable trajectories. For Dayan, these networks of power live on in the law, and her work is a study of the law. In what follows, I am less concerned with the law and more focused on the forms of knowledge, affect, feelings, and intensities described by women “buried alive” by the law at the Lexington Control Unit. This body of work rewrites the temporalities that underwrite theories of the state of exception. A2 Interpretation BadPoetry does not impose a particular meaning, but opens up space for multiple potential interpretationsFernando 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 170-171)//RAW Hence, whenever there is a statement of relationality, one can never fully legitimise this relationality, not because there is a subjective bias in making the statement – ‘I want there to be a relationality so there will be one' – but as there is always already an unknowability within this very relationality. This is a structural assumption, a structural condition. And it is this very assumption that both allows the statement of relationality to be made, and which also never allows the statement to be fully legitimate. It is for this reason that "______ is like ______" is a descriptive statement, one that never reaches the status of a definition, and is never a definitive statement. Hence, “______ is like ______” is a claim. In fact, one can no longer even discern whether the claim made is true or false as such – one can no longer differentiate whether it is a performative or a constative statement as there is no external referent. Referentiality is precisely the assumed relationality of language itself. In this we find an echo of Paul Celan, who on March 26, 1969, wrote this about poetry: "La poésis ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose" (Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself).20 Perhaps then, relationality can at best only be a poetic relationality; one that does not impose a frame, impose a particular meaning, does not efface the singularity of the relationality, but instead only seeks to be open, exposes itself, to the potentiality of relationality.
(Jeremy, “The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death,” ATROPOS PRESS, pg 214-218)//RAW The poet, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy – a being who since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes. If we recall the words of Paul Cenan, the words that we turned to earlier, that of “poetry does not impose itself, it exposes itself,” one’s instinctive reaction – the thought that comes to mind without thinking, without knowing – is the question ‘expose itself to what?’ Whilst it is easy, too easy, to dismiss a naïve question like that, it would be to our detriment if we choose not to attend it, not to attend a possibility that sometimes lies in the simplest of questions, the silly questions, as it were. After all, if one exposes oneself, it can only be so if there was something, or someone to expose oneself to. There has to be a witness to the exposure, otherwise there would not be one at all. Hence, exposure is always a state of establishing a relationality with another. It is not a relationality that seeks to impose a particular, single, meaning, reading upon another. And this is why poetry continues to menace the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge; without an imposition, the borders are not drawn, the limits are not set. And whilst not forgetting the registers that Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida opened earlier – yes there are only always rules to seeing, and we are always already in grammar, always bounded by grammar – the lack of a boundary also always opens more possibilities than we can account for. One may not even be overstating if one claims that at this point, all accounting systems which are set up to predict, to control, via graphs, curves, probabilities – fail. Whilst exposing itself, and hence, opening itself to response, any response, poetry “always risks what it cannot avoid appealing to in reply, namely, recompense and retribution. It risks the exchange that it might expect but is at the same time unable to count on. Once the poem is sent off, set off, one can only hope for a response. In fact, one always gets a response; even a non-response, a complete ignoring of the poem, is a form of response. It is just that one can never know what kind of response one is going to get. Once the poem is set of, the poet remains completely blind to its effects. Once the bomb is set off, the suicide bomber s completely blind to its effects. It is probably of no coincidence that the suicide bomber is usually constituted as one who is completely irrational, cast as a complete idiot; the most common question heard whenever there is an instance of a suicide bombing is ‘why would one give up her life when she has so much to live for? All attempts to provide an answer to the question are banal, as the very person that the answer attempt to address is dead; hence all answers are unverifiable. One has no choice but to admit that all reason eludes, escapes, is beyond one, is beyond the limits of one’s cognition, is at the beyond of knowledge. Perhaps the only thing we can say is that she gives up her life in spite of the fact that she has so much to live for; after all, it is she who chooses to do so. Whilst this does not provide any answer to the question, provide any comfort that we finally understand her, this is all we can say. Perhaps it is the fact that she remains an enigma that is her gift to us. It is the refusal to be understood, to be subsumed under any existing conception, to be flattened, exchanged, reproduced, that is her gift. And in that same spirit, it is not a gift that can be understood – this is not a gift that one can bring to the return-counter at the shop, to be exchanged for something else, something more palatable, something easier, something more comfortable, more comforting. This is a gift that is unknowable, in full potential, always possible; perhaps always a gift that is to come. What continues to trouble us is that this gift – as with all gifts – comes with an obligation to reciprocate, an obligation to respond. So even though this is an objectless gift – and to compound it a gift that we might not even begin to comprehend, or even know is present – we are always already within the realm of reciprocation. This is the point where the eternal question of the serpent, that of ‘what did she mean’, returns to haunt us, along with the other question of responding, and attempting an appropriate response at that; the question of Lenin, that of “what is to be done?” If we attempt the question of Lenin, that of “what is to be done?” If we attempt to answer the question, to provide a prescription, then we are back to the situation of effacement. Perhaps then the task that we are faced with is that of reconstituting Lenin in and within a situation. If the question of ‘what is to be done’ is a situational question, there can be no answer outside of the situation – at the point of uttering both the question and the answer, we are always immanent to the story, in the making, even when we are the ones telling the story to the other – and more than that, each answer is at best a provisional answer. However, the fact that one can even attempt an answer suggests that at least momentarily, one must be able to “step back” as it were, be exterior to the question, to situation. Hence, each answer, each definition to the question can only be accomplished as a more or less provisory, more or less violent arresting of a dynamic that is interminable, but never simply interminable or infinite. For a dynamic such as this can only be conceived as a series of highly conflictual determinations, as a movement of ambivalence, in which the other is always being seized as a function of the same, all the while eluding this capture. The other becomes the intimate condition of the possibility of the game, remaining all the while out of bounds. A2 Ks of 1ac AuthorsTheir critiques of our authors are just like the colonial policeHalberstam, 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 TAM) Introducing this labor upon labor, and providing the space for its development, creates risks. Like the colonial police force recruited unwittingly from guerrilla neighborhoods, university labor may harbor refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways. But there are good reasons for the university to be confident that such elements will be exposed or forced underground. Precautions have been taken, book lists have been drawn up, teaching observations conducted, invitations to contribute made. Yet against these precautions stands the immanence of transcendence, the necessary deregulation and the possibilities of criminality and fugitivity that labor upon labor requires. Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa- expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers. And what will the university say of them? It will say they are unprofessional. This is not an arbitrary charge. It is the charge against the more than professional. How do those who exceed the profession, who exceed and by exceeding es- cape, how do those maroons problematize themselves, problematize the university, force the university to consider them a problem, a danger? The undercommons is not, in short, the kind of fanciful com- munities of whimsy invoked by Bill Readings at the end of his book. The undercommons, its maroons, are always at war, always in hiding. A2 Music FailsThe noise, or what they call music, we present was to remind those who it was meant for that the place they desire exists and that they exist in it now because they have the desireHalberstam, 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) Moten and Harney want to gesture to another place, a wild place that is not simply the left over space that limns real and regulated zones of polite society; rather, it is a wild place that continuously produces its own unregulated wildness. The zone we enter through Moten and Harney is ongoing and exists in the present and, as Harney puts it, "some kind of demand was already being enacted, fulfilled in the call itself." While describing the London Riots of 2011, Harney suggests that the riots and insurrections do not separate out "the request, the demand and the call" - rather, they enact the one in the other: "I think the call, in the way I would understand it, the call, as in the call and response, the response is already there before the call goes out. You're already in something." You are already in it. For Moten too, you are always already in the thing that you call for and that calls you. What's more, the call is always a call to dis-order and this disorder or wild- ness shows up in many places: in jazz, in improvisation, in noise. The disordered sounds that we refer to as cacophony will always be cast as "extra-musical," as Moten puts it, precisely because we hear some- thing in them that reminds us that our desire for harmony is arbitrary and in another world, harmony would sound incomprehensible. Lis- tening to cacophony and noise tells us that there is a wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us. A2 No Safe Spaces***note—used elsewhere, including A2 Ballot K, Performing Freedom, etc.We must perform freedom, even when unsure of an audience – Only these acts of fugitivity refuse the possibility of dispossession and allow the black subject to be posited not as slave or criminal, but as human.Browne, 2012 - PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone; “EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN: Black luminosity and the visual culture of surveillance”; Article; Pg 551-555; DOA: 7/5/15 || NDW) ‘Moment by moment’ is the experience of surveillance in urban life, as David Lyon observes, where the city dweller expects to be ‘constantly illuminated’ (2001, p. 5153). It is how the city dweller contends with this expectation that is instructive. To examine closely the performance of freedom, a performative practice that I suggest that those named fugitive in the Board of Inquiry arbitration hearings made use of, I borrow Richard Iton’s ‘visual surplus’ and its b-side ‘performative sensibility’ (2009, p. 105). What Iton suggests is that we come to internalize an expectation of the potential of being watched and with this emerges a certain ‘performative sensibility’. Coupled with this awareness of an overseeing surveillance apparatus was ‘the conscious effort to always give one’s best performance and encourage others to do the same, and indeed to perform even when one is not sure of one’s audience (or whether there is in fact an audience)’ (p. 105). Iton employs the term visual surplus to think about the visual media of black popular culture (graffiti, music videos) made increasingly available to the public through the rise of hip-hop in the five boroughs of New York City in the 1970s and the uses of new technologies (cellular phones, handheld cameras, the Internet, DVDs) to record and distribute performances. Applied to a different temporal location,Iton’s analyses of visual surplus and performative sensibility are useful for how we think about fugitive acts, black expressive practices and the regulation of black mobilities in colonial New York City 200 years earlier. What I am suggesting here is that for the fugitive in eighteenth century New York such a sensibility would encourage one to perform in this case perform freedom even when one was not sure of one’s audience. Put differently, these performances of freedom were refusals of dispossession, constituting the black subject not as slave or fugitive, nor commodity but as human. For the black subject, the potentiality of being under watch was a cumulative effect of the large scale surveillance apparatus in colonial New York City and beyond stemming from transatlantic slavery, specifically fugitive slave posters and print news advertisements, blackbirders and other freelancers who kidnapped free blacks to transport them to other sites to be enslaved, slave catching and through the passing of repressive black codes, such as those in response to the slave insurrection of 1712. April 1712 saw an armed insurrection in New York City where over two dozen black slaves gathered in the densely populated East Ward of the city to set fire to a building, killing at least nine whites and wounding others. In the end over 70 were arrested, with many coerced into admissions of guilt. Of those, 25 were sentenced to death and 23 of these death sentences were carried out. Burned at the stake, hanged, beheaded and their corpses publicly displayed and left to decompose, such spectacular corporal punishment served as a warning for the city’s slave population and beyond. With these events and the so-called slave conspiracy to burn the city in 1741, the black code governing black city life consolidated previously enacted laws that were enforced in a rather discretionary fashion.6 Some of these laws spoke explicitly to the notion of a visual surplus and the regulation of mobility by way of the candle lantern. On 14 March 1713, the Common Council of New York City passed a ‘Law for Regulating Negro or Indian Slaves in the Nighttime’ that saw to it that ‘no Negro or Indian Slave above the age of fourteen years do presume to be or appear in any of the streets’ of New York City ‘on the south side of the fresh water one hour after sunset without a lantern or a lit candle’ (New York Common Council, Volume III). ‘Fresh water’ here referring to the Fresh Water Pond found in lower Manhattan, slightly adjacent to the Negroes Burial Ground and that supplied the city with drinking water at the time. Again, this law regulating mobility and autonomy through the use of the technology of the candle lantern was amended on 18 November 1731 where ‘no negro, mulatto or Indian slave above the age of fourteen years’ unless in the company of some white person ‘or white servant belonging to the family whose slave he or she is, or in whose service he or she there are’ was to be without a light that could be plainly seen or it was then ‘lawful for any of his Majesty’s Subjects within the said City to apprehend such slave or slaves’ and ‘carry him, her or them before the Mayor or Recorder or any of the Aldermen of the said City who are hereby authorized upon proof of offense to commit such slave or slaves to the 552 CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Common Gaol’ (New York Common Council, Volume IV). Any slave convicted of being unlit after dark was sentenced to a public whipping of no more than 40 lashes, at the discretion of the master or owner before being discharged. Later this punishment was reduced to no more than 15 lashes. Such discretionary violence made for an imprecise mathematics of torture. Mostly, punishment for such transgression was taken into the hands of the slave owner. In 1734 a male slave of John van Zandt was found dead in his bed. The dead man was said to have ‘absented himself’ from van Zandt’s dwelling in the night-time (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Although it was first reported that the slave was horsewhipped to death by Van Zandt for being caught on the streets after dark by watchmen, a coroner’s jury found Van Zandt not negligent in this death, finding instead that ‘the correction given by the Master was not the cause of death, but that it was by the visitation of God’ (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Other laws put into place around light and black mobilities in New York City stipulated that at least one lantern must be carried per three negroes after sunset, more tightly regulated curfews and in 1722 the Common Council relegated burials by free and enslaved blacks to the daytime hours with attendance of no more than 12, plus the necessary pallbearers and gravediggers, as a means to reduce opportunities for assembly and to prevent conspiracy hatching. In recounting physician Alexander Hamilton’s narrative about his travels through New York City in July of 1744, Andy Doolen details that one outcome of the alleged conspiracy of 1741 was the ruining, according to Hamilton, of the traditional English cup of tea (2005). It was thought by Hamilton that: they have very bad water in the city, most of it being hard and brackish. Ever since the negroe conspiracy, certain people have been appointed to sell water in the streets, which they carry on a sledge in great casks and bring it from the best springs about the city, for it was when the negroes went for tea water that they held their caballs and consultations, and therefor they have a law now that no negroe shall be seen upon the streets without a lanthorn after dark. (Hamilton 1948, p. 88) We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to dawn, made knowable, locatable and contained within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a simple device made for a visual surplus where technology met surveillance, made the business of tea a white enterprise and encoded white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law. Of course, unsupervised leisure, labour, travel, assembly and other forms of social networking past sunset by free and enslaved black New Yorkers continued regardless of the enforcement of codes meant to curtail such things. BLACK LUMINOSITY AND SURVEILLANCE 553 Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Oftentimes social networking by free and enslaved black New Yorkers took place right under the surveillant gazes of the white population, in markets and during Sabbath and holiday celebrations. In these spaces of sometimes interracial and cross-class commerce and socializing, black performative practices of drumming, dancing and chanting persisted. During celebrations of Pinkster marking the feast of Pentecost of the Dutch Reformed Church, amongst the rituals, free and enslaved blacks elected a governor who would serve as a symbolic leader resolving disputes and collecting tributes, making this holiday an event for white spectatorship of black cultural and political production, although for many such celebratory resistance made this ‘a festival of misrule’ (Harris 2003, p. 41). So much so that the Common Council of Albany, New York, banned Pinkster celebrations in 1811, for reasons including a resentment of the space that it opened up for unsettling exchanges between blacks and whites (Lott 1993; McAllister 2003; White 1989). The most controversial incorporation of black performativity into Pinkster was the Totau. On the Totau, McAllister writes: a man and a woman shuffle back and forth inside a ring, dancing precariously close without touching and isolating most of their sensual movement in the hip and pelvic areas. Once the couple dances to exhaustion, a fresh pair from the ring of clapping dancers relieves them and the Totau continues. (McAllister 2003, p. 112) That such a performative sensibility was engaged by black subjects in colonial New York City approximately 200 years before the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx, New York City, is of much significance. The Totau, and later, the Catharine Market breakdown reverberate in the cypher of b-boys and b-girls. In Eric Lott’s discussion of black performances he cites Thomas De Voe’s eyewitness account of the Catharine Market breakdown in the early nineteenth century New York City. De Voe writes: This board was usually about five to six feet long, of large width, with its particular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end. Their music or time was usually given by one of their party, which was done by beating their hands on the sides of their legs and the noise of the heel. The favorite dancing place was a cleared spot on the east side of the fish market in front of Burnel Brown’s Ship Chandlery. (De Voe 1862, cited in Lott 1993, pp. 4142) In this instance, the breakdown is performed in a market, allowing for white spectatorship and patronage in a space that is already overdetermined as a site of commerce within the economy of slavery. Later, DeVoe recalls ‘public 554 CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 negro dances’ at Catharine Market in an 1889 New York Times article where he is quoted as saying that the dancers ‘would bring roots, berries, birds, fish, clams, oysters, flowers, and anything else they could gather and sell in the market to supply themselves with pocket money’ (28 April 1889). Sylvia Wynter’s ‘provision ground ideology’ in instructive here for an understanding of solidarity, survival and the role of folk-culture as resistance to the ‘dehumanization of Man and Nature’ (1970, p. 36). Out of the provision grounds came the cultivation of ceremonial practices, including dance, that were, as Wynter tells us, ‘the cultural guerilla resistance against the Market economy’ (1970, p. 36).7 The remains of the Catharine Market breakdown can be found in the cardboard and turntables of the breakdancing cypher. Then and now cultural production and expressive practices offer moments of living with, refusals and alternatives to routinized surveillance within a visual surplus. In so being, they allow for us to think differently about the predicaments, policies and performances constituting surveillance. Colonial New York City was a space of both terror and promise for black life. Lantern laws, fugitive slave notices, public whippings and the discretionary uses of violence by ‘his Majesty’s subjects’ rendered the black subject as always already unfree yet acts, like the breakdown, that were constitutive of black freedom persisted. It is under this context where certain humans came to be understood by many as unfree and the property of others while at the same time creating practices that maintained their humanity by challenging the routinization of surveillance, that we should read the 1783 Board of Inquiry hearings at Fraunces Tavern. A2 Opposition Fails**note—also in unintelligibility goodFugitivity is not simply opposition or transgression to the social but, rather, functions in a zone of indeterminacy that disrupts the relationship between knowledge and resistance—it is through this space of unintelligibility that blackness can find social life within social deathMoten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2008 (Fred, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2, Spring 2008, p. 178-179, ProjectMUSE, IC) I’ll begin with a thought that doesn’t come from any of these zones, though it’s felt in them, strangely, since it posits the being of, and being in, these zones as an ensemble of specific impossibilities: As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of “being for others,” of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given enough attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw, that outlaws [interdit] any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black This passage, and the ontological (absence of) drama it represents, leads us to a set of fundamental questions. How do we think the possibility and the law of outlawed, impossible things? And if, as Frantz Fanon suggests, the black cannot be an other for another black, if the black can only be an other for a white, then is there ever anything called black social life? Is the designation of this or that thing as lawless, and the assertion that such lawlessness is a function of an already extant flaw, something more than that trying, even neurotic, oscillation between the exposure and the replication of a regulatory maneuver whose force is held precisely in the assumption that it comes before what it would contain? What’s the relation between explanation and resistance? Who bears the responsibility of discovering an ontology of, or of discovering for ontology, the ensemble of political, aesthetic, and philosophical derangements that comprise the being that is neither for itself nor for the other? What form of life makes such discovery possible as well as necessary? Would we know it by its flaws, its impurities? What might an impurity in a worldview actually be? Impurity implies a kind of non-completeness, if not absence, of a worldview. Perhaps that noncompleteness signals an originarily criminal refusal of the interplay of framing and grasping, taking and keeping—a certain reticence at the ongoing advent of the age of the world picture. Perhaps it is the reticence of the grasped, the enframed, the taken, the kept—or, more precisely, the reluctance that disrupts grasping and framing, taking and keeping—as epistemological stance as well as accumulative activity. Perhaps this is the flaw that attends essential, anoriginal impurity—the flaw that accompanies impossible origins and deviant translations.2 What’s at stake is fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic—a movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure. This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression. Part of what can be attained in this zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands a para-ontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance.3 This exchange between matters juridical and matters sociological is given in the mixture of phenomenology and psychopathology that drives Fanon’s work, his slow approach to an encounter with impossible black social life poised or posed in the break, in a certain intransitive evasion of crossing, in the wary mood or fugitive case that ensues between the fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black and as a slippage enacted by the meaning—or, perhaps too “trans-literally,” the (plain[-sung]) sense—of things when subjects are engaged in the representation of objects. A2 Suffering/Slavery Reps BadThe status quo is structured by the logics and technology of chattel slavery and the afterlife of slavery is the past’s possession of the present – the attempt to forgo or “move beyond” it is a new linkDillon 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) In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand writes of the Middle Passage, The door [of no return] signifies the historical moment which colours all moments in the Diaspora. It accounts for the ways we observe and are observed as people, whether it’s through the lens of social injustice or the laws of human accomplishment. The door exists as an absence. A thing in fact which we do not know about, a place we do not know. Yet, it exists as the ground we walk…Where one stands in a society seems always related to this historical experience. Where one can be observed is relative to that history. All human effort seems to emanate from this door.32 For Brand, the Middle Passage and chattel-slavery compose the original template for modern power. The door of no return is the site from which all disciplinary and biopolitical regimes emanate. It (and not it alone) determines the ways people are regulated, visualized, mobilized, positioned, and organized. Yet, the deathly touch of terror and the warm embrace of inclusion are not just stained from the original scene. What began at the door is also transmitted, transformed, renewed, and repositioned in our present day.33 This is what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery,” where premature death, incarceration, limited access to healthcare and education, and poverty are structured by the logics and technologies of chattel-slavery.34 Under this analytic, the past does not give way to the present, slowly dissolving under the bright shinning light of progress; slavery’s afterlife is the past’s possession of the present. The past holds the present captive—structuring, surrounding, and inhabiting it. The fabrication of concrete and compartmentalized conceptions of time and space dissolves under the crushing weight of the blood stained gate. But this possession does not just take the form of the tactile, visible, and known. Part of the afterlife of slavery emanates from an absence that cannot be recovered or repaired. The door of no return is not a place, it is a gap that founds the now—it is history as the unknown. The present rests upon this rupture, upon the unknowable, upon the forgotten, and upon the dead. In this chapter, I use the term possession as a modification of the concept of haunting. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon argues that haunting describes how that which seems to be not there—something that is absent or missing—is often a “seething presence…acting on and meddling with taken for granted realities.”35 A ghost is one way something lost, disappeared, or dead makes itself known. Engaging a haunting means to consider the apparitions lingering outside the frame of disciplinary knowledge, to make contact with the reality of fictions and the fictions of reality, to reckon with “endings that are not over” and past events that “loiter in the present.”36 If haunting names the lingering presence of the dead in the realm of the living—the present absence of what is there and yet hidden, the feeling that there is something in the room with you even when your eyes tell you otherwise—then possession is when the ghost does not haunt, but rather, takes hold. Possession is when the ghost inhabits and controls. To be haunted is to see the ghost that has been waiting for your field of vision to change. By contrast, a possessive spirit is not so passive and patient. Unlike a ghost, a spirit does not wait; it grabs hold of you first, perhaps without your knowledge. What seizes you are not the murmurs of the oppressed or the whispered demands of those killed by state violence and terror—possession is the deathly grip of the dominant. Possession is a “psychological state in which an individual's normal personality is replaced by another;” “domination by something (as an evil spirit, a passion, or an idea);” or “something owned, occupied, or controlled.”37 To be possessed is to be under the control of something more powerful than the imagined free will of the liberal individual. We can witness possession in the relationship between race, gender, and death as theorized by black feminists in the 1970s. For example, in her 1968 essay “The Black Revolution in America,” Grace Lee Boggs argues that American capitalism was born out of the labor of black slaves and has since used white workers to “defend the system and…keep Blacks in their place at the bottom of the ladder, scavenging the old jobs, old homes, old churches, and old schools discarded by whites…thereby contributing to the overall capital of the country.”38 She goes on to outline a regime of biopolitical management animated by this history: They [black youth] also recognize that although a particular struggle may be precipitated by an individual incident, their struggle is not against just one or another individual but against a whole power structure comprising a complex network of politicians, university and school administrators, landlords, merchants, usurers, realtors, insurance personal, contractors, union leaders, licensing and inspection bureaucrats, racketeers, lawyers, policemen—the overwhelming majority of who are white and absentee, and who exploit the black ghetto the same way the Western powers exploit the colonies and neo-colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.39 Within a theory of power as possession, slavery’s relationship to the present is more than the haunting of a ghost. Slavery, for Boggs, is not lurking behind contemporary formations of power. Instead, the “complex network” of biopolitical regulation and management outlined by Boggs is given life by an anti-blackness as old as liberal freedom. Contemporary biopolitics are possessed by discourses and technologies produced under slavery that were carried into the future (our present) by race, gender, sexuality, and anti-blackness. As Omise’eke Tinsley writes, “The brown-skinned, fluid- bodied experiences now called blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean.”40 Extending Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploration of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” we can understand race and death as a possessive spirit that works as one, born out of the genocide of conquest and slavery.41 Being placed at the “bottom of the ladder” by an expansive network of racialized management and control is Boggs’s way of describing the uneven distribution of value and disposability produced by slavery’s ongoing role in the present. Although death is sometimes a natural biological phenomenon, it is more often manufactured and distributed by regimes of power far removed from ones last breath or final heartbeat. Race is one such technology; it is a mechanism for distributing life and death, and for black people, race and white supremacy are motivated by a past of subjection, subjugation, torture, terror, and disposability that has not ended.42 Race possesses life in both the biological and biopolitical sense, ending or extending biological life for individuals and populations. While race sometimes haunts, it more often limits life chances by inhabiting and controlling individuals, institutions, and populations. In short, we are possessed by race, and death and life are the outcome. The relationship between race and possession is also evident in the writing of prisoners and activists in the 1970s who connected the contemporary prison to chattel- slavery. Within this body of work, the contemporary prison is animated by logics, technologies, and discourses constructed under nineteenth-century U.S. slavery. For countless prisoners and activists, race (and anti-blackness) were instruments that transcended space and time so that the past could invade and contort the present in its image. For instance, in his best-selling collection of prison writing Soledad Brother published in 1970, George Jackson described the ways that the prison’s connection to slavery reverses, compresses, and undoes the progress of time: My recall is nearly perfect, time has faded nothing. I recall the very first kidnap. I’ve lived through the passage, died on the passage, lain in the unmarked shallow graves of the millions who fertilized the Amerikan soil with their corpses; cotton and corn growing out of my chest, “unto the third and fourth generation,” the tenth, the hundredth.43 Here, Jackson describes the relationship between memory, time, and possession. His captive body is metaphorically infested with the cotton and corn grown under the prison of the plantation. Time did not wash away the horrors of slavery, but rather, modified and intensified them. Jackson both lives the past and continues to live its afterlife. He feels possessed by the forms of death produced under slavery, and throughout his writing connects this to his “living death” in prison. This possession is not temporally constrained; neither the law nor the state can exorcise black bodies of this death sentence. Instead, Jackson argued that the U.S. “must be destroyed” and that anything less would be “meaningless to the great majority of the slaves.”44 Although an extensive review of Jackson’s discussion of slavery is beyond the scope of this project, his ideas and declaration that “I am a slave to, and of, property” were not unique among the black liberation movement.45 In fact, Jackson’s writing was emblematic of larger political, social, and economic changes occurring in the 1960s and 1970s, and paradigmatic of the political thought of the black liberation movement. The work of Shakur and Davis are one of the lines of flights that depart from the thought of Jackson and the black liberation movement. Indeed, Davis dedicates “Reflections” to Jackson’s life (cut short by his violent death) and his struggle against his own misogyny. In addition, Davis offers a literal embodiment of how the theories, histories, and epistemologies produced by the black feminist and black liberation movements have entered the university. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.17 Mb. Share with your friends:
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