Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr Note
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- Vote affirmative to recognize the fugitive politics of Uncle Toliver.
- Vote affirmative to steal from the academy. Moten and Harney explain in 2004 that…
1ac—MotenThe history of domestic surveillance is inseparable from the history of slavery. Lists of human cargo, plantation inventories, and diaries were used by masters to govern slaves, to impose domination onto unwilling bodies. Disciplinary power utilizing information technology such as slave patrols or wanted posters functioned to create a racially stratified security system, imposing a compulsory visibility upon the black body as communicated through the literacy of the White body—it is from this that contemporary policing and surveillance arises. Simone Browne, in 2012, explains that…Browne 2012 – PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone; “Race and Surveillance” “Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies”; Google Book; https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=F8nhCfrUamEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA72&dq=race+and+surveillance+Simone+browne&ots=y_cvDcnYS0&sig=ZmhtR3WJI2mp_clVI6qwScZDZwQ#v=onepage&q=race%20and%20surveillance%20Simone%20browne&f=false; 7/5/15 || NDW) According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be traced to the "simple accounts" of slave owners. Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves. One example involved the "General Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the Negro that what you say is the result of reflection." The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is "exercised through its invisibility," while imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its targets. Disciplinary power then operated on the enslaved as racialized surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to and that produced them as racial, and therefore enslave able, subjects. Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system, a system that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three "information technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes" when apprehended. This security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (black) illiteracy", a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts, became a part of the aparatus of surveillance, and the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place." For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for "a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: "sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception." Seth's, or Sall's, duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white parent) or a "Quadroon Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official with the first US federal census in 1790. I will retun to the census as a technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an infoprmation technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that required constant policing and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned "colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open." "Top eye" here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so as not to appear uppity To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken to." This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a "Technology of Whiteness". Slaves were not, however, passive objects implicated within the play of this biopolitical endeavor. Consider the story of Uncle Toliver, as told in Leon Litwack’s “Been in the Storm So Long”:In Nansemond County, Virginia, a slave known as Uncle Toliver had been indiscreet enough to pray aloud for the Yankees. The master’s two sons ordered him to kneel in the barnyard and pray for the Confederacy. But this stubborn old man prayed even louder for a Yankee triumph. With growing exasperation, perhaps even bewilderment, the two sons took turns in whipping him until finally the slave, still murmuring something about the Yankees, collapsed and died. (Litwak 1979, 30)1One might conclude that Uncle Toliver’s death was a nihilistic, tragic event—that his state of subjugation was so entrenched that nothing meaningful could come from it. Yet, the aporia of the slave’s unintelligible actions, of property’s critique against Property, creates a bewilderment, a disorientation of the Master that allows for the possibility of agency. Fred Moten notes in 2004 that…Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2004 (Fred, “Knowledge of Freedom,” The New Centennial Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2004, p. 285-287, ProjectMUSE, IC) But this is a simple passage, one designed to provide some sense of the violent imposition of silence that marks slavery and will have marked every disaster, every violent assault on or ritual destruction of the whole. We might gather from this simple recounting, this simple “objectivizing archivation,” that slavery is that institution—violent and ritual dehumanization is that event—wherein nothing can be said, whereof nothing can be said, which arrives for us, even now, enveloped in the silence that accompanies the absence of specificity, the lack of an immediate resonance. But to speak here of simplicity—of a text, a passage, that tells, simply, the barest story and unearths, simply, the smallest remnant of a life that gives us, simply, an indication of the nature of a mode of being—is a matter that is, of course, not so simple. The passage, which can only be called “Uncle Toliver,” is more than a subject and more than a text; and its transmission of the whole of Uncle Toliver to us is far from simple. It arrives through various arrangements of the story of Uncle Toliver, the story of a man who could not tell his story as a matter of law, and as a matter of the materiality of his life and death. But the mediation that gives us that story does not obscure the position and situation spoken through his silence. It is spoken so profoundly that the entirety of the Enlightenment tradition and its critical other is invoked, reopened, revised, improvised. The mediated and reconstructed voicing of the slave speaks through the vernacular and for freedom. The mediated and reconstructed voice of a man held as property arrives to us as a critique of Property. As the passage arrives once more, hear again its simplicity in a repetition that serves to further obl/iterate (ob/literate) that simplicity: the subject, the text—that which is more than the person and more than the text—of Uncle Toliver haunts and infuses us. In Nansemond County, Virginia, a slave known as Uncle Toliver had been indiscreet enough to pray aloud for the Yankees. The master’s two sons ordered him to kneel in the barnyard and pray for the Confederacy. But this stubborn old man prayed even louder for a Yankee triumph. With growing exasperation, perhaps even bewilderment, the two sons took turns in whipping him until finally the slave, still murmuring something about the Yankees, collapsed and died. How is this strange arrival possible? What is its significance for us today in the midst of an attempt to provide a desperately needed re/presentation of liberation within an argument for the necessity of something other than either a rejection of, or an indifference to, or a convergence with the (old or given) Enlightenment? Ensemble, figured in and improvised through the ethical mediation of the Enlightenment’s critical opening of the whole, is the improvisation of the singular identities of Litwack and Uncle Toliver, and the totality which is generated by lingering in the music that airily fills the space between them. They speak in ensemble and are written there in a moment at which we are given, through the mediation of improvisation, the whole of the history of the whole, and the whole of the history of singularist (and differentiated) totalizations of the whole. Uncle Toliver is, once more, the autobiography of ensemble and the history of an ensemble voicing and agency; it is not the recording of a differentiated, repressed, and oppressed ego by another ego in search of affirmation. Uncle Toliver is the reality which invocations of naive and idiomatic writing, or calls for a voicing-towards-agency, or overlordly assertions of the whole only imagine within the inevitable return to the best and worst of the Enlightenment that poststructuralism and identity politics must make. Uncle Toliver prepares the ground for the real formulation of a more than discursive ethics; we are propelled toward that view of the world that allows our knowledge of the passage, a view that demands a particular way of being in the world. In other words, our attention to ensemble, as it exists in and as Uncle Toliver, activates and improvises—keeps faith with— ensemble. It is an attention that will have always moved through the interminable attention to differentiating singularity or homogenizing totality that has always foreclosed the possibility of a genuine agency. Agency is in the tradition of Uncle Toliver. Uncle Toliver’s narrative is part of a chain of recitation that moves from a never fully unveiled originary encounter to the specter of an impossible encounter to come, the encounter in the future that would mark the impossible justice of a strange, oppositional resolution. But the oppositional resolution that the bridge or passage would mark falls before its own form. Descent, not oscillation; descent, not the asymmetrical tensions and reemergent subjectivities of a gaze; descent, as in the future resonances of variations of an unknown tongue. Vote affirmative to recognize the fugitive politics of Uncle Toliver.Vote affirmative to acknowledge that the United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance of fugitive bodies.Vote affirmative to endorse fugitivity.Fugitivity is not simply opposition to or transgression of 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 death. Moten, in 2008, continues…Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2008 (Fred, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2, Spring 2008, p. 178-179, ProjectMUSE, IC) **gender modified 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. The narrative of Uncle Toliver is always already in the process of continual reinvention, oscillating between the planes of intelligibility and unintelligibility as it is passed down, translated, and transcribed. It is from this unstable and aporic space that we derive the knowledge of freedom and the subjectivity to assert that freedomMoten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2004 (Fred, “Knowledge of Freedom,” The New Centennial Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2004, p. 304-306, ProjectMUSE, IC) Noam Chomsky and others have begun to frame the fundamental questions concerning knowledge of language as an innate endowment activated in the cut (between speech and writing, between inner and outer speech, between silence and sound, between competence and performance, in the interstice that is and engenders rhythm, generated anew and improvised throughout from the strange combination of experience and n[othing]). Knowledge of freedom is also in that cut or hiatus; it’s where Mary Prince is—as if given by the mediating and improvisational force of de Law/d when that force is enacted in the improvised nonexclusionary expansion of humanity. Ellen Butler’s insight into our knowledge of prayer as a particular linguistic mode is also insight into our knowledge of freedom. And Uncle Toliver’s prayer—uttered in an unknown tongue, given aloud and transmitted through narrative mediation and through a citation and recitation in the rhythmic interstice where ensemble fell—is a citation (one given under the collective name of the Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Works Project Administration in the State of Virginia) which Litwack names, reigns, showing the mark of that unnamed flowing in his récit, his recitation. But, again, Litwack’s is not some predatory erasure, but the echo of that already extant loss inherent in intelligibility, translation, and transcription, whose presence is and allows the mediational “ethics” of ensemble. (Think of what is lost in the translation from Ellen Butler’s “dialect” to “standard English”: the constitutive cut that separates the Lord and de Law/d and is transformed but retained in the chain of re-citation that marks the writing of oral history.) Uncle Toliver is the gain and loss in this recording at the end of the chain of recitations which is history, and which here is extended at the end of a chain of narratives, of the kind of narrative wherein knowledge of freedom is given to us and for us. The constellation of these recitations and narratives is where Orwell’s problem (how we know so little given so much evidence) and Plato’s problem (how we know so much given so little evidence) intersect.12 It’s where the questions concerning the law of genre, the strange institution called literature (where the law is lifted, where everything can be said), and the peculiar institution called slavery (where nothing could be said as a matter of a law broken, and reconstituted in the breaking and reconstitution of the law of genre, and the law of the law of genre, and their intersection) converge. One story told in Nansemond County concerns Uncle Toliver, who had the indiscretion to pray aloud. When rumor reached the great house that he had been praying for the Yankees, Tom and Henry, sons of the master, told the aged slave to kneel in the barnyard and pray for the Confederates. Uncle Toliver prayed as loud as he could for a Yankee victory. All day long they kept him there, taking turns in lashing him, but he would not give in. At last he collapsed, still praying, his voice a mumbled jargon. The only word that could be distinguished was Yankee. Sometime that night, while they were still lashing him, Uncle Toliver died (Negro in Virginia 1994, 209). So you pause at the recitation of lost names and the mumbled jargon where the rest of Uncle Toliver’s utterance remains unheard. In the space that jargon opens (a space off to the side or out-from-the-outside; an appositional spacing or displacement of the encounter in the interest of a subjectivity whose presence remains to be activated; a space not determined by the zero encounter that ruptures the subject or the nostalgic return to an other subject before the encounter; a space where Uncle Toliver speaks through Tom and Henry—the sons of the master—and through the Workers of the Writers’ Project of the Works Project Administration of the State of Virginia, and through Leon Litwak to us: piercing and possessing, disabling and enabling mediation and meditation) the rest is what is left for us to say, the rest is what is left for us to do, in the broad and various echoes of that utterance, our attunement to which assures us that we are “in the tradition.”
“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll 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 of—this 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. 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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