Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr Note

2ac Perm

The permutation creates an ensemble of strategies that, rather than strive and compete for dominance, functions to more holistically invoke the critique of property and creates the possibility of agency through narrative

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.

Cap K—2ac

The recognition of fugitivity is break from the dialectical relation between the Master and Slave—rather than accepting the thesis of property and owner, the fugitive demands analysis of its own human capacity from whence black authenticity can arise

This is all to say that Fanon can only very briefly glance at or glance off the immense and immensely beautiful poetry of (race) war, the rich music of a certain underground social aid, a certain cheap and dangerous socialism, that comprises the viciously criminalized and richly differentiated interiority of black cooperation that will, in turn, have constituted the very ground of externally directed noncooperation. It turns out, then, that the pathological is (the) black, which has been figured both as the absence of color and as the excessively, criminally, pathologically colorful (which implies that black’s relation to color is a rich, active interinanimation of reflection and absorption); as the cortico-visceral muscular contraction or the simultaneously voluntary and impulsive hiccupped “jazz lament” that in spite of Fanon’s formulations must be understood in relation to the acceptable jaggedness, legitimate muscularity, and husky theoretical lyricism of the bop and post-bop interventions that are supposed to have replaced it (176). Because finally the question isn’t whether or not the disorderly behavior of the anticolonialist is pathological or natural, whether or not he is born to that behavior, whether or not the performance of this or that variation on such behavior is “authentic”: the question, rather, concerns what the vast range of black authenticities and black pathologies does. Or, put another way, what is the efficacy of that range of natural-born disorders that have been relegated to what is theorized as the void of blackness or black social life but that might be more properly understood as the fugitive being of “infinite humanity,” or as that which Marx calls wealth?

Now, wealth is on one side a thing, realized in things, material products, which a human being confronts as subject; on the other side, as value, wealth is merely command over alien labour not with the aim of ruling, but with the aim of private consumption, etc. It appears in all forms in the shape of a thing, be it an object or be it a relation mediated through the object, which is external and accidental to the individual. Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production. In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e., the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?31

Though Fanon is justifiably wary of anything that is presented as if it were written into the nature of things and of the thing, this notion of wealth as the finite being of a kind of infinite humanity—especially when that in/finitude is understood (improperly, against Marx’s grain) as constituting a critique of any human mastery whatever—must be welcomed. Marx’s invocation of the thing leads us past his own limitations such that it becomes necessary and possible to consider the thing’s relation to human capacity independent of the limitations of bourgeois form.

Cap/Neolib K –2ac

Permutation do both solves--race theory explains neoliberalism and our strategy is uniquely key to defeat the penal state

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)

I turn to the cultural products of imprisoned and underground activists as a record of what has been forgotten by hegemonic epistemologies. As Roderick Ferguson writes, “Epistemology is an economy of information privileged and information excluded” under which “national formations rarely disclose what they have rejected.”22 Yet, the prisoner and the fugitive index the histories and forms of knowledge that were erased and excluded by law and order and neoliberal economics. Fugitive Life explores the ways that imprisoned and underground activists responded to the changing operations of (and new technologies central to) racialized and gendered power under late capital. In addition, I contrast the forms of knowledge arising from the underground to the epistemologies central to build-up of the neoliberal-carceral state. In this way, I argue that the prisoner and the fugitive are figures that produced epistemologies that undermined the political and historical fictions underpinning this process. For example, while law and order politicians argued that policing and penal technologies were instruments of safety and liberty, and neoliberal economists argued that poverty was the outcome of individual pathology, Davis and countless others labored to name the racialized and gendered violence cloaked by these new discourses. Chapter one, "Possessed by Death: The Neoliberal-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery,” examines the historical foundations of the neoliberal-carceral state. Since the 1960s, scholars, activists, and prisoners have argued that the contemporary prison exists on a historical continuum with nineteenth century chattel slavery. More recently, a growing body of work has made clear the connections between the post-1980s prison and neoliberal economic policies. While the prison’s connection to slavery and the market has been well explored, the contemporary market’s relationship to chattel slavery has largely been overlooked. If slavery’s anti-black technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live on in the operations of the market? What is the relationship between an anti-blackness inaugurated under the Atlantic slave trade and the methods of population management used under neoliberalism? How does the absence, death, and loss left behind by slavery connect to the formation of the contemporary neoliberal-carceral state? To answer these questions, I read two texts written by captive black women in the 1970s United States: Assata Shakur’s "Women in Prison: How We Are” and Angela Davis's "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves." Both texts were composed at the very moment of the neoliberal-carceral state’s emergence and index the ways that black feminism developed under and critiqued this formation. I also include a discussion of Sherley Anne Williams’s 1986 novel Dessa Rose. Although the novel was written in the mid-1980s, Williams cites Davis's essay—and the rise of the prison in the 1970s—as providing the inspiration for the novel. All three texts emerge from the late twentieth- history of our social, political, and economic present. Chapter two, “The End of the Future: Law and Order, the Feminist Underground, and the Temporality of Violence,” extends the first chapter’s concern with time to consider the relationship between the prison, the market, and the future. I begin by exploring how, in their campaign speeches and advertisements, law and order politicians understood the market and prison in relation to time and the future. For Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, the very possibility of a future depended on the immobilization of those rendered surplus or resistant to new economic regimes structured around privatization, deindustrialization, deregulation, and finance. In other words, embedded in the emergent discourses of the neoliberal-carceral state was a vision of the future—one where the freedom of individuality and the market required the mass immobilization of the prison. The first section of the chapter argues that by connecting the freedom of the individual to the governance of the prison, the politics of law and order were complicit with emerging neoliberal discourses of self-care, personal responsibility, and individualism. In the last half of this chapter, I examine how underground women activists of the period understood the time and future of an emerging neoliberal-carceral state. Many1970s activists did not see the prison and the market as separate systems of power. Instead, they understood them as deeply connected, if not at times, indistinguishable. I focus on the writings of underground revolutionary organizations that formed in direct response to the repression and violence of the law and order state. I analyze the communiqués issued by these organizations—specifically the women’s brigade of the Weather Underground and the George Jackson Brigade—to consider what the future of neoliberalism and the prison meant for those enmeshed in the changing carceral and economic regimes of the 1970s. As I argue, the communiqués written by these groups can be understood as feminist and queer responses to the temporality of progress that supported law and order and the development of the neoliberal-carceral state. Whereas chapter one considered how the past is theorized in the writings of imprisoned (and previously underground) revolutionary black women, this chapter analyzes the writings of 1970s imprisoned radicals and underground revolutionaries, most of whom identified as women, in order to examine how they theorized the prison, the market, and time in relation to the state. It contrasts these revolutionary visions with the dreams of people like Nixon who understood the prison and the market as foundational to the security and order of the nation and its future. The third chapter, “Life Escapes: Neoliberal Economics, the Fugitive, and Queer Freedom,” explores two paradigmatic notions of freedom in the 1970s that I call “neoliberal freedom” and “queer freedom.” In chapter two, I analyzed the politics of law and order to argue that law and order was symbiotic with, and productive of, neoliberal discourses that emphasized the relationship between the freedom of the individual and the freedom of the market. In this way, the prison as a discursive field, a set of fantasies, and a regime of dispersed institutional technologies aimed at policing and incapacitation became constitutive of the freedom of the market and individual. Chapter three continues to explore the ways that penal and policing technologies were imagined as central to the life of the free market, but focuses on the writings of early neoliberal thinkers—in particular, Milton Friedman’s 1962 Capitalism and Freedom. Friedman was a Nobel Prize-winning American economist, statistician, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. As a leader of the Chicago school of economics, he has been perhaps the most important opponent to Keynesian economics, and is considered central to the emergence of neoliberal thought and policy. Despite Friedman’s centrality to neoliberal policy across the globe, scholars of neoliberalism and late twentieth century capitalism have largely ignored his writings. I argue that the emergence of neoliberal theories of freedom were, in part, a response to the liberation movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. While feminist, anti-racist, and queer liberation movements made demands that exceeded the material and epistemological possibilities of the social order, neoliberal freedom confined and restricted what freedom could be within the relations between the individual and the market. In addition, Friedman’s theory of freedom relied on the containment of populations he deemed not responsible enough to be free. In this way, neoliberal theories of freedom necessitated the prison. I compare Friedman’s theory of freedom to those produced by 1970s women fugitives. By reading memoirs of former political fugitives alongside Susan Choi’s novel American Woman, I argue for a queer conception of freedom where freedom is the very practice of running. Chapter four, “The Control to Come: Sexuality, Terror, and the Control Unit,” documents the rise of control units under neoliberalism. Control units are prisons within a prison, where inmates are held in 6-by-9-foot rooms for 23 hours a day. After the demise of rehabilitation as an ideal of incarceration, control units became a new model that guided the expansion of prisons. It is not just that the prison system expanded exponentially under the neoliberal shifts of the 1970s; control units also emerged as a unique new penal technology. In this way, I argue that control units are directly connected to the political and economic shifts of the 1970s. I explore one unit in particular, the “High Security Unit” in Lexington, Kentucky, which operated from 1986 to 1988. The isolation unit at Lexington was originally designed to hold sixteen women—those, according to the Bureau of Prisons, who were incorrigible flight risks— but Lexington ended up only detaining three women incarcerated for their involvement with the black liberation movement and Puerto Rican independence movement in the 1970s and early 1980s. This chapter turns to the prison writings of the women held at Lexington in order to explore the relationship between sexuality, the body, the expansion of control units as a model of punishment, and the larger social and economic changes implemented under neoliberalism. It also argues that Lexington offers a genealogy of the forms of punishment and incarceration central to the “war on terror

The neoliberal narrative is described as the “home of the free,” but is rather an extension of the prison—it connects the powers of market under slavery to the powers of the market under neoliberalism—embracing fugitivity is key

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)

In her 1978 essay “Women in Prison: How We Are,” Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur wrote: For many, prison is not that much different from the street…For many cells are not that different from the tenements…and the welfare hotels they live in on the street…The fights are the same except they are less dangerous. The police are the same. The poverty is the same. The alienation is the same. The racism is the same. The sexism is the same. The drugs are the same and the system is the same.24 For Shakur, the regulations of a burgeoning neoliberal-carceral state possessed life in ways that rendered the free world an extension of the prison. An assemblage of race, gender, capital, policing, and penal technologies produced a symbiosis between the de- industrialized landscape of the late 20th century urban United States and the gendered racisms of an emerging prison-industrial complex. Diffuse structural networks of racism and sexism mimicked the steel bars of a cage. This is the complicity between freedom and captivity, the entanglements between t he living and the living dead, and the hemorrhaging of a buried past into the imagined progress of the present. For Shakur, prison looked like and felt like nineteenth century chattel slavery: “We sit in the bull pen. We are all black. All restless. And we are all freezing.”25 In the essay, affect continually forces the past to open directly onto the present.26 The sensations and feelings of frozen skin speaks in a way that words cannot. In prison, shivering black flesh weighted with chains looked like slavery to Shakur. As a fugitive who now has political asylum in Cuba, she understands herself as a twenty-first century runaway slave, a “maroon woman.”27 Although Shakur’s essay does not name neoliberalism explicitly, we can read it as a black feminist theorization of neoliberalism at the very moment of its emergence. Indeed, it is a narration of the drastic racialized and gendered restructurings of social and economic life in the 1970s United States from the perspective of someone detained for resisting those changes. Written by a captured member of the underground black liberation movement, the text names the discourses and (state) violence neoliberalism requires yet erases. Neoliberalism is most certainly an economic doctrine that prioritizes the mobility and expansion of capital at all costs, but its mechanisms exceed the liberation of the market from the repression of the state. As Shakur indicates, one of the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the neoliberal state is the kinship shared between the free world and the prison—an affinity structured and produced by an anti- blackness inaugurated under chattel-slavery. More over, as Shakur argues throughout the essay, the technologies of immobilization utilized by the neoliberal state specifically target black women, a process connected to the emergence of the black feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By reading black feminist texts from the 1970s as implicit theories of neoliberalism, we can come to understand the formation and implementation of neoliberalism in a new light. Shakur not only connects an emergent neoliberalism to a rapidly expanding prison regime, she also links the contemporary prison to chattel slavery—an institutional, affective, and discursive connection apprehended by Angela Davis’s phrase, “From the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison.”28 The connections made by Shakur between the prison and neoliberalism, and between slavery and the prison, have been thoroughly explored by many scholars.29 Indeed, during the past two decades, a growing body of scholarship has affirmed and extended Shakur’s analysis of blackness, slavery, and the prison by exploring what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.”30 By centering racial terror in a genealogy of the prison, scholars have come to understand the barracoons, coffles, slave holds, and plantations of the Middle Passage as spatial, discursive, ontological, and economic analogues of modern punishment that have haunted their way into the present.31 If the carceral becomes a functional surrogate for slavery’s production of social and living death, then Shakur’s text also hints at another connection that has garnered less attention—slavery’s haunting possession of neoliberalism. While the prison’s connection to slavery and the market has been well explored, the contemporary market’s relationship to chattel slavery has largely been overlooked. If slavery’s anti- black technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live on in the operations of the market? What is the relationship between an anti-blackness inaugurated under the Atlantic slave trade and the methods of population management used under neoliberalism? How does the absence, death, and loss left behind by slavery connect to the formation of the contemporary neoliberal-carceral state? What is the connection between the necropolitics of chattel-slavery and the biopolitics of neoliberalism? To answer these questions, I read two texts written by captive black women in the 1970s United States: Assata Shakur’s "Women in Prison: How We Are” and Angela Davis's "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves." Both texts were composed at the very m oment of the neoliberal-carceral state’s emergence and index the ways that black feminism developed under and critiqued this formation. Throughout the chapter, I examine how Shakur and Davis theorize the relationship between the carceral, the market, the population, and the body. While Davis’s essay explores black women’s experiences of terror and resistance under chattel slavery in order to contest the discourse of the black matriarch, Shakur’s essay describes black women’s experiences of gender, sexuality, race, violence, and incarceration in the early 1970s. I also include a discussion of Sherley Anne Williams’s 1986 novel Dessa Rose. Although the novel was written in the mid-1980s, in the author's note, Williams cites Davis's essay—and the rise of the prison in the 1970s—as providing the inspiration for the novel. Williams uses fiction to recover the histories of enslaved black women Davis could not discover in the written record. Williams turns Davis's brief description of a uprising on a slave coffle led by a pregnant black woman into a novel that theorizes the racialized, gendered, affective, and economic politics of chattel slavery and its regimes of incarceration, torture, and terror. All three texts emerge from the late twentieth-century prison (and an emergent neoliberal state) in order to theorize chattel slavery as a history of our social, political, and economic present. Yet the texts do not undo normative conceptions of time by deploying the conventions of fact; rather, they use fiction, memory, and imagination to connect the forgotten, the lost, and the dead to the now. These texts insist that the absence of memory shapes the contours of the present. While many projects on the legacy of slavery utilize demographic data to measure slavery’s extension into our present in concrete terms, I attempt to engage the past through it’s forgetting. I leave behind the world of facts, proof, and Truth in order to connect the powers of the market across time and space through non-normative epistemologies that rely on affect, memory, and imagination. As a matter of fact, it was the reason and rationality of mathematics, demographics, and insurance that produced millions of corpses in the service of making millions of commodities. To be clear, this chapter has three goals. First, it connects the powers of market under slavery to powers of the market under neoliberalism by exploring how black feminists made sense of the afterlife of slavery under an emergent neoliberal state. Second, it uses black feminist engagements with loss, to assert that death and loss undo to the progress of time so that the past lives on, and possesses the present. By engaging death, loss, and forgetting, the texts I analyze connect penal and economic technologies in the 1970s United States to the carceral nature of the market under chattel slavery. Finally, by constructing a critical genealogy of the market through the writings of black feminists working within and under the neoliberal-carceral state, I argue that under neoliberalism, the market supplements and mimics the prison.

Foucault/Liberal Subject K—2ac

Our narrative deconstructs the myth of the universal, autonomous Kantian subject—rather than accede to the univocal logic of the Enlightenment or of polemic critiques thereof, our strategy inserts resistant appositional to both, creating the possibility of a polyvocal discourse

Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2004 (Fred, “Knowledge of Freedom,” The New Centennial Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2004, p. 274-278, ProjectMUSE, IC)

In 1989, in the tradition of answering the question concerning Enlightenment, Jacques Derrida declares:

Of course I am ‘in favour’ of the Enlightenment; I think we shouldn’t simply leave it behind us, so I want to keep this tradition alive. But at the same time I know that there are certain historical forms of Enlightenment, certain things in this tradition that we need to criticize or deconstruct. So it is sometimes in the name of, let us say, a new Enlightenment that I deconstruct a given Enlightenment. And this requires some very complex strategies; requires that we should let many voices speak. . . . There is nothing monological, no monologue—that’s why the responsibility for deconstruction is never individual or a matter of the single, self-privileged authorial voice. It is always a multiplicity of voices, of gestures. . . . And you can take this as a rule: that each time Deconstruction speaks through a single voice, it’s wrong, it is not ‘Deconstruction’ anymore. So in [“Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy”] . . . not only do I let many voices speak at the same time, but the problem is precisely that multiplicity of voices, that variety of tones, within the same utterance or indeed the same word or syllable, and so on. So that’s the question. That’s one of the questions.

But of course today the political, ideological consequences of the Enlightenment are still very much with us—and very much in need of questioning. So a new Enlightenment, to be sure, which may mean deconstruction in its most active or intensive form, and not what we inherited in the name of Aufklärung. . . . (75)

The black radical tradition is in apposition to enlightenment. Appositional enlightenment is remixed, expanded, distilled, and radically faithful to the forces its encounters carry, break, and constitute. It’s (the effect of) critique or rationalization unopposed to the deep revelation instantiated by a rupturing event of dis/appropriation, or the rapturous advent of an implicit but unprecedented freedom. It’s the performance of something like a detour of Kant onto a Heideggerian path, a push toward a critical rhythm in which Aufklärung and Lichtung animate one another, in which the improvisation through their opposition is enacted in (interruptions of) passage, tone, pulse, phrase, silence. But the dark matter that is and that animates this tradition sounds, and so sounds another light that for both Kant and Heidegger, in the one’s advocacy and in the other’s avoidance, would remain unheard.

Another way to put it would be this: there is an enduring politicoeconomic and philosophical moment with which the black radical tradition is engaged. That moment is called the Enlightenment. This tradition is concerned with the opening of a new Enlightenment, one made possible by the ongoing improvisation of a given Enlightenment—improvisation being nothing other than the emergence of “deconstruction in its most active or intensive form.” That emergence bears a generativity that shines and sounds through even that purely negational discourse which is prompted by the assumption that nothing good—experientially, culturally, aesthetically—can come from horror. The Afro-diasporic tradition is one that improvises through horror and through the philosophy of horror, and it does so in ways that don’t limit the discursive or cultural trace of the horror to an inevitable descriptive approach toward some either immediately present or heretofore concealed truth. There is also a prescriptive component in this tradition, which is to say in its narrative and in its narratives, that transcends the mythic and/or objectifying structures and effects of narrative while, at the same time, always holding on to its impossible descriptive resources. A future politics is given there so powerfully that it’s present as a trace even in certain reactions that, in the very force and determination of reaction, replicate horror’s preconditions. Such replication is done, for instance, in the vexed ethics of encounter of which Olaudah Equiano tells—and which Frantz Fanon, among others, and Homi Bhabha, after Fanon, cite and recite, theorize and retheorize. I’m after another recitation of that improvisatory and liberatory trace.

All this brings to mind an interesting and important recent text. In his (Dis)forming the American Canon, Ronald A. T. Judy (1993) would deconstruct and abandon the Enlightenment, its subject and its oppressive sociopolitical manifestations, by way and in the interest of a valorized unreadability, an errant and essentially unapproachable textuality that carries the trace of another being, another subjectivity, another literacy, another politics: the Afro-Arabic. In so doing, however, he renews the temporal and ontological constitution—namely, the systemic relation and opposition of totality and singularity—which grounds the “old” Enlightenment and its phantomic subject by his entrance into the nostalgic projection of an other, pre-oppositional (and thus deeply oppositional) origin.

Judy attempts to take an improvisational tradition, one weighted toward the impossible generativity of an apocalyptic event/institution, and expose it to a deconstruction; or, he would find within it a certain self-deconstructive germ in the form of a fragmentary eighteenth-century Afro-Arabic slave narrative called Ben Ali’s Diary. He does so because he reads the canonical slave narratives (most especially those of Douglass, though I’d argue that his claim extends to those of Mary Prince as well as Equiano—about both of which, more later) as replications of certain deeply problematic metaphysical structures, the most important being a unitary formulation of the subject which has its origins in an intensely racialized—as well as an intensely gendered (sexed and sexualized)—understanding of “Man.” What I’ll attempt to argue here is that both the canonical slave narratives of Prince and Equiano and the noncanonical and fragmentary narratives of Uncle Toliver and Ellen Butler resist placement within a polemic for or against the old Enlightenment subject. Rather they serve as récits and recitations (which is to say rationalizations or theorizations) of an improvisatory suspension of subjectivity, and of a certain desire for subjectivity, and of any prior understanding of subjectivity’s differentiated ground.

These narratives are improvisational and generative in some deep ways, and the tradition they recombine, extend, and transform is marked precisely by an ongoing anarchic seizure, excess, and intensification of what it carries with it as deconstruction. The tradition does so precisely by its active embrace of improvisation in its relation to a material dissatisfaction with the opposition between singularity and totality and its political effects. That improvisation is present in European traditions as well, but with this difference: their general repression of improvisation, an embarrassed refusal enacted by precisely that irrationalism against which it would guard. One could more judiciously call this irrationalism a wariness that manifests itself as a certain disabling decision neither to improvise nor to rationally encounter the revelatory and critical dis/appropriation that must ensue when one is confronted with the structures and effects of “other” traditions that generate and are generated by improvisatory practices. Not even Derrida is immune to this wariness (which, finally, we could call Eurocentrism), though what’s cool in his work is the trace of improvisation (of which he is wary, but to which, more often than not, he is attuned, especially in his writing, more complexly in his mediated and recorded speech) that emerges as if a certain elaborative moment in the generative history of philosophy-as deconstruction always and all throughout the ensemble of tradition(s) carries along with it another level of intensity. What I’m after is a critique of the absence of that intensity in the heretofore almost always correspondent historico-philosophical phenomena of Enlightenment and Eurocentrism, and in certain critiques of that absence and that correspondence which lose that intensity themselves. Judy loses that intensity, that laughter out-from-outside of the house of being, even as he raises crucial questions regarding the development of that intensity in knowledge production and academic labor, allowing us to linger, for instance, at the intersection of the university and the plantation as places of work. What I’ll do here is focus on some other important questions he raises and prompts. Is writing (a more or less conventional and complete autobiographical narrative) always writing-into-being as it is manifest in the totalizing virtuality of the racialized, gendered, nationalized, “universal” Kantian Subject? This question is a central one, for it implies and opens a critique of being and its question, as well as an improvisation of that subject, its exclusionary categorization, and its conflation with being. It also raises another question: What are the effects of the personalized recounting of the horror of the African encounter with the European other, the middle passage, and slavery? Finally, in a question prompted by Judy’s work, what, asks Wahneema Lubiano in her introduction to Judy’s text, are the effects— if any, either good or bad—of the depersonalization of that recounting, or at least the valorization of a narrative that, rather than establishing authorial subjectivity, places the very idea of authorship/authority and the possibility of subjectivity on interminable hold? I employ the term “subjectivity” here, placed within the frame of possibility, in order to begin opening access to what lingers in the cut between the subject and its deconstruction, the virtualities of (European) Man and their others. I’m interested in the objectivity of slave narrative and in the knowledge of language and freedom contained there, and within which, if we linger longer than Judy is willing, we might commit an action.

Ontology K—2ac

Our strategy is one that operates from ‘out of outside’, that begins with the improvisation of subjectivity itself. Our act of telling, of imposing anarchy upon traditional understandings of ‘Man’, is a prerequisite to creating new forms of agency

Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2004 (Fred, “Knowledge of Freedom,” The New Centennial Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2004, p. 278-280, ProjectMUSE, IC)

What I want to get at is that that telling must be situated at a frontier, on the border that is the condition of possibility of “the law of genre” (Derrida 1980, 52). Such a telling must simultaneously fulfill and exceed the generic responsibilities of narrative, must be both récit and recitation. It must move through and reorient the paradoxical space-time of “foreshadowing description,” thereby exhibiting that which, because of its material access to presents that are no longer or that have not yet been, might have been called “ecstatic temporality” (52). This telling must also occupy the space of a frontier between narrative and rationalization, between narrative and the theory of narrative, between narrative and the improvisation of its discourse and of its story, and above all, of its subjectivity and of what that subjectivity knows, and of what that subjectivity is both constituted and capable. This telling must also be situated on the frontier at which “Man” is improvised. I’m interested in how the free story that forms the paradoxically anarchic ground of the black radical tradition will have rationalized that conception of “Man,” improvising through its exclusionary force and toward a notion of agency that allows a fundamental reconstitution of both the methods and the objects of ethics, epistemology, and ontology. With regard to this last formulation, one must see how this telling lies at the frontier of, or in the cut between, singularity and totality, between the unlocatable origin and as yet unlocalized end of their mutual philosophical and politicoeconomic systematization.

When I say that we must improvise notions of genre and of narrative; and that we must descend into the rhythmic break between “foreshadowing” and “description,” rather than treat their oxymoronic linkage as a fateful and convenient bridge that erases itself in its presencing of origination and destination; and that we must honor and extend—by way of improvisation—the black radical tradition’s ongoing improvisation of “Man,” knowing full well the danger of a kind of negative reification such a distancing romance holds; and that we must venture a continued movement out-from-outside of a range of conventional philosophical and historical understandings embedded in the oppositional relation of singularity and totality—I’m thinking of, and hopefully through, a certain pivotal moment in the tradition that marks the intersection of these tasks and their unfulfillment, the event of their dis/appropriation. In the epilogue to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison writes: “Our fate is to become one and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description.” The impasse this impossible fate represents, and the unresolvable caesura this passage is and contains (and implicit here is an argument for the profoundly generative and regenerative force of this phrasing—which is less and more than a sentence, less and more than a proposition—its ability to spawn negations and affirmations of itself that hold prominence in the contemporary extension of that strain of the tradition in which social development is foregrounded), marks a need to know some things again, as if for the first time, about knowledge and (language and their relation to) freedom. So what I’m interested in, here, is freedom and the relationship of certain narratives of slavery to the question of freedom, not only in the historical context in which they were written, but in the no-less-desperate context of our fiercely urgent now. Mary Prince, Ellen Butler, Olaudah Equiano, and Uncle Toliver know something—narratives and understandings of narrative and understandings of the relation between narrative and freedom—that we need to know. What I’m after, among other things, is the question of where that knowledge comes from, and the im/possibilities and theoretical and political problems regarding our access to its source.

Psychoanalysis K—2ac

No link and impact turn – the aff does not rely upon a universal understanding of race –we allow for black individualism and resistance – however we also recognize that the black body has been objectively demonized by the status quo – only the aff confronts that – the alt’s attempt to wish away anti-blackness fails

Reid-Brinkley et al, 13 Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of Public Address and Advocacy Director of Debate, William Pitt Debating Union, Department of Communication University of Pittsburgh; AND Amber Kelsie, M.A., Doctoral Student, Department of Communication University of Pittsburgh; AND Nicholas Brady, Doctoral Student, Department of Culture & Theory, University of California, Irvine; AND Ignacio Evans, B.A. History, Towson University; “We Be Fresh As Hell Wit’ Da Feds Watchin’: A Bad Black Debate Family Responds,” 10/6/2013, http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/we-be-fresh-as-hell-wit-da-feds-watchin-a-bad-black-debate-family-responds, HSA)

The Philcox translation offers a fairly different wording; significantly what is removed from the Philcox translation entirely is the line: “Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say this is false.”[24] After this section of the passage, Markmann’s translation goes on to explain that the “metaphysics” of the Black (“customs and agencies”) were “wiped out” by civilization.[25] In the Philcox translation, these same agental capacities and conditions are “abolished.”[26] Here is a moment in which a studied comparison between the two translations—and the Markmann translation in particular—can be enlightening. Though the wordings are different (and one more strongly worded than the other), the relationship of whiteness to blackness offered in each is not mutually exclusive, but mutually revealing. Bankey interprets this passage as indicating that a discussion of blackness as such reproduces racism by ignoring lived experience of individual blacks. We think that is the opposite of what is expressed in either version of the text. Rather, the texts explain that individual/subjective/agental experience of a given black person is exactly what cannot be accounted for because that being is overdetermined by blackness (at symbolic, material, and metaphysical levels). Bankey misreads Philcox’s translation to suggest that we can “get at” “the lived experience of the black,” in a way that would be intelligible under the current (white) framing (gaze). But the rest of the passage, not to mention the entire chapter and book as a whole, explain at length that lived experience is exactly what is unintelligible and distinct from subjective/white individual capacities for experience. In light of this reading, Bankey’s implication that black people (in debate/in the world) stop interrogating whiteness and white bodies is especially nonsensical. It assumes that racism is simply petty prejudice that can be bi-directionally imposed. Fanon in this passage makes it clear that this proposition has no converse.¶ There are criticisms that one could make of Wilderson, and many have. We here do not care to defend Wilderson’s use of psychoanalysis for example. But the suggestion that he makes his burden a proof of universal black experience has failed to see the forest for the trees. Black experience is universalized as black (“Look! A Negro!”). Individual experience is constituted in this conundrum. This condition—of blackness—is something we must work through, rather than wish away.

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