Antiblackness

Coalitions
Historically failed coalitions do not mean that they can never
succeed now is key.
Kim 98 (Elaine H., Professor in Asian American Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley, At least youre not black: Asian Americans in U.S. race
relations, Social Justice Fall 1998 v25 i3 p3(1),
http://maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/pub/eres/SOC217_PIMENTEL/asians2.pdf, accessed
7/18/16)
In a society held together by hierarchical arrangements of power and the privileging
of competitive individualism, it is difficult for groups of color to deal with each other
on an equal basis, without falling into competition, ranking, and scrambling around
hierarchies of oppression. This is all despite the indisputable fact that people of
color in the U.S. wear at different moments and often at the same moment the face
of both victim and victimizer. Even among Asian Americans, hierarchies operate.
When Asian Americans came to fuller voice with the Civil Rights Movement of the
1960s, that voice, which has been the loudest ever since, was male, Englishspeaking, Chinese or Japanese, and heterosexual. Given this picture, for Asian
Americans to work together across nationalities, languages, generations, genders,
and sometimes social classes is in itself almost a miracle. A few years ago, when
the question arose of whether we were experiencing cultural diversity or racial
"balkanization" at Berkeley, I remember thinking that experiences of cultural
diversity were being defined exclusively from the standpoint of the dominant
culture. For many students of color who come from communities where their group
is very much in the minority and who have been overwhelmed with growing up
brown, yellow, red, or black in a culture defined by whiteness, being with other
students of color is experiencing cultural diversity. Moreover, even though all Asians
may look alike to others, it is quite a step for some Korean Americans to make
friends with Filipino Americans or for some Vietnamese Americans to take classes
with Bangladeshi American students. Perhaps we need to redefine what we mean by
"coalition." Racial meaning extends into social relations and social practices. What,
indeed, is a person of color? On some California college campuses, Asian Americans
are regarded by some as "inauthentic people of color." But different people of color
experience racism and racialization differently. The income gap between Asian and
white men is nowhere near as large as between Latino or black men and white men
- unless the relationship between schooling and income is taken into account. An
Asian American man must have much more education than a white man with
comparable income must. Racism against Asian Americans takes other
unique forms: resentment and fear of a yellow peril takeover by
unassimilable foreigners who excel at copying but cannot originate,
or as robotic automatons and nerdy buffoons with no human or
animal feelings. Asian American men have often pointed to the
feminization of Asian Americans, who, whether male or female, gay or
straight, are only good for the "bottom" position. Since their information

sources are primarily from the dominant culture, people of color are almost as
susceptible to racist stereotyping as anyone else. Thus, it should not be surprising
that what Cornel West has called xenophobia is so prevalent among African
Americans and that many Asian Americans stereotype African Americans as
unreliable or crime-prone, that many Latinos can routinely call an Asian of whatever
background chino, or that many Korean immigrants still refer to all Latinos as
"Mexican." Some Asian American activists feel that other people of
color do not respect and trust Asians in coalition work and that other

people of color have a difficult time accepting the idea of Asian

American leadership. Korean American members of the Oakland East Bay
African Asian Roundtable have conjectured that this may be because they accept
the Fu Manchu notion of Asians as untrustworthy aliens. I recall the
National Conference poll, according to which more than four blacks and Latinos in
10 and 27% of whites agreed with the stereotype of Asian Americans as
"unscrupulous, crafty, and devious in business" (San Francisco Chronicle, March 3,
1994). It has been suggested that other people of color have good reason not to
trust Asian Americans, who have not been widely known in this country for risking
our own hides or sticking out our own necks for someone else. After African
American skulls were cracked in protests over employment discrimination, Asian
Americans stepped in to take up the consent decree jobs. Recently, Ling-Chi

Wang was feted by the National Association for Bilingual Education

for his role in Lau vs. Nichols, which had far-reaching effects on the language and
education rights of both Asians and Latinos. However, while the organization
boasts a membership of 10,000 Latinos and Chicanos, very few Asians
participate. Looking more closely, we can better understand why.

Asians are fewer in number and far less politically and linguistically
powerful than are Latinos, especially because there are so many different Asian
languages, including multiple Chinese and Filipino languages. Though El Paso and
Miami are virtually bilingual cities, nowhere in this country can a Chinese or Korean
thrive without any English. Most people perhaps find it difficult to imagine Asian
American leadership in coalitions with other people of color since there has been
little history of Asian Americans working in such coalitions - despite a
few spectacular examples, mostly in agricultural labor organizing during the first
half of this century. They may not realize that the majority of Asian Americans today
are primarily newcomers who have been in this country fewer than 25 years. Some
say that irreconcilable differences arise between Asian American newcomers and
other people of color who trace their political consciousness and understanding of
racial and economic justice to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Yet, I see the
struggle for affirmative action and other compensatory programs as having affinity
with the movement for immigrant rights. At base, both are about equal access. Even
though many of todays Asian immigrants cant claim the U.S. Civil Rights
Movement as their legacy, organizing efforts among them could stress heritages in
the Asian homelands that are also rooted in struggles for justice and equality, such
as the long and bloody movement against martial law in the Philippines and Taiwan
and the democracy movements in China, India, and Burma. Every Japanese

American can be proud of the huge peace movement in Japan, where the atomic
bomb was dropped. In addition, for the past three decades, the most spectacular
labor movement in the world has been taking place in South Korea, the country that
boasted the worlds longest work week, and where murder and assault of labor
leaders have been legendary. Coalition work is not easy for anyone.
Moreover, coalition is not right for everything we do. Perhaps it might

help for us to view coalition not as a site of comfort and refuge, but
as a site of struggle. The fact is that the ever-increasing visibility of
Asian Americans means that we can no longer be dismissed as honorary
whites, honorary blacks, or a wedge between the two. We need to end
"biracial theorizing" and zero-sum thinking. A third space is needed.
Tiger Woods has said, "I dont consider myself a Great Black Hope. Im just a golfer
who happens to be black and Asian." Why cant a person be both black and Asian?
Or will we just let Nike decide what Tiger Woods "is"? It seems clear that these days
we are hurtling toward the bifurcation of U.S. society into two major economic
classes - the very rich and the poor. Most Asian immigrant parents, having struggled
so hard to make a new life in an adopted country, want economic security and
social success for their children at almost any price. The children do not want to fall
their parents. In many ways, it would be a luxury for either parents or children to
stop to think about the so-called bigger picture. In commodity capitalism, both in
the U.S. and in Asia, we are strongly discouraged from recalling that the well-being
of every American, every Asian, indeed of everyone on the planet, depends on the
well-being of the collectivity. No matter what, in the end there is no real turning
away from other peoples straggles for equality and justice. Yet the combination of
pressures from within the Asian family and community and from the often
competitively cutthroat world outside the family could poison the atmosphere,
making it even more difficult for us to keep our eyes on the prize of peace and
justice built on compassion, which are necessary for beauty and creativity to come
into being. If we dont watch out, Asian Americans may find ourselves one day
schooled, credentialed, and trapped in the old "buffer zone" or "middleman"
position, attempting an ultimately impossible mediation between those mostly
white people who have the power to make the rules and those mostly black and
brown people who are oppressed by them. Whether as professors, newscasters,
attorneys, or middle managers, we could be positioned to serve as apologists for
and explicators, upholders, and functionaries of the status quo. We are all now

facing the enormous challenge of the direct and indirect impact of a

shameful assault on the poor, immigrants, and people of color in
this country. How will Asian Americans face this challenge? With
whom will we join forces and what values will we espouse? In my view,
one of the challenges for Asian Americans in the 21st century will be
resisting the "gatekeeper function" with strong and focused
commitment to place first priority, in whatever arenas we occupy, on
the needs and well-being of the disenfranchised. This work can be done quite
creatively, I think, from an interstitial location, with one foot in the margins and the
other in the mainstream much of the time. An interstitial location is

different from a buffer zone. It is "both/and" rather than "either/or."

It bears more resemblance to a Trojan Horse than to a mascot . If we
remember the traditional Korean belief that the social health of the
individual cannot be separated from the health of the collectivity,
then we will be able to see clearly that we might play a pivotal part in this countrys
progress by helping to envision and participate in the emergence of a multiracial
democracy. For the health of a larger community, can we declare our

support for policies that might benefit us only indirectly and in the
long term, just like those justice-loving African Americans who
declared their support for the politically isolated Japanese
Americans during World War II? Asian Americans can set an example of
commitment to a fairness that rejects narrow self-interest in favor of a community of
justice. From our quite different exclusions, from our specific sites of contradiction,
from our heterogeneous communities of resistance, perhaps we can reach across
our pain and differences to build bridges to one another.

Prashad
We are neither color-blindness nor multiculturalism, but
polyculturalism.
Prashad 01 (Vijay, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and
Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Everybody Was Kung Fu
Fighting, Beacon Press, 2001)
W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimed that the problem of the twentieth
century would be the problem of the color line.1 Indeed, looking

back at a century of racist oppression, Du Bois could only have

judged that the hundred years ahead would mirror its past, and that
the main fights for progressive forces would be along the color line. In PanAfricanist intellectuals gathered in London to encourage a feeling of unity and to
facilitate friendly intercourse among Africans in general; to promote and protect the
interests of all subjects claiming African descent.2 It was at this gathering that Du
Bois first enunciated his dictum, in trepidation and with hope for the world to come.
Anticolonialism in the entire oppressed world threw down a severe challenge to
colonial puissance, whether through countless acts of disorganized resistance or
through the sporadic organizations of anticolonialism. The fights of the anticolonial
and antiracist forces produced the social democratic agenda of the elite, whose
concessions, whether of the Great Society or the Scandinavian variety, came in
response to the challenges from below. Withdrawal of colonial rule in the s
and sIndia/Pakistan in , Indonesia in , and Ghana in
was met with a shift in strategy from the captains of capitalism, who
produced a phenomenon that the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, was to
quickly label neocolonialism. The essence of neocolonialism, wrote Nkrumah,
is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the
outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and
thus its political policy is directed from outside, by which he meant by mainly U.S.
and European finance capital.3 During the era of neocolonialism, the presence of
the USSR allowed the nascent Third World to lobby between the powers for the
means of development. As the USSR collapsed in the s, neocolonialism was
replaced by the theory of neoliberalism in which freedom came to mean liberty of
the moneyed to act unburdened by notions of justice and democracy.4
Neoliberalism threatens us with the reproach of equality, and forbids us to create
organizational platforms based on our historical and current oppression. To fight
against racism is twisted into a racist act, for to invoke race even in a progressive
antiracist agenda is seen as divisive. The same may be said of other oppressions:
Did feminism produce a high divorce rate, or didnt sexism set the terms for the
failure of companionate marriages? Are people poor because of trade unions or
because of the ravages of profit? The problem of the twenty-first century, then, is
the problem of the color blind. This problem is simple: it believes that to redress
racism, we need to not consider race in social practice, notably in the sphere of
governmental action. The state, we are told, must be above race. It must not
actively discriminate against people on the basis of race in its actions. At the dawn

of a new millennium, there is widespread satisfaction of the progress on the race

problem; this is so to some extent, but the compass of attacks against blacks and
Latinos remains routine. If we do not live by s Plessy v. Ferguson, we
continue to live by its principle axiomthat race is a formal and individual
designation and not a historical and social one.5 That is, we are led to believe that
racism is a prejudicial behavior of one party against another rather than the
coagulation of socioeconomic injustice against groups. If the state acts without
prejudice (that is, if it acts equally), then that is proof of the end of racism. Unequal
socioeconomic conditions of today, based as they are on racisms of the past and of
the present, are thereby rendered untouchable by the state. Color-blind justice
privatizes inequality and racism, and it removes itself from the project of
redistributive and anti-racist justice. This is the genteel racism of our new
millennium. In this chapter I propose to settle accounts with the two
major theoretical and political approaches to racism. The first is that of
the color blind, for this is the dominant framework that stretches from
neoconservatives to all manner of liberals, and frequently includes people of all
colors, many of whom have made it (often at great odds, and with the immense
effort of families and friendsan effort that is generally ignored when their success
is touted). Cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson correctly notes Martin Luther King Jr.s
use of an argument beyond race in which he conceived of color blindness as a
crushing blow to the pigmented morality of white chauvinists.6 While today Kings
words (content of their character not color of their skin) are used against
antiracists, in his own day King deployed a kind of color-blind argument to pledge a
black humanity, forged in slavery, survival, and struggle, to the reconstruction of
society, not the maintenance of extant social relations. Against King, color

blindness is generally used in our day as a way to argue that things

must remain the same, for the structural features of racism cannot
be touched by the manner in which contemporary color blindness
operates. If color blindness occludes the stuctures and practices of
actually existing racism, a kind of primordialism puts too much stake in race.
Despite all indications that race is not a phenomenon that can be
gleaned in the bloodstream,7 but that it is a social institution, those
who advocate a primordialism see race both as people organized by
the color of their skin and by genetic predispositions. The most
virulent practitioners of this line of argument are the militant and
illiberal white supremacists, such as those who congregate in the militia
movement, the fascist brigades, the Ku Klux Klan, and other such monstrous
organizations. I limit my discussion of their position here mainly because the
arguments are well made elsewhere.8 Beyond the color blind and the
primordial is the problem of multiculturalism. It is currently the most
compelling framework for a supposed social justice movement, but as literary critic
Stanley Fish puts it so clearly, there is no justifiable principle for
multiculturalism.9 Boutique multiculturalists who like the
faddishness of difference cannot be taken seriously, since they
reduce different ways of life to superficial tokens that they can harness

as style, but refuse to engage with those parts of difference with which they
disagree. In short, they want the fun, but not the fundamentalism. Strong
multiculturalists claim to tolerate difference, but, often only if
what differs is a kind of reasonable difference (thereby joining ranks
with cultural browsers). Fish argues that since few people in the world live in
homogeneous zones, it behooves us all to be multiculturalists. The tolerance we
practice should be based on a kind of inspired adhoccery where we
make decisions on the fly and not based on any regulated principles.10 I admit
there is something attractive about unregulated life, about existence along the
grain of the quotidian choices made by people. What is unclear from Fish is whether
there is any power for the regulation of the ethical choices we make and the acts we
commit in our everyday lives. Im not keen on a life governed by the anarchical
production of morality by a free market. My sense of inspired adhoccery is that a
population galvanized by the struggle for social justice willfully creates principles of
and institutions for interaction and then mediates those principles through itself.

Multiculturalism is a principle for the regulation of social life from

above, one that can only fitfully find itself in the sorts of struggles that produce the
values of interaction from below. A close engagement with the concept of
multiculturalism allows us to cultivate the category of the polycultural ,
one that not only encourages the inherent complexity of cultures,
but that also stakes its claim to political, and delimited, claims
rather than the pretense of universal, and nonembodied, values . But
more on that later.

Butler Precarious Life

Precarious Life DA: Their acceptance of the human as a point
of analysis fortifies the human/nonhuman dyad making the
humanist quest to exterminate the anti-human inevitable,
outweighs and turns. Only the affs genealogy destabilizes the
binary between human and bestial bodies.
Butler 12 (Judith, Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and
Comparative Literature and the codirector of the Program of Critical Theory at the
University of California, Berkeley, Precarity Talk A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren
Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejic, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanovic ; ;
edited by Jasbir Puar, TDR: The Drama Review 56:4 (T216) Winter 2012. 2012 New
York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
http://www.jasbirpuar.com/assets/JKP_Precarity-Talk.pdf, accessed 7/18/16)
I thought to take up this question of the human since references to precarity
sometimes rely on ideals of humanization and sometimes actually decenter the
human itself. It is always possible to say that the affective register where precarity
dwells is something like dehumanization. And yet, we know that such a word

relies on a human/animal distinction that cannot and should not be

sustained. Indeed, if we call for humanization and struggle against
bestialization then we affirm that the bestial is separate from and
subordinate to the human , something that clearly breaks our broader

commitments to rethinking the networks of life. On the one hand, I want

to be able to say that the human operates differentially, as Fanon clearly
thought it did ([1952] 2008; [1961] 2005), such that some are humanized
and others are not, and that this inequality must be opposed. But the
critical task is to find a way to oppose that inequality without embracing
anthropocentrism . So we have to rethink the human in light of

precarity, showing that there is no human without those networks of life within
which human life is but one sort of life. Otherwise, we end up breaking off
the human from all of its sustaining conditions (and in that way become complicit
with the process of precaritization itself ). So the point is not to develop a

conception of the human that would include every possible person

first because such conceptions come to operate as exclusionary norms, and they
are based on this breaking off of the human from its own material need, and the
broader fields of life in which that need is implicated. To think critically, usefully,

about how the norm of the human is constructed and maintained

requires that we take up a position outside of its terms, not as the
nonhuman or even the antihuman , but rather precisely through thinking

forms of sociality and interdependence, no matter how difficult, that are

irreducible to uniquely human forms of life and so cannot be adequately

addressed by any definition of human nature or the human individual. To speak
about what is living in human life is already to admit that human
ways of living are bound up with nonhuman modes of life. Indeed, the
connection with nonhuman life is indispensable to what we call human life. In
Hegelian terms , if the human cannot be the human without the

inhuman, then the inhuman is not only essential to the human, but
is therefore the essence of the human . The point is not to simply
invert the relations , but rather to gather and hold this merely apparent

paradox together in a new thought of human life in which its

component parts, human and life, never fully coincide with one
another. In other words, if we have to hold onto this term human life in order to
describe and oppose those situations in which human life is jeopardized, it will
have to be done in such a way that the very conjunctionhuman lifewill on
occasion seek to hold together two terms that repel one another, or that work in
divergent directions. Human life is never the entirety of life, and life can
never fully define the humanso whatever we might want to call human life will
inevitably consist of a negotiation with this tension. Perhaps the human is the name
we give to this very negotiation. What seems to follow is this : while it is
important to ask, Whose life qualifies as a human life?, we have also to ask
the inverse question: What of human life is inevitably nonhuman ? If there is
a human life that does not qualify as human , that has to be marked and

opposed, then the question becomes : Through what modes of sociality

is that opposition articulated ? And how do those modes of oppositional
sociality redefine and resituate the human in light of animal and organic networks of
life? There has to be a way to find and forge a set of bonds that can produce
alliances over and against this grid of power that differentially allocates
recognizability and uses the human as a term through which to institute inequality
and unrecognizability. The beginning of such alliances can be found in ethical
formulations such as these: even if my life is not destroyed in war, something of my
life is destroyed in war when other lives are destroyed in war, and when living
processes and organisms are also destroyed in war. Since the existence of other
lives, understood as any mode of life that exceeds me, is a condition of who I am,
my life can make no exclusive claim on life (I am not the only living thing). At the
same time, my own life is not every other life, and cannot be (My life is
not the same as other lives). In other words, to be alive is already to be connected
with, dependent upon, what is living not only before and beyond myself, but before
and beyond my humanness. No self and no human can live without this

connection to a biological network of life that exceeds and includes

the domain of the human animal. This is why in opposing war, for example,
one not only opposes the destruction of other human lives, but also the poisoning of
the environment and the assault on living beings and a living world.

Hudson

2AC Hudson
Blackness is not ontological but a snapshot image of a broader
contingent structure within a colonial matrix that posits
whiteness as the master signifier and everything else as
occupying degrees of deviance from whiteness. Anti-blackness
is not the global stage of violence and their fatalism reentrenches this relation that thrives upon militant antagonism.
-

Human history is so short.

No stage: Everyone is white, some are just less white than others

Hudson 13 (Peter, Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand,

Johannesburg, The state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics, 39:2,
263-277, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2013.802867, accessed 7/18/16)
This is a slightly more developed version of a paper first presented at a Public
Affairs Research Institute (PARI) seminar on the South African State in May 2012 in
which I address the relationship between liberal democracy and national
democracy, and do so by examining their respective articulations with the colonial
unconscious.1 In this version, I firstly elaborate on the concept of colonialism itself,
addressing in particular the issue of the specificity of the colonised in relation to
both the reproduction and transformation of colonialism;2 [Begin Footnote] My foil
here is the ontological fatalism of Frank Wildersons argument . See
Wilderson (2008), according to which the only way Humanity can

maintain both its corporeal and libidinal integrity is through the

various strategies through which Blackness is the abyss into which
humanness can never fall (105). And were there to be a place and
time for blacks cartography and temporality would be impossible
(111). Here then, the closure of colonialism is absolute. [End Footnote]
and secondly, make use of Freuds analysis of the joke form (in Jokes and the
Unconscious, Freud 1976) to buttress the analysis of how Brett Murrays
controversial 2012 painting of President Zuma, titled The Spear, works as a
determinate practice of signification. The painting depicted Jacob Zuma with his
penis exposed, in a pose reminiscent of Lenin in Victor Ivanovs work. It provoked
outrage in various quarters and was eventually vandalised in the Goodman Gallery,
where it formed part of Murrays exhibition titled Hail to the Thief II. I examine the
South African state, but not from a perspective that it is often if ever considered.
I examine the colonial collective unconscious and the relation between it, and on
the one hand the South African state as a liberal democratic constitutional state,
and on the other, the South African state qua national democratic state (that is, qua
state defined by its anti-colonialism). My question then is this: Can the South African
state, understood as a liberal democratic constitutional state, recognise the political
significance of the colonial unconscious? What is the difference in the ways a liberal
democratic state and a national democratic state are related to this colonial
unconscious? What should the South African state qua National Democratic state
do about this colonial unconscious? What is the appropriate political way of

dealing with this specific mode of existence of colonialism? The black man is not.
Any more than the white man. (Fanon 1968, 165) Fundamentally, for Fanon,

colonialism is about the construction of white subjects and black

subjects these are in no sense necessary identities ( as racist discourse
claims ). Secondly, flowing from this, there is no foundation to colonialism:
it doesnt rest on Man or History , it is just a contingent social relation a

differential (over-determined) relation, which its got to be if it is a

contingent construction that can be transformed and replaced.
Neither white nor black has value independently of their
relationship white is the difference between it and black, and vice
versa. The whiteness of white, where whiteness = brimming with
identity self-possession and sovereignty depends on the blackness of

black, where blackness = without identity and self-control. Colonialism

satisfies the conditions of a signifying dyad in that its elements ( coloniser and
colonised ) do not exist independently of the relation s into which they

enter and through which they determine each other reciprocally

(Deleuze 1973, 302). On their own, they dont have a determinate value
but only acquire one through their reciprocal determination in
relation. This is a differential relation, because whiteness only has its
colonial meaning in its relation to blackness, and vice versa. The
presence of the one in the other precludes either from attaining full
identity to itself. Neither is a self-sufficient substance that can rest on itself;
rather, each only exists through its relationaldifferential tension vis--vis the other
in the colonial matrix. This latter is itself a contingent set of signifying
practices, notwithstanding the fact that the fundamental social
division they institute presents itself as ontological. But and this is
crucial within this interdependence, there is asymmetry: whiteness is

the master signifier, and it has both white and black subjects in its
grip. White subjects identify with it and thus see themselves
through it as whole and in control of themselves it invests them with at least
the illusion of selfsufficiency and full autonomy. But black subjects also
identify with it they want to be white (a central theme of Black Skin, White
Masks) and so they look at themselves (blacks) through the white
signifier also but what they see (which is exactly the same as what the white
subject sees when he looks at the black) is a body manqu not the
corporeal schema (Fanon 1968, 78) the white sees when he looks at himself which
gives him a body image and an image of himself which is structurally harmonious
(114) but something undefinable and unassimilable (114) into the
white order of being with which he seeks to identify the black sees himself as
non-existent (98, 139), with nothing to hold onto. Torn between two
impossibles to be white and to be black the first barred and second an

impossibility in its own terms as there is no black being blackness produces no

ontological resistance (77, 78) turn white or disappear (71) sums up the
ontological void of the black colonised subject. Made to want to be white, but
incapable of this he is black; and his blackness seen through his own white eyes
reduces him to nothing. The colonial symbolic is so constructed as to give the
black subject nothing to hold onto no orthopaedic support for an identity just a
whiteness forever eluding him and a blackness that doesnt exist in any case.

Within the colonial matrix, this is the ontological vortex that is the
elementary colonial identity and lived experience of the colonised
black subject; and all his compulsive (self-destructive) pathologies, his specific
repertoire of reactional conduct, have their source in this primary ontological
differential. So, fundamentally, colonialism is an ontological differential between
white and black subjects; and this orders each and every sphere or sector of
colonial society (including the economy). Whiteness as whiteness the

meaning of whiteness and that of blackness is carried via a

constellation of postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and
subtly work their way into ones mind and shape ones view of the
world of the group to which one belongsa thousand details,
anecdote stories which are woven into prejudices, myths, the
collective attitudes of a given group (Fanon 1968, 78, 133). This is how
the subject positions of both whites and blacks are constituted.
We can call this constellation the Colonial Big Other (symbolic) in and
through which the colonial relation is constituted and reproduced.
This Big Other is white, in that whiteness is its master signifier and therefore all
identities are white under colonialism. Everyone is white in the colonial
symbolic including blacks; it is just that they are less white than
whites to the point of not being at all Fanon says again and again that
the black man desires to be white but, when he looks at himself through the
eyes he has adopted, the eyes that are his what he (qua white eyes) sees is
something that doesnt exist inequality, no non-existence (Fanon 1968, 98,
original emphasis). He subsists at the level of non-being (131) just as the white,
when it sees the black, sees an other that is, as Fanon says absolutely not self, so
does the black see himself as absolutely not self (114). This is the depth of the
fissure in the black colonial subject position, caught between two impossibles:
whiteness, which he desires but which is barred to him, and blackness, which is
non-existence. Colonialism, anxiety and emancipation3 Thus the self-

same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity

itself. There always has to exist an outside , which is also inside, to the
extent it is designated as the impossibility from which the possibility of the
existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the
excluded place which isnt excluded insofar as it is necessary for the very
possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal ( may be considered

ontological ), its content (what fills it) as well as the mode of this

filling and its reproduction are contingent . In other words, the meaning
of the signifier of exclusion is not determined once and for all : the place

of the place of exclusion, of death is itself over-determined , i.e. the

very framework for deciding the other and the same, exclusion and
inclusion, is nowhere engraved in ontological stone but is political and
never terminally settled. Put differently, the curvature of intersubjective
space (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the othering
of otherness are nowhere decided in advance (as Social Dynamics a
certain ontological fatalism might have it) (see Wilderson 2008). The social does
not have to be divided into white and black, and the meaning of
these signifiers is never necessary because they are signifiers . To be
sure, colonialism institutes an ontological division, in that whites exist in
a way barred to blacks who are not. But this ontological relation is really
on the side of the ontic that is, of all contingently constructed identities, rather
than the ontology of the social which refers to the ultimate unfixity, the
indeterminacy or lack of the social. In this sense, then, the white man doesnt exist,
the black man doesnt exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the colonial
symbolic itself, including its most intimate structuring relations division is
constitutive of the social, not the colonial division. Whiteness may well be

very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but respect for the

ontological difference (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows
up its ontological status as ontic. It may be so deeply sedimented
that it becomes difficult even to identify the very possibility of the
separation of whiteness from the very possibility of order, but from this it
does not follow that the void of black being functions as the ultimate
substance, the transcendental signified on which all possible forms

of sociality are said to rest. What gets lost here, then, is the specificity of
colonialism, of its constitutive axis, its ontological differential. A crucial feature of
the colonial symbolic is that the real is not screened off by the imaginary in the way
it is under capitalism. At the place of the colonised, the symbolic and the imaginary
give way because non-identity (the real of the social) is immediately inscribed in the
lived experience (vcu) of the colonised subject. The colonised is traversing the
fantasy (Zizek 2006a, 4060) all the time; the void of the verb to be is the very
content of his interpellation. The colonised is, in other words, the subject of anxiety
for whom the symbolic and the imaginary never work, who is left stranded by his
very interpellation.4 Fixed into non-fixity, he is eternally suspended between
element and moment 5 he is where the colonial symbolic falters in the
production of meaning and is thus the point of entry of the real into the texture
itself of colonialism. Be this as it may, whiteness and blackness are (sustained by)
determinate and contingent practices of signification; the structuring relation of
colonialism thus itself comprises a knot of significations which, no matter how tight,

can always be undone. Anti-colonial i.e., anti-white modes of

struggle are not (just) psychic 6 but involve the reactivation (or
de-sedimentation) 7 of colonial objectivity itself. No matter how
sedimented ( or global ), colonial objectivity is not ontologically immune
to antagonism . Differentiality, as Zizek insists (see Zizek 2012, chapter 11, 771
n48), immanently entails antagonism in that differentiality both makes possible the
existence of any identity whatsoever and at the same time because it is the
presence of one object in another undermines any identity ever being (fully) itself.
Each element in a differential relation is the condition of possibility and the
condition of impossibility of each other. It is this dimension of antagonism that the
Master Signifier covers over transforming its outside (Other) into an element of
itself, reducing it to a condition of its possibility.8 All symbolisation produces

an ineradicable excess over itself, something it cant totalise or

make sense of, where its production of meaning falters. This is its
internal limit point, its real:9 an errant object that has no place of its own,
isnt recognised in the categories of the system but is produced by it its part of
no part or object small a. 10 Correlative to this object a is the subject stricto
266 P. sensu i.e., as the empty subject of the signifier without an identity that
pins it down.11 That is the subject of antagonism in confrontation with the real of
the social, as distinct from subject position based on a determinate identity. As
weve seen under colonialism, (the real of) non-meaning is brought into the logic of
the system the colonised directly experiences the void of non-identity as the
meaning of its subject-position (or social identity). Under capitalism, proletariat
designates this (non-designated) part of no part, this object without a designated
place, this non-totalisable excess produced by the system that cant integrate it,
however, as it is not recognised in its categories. Note that under capitalism, the
working class first has to separate itself from itself qua working-class before it can
become proletariat it has to go through self-dissolution, whereas the colonised is
always already dissolving.

1AR XT Hudson
Multiple claims made by Hudson they cant drop any of them:
1. Anti-blackness is a contingent antagonism within a
broader system of coloniality. History has been so short
and our understanding of it so limited. They take a
snapshot image of history and use it to describe the
world. Thats epistemically bankrupt.
2. Their fatalism re-entrenches the system. Signifiers always
have the potential to change, but their investment in the
colonial position of blackness is really an investment in
whiteness as the positive to their negation. If it is true
that white and black do not exist independent of the
other, investing in one can only fortify the other.
3. They dont solve our impacts but cause them by
entrenching a colonial matrix that undergirds violence.
Anti-blackness is not a stage upon which all violence
occurs. It is just a particularly sedimented relation. In
fact, whiteness occupies the position of master signifier
and subjects are assigned based on degrees of whiteness.
They uphold that.

1AR AT Goes Neg

Complete detachment from whiteness is a PREREQUISITE to alt
solvency. All of our arguments about affective investment
prove they accept the positionality of black as diametrically
opposed to white, which is in fact the colonial identity as
posited by whiteness.
Hudson 13 (Peter, Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, The state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics, 39:2,
263-277, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2013.802867, accessed 7/18/16)
The colonised must in other words take the step of exposing himself to that utterly
naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born (Fanon 1968, 7): he must
withdraw even from the colonial nothing that he is, and descend into real hell
where he is even emptier than he already is. In his elementary position, the
colonised unconsciously identifies himself with whiteness,
unconsciously believes that whiteness is his way out of his colonial destitution;
and Fanon sees this stubborn clinging onto whiteness as being responsible for the
black man (lacking) the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent (7).
Whatever the case, the colonised subject has to destroy his attachment
to whiteness by withdrawing to the point where he sustains himself ,
wiping the slate of his colonial identity clean before any anti-colonial
transformation is possible

AT Stage Metaphor
The stage is structured by affective investment not
antiblackness. If it is contingent, then antiblackness is another
tragedy played out on the stage. We dont need to win that
anti-asian violence is more important. But that they are part of
a common structure.

Survival Strategies

FW AT Survival Strats
Debating reform to the federal government IS a survival
strategyexpanding the floor of the cage is necessary to
challenge gratuitous state violence
CHOMSKY 1997 (Noam, Interview with David Barsamian, Z Magazine, March)
I dont know if you recall that in a previous interview with you I made some comment about how, in the current

The federal
government has all sorts of rotten things about it and is fundamentally illegitimate, but
weakening federal power and moving things to the state level is just a disaster. At the state
level even middle-sized businesses can control what happens . At the federal level only the
circumstances, devolution from the federal government to the state level is disastrous.

big guys can push it around. That means, that if you take, say, aid for hungry children, to the extent that it exists, if
its distributed through the federal system, you can resist business pressure to some extent. It can actually get to
poor children. If you move it to the state level in block grants, it will end up in the hands of Raytheon and Fidelity
exactly whats happening here in Massachusetts. They have enough coercive power to force the fiscal structure of
the state to accommodate to their needs, with things as simple as the threat of moving across the border. These are

the tendencies here,

both in elite circles and on the left, are such rigidity and doctrinaire inability to focus
on complex issues that the left ends up removing itself from authentic social
struggle and is caught up in its doctrinaire sectarianism . Thats very much less true there. I
realities. But people here tend to be so doctrinaire. Obviously there are exceptions, but

think thats parallel to the fact that its less true among elite circles. So just as you can talk openly there about the
fact that Brazil and Argentina dont really have a debt, that its a social construct, not an economic factthey may
not agree, but at least they understand what youre talking aboutwhereas here I think it would be extremely hard
to get the point across. Again, I dont want to overdraw the lines. There are plenty of exceptions. But the differences

The more power and privilege you

have, the less its necessary to think, because you can do what you want anyway.
When power and privilege decline, willingness to think becomes part of survival .
are noticeable, and I think the differences have to do with power.

I know when excerpts from that interview we did were published in The Progressive, you got raked over the coals
for this position.
Exactly. When I talked to the anarchist group in Buenos Aires, we discussed this. Everybody basically had the same
recognition. Theres an interesting slogan thats used. We didnt mention this, but quite apart from the Workers
Party and the urban unions, theres also a very lively rural workers organization. Millions of workers have become
organized into rural unions which are very rarely discussed. One of the slogans that they use which is relevant here,

we should "expand the floor of the cage." We know were in a cage. We know
were trapped. Were going to expand the floor, meaning we will extend to the limits
what the cage will allow. And we intend to destroy the cage. But not by attacking
the cage when were vulnerable, so theyll murder us. Thats completely correct. You
have to protect the cage when its under attack from even worse predators from
outside, like private power. And you have to expand the floor of the cage,
recognizing that its a cage. These are all preliminaries to dismantling it. Unless
people are willing to tolerate that level of complexity, theyre going to be of no use
to people who are suffering and who need help, or, for that matter, to themselves.
is that

Neolib Link
Survival strategies fragments mass movements into a totality
of atomized individuals, each struggling to survive, rendered
reactive to dominant hierarchy. Their liberation is an illusion
and only collective search for material transformation can
solve.
Papantonopoulou 14 (Saffa, Anthropology and Middle East Studies Dual PhD,
Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv: Transgender Subjects, Wounded
Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude, WSQ: Womens Studies
Quarterly 42: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2014),
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/549603/summary, accessed 7/18/16)
Wendy Browns words ring just as true today as they did twenty years ago when
they were written. While Brown did not explore what, exactly, mobilizes wounded
attachments, what we have seen since 1993 is an increase in the

deployment of wounded attachments by neoliberalism and

neocolonialism. The Zionist economy of gratitude, as part of a multibillion-dollar
propaganda industry, is an economy in a very literal sense. Pinkwashing deploys
preexisting tropes of Jewish victimization inherent to Zionism, in an attempt to hail
the transgender subject into a debt of gratitude toward neoliberalism. This

narrative deploys vulnerability as economic capital, and its

historical rise coincides with a tactical and discursive shift by
radical and progressive politics within the West. This shift has been
a move toward hyperindividualized projects of semiotic and
representational interventions into existing systems. This is
encapsulated in the assump- tion that through better (media)
representation, and precisely defined terminologies, transgender people and
other oppressed people may find liberation. The renaturalization of
capitalism within late twentieth-century identity politics is both a
product of and produced by the reframing of both temporality and the
individuals relation to the collective within purportedly liberatory
political projects. No longer part of a mass movement that aims toward
liberation of the collective in historical time, we are instead relegated to
a totality of atomized individuals, each struggling to survive . The

struggles for survival are very much real, but the ways in which they
have been politicizedeven more, the ways in which survival within
the existing system has become the political project reflect an
internalization of Margaret Thatchers infamous quip There is no
alternative . We are often grappling with subjectivities that have

been produced by disciplinary regimes in order not to survive.

Liberation will mean the ceasing-to-be of many of these disciplined

subjectivities. And there are few things more terrifying than calling
for the death of ones own subject position. But this may be the point
where it makes sense to part from Brown, as Brown parts from Nietzsche. After all,
Brown does not account for movementssuch as, say, the Black Panther Party, to
name one examplethat politicized identity as part of a liberatory project, avoiding
both liberal co-optation and crude Marxist reductionism. Rather than focus further
on Browns notion of wounds and traumas, it may be useful to reevaluate Fanons
notion of catharsis in the twenty-first century. What might we imagine a transgender
catharsis could look like? To Fanon, catharsis happens as part of decolonial struggle,
which is, in his words, an agenda for total disorder. But it cannot be accomplished
by the wave of a magic wand . . . or a gentlemans agreement. Fanon specifies that
decolonial struggle is an historical process (1963, 2). Liberation, catharsis,

and healing from trauma will not happen on the level of a matrix of
individuals, or a more precise regime of signification, and no theoretical
intervention (even on the part of this text) will bring it into being. Again,
we cannot signify our way toward liberation as something that
happens in historical time; we cannot make a priori promises of
safety or security. There is unfortunately no predicting what,
exactly, a historical unraveling of a violent system may bring about.
But we can, at the very least, prepare ourselves, by critically examining
what sort of political tropes we reproduce in attempting to name our
pain . Demanding liberation in historical time, through a collec- tive

struggle that places more weight on the material than on the semiotic or
symbolic, while simultaneously allowing geocultural cross-pollination of ideas and
signifiers without a historically deterministic search for origins (Foucault 1977),
may allow us to break out of cycles of debt and gratitude. But this change will

not happen through theoretical intervention alone; it must happen

through a structural and material transformation of the world we live in.

Fails
Survival strategies fail
Subotnik 98 Professor of Law, Touro College, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center. 7
Cornell J. L. & Pub. Pol'y 681
Having traced a major strand in the development of CRT, we turn now to the strands' effect on the relationships of
CRATs with each other and with outsiders. As the foregoing material suggests,

the central CRT message is

not simply that minorities are being treated unfairly , or even that individuals out there are in
pain - assertions for which there are data to serve as grist for the academic mill - but that the minority
scholar himself or herself hurts and hurts badly .
What
can an academic trained to [*694] question and to doubt n72 possibly say to Patricia Williams
when effectively she announces, "I hurt bad"? n73 "No, you don't hurt"? "You
shouldn't hurt"? "Other people hurt too"? Or, most dangerously - and perhaps most tellingly - "What do you
An important problem that concerns the very definition of the scholarly enterprise now comes into focus.

expect when you keep shooting yourself in the foot?" If the majority were perceived as having the well- being of
minority groups in mind, these responses might be acceptable, even welcomed. And they might lead to real

writes Williams, the failure by those "cushioned within the invisible

privileges of race and power... to incorporate a sense of precarious connection as a part of our lives
is... ultimately obliterating." n74
conversation. But,

These words will clearly invite responses only from fools and
sociopaths; they will, by effectively precluding objection, disconcert and disunite
others. "I hurt," in academic discourse, has three broad though interrelated effects .
First, it demands priority from the reader's conscience. It is for this reason that law
review editors, waiving usual standards, have privileged a long trail of undisciplined
- even silly n75 - destructive and, above all, self-destructive arti cles. n76 Second, by
emphasizing the emotional bond between those who hurt in a similar way, "I hurt"
discourages fellow sufferers from abstracting themselves from their pain in order to
gain perspective on their condition. n77
"Precarious." "Obliterating."

[*696]

Last, as we have seen, it precludes the possibility of open and

structured conversation with others.

n78 [*697]

It is because of this

conversation-stopping effect of what they insensitively call "first-person agony stories" that
Farber and Sherry deplore their use. "The norms of academic civility hamper readers from challenging
the accuracy of the researcher's account; it would be rather difficult, for example, to criticize a law review article by
questioning the author's emotional stability or veracity." n79 Perhaps, a better practice would be to put the
scholar's experience on the table, along with other relevant material, but to subject that experience to the same
level of scrutiny.

through the foregoing rhetorical strategies CRATs succeeded in limiting academic

debate, why do they not have greater influence on public policy? Discouraging white legal scholars
from entering the national conversation about race , n80 I suggest, has generated a kind
of cynicism in white audiences which, in turn, has had precisely the reverse effect of that ostensibly
desired by CRATs. It drives the American public to the right and ensures that
anything CRT offers is reflexively rejected.
If

In the absence of scholarly work by white males in the area of race, of course, it is difficult to be sure what reasons
they would give for not having rallied behind CRT. Two things, however, are certain. First,

the kinds of issues

are too important in their implications [*698] for American life to be confined to
communities of color. If the lives of minorities are heavily constrained, if not fully defined, by the thoughts
and actions of the majority elements in society, it would seem to be of great importance that
white thinkers and doers participate in open discourse to bring about change. Second, given
raised by Williams

the lack of engagement of CRT by the community of legal scholars as a whole, the discourse that should be taking
place at the highest scholarly levels has, by default, been displaced to faculty offices and, more generally, the
streets and the airwaves.

AT Affirm Otherness
Affirming indigenous identity in academic space depoliticizes
the radical claims of othernesswe should not articulate
indigenous identity but instead allow it to be opaque
LINDNER AND STETSON 2009 (Keith, a PhD candidate in the Department of
Geography at Syracuse University; George, postdoc fellow at US Coast Guard
Academy, For Opacity: Nature, Difference and Indigeneity in Amazonia, Topia,
Spring)
critical scholarship that works to
de-essentialize such nature-arguments, precisely because of the exclusionary and potentially
violent implications of essentialized thinking, can at the same time depoliticize . Following arguments
The second complication seems to run directly counter to the first:
denaturalize and

within cultural studies about the articulation of identities (Hall 1990), critical social scientists have been increasingly
wary of a link between indigeneity and nature, pointing out both the ways naturalizing arguments have been used
against indigenous peoples as part of (post)colonial projects of domination (as in the example used to open this
paper), as well as the problematic assumptions involved in treating any identity as static or essential (Braun 2002;
Conklin 1997; Conklin and Graham 1995; Rogers 1996; Valdivia 2005a). Li, following Hall (1996), argues that
framings linking indigenous peoples with nature, as in harmony with nature or as natural conservationists, are

Even simple identification

as indigenous cannot be taken for granted: a groups self-identification as tribal
or indigenous is not natural or inevitable, but is, rather, a positioning an
accomplishment, a contingent outcome of the cultural and political work of articulation (Li 2000: 151,
strategic essentialisms: not natural, but articulated and historically contingent.

163).

Such arguments, however, run the risk of undermining claims of indigenous peoples
to territorial and other rights: if the category indigenous is articulated, this might
become grounds for discrediting claims made by indigenous peoples that posit them
as different from other inhabitants of a nation-state. Accounts of indigeneity as
articulated or strategic essentialism risk working to uncover indigenous
authenticity, to show indigenous peoples, stripped of their indigenous garments, as
corrupt posers or fake Indians, which in turn can undermine indigenous claims
when appropriated by state elites (Conklin 1997). Such arguments can be detrimental in
a political context where reflexivity is not reciprocated; countering the essentialized
representations of elites often involves employing language that is no less
simplistic or essentializing (Dove 1999: 236).
How might one negotiate such complex and contested terrain? Conceptualizations
of indigeneity that take an essentialist tacticmany official definitions, museums and National
Geographic, among other common sources in popular culturerisk reinforcing the sort of nature-based arguments

freeze indigeneity on the nature side of the nature-society divide. Yet

indigenous peoples themselves have begun to appropriate such arguments to capture
public opinion and press claims against states (Smyth 2000; Valdivia 2005b). Further, a deconstructionist
reading of indigeneity, far more common in academia, risks robbing indigenous
peoples of an important political resource by positing indigeneity as fundamentally
similar to all other identities: a contingent outcome of ... articulation (Li 2000: 163).
that can function to

This paper seeks a partial way out of this impasse by approaching questions of indigeneity and nature in the

Combining an explicit politicization of scholarly

workworking to write with, rather than aboutwith an explicit ethical stance, one that refuses
context of an ethical engagement with difference.

to decisively delineate what indigenous identity really is, might begin to work
against the potential harmful affects of both essentialist and deconstructionist
readings of indigeneity and nature. To do so, we seek to initiate a shift away from
conceptualizing alterityhuman and non-humanas an effect or articulation of power, toward alterity as an
opacity that is itself productive of effects that demand ethical response . We read our
recent involvements with the alternative development NGO Village Earth through the work of the postcolonial

a move
away from questions of identity and a commitment to foregrounding opacity can
produce an ethical mode of relation between scholars and the Others they study
what we call opaque alliance . Our central argument is that an ethical response to alterity means
foregrounding, rather than submerging, opacity . We turn to Glissant not because he is the first to
theorist, novelist and poet douard Glissant. Drawing on Glissants concept of opacity, we argue that

mobilize these theoretical ideas,2 but because we have found his work to be underutilized in our disciplinary homes
of geography and political science, yet useful as we negotiate the difficulties of fieldwork and think about how to
engage ethically with alterity. Further, nature figures prominently in Glissants work, particularly his literary and
poetic work, in complex ways.

Language/Word PICS
The negatives emphasis on the pre given CONTENT of our words over
the EXPRESSION of their context prevents an understanding of
language-as-becoming. Destroys the possibility for emancipatory
politics

Stevenson 2k9 (Frank, Dept. English, National Taiwan Normal University,

Stretching Language to Its Limit: Deleuze and the Problem of Poeisis, Concentric:
Literary and Cultural Studies 25.1) //nz
Lecercle ends his book with a discussion of Deleuzes late theory, in Essays Critical and Clinical (Paris 1993),2 of style as a writers

). In the last section of her Gilles Deleuze and

the Ruin of Representation (1999), Olkowski also focuses on
Deleuzes problem of language in relation to his theory of style as
langue-vibration, as set forth in this same stuttering model in Essays: 3
Make the language system stutteris it possible without confusing
it with speech? Everything depends on the way in which language is thought: if we extract it like a
homogeneous system in equilibrium, or near equilibrium, and we
define it by means of constant terms and relations, it is evident that
the disequilibriums and variations can only affect speech. . . . But if the system
capacity to make language stutter (113

appears to be in perpetual disequilibrium, if the system vibratesand has terms each one of which traverses a zone of continuous
variationlanguage itself will begin to vibrate and stutter. (Deleuze 108, Olkowski 229) Deleuze had of course for many years been
breaking away from Saussurian and Chomskian semiotics, indeed from (post)structuralism with its focus on meaning (signification)

In The Logic of Sense (1969) his Stoic theory of language

takes meaning as a virtual event, a surface effect of langue; the
infinitive Verbits paradigm the verb to becomeis now seen as
expressing the entire range of language, as the virtual event of
language. Developing further this idea of language as
fundamentally (verbal) action and event, Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1982) set forth
and interpretation.

a fully pragmatic language-theory based on mots-dordre (order-words, commands).4 This theory is much indebted to Austins
speech-act theory (or theory of performative utterances, Deleuzes noncs) and is much closer to Foucault than to Derrida or

The performative
must be the motion that inaugurates any such variation in
language, for [it] is both language and body. The performative is
language, in that it expresses sense in a proposition; it is
simultaneously corporeal insofar as it actualizes something in
bodies, it involves the actions and passions of bodies; it is doing by
saying (229). This catches one of the central paradoxes in Deleuzes
language theorythe nonc (utterance, speech) is simultaneously linguistic
and corporealand is closely related to the problem raised by Deleuze himself in the above passage: Make the
Lacan. Thus immediately after citing the above late-Deleuzian passage Olkowski notes that

language system stutteris it possible without confusing it with speech?

Everything depends on the way

That is, this is not stuttering

in the normal sense (a kind of vibration of speech or of the voice) but in a much wider
in which language is thought

. . . (Essays 108).

sense where, far from equilibrium, langue itself vibrates or

(metaphorically or metonymically?) stutters. For this wider langue-vibration or rocking is the physical, corporeal action of
langue, its bodily walking, even though it contains speech within it (in a close- to-equilibrium state of vibration). Deleuze
indeed associates it (metaphorically or metonymically) with the rolling gait of
Becketts Watt (110), for speaking is no less a movement than walking:
the former goes beyond speech toward language, just as the latter goes
beyond the organism toward a body without organs

(111). In this late model,

language becomes so strained at its extreme limit of

disequilibrium that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer . . . then
language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and
makes it confront silence (113.) The extreme point in the pendulums arc, where we feel that language is
moving beyond itself, is simultaneously confronting non-language, non-speech, silence and looking back at itself, is the point
reached in the stammering of truly creative writers: Stylethe foreign language within languageis made up of these two
operations, or should we instead speak with Proust of a nonstyle, that is, of the elements in a style to come which do not yet exist?
5 Style is the economy of language. To make ones language stutter, face to face, or back to back, and at the same time to push

now
has a foreign language within it because it is in the process of
overcoming itself, becoming-other or becoming-foreign to itself,
perhaps becoming its own future and/or its own past.6 However, here we
might want to know how far this notion of poetic, or more generally
literary, style (as non-style) differs from conventional or traditional
notions of style and/or non-style. But it is hard to pin down the
meaning of style in the conventional sense, except perhaps by
saying it has to do with the technique, the use of words, the form of
language as a whole to its limit, to its outside, to its silencethis would be like the boom and the crash (113). Language

expression rather than the content or meaning . It would be tempting to say that the

vibrating langue-machine is primarily the force of expression itself

rather than some sort of (static, objectified) content,

except for the problem that Deleuze

does not want to distinguish form from content here.7 However, insofar as the best writing stylealso painterly, musical, dancing
style?is sometimes said to be the most economical, Deleuze does also say in the above passage that Style is the economy of
language (113), no doubt thinking of this stuttering-of-language model as the most generalized and encompassing, and/or most

It is
also the most metaphysical model: language becomes most truly
poetic when it confronts its own ultimate limit and the silence
that lies beyond it.8 Still, the problem of literariness does arise here. Lecercle points out
the apparent contradiction in Deleuzes attitude toward literariness
in late essays like He Stuttered and The Exhausted: while
clearly wanting to reject any elitist, self-consciously text-oriented or
style-heavy (hence non-style) poetics, he chooses as his examples Luca,
Beckett, and other writers associated with elitist, hyper-intellectual
high-modernist literature (Deleuzes forgivable intellectual aesthetes love of sophisticated art is also clear
reductive, most simplified model of poiesis (which literally means making in or with language) we could possibly have.

in his Cinema books and his book on the English painter Francis Bacon).9 But there is a more specific literariness issue that will
concern me here: that of figures of speech like metaphor, often associated with literary (especially poetic) style. Though

Deleuze does say, as part of his and Guattaris turn away from
semiotics with their pragmatic language theory, that he has no use
for meaning or metaphor, the problem is that, at least for the

uninitiated, metaphoricity would seem to underlie his entire

philosophical discourse, manifesting itself everywhere and not
least, ironically enough, in the very idea that the vast vibratinglangue model could itself be or embody poetic speech. A particular case of this
is the notion, trope or figure of langue gazing simultaneously (in a double-movement) at the silence beyond it and back at itself, also

. For the notion (figure) of silence

here again suggests a certain poetic (indeed humanistic) priority inasmuch
as, from a physical-science point of view, there may ultimately be
only noise (rather than silence, a term defined by a listener) beyond and between (the elements
of) language or any system of meaning .10 Moreover, the late Deleuzes argument (via Beckett)
that language (meaning) could exhaust not just itself (leaving silence) but its
own possibility may seem more poetic than logical. Thus, inasmuch as Deleuze
taken by Deleuze as the problem of languages exhaustibility

takes his late vibrating-langue model (diagram, machine) as itself embodying poiesis or poetic speech, I want to look at the
problem of literariness (style vs. non-style) in relation to this model, more specifically the problem of metaphoricity. My first point
here will be that while Deleuze rejects (a semiotics-based) signification and metaphor on principle, the stuttering-langue machine or
model is itself a figure and an embodiment of metaphoricity in its literal sense of going-beyond (langue moves beyond itself
toward silence). My second point (closely tied to the one above) point will be that the very notion of the limit of language (as a form
of sound and/or noise?) and the silence beyond this limit is a sort of metaphor or metaphorical conception (literally one that goes
beyond itself). My third point will be that the conception of languages exhaustion as a total breaking-down or radical selftransformation is also metaphorical in the literal sense, as is Deleuzes logical claim that Becketts narrative exhaustion of logical

However, I will
also point out in Deleuzes defensei.e. this is admittedly an
ambiguous or problematic issue at bestthat he accepts a certain
conception of figure (rather than metaphor), one at least partly influenced by
Lyotard and one which does try to get beyond semiotics by going
beneath language, i.e. by not assuming at the outset any
foundational or totalizing conception of langue but rather that
there are only indeterminate figures. But here we come back to the first problem above: if
possibilities in Watt is in effect the giving of another reality to possibility, one that is itself exhaustible.

there are only shadowy figures beneath (or instead of) a totalized language, then how can we begin from the model of a totalized
langue that commences to vibrate or stutter when stretched to its extreme limits? Given the above-mentioned problematic notion
of silence in relation to sound and noise, I will then suggest that one might also move completely outside of this Deleuzian language-

Here we begin with that

physical reality or physical world (of atoms, sound waves, etc.) that Deleuze seems
to want to reach by stretching his langue to or beyond its limits, and
I will briefly describe some ways in which the information-theory
modelin which noise, which underlies sound/meaning and distorts
or interrupts signals (meaningful sounds, messages)may possibly achieve the
same results Deleuze is aiming for in a much simpler or more direct
way, even if now the (arguably poetic) notion of the silence that lies beyond
langue may have to be discarded. The turn to
information/communication theory also seems justified inasmuch as
poiesis (making) does also appear in autopoietic (self-making) systems theory,
apparently a more encompassing field than that of merely-human
language. Finally, in the Conclusion I will briefly explore the concepts or practices of problem and question,
space (or meaning-space) by turning to the model or paradigm of information theory.

problematizing (a Deleuzian term) and questioning in order to see what sort of light questionabilityperhaps itself a form of
background noisemight throw on the above questions, problems, ambiguities, paradoxes. In fact Deleuze in Difference and
Repetition seems to have a very preliminary, incipient, inchoate theory of questioning and/or problematizing, though one not
explicitly related by him to the problem of language. Poiesis and the Problem of Metaphor Poiesis in Greek means simply making,
but it became associated long ago with the creative making of any art form, and more especially with that of writing (hence
poetry). However, since at least the mid-20th century (with the rise of cybernetics) poiesis has also been used to signify the

creative making of any system; in this wider usage of the term we usually get it as autopoiesis or the self-making (self-creation,
self-generation) of a system. Hence we have autopoietic systems theory, arguably a (metaphorical or metonymic?) usage or
context of poiesis which might have fit Deleuzes vibrating langue-model as well as, or even better than, the modern-poetic context.
This self-generating aspect is already clear in the prototypeset forth by Deluze and Guattari in Chapter 5 of A Thousand Plateaus
of the late He Stuttered langue-machine. For this prototypical abstract machine does not depend on any pre-existing

it . . . makes no
distinction within itself between content and expression; its
content is the force of its expression, it generates itself: We must
say that this abstract machine is necessarily much more than
language. When linguists (following Chomsky) rise to the idea of a purely
language-based abstract machine, [we object] that their
machine . . . is not abstract enough because it is limited to the form
foundation in language, unlike the vast syntactic theory/model of Chomsky. Rather,

of expression and to alleged universals that presuppose language.

. . . A true

abstract machine has no way of making a distinction within itself between a plane of expression and a plane of content because it

The abstract machine in itself is destratified,

deterritorialized; it has no form of its own . . . and makes no
distinction within itself between content and expression. . . . [It] in
itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is
diagrammatic. . . . It operates by matter, not by substance; by
function, not by form. . . . [It] is pure Matter-Function. . . . (ATP, On Several Regimes of Signs 141) We
cannot begin like Chomsky from the foundation of a pre-given
draws a single plane of consistency. . . .

language , that is, by distinguishing expression from content , for there

is no pre-given language but rather only the rhizomic, unspecified,

shifting configurations of sense.11 In a further extension of or variation on this deterritorializedChomsky model we have the double-axis vibrating-langue model of He Stuttered (1993). 12 This somehow begins from what might
have been the classical double-axis semiotic models of Saussure (associative and syntagmatic axes) and Jakobson (metaphoric and

Language is subject to
a double process, that of choices to be made and that of sequences
to be established: disjunction or the selection of similars,
connection or the consecution of combinables. As long as language is considered as a
syntactic-metonymic axes or poles), but quickly moves beyond their traditional sense:

system in equilibrium, the disjunctions are necessarily exclusive (we do not say passion, ration, nation at the same time, but
must choose between them), and the connections, progressive (we do not combine a word with its own elements, in a kind of stop-

But far from equilibrium, the disjunctions become

included or inclusive, and the connections, reflexive, following a
rolling gait that concerns the process of language and no longer the
flow of speech. Every word is divided, but into itself (pas-rats, passions-rations); and every word is combined, but with
itself (pas-passe-passion). It is as if the entire language started to roll from right
to left, and to pitch backward and forward: the two stutterings. (Essays
start or forward-backward jerk).

110

Words have different meanings in different contexts no

reason why ours are uniquely bad
Butler, 97 Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature University of
California-Berkeley, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative p. 38 Judith

This story underscores the limits and risks of resignification as a strategy of opposition. I will not propose that the pedagogical recirculation of examples of hate
speech always defeats the project of opposing and defusing such speech, but I want to underscore the fact that such terms carry connotations that exceed the purposes

Keeping such terms unsaid

and unsayable can also work to lock them in place, preserving their power to injure, and
arresting the possibility of a reworking that might shift their context and purpose. That
such language carries trauma is not a reason to forbid it s use. There is no purifying
language of its traumatic residue, and no way to work through trauma except through the
arduous effort it takes to direct the course of its repetition. It may be chat trauma constitutes a strange kind of
resource, and repetition, its vexed but promising instrument. After all, to be rained by another is traumatic: it is an act that precedes my will,
an act that brings me into a linguistic world in which I might then begin to exercise agency
at all. A founding subordination, and yet the scene of agency, is repeated in the ongoing
interpellations of social life. This is what I have been called. Because I have been called something, I have been entered into linguistic life, refer
to myself through the language given by the Other, but perhaps never quite in the same terms that my language mimes. The terms by which we
are hailed arc rarely the ones we choose (and even when we try to impose protocols on how
we are to be named, they usually fail); but these terms we never really choose arc the
occasion for something we might still call agency, the repetition of an originary
subordination for another purpose, one whose future is partially open.
for which they may be intended and can thus work to afflict and defeat discursive efforts to oppose such speech.