1NC PIK

ending your genealogy with the simple, easily-digestible recommendation that marijuana
should be legalized ruins the entire point of genealogical investigation in the first place
Foucault wrote genealogies as a direct rejection of Lenins question What is to be done?
by providing a direct instruction manual for political action, the affirmative has corrupted
the unsettling critical potential of genealogy the goal of our genealogy is to make you feel
uncomfortable with everything about how we are currently acting, and that uneasiness
cannot be achieved if we tell you exactly what to do!
Flyvberg & Richardon 2 dept of development @ Aalborg University
(Bent, Aalborg University, Department of Development and Planning & Tim, University of
Sheffield, Department of Town and Regional Planning, Planning and Foucault: In Search of the
Dark Side of Planning Theory, http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/DarkSide2.pdf.) JPG
3. Towards Foucault Instead of side-stepping or seeking to remove the traces of power from planning, an alternative approach accepts power as
unavoidable, recognising its all pervasive nature, and emphasising its productive as well as destructive potential. Here, theory engages squarely
with policy made on a field of power struggles between different interests, where knowledge and truth are contested, and the rationality of
planning is exposed as a focus of conflict. This is what Flyvbjerg has called realrationalitat, or real-life rationality (Flyvbjerg 1996), where the
focus shifts from what should be done to what is actually done. This analysis embraces the idea that rationality is penetrated
by power, and the dynamic between the two is critical in understanding what policy is about. It therefore becomes meaningless, or
misleading - for politicians, administrators and researchers alike - to operate with a concept of rationality in
which power is absent (Flyvbjerg 1998, 164-65). Both Foucault and Habermas are political thinkers. Habermass thinking is well
developed as concerns political ideals, but weak in its understanding of actual political processes. Foucaults thinking, conversely, is weak with
reference to generalised ideals--Foucault is a declared opponent of ideals, understood as definitive answers to Kants
question, What ought I to do? or Lenins What is to be done? --but his work reflects a sophisticated understanding of
Realpolitik. Both Foucault and Habermas agree that in politics one must side with reason. Referring to Habermas and similar thinkers, however,
Foucault (1980b) warns that to respect rationalism as an ideal should never constitute a blackmail to prevent the analysis of the rationalities
really at work (Rajchman 1988, 170). Habermass main complaint about Foucault is what Habermas sees as Foucaults relativism. Thus
Habermas (1987, 276) harshly dismisses Foucaults genealogical historiographies as relativistic, cryptonormative illusory science. Such critique
for relativism is correct, if by relativistic we mean unfounded in norms that can be rationally and universally grounded. Foucaults norms
are not foundationalist like Habermass: they are expressed in a desire to challenge every abuse of power, whoever the
author, whoever the victims (Miller 1993, 316) and in this way to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the
undefined work of freedom (Foucault 1984a, 46). Foucault here is the Nietzschean democrat, for whom any form of
government - liberal or totalitarian - must be subjected to analysis and critique based on a will not to be dominated,
voicing concerns in public and withholding consent about anything that appears to be unacceptable. Such norms cannot be given a
universal grounding independent of those people and that context, according to Foucault. Nor would such grounding be
desirable, since it would entail an ethical uniformity with the kind of utopian-totalitarian implications that Foucault
would warn against in any context, be it that of Marx, Rousseau or Habermas: The search for a form of morality acceptable by everyone in the
sense that everyone would have to submit to it, seems catastrophic to me (Foucault 1984c, 37 quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1986, 119). In a
Foucauldian interpretation, such a morality would endanger freedom, not empower it. Instead, Foucault focuses on the analysis of evils and
shows restraint in matters of commitment to ideas and systems of thought about what is good for man, given the historical experience that few
things have produced more suffering among humans than strong commitments to implementing utopian visions of the good. For Foucault the
socially and historically conditioned context, and not fictive universals, constitutes the most effective bulwark against relativism and nihilism,
and the best basis for action. Our sociality and history, according to Foucault, is the only foundation we have, the only solid ground under our
feet. And this socio-historical foundation is fully adequate. Foucault, perhaps more than any recent philosopher, reminded us of the crucial
importance of power in the shaping and control of discourses, the production of knowledge, and the social construction of spaces. His analysis of
modern power has often been read by planning theorists as negative institutionalised oppression, expressed most chillingly in his analysis of the
disciplinary regime of the prison in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1979). However, it is Foucaults explanation of power as
productive and local, rather than oppressive and hierarchical, that suggests real opportunities for agency and change
(McNay 1994). Whilst Foucault saw discourse as a medium which transmits and produces power, he points out that it is also a hindrance, a
stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. So, at the same time as discourse reinforces power, it also
undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it (Foucault 1990, 101). Foucault rarely separated knowledge from
power, and the idea of power/knowledge was of crucial importance: we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that
knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and
its interests ... we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions
of knowledge. We should admit rather that power produced knowledge .. that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no
power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge ... (Foucault 1979, 27). For Foucault, then, rationality was contingent,
shaped by power relations, rather than context-free and objective. According to Foucault, Habermass (undated, 8) authorisation of power by
law is inadequate (emphasis deleted). [The juridical system] is utterly incongruous with the new methods of power,
says Foucault (1980a, 89), methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus... Our historical
gradient carries us further and further away from a reign of law. The law, institutions - or policies and plans - provide no
guarantee of freedom, equality or democracy. Not even entire institutional systems, according to Foucault, can
ensure freedom, even though they are established with that purpose. Nor is freedom likely to be achieved by imposing abstract theoretical
systems or correct thinking. On the contrary, history has demonstrated--says Foucault--horrifying examples that it is precisely those social
systems which have turned freedom into theoretical formulas and treated practice as social engineering, i.e., as an epistemically derived techne,
that become most repressive. [People] reproach me for not presenting an overall theory, says Foucault (1984b, 375-6),
I am attempting, to the contrary, apart from any totalisation - which would be at once abstract and limiting - to open up
problems that are as concrete and general as possible. What Foucault calls his political task is to criticise
the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent ; to criticise them in such a manner
that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that
one can fight them (Chomsky and Foucault 1974, 171). This is what, in a Foucauldian interpretation, would be seen as an effective
approach to institutional change , including change in the institutions of civil society. With direct reference to
Habermas, Foucault (1988, 18) adds: The problem is not of trying to dissolve [relations of power] in the utopia of a perfectly transparent
communication, but to give...the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics...which would allow these games of power to be
played with a minimum of domination. Here Foucault overestimates his differences with Habermas, for Habermas also believes that the ideal
speech situation cannot be established as a conventional reality in actual communication. Both thinkers see the regulation of actual relations of
dominance as crucial, but whereas Habermas approaches regulation from a universalistic theory of discourse, Foucault seeks out a
genealogical understanding of actual power relations in specific contexts. Foucault is thus oriented towards phronesis, whereas
Habermass orientation is towards episteme. For Foucault praxis and freedom are derived not from universals or theories.
Freedom is a practice , and its ideal is not a utopian absence of power. Resistance and struggle, in contrast to consensus, is for Foucault
the most solid basis for the practice of freedom. Whereas Habermas emphasises procedural macro politics, Foucault stresses
substantive micro politics, though with the important shared feature that neither Foucault nor Habermas venture to define the actual
content of political action. This is defined by the participants. Thus, both Habermas and Foucault are bottom-up thinkers as concerns the content
of politics, but where Habermas thinks in a top-down moralist fashion as regards procedural rationality - having sketched out the procedures to
be followed - Foucault is a bottom-up thinker as regards both process and content. In this interpretation, Habermas would want to tell
individuals and groups how to go about their affairs as regards procedure for discourse. He would not want, however, to say anything about the
outcome of this procedure. Foucault would prescribe neither process nor outcome ; he would only recommend a
focus on conflict and power relations as the most effective point of departure for the fight against domination. It

is because of his double bottom-up thinking that Foucault has been described as non-action oriented. Foucault (1981)
says about such criticism, in a manner that would be pertinent to those who work in the institutional setting of planning: Its true that
certain people, such as those who work in the institutional setting of the prison...are not likely to find advice or instructions
in my books to tell them what is to be done. But my project is precisely to bring it about that they no
longer know what to do, so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without
saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous (Miller 1993, 235). The depiction of Foucault as non-action oriented is correct

to the extent that Foucault hesitates to give directives for action, and he directly distances himself from the kinds of

universal What is to be done? formulas which characterise procedure in Habermass communicative rationality. Foucault

believes that solutions of this type are themselves part of the problem. Seeing Foucault as non-action oriented
would be misleading, however, insofar as Foucaults genealogical studies are carried out only in order to show
how things can be done differently to separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no
longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think (Foucault 1984a, 45-7). Thus Foucault was openly pleased when during a revolt in
some of the French prisons the prisoners in their cells read his Discipline and Punish. They shouted the text to other prisoners, Foucault told an
interviewer. I know its pretentious to say, Foucault said, but thats a proof of a truth--a political and actual truth--which started after the book
was written (Dillon 1980, 5). This is the type of situated action Foucault would endorse, and as a genealogist, Foucault saw himself as highly
action oriented, as a dealer in instruments, a recipe maker, an indicator of objectives, a cartographer, a sketcher of plans, a gunsmith (Ezine
The establishment of a concrete genealogy opens possibilities for action by describing the genesis of a
1985, 14).
given situation and showing that this particular genesis is not connected to absolute historical necessity. Foucaults
genealogical studies of prisons, hospitals and sexuality demonstrate that social practices may always take an
alternative form, even where there is no basis for voluntarism or idealism. Combined with Foucaults focus on domination, it is easy to
understand why this insight has been embraced by feminists and minority groups. Elaborating genealogies of, for instance, gender and race leads
to an understanding of how relations of domination between women and men, and between different peoples, can be changed (McNay 1992,
Bordo and Jaggar 1990, Fraser 1989, Benhabib and Cornell 1987). The value of Foucaults approach is his emphasis on the dynamics of power.
Understanding how power works is the first prerequisite for action , because action is the exercise of power.
And such an understanding can best be achieved by focusing on the concrete. Foucault can help us with a materialist understanding of Realpolitik
and Realrationalitat, and how these might be changed in a specific context. The problem with Foucault is that because understanding and action
have their points of departure in the particular and the local, we may come to overlook more generalised conditions concerning, for example,
institutions, constitutions and structural issues. In sum, Foucault and Habermas agree that rationalisation and the misuse of power are among the
most important problems of our time. They disagree as to how one can best understand and act in relation to these problems. From the perspective
of the history of philosophy and political theory, the difference between Foucault and Habermas lies in the fact that Foucault works within a
particularistic and contextualist tradition, with roots in Thucydides via Machiavelli to Nietzsche. Foucault is one of the more important twentieth
century exponents of this tradition. Habermas is the most prominent living exponent of a universalistic and theorising tradition derived from
Socrates and Plato, proceeding over Kant. In power terms, we are speaking of strategic versus constitution thinking, about struggle versus
control, conflict versus consensus.

genealogical strategies are easily coopted unless there is an unending, constant stream of
critical investigation and epistemic questioning their concrete advocacy is a closure of
epistemic uncertainty in favor of a universal truth of what should be done, turns all of case
and solidifies new hegemonies
Medina 11 prof @ Vanderbilt
(Jose, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction,
and Guerrilla Pluralism, Foucault Studies, No. 12, pp. 9-35, October 2011)
As Foucault puts it, genealogies can be described as the attempt to de- subjugate historical knowledges, to set them free, or in other words to
enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse.40 But, as he emphasizes,
genealogies do not simply reject knowledge, or invoke or celebrate some immediate experience that has yet to be captured by

knowledge. This is not what they are about. They are about the insurrection of knowledges. 41 Genealogical
investigations proceed by way of playing local, discontinuous, disqualified, or nonlegitimized knowledges off against
the unitary theoretical instance that filters them out or absorbs them by putting them in their proper place within a hierarchy.
Genealogies are insurrections of subjugated knowledges . And the plurals here are crucial , for the plurality of
insurrections and of subjugated knowledges has to be kept always alive in order to resist new hegemonic
unifications and hierarchizations of knowledges. The danger that the critical work of genealogies can be
reabsorbed by hegemonic power/knowledges is brilliantly described by Foucault : Once we have excavated
our genealogical fragments, once we begin to exploit them and to put in circulation these elements of knowledge that
we have been trying to dig out of the sand, isnt there a danger that they will be recoded, recolonized by these
unitary discourses which, having first disqualified them and having then ignored them when they reappeared, may now be ready to reannex them
and include them in their own discourses and their own power- knowledge? And if we try to protect the fragments we have dug up, dont we
run the risk of building, with our own hands, a unitary discourse? 42 Insurrections of (de-)subjugated
knowledges and their critical resistance can be co- opted for the production of new forms of subjugation and exclusion

( new hegemonies ) or for the reinforcement of old ones. The only way to resist this danger is by guaranteeing the
constant epistemic friction of knowledges from below, whichas I have argued elsewheremeans guaranteeing that
eccentric voices and perspectives are heard and can interact with mainstream ones, that the
experiences and concerns of those who
live in darkness and silence do not remain lost and un-attended, but are allowed to exert friction. Genealogies
have to be always plural , for genealogical investigations can unearth an indefinite number of paths from for- gotten past struggles to the
struggles of our present. And the insurrections of subjugated knowledges they produce also need to remain plural if
they are to retain their critical power , that is, the capacity to empower people to resist oppressive
power/knowledge effects. In the next section I will put this Foucaultian pluralism in conversation with other epistemological pluralistic
approaches to memory and knowledge of the past.
our alternative is simple endorse the genealogy, do not endorse the prescription for
action. this is substantively different than the affirmative doing genealogy means a
constant uncertainty about the affirmative which the permutation cannot access it means
constant historical investigation
 1NC K
The only ethical demand is one that calls for the end of the world itselfthe affirmative
represents a conflict within the paradigm of America but refuses to challenge the
foundational antagonism that produces the violence that undergirds the that same
paradigm
Wilderson, 10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American
Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,]

Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of
their demandsand, by extension, the grammar of their sufferingwas indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are
the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw our attention
not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful
interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern worlds capacity to think, act, and exist spatially
and temporally . The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual
dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to
account but to call the world itself to account , and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was not
demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within
capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, on the one
hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to
becoming a being for the captor (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value is extracted from labor power through
commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal
integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a
sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the worldand not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself
was unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her
claim. Instead, it calls her crazy. And to what does the world attribute the Native American mans insanity? Hes crazy if he thinks hes
getting any money out of us? Surely, that doesnt make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big

enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with
violence ? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed
politically, intellectually, and cinematicallyunless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the
Savage. Repair the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, thirteen simple words, and the
structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An ethical modernity would no
longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been
promoted to the level of antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights. When pared down to

thirteen words and two sentences, one

cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political,
questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even
socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem
for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clearif the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the
archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go byis that what
can so easily be spoken is now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so
ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen words not only render their speaker
crazy but become themselves impossible to imagine . Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning
scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by
radical politics and scholarship were not Should the U.S. be overthrown? or even Would it be
overthrown? but rather when and howand, for some, whatwould come in its wake. Those steadfast in their
conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of
everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of
SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the
Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives
could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the
possibility of success, but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a
convincing case by way of a paradigmatic analysisthat the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to
maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential
candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.i One could (and
many did) acknowledge Americas strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but
rather remained an assessment of the so-called balance of forces. The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent
Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible
hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the questionand the
power to pose the question is the greatest power of all retreated as did White radicals and progressives
who retired from struggle. The questions echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM
Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting
(some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the crazies

shout at passers-by . Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the
political landscape , but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that became
authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist . Is it still possible for a
dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the Slave estatesii destruction , to manifest itself at
the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the
streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is no in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as
political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but yes in the sense that in even the most
taciturn historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this
foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptomsit registers in both cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness
of the structural antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the
coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present, Blackness and Redness manifests only in the rebar of
cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in
the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic strategies/design), even when the script labors for
the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems that can
be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism ( an irreconcilable struggle
between entities , or positionalities, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of
one of the positions ). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the
script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of family values), the non-narrative, or cinematic,
strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontologyor non-ontology.
The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of conflict . Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we
speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible.iii Likewise, the
grammar of political ethicsthe grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of sufferingwhich underwrite Film
Theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and which underwrite cinematic
speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is also unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory,
political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a structure of suffering. And the structure of
suffering which film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume crowds out other structures of suffering, regardless of
the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in question . To put a finer point
on it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one another
(despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological positionality from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the
most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory
that follows.

Black positionality renders their notions of counterhegemony and resistance incoherent

blackness is the site of absolute dereliction and blackness can only be the total
disconfiguration of civil society
Wilderson 2007 [Frank B., The Prison Slave as Hegemonys Silent Scandal in Warfare in the
American Homeland ed. Joy James, p. 31-2]

Slavery is the great leveler of the black subjects positionality . The black American subject does not generate
historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are "off the map" with
respect to the cartography that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past but not a heritage. To the data-
generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much like that which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological Axis.
This places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony. However,
it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position becauseand this is key our presence works back on the grammar
of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject even-the most massacred among them, Indiansis
required to have analogs within the nations structuring narrative, and the experience of one subject on whom
the nations order of wealth was built is without analog, then that subjects presence destabilizes all other
analogs. Fanon writes, "Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder."12 If
we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely
as a repository of complete disorder as the black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of
the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence, through
which civil society is possible namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the
site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic , for blackness in America generates no categories for
the chromosome of history and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience
without analog a past without a heritage . Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the
Imaginary, for "whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says black (Sexton), and whoever
says "aids" says blackthe "Negro is a phobogenic object."13 Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic
object, a past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas
this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament or, worse, disavowalnot at least, for a true
revolutionary or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition . If a social movement is to be neither
social-democratic nor Marxist in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the
positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting
whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They
have been, and remain today even in the most antiracist movements, such as the prison abolition
movementinvested elsewhere . This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually
antiblack, meaning that it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more
dangerous to the United States. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism or community control
of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialec tic:
a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm , a "program of complete disorder ." One must embrace its
disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it if, indeed, ones politics are to be
underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites ones politics, then
through what strategy of legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition "? What are this
movements lines of political accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the
embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and
of itself. No one, for example, has ever been known to say, "Gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all."
Yet few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of
blackness and the state of political movements in the United States today is marked by this very
Negrophobogenisis: "Gee-whiz, if only black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there is something more
terrifying about the foy of black than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to
remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil societywith hegemony as a handy prophylactic , just in case. If through
this stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, the work will fail, for it is always work
from a position of coherence (i.e., the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence of the black subject, or
prison slave. In this way, social formations on the left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between
workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as
revolutionary promises than as crowding y out scenarios of black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration.
Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman
demanding a social wage) gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the black subject
gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society . From the coherence
(whether a prison slave or a prison slave-in-waiting)
of civil society, the black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims blackness not as a
positive value but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of "absolute dereliction." It is a "scandal" that
rends civil society asunder . Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of
hegemony. It is a black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via
reform or reparation) but that must, nonetheless, be pursued to the death.

Their descriptions of statistics mystifies the true violence of anti blackness

Wilderson-2010- Frank B Wilderson III- Professor at UC irvine- Red, White and Black- p.
8-10
I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my ar- gument wedded to the disciplinary needs of political science, or even
sociology, where injury must be established, first, as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of intent, or
racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed. If the position of the Black is, as I argue, a paradigmatic
impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human
subject, as imagined by Marxism and psy- choanalysis, then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of
repressive practices on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This banishment from
the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of Black people's staunchest
"allies," and in some of the most "radical" films. Herenot in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or
conservative scholarshipis where the Settler/Master's sinews are most resilient . The polemic animating this research
stems from (1) my reading of Native and Black American meta-commentaries on Indian and Black subject positions written over the past twenty-
three years and ( 2 ) a sense of how much that work appears out of joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political
praxis and socially engaged popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of abandonment I experience when I
read the meta-commentaries on Red positionality (by theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria Jr., and
Haunani-Kay Trask) and the meta-commentaries on Black positionality (by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy,
Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe) against the deluge of multicultural positivity is overwhelming. One
suddenly realizes that, though the semantic field on which subjec- tivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally through the protocols of
multiculturalism and globalization theory, Blackness and an unflinching articulation of Redness are more unimaginable and illegible within this
expanded semantic field than they were during the height of the F B I ' S repressive Counterintelligence Program ( C O I N T E L P R O ) . On the
seman- tic field on which the new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed lO become partially legible through a programmatics of
structural adjust- ment (as fits our globalized era). In other words, for the Indians' subject position to be legible, their positive registers of lost or
threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point of fact the antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians "possess" is a
position in relation to a socius structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have been subjected to
genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which Indians
would not, paradoxically, "exist." 9 Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims suc- cessfully made on the
state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and
political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words,
why should we think of today's Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could
answer these questions by demonstrat- ing how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on
the state has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated
and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of H I V infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at
the polls still constitute the lived expe- rience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us
in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which would only mystify, rather than
clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and empirical markers
of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a
downward spiral into sociology, political sci- ence, history, and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am
calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic
whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it.
The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he
demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the "solid" plank of "work" is
removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of "claims against the state"the proposition
that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory
project for the Black positiondisintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle
Passage. Put an- other way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that
is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Hu- manity establishes, maintains, and
renews its coherence, its corporeal in- tegrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous
violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of re- lationality, then our analysis
cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not
unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits
the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and
Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.

We must burn civil society to the ground.

Burn and leave nothing white behind you. We have been trained to think in a narrative of
progress that takes us up from slavery, but there is no up from slavery. From segregation to
neosegregation, the end of the 1ACs progress is only the perfection of the slave, under
conditions of total freedom. It is only under conditions of freedom, of bourgeois legality, that the
slave can perfect itself as a slave by freely choosing to bow down before its master and ask to be
free. The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer for equal rights. The legal system
becomes the plantation, and the plantation never kills itself no matter how much it is changed.
We must kill it.
Farley 5 [Boston College (Anthony, Perfecting Slavery,
http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=lsfp)]

BURN What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of necessity,
VII.
burned everything: They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn
everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own
labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist. 48 The slaves burned everything because everything was against them.
Everything was against the slaves, the entire order that it was their lot to follow, the entire order in which
they were positioned as worse than senseless things, every plantation, everything . 49 Leave nothing white
behind you , said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-overblack. 50 God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire
next time. 51 The slaves burned everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti. 52
Theirs was the greatest and most successful revolution in the history of the world but the failure of their fire
to cross the waters was the great tragedy of the nineteenth century. 53 At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du
Bois wrote, The colorline belts the world. 54 Du Bois said that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the
colorline. 55 The problem, now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century is the problem of the colorline. The
colorline continues to belt the world. Indeed, the slave power that is the United States now threatens an entire
world with the death that it has become and so the slaves of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, those with nothing but
their chains to lose, must, if they would be free, if they would escape slavery, win the entire world. VIII. TRAINING We begin as children. We
are called and we become our response to the call. Slaves are not called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the broken-hearted? The
slaves are divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the slaves are split asunder by what they are called upon to become. The slaves are called upon
to become objects but objecthood is not a calling. The slave, then, during its loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This is schizophrenia. The
slaves are not called, or, rather, the slaves are called to not be. The slaves are called unfree but this the living can never be and so the slaves burst
apart and die. The slaves begin as death, not as children, and death is not a beginning but an end. There is no
progress and no exit from the undiscovered country of the slave, or so it seems. We are trained to think
through a progress narrative, a grand narrative, the grandest narrative, that takes us up from slavery. There
is no up from slavery . The progress from slavery to the end of history is the progress from white-over-black
to white-over-black to white-overblack. The progress of slavery runs in the opposite direction of the pastpresent-future timeline.
The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the end of the timeline , only under conditions of total juridical
freedom. It is only under conditions of freedom, of bourgeois legality, that the slave can perfect itself as a
slave by freely choosing to bow down before its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer
for equal rights. The system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a plantation. The system of
law is a plantatio n. These plantations, all part of the same system, hierarchy, produce white-overblack,
white-over-black only, and that continually. The slave perfects itself as a slave through its prayers for equal
rights. The plantation system will not commit suicide and the slave, as stated above, has knowing non-
knowledge of this fact. The slave finds its way back from the undiscovered country only by burning down
every plantation . When the slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes the
free choice to not be. Education is the call. We are called to be and then we become something. We become
that which we make of ourselves. We follow the call, we pursue a calling. Freedom is the only calling it alone
contains all possible directions, all of the choices that may later blossom into the fullness of our lives . We can
only be free. Slavery is death. How do slaves die? Slaves are not born, they are made. The slave must be trained
to be that which the living cannot be. The only thing that the living are not free to be is dead. The slave must be
trained to follow the call that is not a call. The slave must be trained to pursue the calling that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to
objecthood. The slave must become death. Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-over-black, death, then, is what the
slave must become to pursue its calling that is not a calling.

Our act of an unflinching paradigmatic analysis allows us to deny intellectual legitimacy to

the compromises that radical elements have made because of an unwillingness to hold
moderates feet to the fire predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis
Wilderson, 10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American
Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,]

STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During the last years of apartheid I
worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and above-ground capacity, for the
Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period, I began to see how essential an
unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing
order . The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist Movement
made with the moderate elements were due, in large part, to our inability or
unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a political agenda
predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies
and points of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic considerations . Simply
put, we abdicated the power to pose the question and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of

all . Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and
Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and
academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a place
where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and
interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes,
Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu
Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.
 1NC Case
Legalizing marijuana doesnt address the larger systems of oppression that motivates the
police state it just displaces marijuana dealers into other forms of criminality
Nakagawa 2014 - Lifelong political activist, community organizer, organization builder, and
trouble-maker (July 31, Scott, Why I Support Marijuana Legalization, But Not as a Strategy for
Winning Racial Justice http://www.racefiles.com/2014/07/31/why-i-support-marijuana-
legalization-but-not-as-a-strategy-for-winning-racial-justice/)
But, while I support legalization as an incremental step in the right direction, I think we are
wrong to promote legalization as a means of achieving racial justice . Making that claim minimizes the very
real problem of structural racism that has made the war on drugs such a hugely devastating law enforcement
strategy for Black people. The legalization of marijuana, in my opinion, would not lead to less over-
policing, racial profiling, or over-incarceration of Black and brown people. What relief legalization would
provide, and I do believe there would be some immediate relief, would be mostly temporary . Why?
The New York Times report on reader response to their legalization editorials sums it up nicely,
Times readers favor legalization for the same reasons the Times editorial board does: They think the
criminalization of marijuana has ruined lives; that the public health risks have been overstated;
and that law enforcement should focus its resources on graver problems. Those graver problems bother
me. They bother me because the illegal drug trade is as much an economic issue as it is public
health issue. My experience growing up in a drug economy tells me that folk turn to illegal means of
making money when legal jobs arent available. And decent paying legal jobs have rarely been harder to find
than right now. As a sociologist friend of mine recently reminded me, prison is a form of disguised
unemployment. Thats part of the reason programs meant to reduce recidivism so often dont work.
Without a job, people are often forced to commit crimes, like selling marijuana. Once convicted of that
crime, a criminal record can make you unemployable. Those whove been to prison too often end up back in
prison, and keeping them there is a way of managing unemployment, even if this effect is, perhaps,
mostly incidental. If we added incarcerated Black people to the unemployment rolls, Black unemployment
statistics would be noticeably higher (and its already twice that of whites). This would more
accurately reflect the status of Black people in the U.S. labor market. Large numbers of poor Black
people have been structurally excluded from the legitimate economy, ironically in part because Black
people as a class won the right to ordinary worker protections nationwide via the Civil Rights Movement.
This made other excluded workers, like undocumented migrants, cheaper, more compliant, and , following
the logic of the market, more desirable. Being excluded from decent employment opportunities will drive
some people to drug dealing. Unless we deal with this reality, legalizing marijuana will only drive current,
low-end marijuana dealers to graver problems for which there are often more stringent punishments and
less public sympathy. From the perspective of a poor person dependent on the marijuana trade for their
living, legalization is a dead-end. Richer people with the capital to invest in grow operations, licensing,
retail stores, etc., will come in after ordinary drug dealers have suffered all the risk involved in developing
marijuana markets illegally and squeeze them out. Those of us concerned with racial justice must ask,
squeezed out to where?

People in jail for marijuana possession are only .2% of the total population the aff does
nothing in the most ambitious scenarios
Caulkins and Sevigny 2009 - Carnegie Mellon Universitys Heinz School of Public Policy AND
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh (July 31, Jonathan
P. and Eric L., How Many People Does the US Imprison for Drug Use, and Who Are They?
http://ibhinc.org/pdfs/CaulkinsSevignyHowanydoestheUSimprison2005.pdf)
The vast majority (85%) of the 274,324 people in prison in the U.S. in 1997 for drug-law violations
were clearly involved in drug distribution in one way or another. Many of the remaining 15% (41,047)
had at least some suggestion of possible current or past involvement in distribution. The precise
proportion of drug offenders in prison solely because they used drugs is thus hard to pin down, but
appears to be somewhere in the range of 2%-15%, representing 5,380 to 41,047 individuals.
Furthermore, only about one- third of the 41,047 individuals were in prison as new court commitments;
most were already on parole or probation before the infraction that led to their current incarceration.
Almost half had a current nondrug infraction that may have contributed to their incarceration. Even taking
the upper bound figure of 15%, the number of people in prison for their drug use is far lower
than would be implied by naively assuming that everyone convicted of drug possession was not
involved in distribution. Incarceration for drug use/possession thus appears to be a very modest
contributor (0.5%-3.6%) to the total sentenced U.S. prison population (1,137,210 in 1997). One reason
is that the expected time served by these individuals is about half that for those who were clearly
involved in drug distribution. It is also worth noting that 50-80% of arrestees test positive for some
illicit drug and -15% of drug arrests are for possession (Maguire and Pastore, 1997), so presumably if
the criminal justice system wanted to incarcerate many more drug users, that would be possible . Among
those in prison for drug use, almost 90% were involved with cocaine, heroin, and/or (meth) amphetamines.
Just 5-7% possessed only marijuana. Hence, the number of marijuana users in prison for their use is
perhaps 800-2,300 individuals or on the order of 0.1- 0.2% of all prison inmates . This figure is roughly
consistent with ONDCP (2005) and is well below Thomas' (1999) estimate of 9,700 based on the
same survey because Thomas assumes that all inmates convicted of possession were not involved
in trafficking. An implication of the new figure is that marijuana decriminalization would have
almost no impact on prison populations , although it might well have a bigger effect on other
components of the criminal justice system. Another implication is that the imprisonment risk due to
drug use is low, perhaps on the order of one-and-a-half days per year of use for cocaine, heroin, and
(meth)amphetamines, and no more than about an hour per year of use for marijuana. That is not to say
that there are not many drug users in prison. However, for heavy users of these four major drugs, the
vast majority are in prison because of nondrug offenses (68%- 75%) or drug distribution offenses (22%-
26%). This implies that comparing characteristics of imprisoned drug offenders with those of
drug users is not helpful for determining whether drug-related imprisonment falls
disproportionately on one group or another. Since most imprisoned drug offenders are involved
in distribution, the relevant referent group is drug distributors, not drug users.
The status quo is decriminalization but legalization causes regulations that
disproportionately harm poor people and minorities causes net more persecution
Gulite 2014 - graduated cum laude from The George Washington Universitys Honors Program
with degrees in Political Science and Criminal Justice. During her time at school, she served as
the GW Liberty Societys president and worked closely with the DC Forum for Freedom in
addition to Students for Liberty (Kelli, 3 Ways Marijuana Legalization Can Screw Poor
Minorities http://thoughtsonliberty.com/3-ways-marijuana-legalization-can-screw-poor-
minorities)
Luckily, the nationwide decriminalization of marijuana is almost here. In October, Maryland will be the
seventeenth state to decriminalize the possession of marijuana. Its not unreasonable to believe that the
nationwide legalization, commercial production, and regulation of marijuana will soon follow. A
majority of Americans support legalization, the New York Times recently came out in full
support of federal legalization, and the two states that have already legalized marijuana,
Colorado and Washington, have only reported positive results. With the dawn of the commercial
production of legal pot, it is important to keep in mind those who the drug war has affected most,
poor minorities. Yes, marijuana legalization would generate millions in tax revenue and could
provide a substantial boost to the economy. However, we should be wary of regulations surrounding
the legalized commercial production of weed that protect big business or state interests to the detriment of
poor minorities. Here are three potentially harmful regulations: 1. Criminal Background Checks
and Occupational Licensing In Colorado and Washington, marijuana businesses have been subject to
fairly strict licensing laws. The Colorado Department of Revenue has an entire Marijuana
Enforcement Division to review marijuana business and professional license applications. To
obtain an occupational license in Colorado, owners must undergo a full criminal background check as
licensees may not have any Controlled Substance Felony Convictions that have not been fully discharged
for five years prior to applying. Given the well-documented disproportionate enforcement of drug policy on
minorities, such licensing requirements could easily and unfairly skew the new legal marijuana market in
favor of whites. 2. The Overbearing Costs of Marijuana Retail Licenses and Taxation Legalization
proponents have consistently argued that states should legalize in order to tax marijuana businesses and
collect revenue from licensing fees. The states that have legalized marijuana have taken this
mantra to heart. Colorado made nearly $6 million in revenue from marijuana dispensaries just
this past month. One Colorado marijuana business owner reported that permit and licensing fees
cost him $20,000 just in one year. While poor minorities were able to participate in the illegal marijuana
economy, they will not be able to participate in the legal drug economy if the state continues to charge such
enormous fees and taxes. 3. Zealously Persecuting Black Market Distribution As it stands now,
marijuana legalization has created a perfect storm to continue to imprison poor minorities for
nonviolent weed offenses. Poor minorities, who are more likely to have felony drug charges, are largely
unable to participate in the legal marijuana market. If they do have a clean criminal history, they are still
priced out of the market by bigger businesses who can afford outrageously high state taxes and fees
upfront. While dispensaries are charging high premiums to cover their overhead, a black market for cheap
marijuana will emerge in poor communities. But now, laws intended to protect legal marijuana business
interests will be used to persecute those participating in the black market, as decriminalization doesnt yet
protect distributors or dealers.
 2NC
the drive to tie all theories to prescriptions for action is a capitalist ploy to require utility
from everything that you think or say our alternative is a masturbatory philosophy that
explicitly refuses to be useful so as to show us the gross failure of an ideological system in
which we are trapped
Esplin 4 prof of phil @ U of Sydney
(Gregory, Philament Journal, Beating Off Teleology: A Defense of Non-Productive Thought)
Masturbatory philosophy seeks movement , yet has no destination. Rejecting the notion that intellectual
inquiry can at some point be fully completed, such a philosophy never tires of reconfiguring its method. Thus,
this beating off approach to thought celebrates the thoroughly offbeat. Here we must cite once more the influence of Deleuze and Guattari's
"becoming-thought" on my conception of philosophy as a masturbatory project. Insisting on the non-teleological potential of philosophy, they
write in A Thousand Plateaus: But a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end , departure nor arrival, origin nor
destination ; to speak of the absence of an origin, to make the absence of an origin the origin, is a bad play on words. A line of
becoming has only a middle. The middle is not an average; it is fast motion; it is the absolute speed of movement. A becoming is always
in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one nor the two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border
or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both. [4] In this problematic the conflicting rivalry between movement and
destination undermines the Western sensibility of progress. In denying an end point, Deleuze and Guattari
liberate thought from being directed towards a goal, freeing philosophy to become, as they put it, "nomadic."
Perhaps it is, not so much a matter of nomadic politics being an alternative means of intervention, as it is an accurate realization of our
position as fractured subjects, isolated individuals unable to collectively enact political change. In this respect,
perhaps the hope that we can find liberation in being nomads shares something with the sensibility that preoccupied Benjamin in his study of
urban culture: the very mechanisms of capitalism might contain their revolutionary potential. [5] Resisting the longing
for a pre-capitalist world, we hope that we might find redemption in embracing our status as de-centered subjects. It is
true, of course, that this politics of resistance seems strangely similar to the mechanisms of Capital. However, far from being a concession to the
dominant powers, this is precisely its liberating appeal. [6] The nomad's refusal to mourn a lost pre-modern world of harmony is matched by his
willful celebration of the fractured. Following Nietzsche, the nomad refuses any "peace of soul." The nomad is at war with
everything, including most essential, himself. The nomad does not seek asylum, only further struggle. [7]
There is no homeland he seeks, no goal for which he strives. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, If the nomad can be called the
Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterrirtorialization afterward as with the migrant, or upon something else as
with the sedentary (the sedentary's relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad,
on the contrary, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on
deterritorialization itself. [8] In this formulation, there is no end - in both senses of the word: there is no conclusion, no
completion, to the nomad's project. Additionally, the nomad has no goal, no purpose, to his wandering. He
travels to accomplish nothing. The end to his search comes in the search itself. At this point, we must address
the important objection that such nomadic, non-essentialist politics is purely a negative project - it seeks only to
deny current social configurations, offering no alternatives. In response, we might point to the redemptive
possibilities enabled by such theorizing in the negative, something along the lines of what Fredric Jameson has diagnosed
as a "utopian" politics. The absence of positive claims, constitutes, on Jameson's account, its importance: Utopia is somehow
negative; and that it is most authentic when we cannot imagine it. Its function lies not in helping us to imagine a
better future but rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future - our imprisonment
in a non-utopian present without historicity or futurity - so as to reveal the ideological closure of the system in
which we are somehow trapped and confined. [9] The brilliance of Jameson's dialectics is located in his awareness of the
nonrepresentational nature of utopian thinking, turning its supposed weakness into its strength through refusing to engage in positive
characterizations of new modes of sociality. [10] Of course the teleological sensibility that Deleuze and Guattari rebel
against informs not merely Leftist understanding of history, but the triumphant polemics of Fukuyama and others on the Right.
What makes Fukuyama's pronouncements so flawed is not in his perception of the current dominant status of Western Capitalist political
configurations - here he might be somewhat correct - but in his assumption that this fact is not at all a matter of contingent forces. History,
according to Fukuyama, could not have been different. In this understanding, everything happened for a reason, leading to the fulfillment of pre-
established design - that is, to the realization of the world as it is now. We have truly become children of the structures of
modern capitalism in our obsession with utility. While we might easily castigate American intellectual history, represented by
that curious word, pragmatism, as the most grievous instance of dogmatic rationalism, I suggest that the underpinnings of this sensibility lie, not
only in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, but equally in the teleological grounding of the Western philosophical tradition. Aristotelian physics
conceives of a purpose behind the apparent chaos of the world: far from simply contingent configurations of matter, Aristotle asserts, objects in
the world possess a fixed essence that, when realized, contribute to the functioning of the larger system.
 1NR
Their assertion that biopolitics is the organizing logic of contemporary violence is based off
of a Eurocentric Foucaultian analysis that masks the racialized torture of incarceration.
Rodriguez 2006 [Dylan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC
Riverside, Forced Passages pages 170-171]

The prison regimes twinned technologies of immobilization and bodily disintegration depart
drastically from the virtual and technically disembodied disciplinary technologies of Benthams Panopticon or Foucaults
biopolitical carceral, whose Eurocentric regimes pivot on the relative absence or infrequent
physical application of direct bodily coercion and punishment. The technology of the current
punitive carceral entails a constant, state-structured application of physical and psychological
violence, a vectoring of coercion that generally exceeds conventional notions of torture, encompassing
a profoundly sophisticated form of subjection that constantly reshapes the imprisoned bodys form, content, and context. Political prisoner Janet
Hollaway Africa, imprisoned since 1978 as one of the MOVE Nine, elaborates how the bodily passage into this relation of direct violence melts
away the juridical formality of the prison, establishing the political premises for an abolitionist or antisystemic practice.

Their conception of power and discipline places erasure on non-white individuals and
communities by universalizing operations of power on white bodies as some sort of all
incorporating narrative of experience, rendering invisible entire histories of white
supremacist slaughter.
Joy James 1996 [Resisting State Violence p. 24-25]

Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish offers a body politics of state punishment and prosecution that is considered by some postmodernists to be a master
narrative competent to critique contemporary state policing. Yet this particular work contributes to the erasure of racist violence. In
respect to U.S. policing and punishment, the metanarrative of Discipline and Punish vanquishes
historical and contemporary racialized terror, punishments, and control in the United States; it
therefore distorts and obscures violence in America in general. By examining erasure in body
politics, lynching, and policing; penal executions and torture; and terror in U.S. foreign policy
issues that Foucault overlooks in his discussion of the history of policing in the United States we find visceral spectacles of state abuse.
Erasure in Body Politics Writing about the "disappearance of torture as a public spectacle"with no
reference to its continuity in European and American colonies where it was inflicted on
indigenous peoples in Africa and the AmericasFoucault weaves a historical perspective that
eventually presents the contemporary ("Western") state as a nonpractitioner of torture.1 His text
illustrates how easy it is to erase the specificity of the body and violence while centering
discourse on them. Losing sight of the violence practiced by and in the name of the sovereign,
who at times was manifested as part of a dominant race, Foucault universalizes the body of the
white, propertied male. Much of Discipline and Punish depicts the body with no specificity tied to racialized or sexualized punishment. The
resulting veneer of bourgeois respectability painted over state repression elides racist violence
against black and brown and red bodies. Foucault states that the "historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the
human body was born" (137). Failing to concretize this "art of the human body," he leaves unaddressed these questions: which body serves as prototype? Who bore
this representative model or type? Ostensibly talking about the body while ignoring its uniqueness, Foucault explores issues of policing that are restricted to behavior.
If one asserts that the "introduction of the 'biographical' is important in the history of penalty. . . . Because it establishes the 'criminal' as existing before the crime and
even outside it" (252), one might also note that the biographical is intricately tied to the biologicalthat is, the "criminal" is identified not only by his or her act but
also by his or her appearance.2 Consider
how Foucault's discussion of nonconformity as offense masks the body: What
is specific to the disciplinary penalty is non-observance, that which does not measure up to the rule, that
departs from it. The whole indefinite domain of the non-conforming is punishable: the soldier commits an
"offence" whenever he does not reach the level required; a pupil's "offence" is not only a minor infraction,
but also an inability to carry out his tasks. (178-79) Nonobservance and nonconformity are often understood
as biologically determined, given that the departure from the norm shows up not only in behavior but visually
in terms of physical characteristics that are racialized. Foucault'sexclusive focus on actions suggests
undifferentiated bodies. Physical appearance, however, can be considered an expression of either
conformity or rebellion. Because some bodies fail to conform physiologically, different bodies
are expected and are therefore required to behave differently under state or police gaze. Greater
obedience is demanded from those whose physical difference marks them as aberrational, offensive, or
threatening. Conversely, some bodies appear more docile than others because of their conformity in
appearance to idealized models of class, color, and sex; their bodies are allowed greater leeway
to be self-policed or policed without physical force. To illustrate: a white male executive in an Armani
suit is considered more docile, civilized, and in need of less invasive, coercive policing than a
black male youth in a hooded sweatshirt and off-the-hip baggy jeans. (In contrast, white youths who racially cross-
dress with baseball caps turned backwards, "X" t-shirts, low-riding pantsare generally not aggressively targeted by police who distinguish between fashion
consumerism and racial membership.) Noting how physique is constructed as a marker for deviancy and criminality, Frantz Fanon writes in "The Negro and
Psychopathology" that the "Negro symbolizes the biological danger. . . . To suffer from a phobia of Negroes is to be afraid of the biological." 3 To fear the black is to
fear the body; conversely, to revere the black is to idealize the body. Foucault writes of social fear and policing that are reflected in "binary division and branding,"
which produces the polarized social entities of the "mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal"; this "coercive assignment" of labeling, categorizing, and
identifying places the individual under "constant surveillance" (199). Foucault, however, makes no mention of sexual and racial
binary oppositions to designate social inferiority and deviancy as biologically inscribed on the
bodies of nonmales or nonwhites. Therefore, when he reports in Discipline and Punish that "the mechanisms of power" are organized "around
the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him," racial and sexual issues are evaded (199-200). To write that these mechanisms of
dominance rely on the panopticism produced by the disciplinary and exclusionary practices for
the "arrest of the plague" and the "exile of the leper" (which for Foucault respectively represent the dreams of a "disciplined
society" and a "pure community") without considering the role of race in the formation of that disciplined
society and pure community is to see the United States through blinders (198). In racialized
societies such as the United States, the plague of criminality, deviancy, immorality, and
corruption is embodied in the black because both sexual and social pathology are branded by
skin color (as well as by gender and sexual orientation). Where the plague and the leper are codified in the black, for instance,
the dreams and desires of a society and state will be centered on the control of the black body. Binary oppositions and panopticism will
thereby be racialized. In binary opposition, antiblack racism has played a critical, historical role
in rationalizing (and inverting) hierarchies of oppressor and oppressed: crazy/sane, dangerous/harmless,
and normal/deviant. Foucault ignores this phenomenon, while other theorists such as Frantz
Fanon and Sander Gilman explore it. Panopticism and the policing gaze are also informed by racial and sexual bias; the tools for
observation and examination that Foucault delineates are constructed within worldviews
influenced by racial and sexual mythologies and political ideologies that guide carceral testing.
Foucault's carceral refers to a network of regimentation and discipline, a prison without walls in turn made up of social networks for surveillance.
i
After the Watts Rebellion, RFK observed: There is no point in telling Negroes
to observe the lawIt has almost always been used against themAll these
placesHarlem, Watts, South Side [of Chicago]are riots wating to happen.
Quote in: Clark, Kenneth B. The Wonder is There Have Been So Few Riots.
New York Times Magazine, September 5, 1965.
ii
Slave estate is a term borrowed from Hortense Spillers.

See Emile Benveniste. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth

iii

Meek. Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971.