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Coates’s Dream is a terrible and practically invincible hegemon, so enduring and impervious that it brings about a sense of hopelessness that borders on philosophical cynicism. His protagonist walks close enough to the valley of total disillusionment that he must overtly protest that he is not a cynic (71). And finally, Between the World is not an exercise in cynicism. The narrator’s aphoristic insights are earnestly delivered in the hope that they will equip the son for the “struggle” (71, 107, 151). But the struggle that is recommended to the son and to readers is conceived in intensely private, almost solipsistic terms: Greater personal understanding of the beautiful but doomed world seems the endpoint of this striving. The narrator entreats his son to “[s]truggle for wisdom” (151), which is most attainable through the “singular gift of study” (116). It is no overstatement to say that, for Coates’s narrator, a rigorous personal scholarship is the apogee of living. “If my life ended today,” he writes, “I would tell you that it was a happy life—that I drew great joy from study, from the struggle toward which I now urge you” (115). Of course, this elevation of inquiry and learning has rich precedent in the tradition of black masculine autobiography that traces back to antebellum slave narratives. But while the giants of this tradition—Douglass, Du Bois, and Malcolm among them—framed individual study as a means of advancing the collective toward a “Canaan [that] was always dim and far away” (Du Bois 5), Coates’s narrator casts study as a form of personal therapy that enables one to endure the moment. As he puts it, the “struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness” (106). This conception of study as life’s ultimate activity, and wisdom as its Canaan, is anomalous in the [End Page 190] tradition of socially transformative black intellectualism that Coates inherits; but it is the logical expression of a world-view dominated by the insuperable Dream.

If there is no hope of impeding the forces that plunder the black body, then there is no point in being collectively organized against those forces. The intelligent and expedient response to this condition is to develop a personal strategy for survival—like the cerebral exercises of the intellectual who struggles to study and understand a world he can do little to change. Coates’s narrator also seems to endorse other strategies that black people have used to survive under the Dream—most notably the vernacular arts of music and dance, but also the collective acts of “black people toasting their cognac and German beers, passing their blunts” (149). These are the folk remedies and temporarily healing rituals of the therapeutic nationalism that give comfort to Coates’s narrator. Indeed, the emotional high point of his narrative is reached when he describes the state of ecstatic safety experienced while held in the loving bosom of blackness that he finds at a Howard Homecoming tailgate party. Encircled by a reveling microcosm of “the entire diaspora,” he experiences a spiritual transcendence and a return to the womb, feeling himself disappear into the surrounding bodies of “hustlers, lawyers, Kappas, busters, doctors, barbers, Deltas, drunkards, geeks, and nerds” (147). In this climax of therapeutic nationalism the narrator himself dissolves, as do the apparently superficial differences that fracture black community in the neoliberal era. The divergent class interests that might set the lawyer in political conflict with the hustler, or the sociospatial mobility that might distance the doctor from the barber, are irrelevant in this transcendent rapture, described by the narrator as “a moment imbued by a power more gorgeous than any voting rights bill.”

It is easy to be seduced by the language of the undercommons. Embodying and enacting it, however, is difficult indeed. Being within and against the university, refusing the call to order through insolent obstructive unprofessionalism, is almost impossible to sustain. Halberstam (2009, 45) describes the undercommons as “a marooned community of outcast thinkers who refuse, resist, and renege on the demands of rigor, excellence, and productivity.” A romantic and appealing notion for sure but refusing and reneging on “the university of excellence” will cost you your job. When Moten describes subversion as a “series of immanent upheavals” expressed through “vast repertoires of high-frequency complaints, imperceptible frowns, withering turns, silent sidesteps, and ever-vigilant attempts not to see and hear” (2008, 1743), one is reminded instantly of Thomas Docherty, disciplined and suspended for his negative vibes.7 Being with and for the maroon community is difficult too. First of all, “Where and how can we find/see the Undercommons at work?” (Ĉiĉigoj, Apostolou-Hölscher, and Rusham 2015, 265). Where and how can one find those liminal spaces of sabotage and subversion, and how does one occupy them in a spirit of hapticality, study, and militant arrhythmia that brings the utopic underground to the surface of the fierce and urgent now? Beautiful language, but how does one live it? Networks do, of course, exist—the Undercommoning Collective, the Edu-Factory Collective, the International Network for Alternative Academia, to name but a few. These are promising spaces for bringing together and harboring the maroons and the fugitives. But networks are typically short-lived, and—as Harney and Moten warned—there is a danger of institutionalization, of taking institutional practices with you into alternative spaces “because we’ve been inside so much” (Harney and Moten 2013, 148). And so, predictably, meetings of the fugitives come with structure, order, an official agenda, and circulated minutes. The outcasts convene in conventional academic conferences, with parallel sessions, panels of papers, lunch breaks, wine and nibbles (e.g., Edu-Factory 2012). These spaces offer time out, welcome respite, a breathing space, a trip abroad, and then one returns to work. If hapticality, the touch of the undercommons, is “a visceral register of experience … the feel that what is to come is here” (Bradley 2014, 129–130), then this seems elusive. It is hard to detect a sense of the utopic undercommons rising to the surface of the corporate-imperial university. Moten describes the call to disorder and to study as a way to “excavate new aesthetic, political, and economic dispositions” (Moten 2008, 1745). But this notion of excavating is highly problematic. It is common within the discourse of “everyday utopianism”—finding utopia in the everyday, recovering lost or repressed transcendence in “everydayness” (Gardiner 2006)—to describe the process of utopian recovery in terms of excavating: excavating repressed desires, submerged longings, suppressed histories, untapped possibilities. But the fundamental questions of where to dig and how to identify a utopian “find” are never adequately addressed (see Webb 2017). Gardiner defines utopia as “a series of forces, tendencies and possibilities that are immanent in the here and now, in the pragmatic activities of everyday life” (2006, 2). But how are these forces, tendencies and possibilities to be identified and recovered? For Harney and Moten, it is through study, hapticality and militant arrhythmia. These are slippy concepts, however, evading concrete material referents. What is it to inhabit the undercommons? Those who have written of their experiences refer to “small acts of marronage” such as poaching resources and redeploying them in ways at odds with the university’s designs and demands (Reddy 2016, 7), or exploiting funding streams “to form cracks in the institution that enable the Others to invade the university” (Smith, Dyke, and Hermes 2013, 150). For Adusei-Poku (2015), the undercommons is a space of refuge which is all about survival (2015, 4–5). We who feel homeless in the university are forced into refuge. We gather together to survive. We may gain satisfaction from small acts of marronage, but this is less about bringing the utopic common underground to the surface as it is a form of “radical escapism” (Adusei-Poku 2015, 4). Benveniste (2015, v) tells us that: “The undercommons has no set location and no return address. There is no map for entering and no guide for staying. The only condition is a living appetite. Listen to its hunger for difference.” We need more than poetry, however. And we need more than a series of minor acts of resistance. As Srnicek and Williams rightly emphasize, resistance is a defensive, reactive gesture, resisting against. Resistance is not a utopian endeavour: “We do not resist a new world into being” (Srnicek and Williams 2016, 47). The undercommons, when one can find it, is a bolt hole, a place of refuge, a breathing space in the system. We need something more. The occupation Can the occupied building operate as a site of utopian possibility within the corporate-imperial university? Reflections on, and theorizations of, two recent waves of occupation—“Occupied California” 2009–2010 and the UK Occupations 2010–2011—have answered this question affirmatively. The “occupation” should not be understood here as solely or necessarily “student occupation.” It goes without saying—though sadly so often does need saying —that “faculty also have a responsibility to fight with and for students” (Smeltzer and Hearn 2015, 356). Though led by a new historical subject, “the graduate without a future” (Schwarz-WeinStein 2015, 11), the importance of faculty support for the occupations was emphasized on both sides of the Atlantic (Research and Destroy 2010, 11; Dawson 2011, 112; Holmes and R&D and Dead Labour 2011, 14; Ismail 2011, 128; Newfield and EduFactory 2011, 26). Long before Occupy took shape in Zuccotti Park, “occupation” was being heralded as the harbinger of a new society and a new way of being. If we return to the notion of creating utopian spaces, the key aim for some of the occupiers was to create communes within the university walls—to communize space (Inoperative Committee 2011, 6).8 Communization here is understood as a form of insurrectionary anarchism that refuses to talk of a transition to communism, insisting instead upon the immediate formation of zones of activity removed from exchange, money, compulsory labor, and the impersonal domination of the commodity form (Anon 2010a, 5). As one pamphlet declared: We will take whatever measures are necessary both to destroy this world as quickly as possible and to create, here and now, the world we want: a world without wages, without bosses, without borders, without states. (Anon 2010d, 34) This is a revolutionary anarchism that takes the university campus as the site for a practice—communization—that not only prefigures but also realizes the vision of a free society. Heavily influenced by The Coming Insurrection (Invisible Committee 2009), but tapping into a long tradition of anarchist theory and practice from Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones (Bey 1985) to David Graeber’s Direct Action (Graeber 2009), occupation becomes “the creation of a momentary opening in capitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketches the contours of a new society” (Research and Destroy 2010, 11). It is “an attempt to imagine a new kind of everyday life” (Hatherley 2011, 123). Firth (2012) refers to these momentary openings as critical, experimental utopias: Such utopias are … simultaneously immanent and prefigurative. They are immanent insofar as they allow space for the immediate expression of desires, satisfaction of needs and also the articulation of difference or dissent. They are prefigurative to the extent that they allow one to practice and exemplify what one would like to see at a more proliferative range in the future (26) The ultimate aim is for the practice to spread beyond the campus through a dual process of provocative rupture—the idea that insurrectionary moments can unleash the collective imagination and stimulate an outpouring of creativity that blows apart common sense and offers glimpses of a future world (Gibson-Graham 2006, 51; Shukaitis and Graeber 2007, 37)—and “contaminationism,” that is, spreading by means of example (Graeber 2009, 211). It may well have been the case that communism was realized on the campuses of Berkeley and UCL, that a momentary opening in capitalist space/time appeared through which another world could be glimpsed. The occupation, however—whether California, London, or anywhere else—is likely always to remain a localized temporary disruptive practice. A practice with utopian potency, for sure, in terms of suspending normalized forms of discipline and opening new egalitarian discursive spaces (Rheingans and Hollands 2013; Nişancioğlu and Pal 2016). In terms of wider systemic change, however, “small interventions consisting of relatively non-scalable actions are highly unlikely to ever be able to reorganise our socioeconomic system” (Srnicek and Williams 2016, 29). What “the occupation” demonstrates more than anything is the reality of the corporate-imperial university, as the institutional hierarchy, backed by the carceral power of the police and criminal justice system, inevitably disperses the occupiers—often using militarized force—and repossesses the occupied space in a strong assertion of its ownership rights not only to university buildings but also to what constitutes legitimate thought and behavior within them (on this see Docherty 2015, 90). The significance, and utopian potential, one attaches to campus occupations depends in part upon the significance one attaches to the university as a site of struggle. For the Edu-Factory Collective: As was the factory, so now is the university. Where once the factory was a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers and capitalists, so now the university is a key space of conflict, where the ownership of knowledge, the reproduction of the labour force, and the creation of social and cultural stratifications are all at stake. This is to say the university is not just another institution subject to sovereign and governmental controls, but a crucial site in which wider social struggles are won and lost. (Caffentzis and Federici 2011, 26) Clearly, if this is true, then the form the struggle takes, and the example it sets, is of immense significance. Srnicek and Williams describe as “wishful thinking” the idea that the occupation might spread beyond the campus by means of rupture or contamination (2016, 35). However, if the university really is a key site of class struggle (Seybold 2008, 120; Haiven and Khasnabish 2014, 38), a site through which wider struggles are refracted and won or lost, then the transformative potential of the occupation needs to be attended to seriously. The analysis of the university offered by the Edu-Factory Collective is, however, outdated. Sounding like Daniel Bell writing in 1973 about how universities had become the “axial structures” of post-industrial society (Bell 1973, 12), the analysis does not hold water today. Moten overdoes it when he tells us that “the university is a kind of corpse. It is dead. It’s a dead institutional body” (Moten 2015, 78). What is clear, however, is that “focusing on the university as a site of radical transformation is a mistake” (Holmes and R&D and Dead Labour 2011, 13). As has been widely noted, there is very little distinguishing universities from other for-profit corporations (Readings 1996; Lustig 2005; Washburn 2005; Shear 2008, Tuchman 2009). What does separate them is their inefficiency, due in large part to the fact that universities operate also as medieval guilds, with faculties “ruled by masters who lord over journeymen and apprentices in an artisanal system of production” (Jemielniak and Greenwood 2015, 77). If the university is a sinister hybrid monstrosity—part medieval guild, part criminal corporation—which has no role other than reproducing its own privilege, then no special status can be attributed to campus protests. In this case, “A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison” (Research and Destroy 2010, 10). A reading room in a prison. Another apposite metaphor. The occupation is a safe space, offering temporary respite, a place to hide, a refuge, a bolt-hole, a breathing space. As with the utopian classroom and the undercommons, what the occupation suggests is that “defending small bunkers of autonomy against the onslaught of capitalism is the best that can be hoped for” (Srnicek and Williams 2016, 48). Conclusion Zaslove was right to characterize utopian pedagogy within the corporateimperial university as the search for bolt-holes and breathing spaces in the system. He himself suggests that, “All university classes should become dialogic-experiential models that educate by expanding the zones of contact with wider communities” (2007, 102). Like so many others, Zaslove sees dialogic-experiential models of education beginning in the classroom then expanding outward. The literature is full of references to “exceeding the limits of the university classroom” (Coté, Day, and de Peuter 2007a, 325), “extend [ing] beyond the boundaries of the campus” (Ruben 2000, 211), and “breeching the walls of the university compounds and spilling into the streets” (Research and Destroy 2010, 10). This all brings to mind Giroux’s notion of academics as border crossers (Giroux 1992), but it also paints a picture of academics taking as their starting point the university and from there crossing the border into the community and the street. The University can be the site for fleeting, transitory, small-scale experiences of utopian possibility—in the classroom, the undercommons, the occupation. It cannot be the site for transformative utopian politics. It cannot even be the starting point for this. Given the corporatization and militarization of the university, academics are increasingly becoming “functionaries of elite interests” inhabiting a culture which serves to reproduce these interests (Shear 2008, 56). Within the university, “radical” initiatives or movements will soon be co-opted, recuperated, commodified, and neutralized (Gibson-Graham 2006, xxvi; Seybold 2008, 123; Neary 2012b, 249; Rolfe 2013, 21). Institutional habitus weights so heavily that projects born in the university will be scarred from the outset by a certain colonizing “imaginary of education” (Burdick and Sandlin 2010, 117). And we have long known that the university is but one space of learning, and perhaps not a very important one at that. Identifying the academy as the starting point for a utopian pedagogy privileges this arcane space over sites of public pedagogy such as film, television, literature, sport, advertising, architecture, media in its various forms, political organizations, religious institutions, and the workplace (Todd 1997). Perhaps the emphasis on creating radical experimental spaces within the academy needs to shift toward operating in existing spaces of resistance outside it. Haiven and Khasnabish argue that many social movements function already as “social laboratories for the generation of alternative relationships, subjectivities, institutions and practices” (2014, 62), providing “a space for experiments in knowledge production, radical imagination, subjectification, and concrete alternative-building” (Khasnabish 2012, 237). Why locate utopian pedagogy in the university when “critical utopian politics” can take place in “infrastructures of resistance” such as intentional communities, housing collectives, squats, art centers, community theatres, bars, book shops, health collectives, social centers, independent media and, increasingly of course, the digital sphere (Firth 2012; Shantz 2012; Amsler 2015; Dallyn, Marinetto, and Cederstrom 2015)? Moving beyond short-term, localized, temporary modes of resistance, utopian pedagogy would work across these sites to develop a long-term strategy and vision. There is a role for the academic in utopian politics, but not in the university-as-such. The utopian pedagogue has a responsibility to exploit their own privilege and to work with students, communities and movements outside and divorced from the university. As Shear rightly notes, academics (and especially those working in the humanities and social sciences) “inhabit a privileged space in which critical inquiry concerning social hegemony and political-economic domination” is possible (Shear 2008, 56). Within the university, however, spaces for embodying and enacting this kind of inquiry have become constrained, compromised, monitored, surveilled, co-opted, and recuperated. As I have argued throughout this article, utopian pedagogy has become a search for bolt-holes and breathing spaces in the system. Beyond the academy, however, there is a role to play. As Chomsky (2010) tells us, with privilege comes responsibility. And as Giroux frames it, this is an ethical and political responsibility to provide “theoretical resources and modes of analysis” to help forge “a utopian imaginary” (Giroux 2014a; 153; 2014b, 200). This means putting one’s knowledge and resources to use in the service of a collaborative process of memory- and story-making, pulling together disparate inchoate dreams and yearnings in order to generate a utopian vision that can help inform, guide, and mobilize long-term collective action for systemic change.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277902726_Doing_Being_Deviant_Deviance_Studies_Description_and_the_Queer_Ordinary]//ETang

In their article “Social Deviance and Political Marginality,” Irving Louis Horowitz and Martin Liebowitz discuss the erosion of the distinction between “personal deviance and political dissent” in the campus protest movements of the 1960s (284). They note the affinities between the New Left and marginal social groups and the embrace of a politics of rebellion against norms of propriety and social participation. In contrast Doing Being Deviant to the Old Left, with its stance of working-class solidarity and its habits of respectability, the new social radicals take up a politics of everyday life that pushes them toward the fringes of society. Horowitz and Liebowitz write, If there is a hero, it is the alienated man who understands what is wrong and seeks escape. Often, escape takes the form of social deviance, which is considered no worse than the forms of behavior which are traditionally defined as normative. The traditional hero has been supplanted by the anti-hero who wins and attains heroic proportions by not getting involved in the political pro - cess. This anti-hero is defined by what he is against as much as by what he is for; he is for a world of his own, free from outside constraints, in which he is free to experiment and experience. (289) Horowitz and Liebowitz address the convergence between the culture of Left protest and the margins of society, considering the unlikely alliance between the antiwar movement and the Hells Angels, or the identification among student activists with forms of social marginality (homosexuality, mental illness, and addiction) in order to escape the draft. Horowitz and Liebowitz’s account of the student movement as “a celebration of deviance itself as the ultimate response to orthodox politics” (289) resonates with dismissals of both student protest and queer studies as engaging in a narcissistic and indulgent politics of personal liberation. Yet the importance of struggles over the definition of norms and deviance has been crucial in queer activism, since those subject to social stigma and inferiorization are drawn to contest, as Edwin M. Schur notes, the “oppressive conditions governing their everyday experience” (195). Horowitz and Liebowitz’s account of the New Left resonates with Herbert Marcuse’s account of Orpheus and Narcissus in Eros and Civilization and with a recently ascendant ethics of refusal, self-divestiture, and impossibility in queer studies. Marcuse contrasts the image of Prometheus, which he associates with the modern performance principle, with that of Orpheus and Narcissus, who are identified with the realm of the underworld, the aesthetic, and death. In contrast to the images of the Promethean culture-heroes, those of the Orphic and Narcissistic world are essentially unreal and unrealistic. They designate an “impossible” attitude and existence. The deeds of the culture-heroes also are “impossible,” in that they are miraculous, incredible, superhuman. However, differences 89 their objective and their “meaning” are not alien to the reality; on the contrary, they are useful. They promote and strengthen this reality; they do not explode it. But the Orphic-Narcissistic images do explode it; they do not convey a “mode of living”; they are committed to the underworld and to death. (165) Marcuse’s account of the Orphic-Narcissistic realm offers an image of what Horowitz and Liebowitz understand as the fusion of revolt and deviance. While Marcuse invokes the mythological realm of the underworld, his description of an impossible, death-bound existence that inverts moral hierarchies draws on the image-repertoire of a sociological underworld, the dwelling place of exiles and outcasts. Marcuse associates the Orphic-Narcissistic revolt with homosexuality and with a more general revolt against sexual norms: “The classical tradition associates Orpheus with the introduction of homosexuality. Like Narcissus, he rejects the normal Eros, not for an ascetic ideal, but for a fuller Eros. Like Narcissus, he protests against the repressive order of procreative sexuality. The Orphic and Narcissistic Eros is to the end the negation of this order—the Great Refusal” (171). The importance of homosexuality in Marcuse’s allegory of the New Left is crucial, for homosexuality seems to offer a fusion of protest and deviance, revolution and refusal. Queer studies took up this mantle of Orphic-Narcissistic revolt and remains invested in the idea of an impossible—because absolute—withdrawal from the social. Today, queer studies—prestigious but unevenly institutionalized—still signals absolute refusal or criticality—all anti- and no normativity. In their influential 2004 essay, “The University and the Undercommons” (and in the 2013 book that followed from it), Fred Moten and Stefano Harney rely on such an understanding of queer (as well as concepts borrowed from black studies, feminism, ethnic studies, and anticolonial thought). They call for betrayal, refusal, theft, and marronage as modes of resisting the iron grip of the academy, pointing to an uncharted, underground, and collective space they call the undercommons. “To enter this space,” they write, “is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons” (103). Moten and Harney speculate whether the “thought of the outside” (105) is possible inside the university and suggest that if there is an outside, it is along the margins and at the bottom. Yet their imagination of that outside is indebted to the inside, in particular to the conception of deviance produced within sociology. Their account of the undercommons reads like a rap sheet, a list of the traditional topics of deviance studies: theft, homosexuality, prostitu - tion, incarceration. Moten and Harney do not describe the undercommons, but rather ask their readers to join it, to participate in active revolt against profes - sional and disciplinary protocols. To offer an objective account of the social position of radical academics would be to further business as usual in the academy; dwelling in the undercommons requires giving up on the usual protocols of description. Moten and Harney argue against the traditional role of the “critical academic” (105), which they see as just another turn of the professional screw, since work that opposes the academy does not chal - lenge its basic structure or everyday operations. They argue that “to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it and to be recognized by it, and to institute the negligence of the internal outside, that unassimilated underground, a negligence of it that is precisely, we must insist, the basis of the professions” (105). In contrast to the figure of the critical academic, they forward the image of the “subversive intellectual” who is “in but not of” the academy (101). Without dismissing the galvanizing effect of such a call to the undercommons, it is important to consider the limits of the refusal of objectification as a strategy. To be unlocatable, to be nowhere, to be in permanent revolt: Moten and Harney describe the path that queer inquiry laid out for itself. Objectification—recognition, description, critique—can be a way to reinforce the status quo, but it is also a way of acknowledging one’s institutional position and the real differences between inside and outside. Even the most subversive intellectuals in the academy are “on the stroll” in a metaphorical but not a material sense. The fate of those who came “under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love” (101), if they survive, is to become “superordinates” in Becker’s sense. Whose side are we on? Can we hold onto the critical and polemical energy of queer studies as well as its radical experiments in style and thought while acknowledging our implication in systems of power, management, and control? Will a more explicit avowal of disciplinary affiliations and methods snuff out the utopian energies of a field that sees itself as a radical outsider in the university? To date, both the political and the methodological antinormativity of queer studies have made it difficult to address our implication in the violence of knowledge production, pedagogy, and social inequality. Such violence is inevitable, and critical histories of the difference s 91 disciplines—and the production of knowledge about social deviance—are essential. Undertaking such work, however, will not allow escape into a radically different relation to our objects because we are (as Moten and Harney also argue) part of that history—we are its contemporary instantiation. To imagine a social world in which those relations are transformed—in what Moten and Harney refer to as the “prophetic organization” (102)—may be crucial for the achievement of social justice, but to deny our own implication in existing structures is also a form of violence.

The big question, the 'million dollar question,' that necessarily arises here is, of course, this: can this singular type of tie function as the ground of any social tie, or is the latter always based on the repression of the former? I will not answer this question here, but will say something else instead. If there is any intrinsic politics of psychoanalysis, it consists in insisting on its work of unbinding and of separation (in the sense sketched out above), and in not succumbing to the following criticism, which is becoming louder and louder: psychoanalysis only disintegrates, dismantles, separates, it is obsessed with negativity and lack, it never amounts to any affirmative, positive project (be it political or simply 'human'). The politics of psychoanalysis today should be to not yield to this (by trying to 'nevertheless' propose something 'positive'), but to pursue its work of analysis which has always had an intrinsically social character. Does this mean that psychoanalysis has to abstain from passing any kind of social judgment and to uncritically accept, if not even actively support, the contemporary disintegration of social ties, the crumbling of solidarity and of collective projects, the spectacle of the social tissue breaking into tiny pieces, small individual islands of enjoyment? I believe that it has to do something else, namely to critically examine this diagnosis itself, the diagnosis that should raise suspicion already on account of its being so gladly embraced by everybody, by those on the right and those on the left, by the rich and the poor, the religious and the not religious, the exploited and the exploiters. Do we really live in the times of an accelerated dissolution of the social ties and of the emergence of an untied multitude of individuals as solipsistic islands of enjoyment? What if this diagnosis itself is a form of repression, a 'compromise formation' fiercely criticizing a certain content (the criticism of which is utterly acceptable) in order to avoid the real source of the problem? What we could say, for example, is this: the existence of the multiplicity of individuals as solipsistic islands of enjoyment is precisely the form of existence of the contemporary social link. The socio-economic mobilization of lndividuals may not take the same form as 100 or 200 years ago, yet this is not to say that it does not take place and that we are not - as individuals with our own way of enjoyment - very much engaged in 'feeding' the present social link, which binds us to itself, and to each another. Here we should stress again what we have already indicated: that perhaps the crucial mistake lies in the fact that we are too fast and too willing to understand enjoyment as something essentially 'atavistic,' solipsistic, or simply a-social, cut off from the field of the Other. Contrary to this, we should recognize the point where - through the dialectics of repression and its maintenance - enjoyment is very much linked to the Other and is always-already social. More precisely: the subject of enjoyment does not need the Other, except at the point where the latter, with its 'bare' existence, guarantees the repression that the enjoyment 'needs' in order to emerge as enjoyment.

I argue that these three Lacanian orders relate to the basic areas of neural anatomy: the left and right neocortex, plus the subcortical areas (from limbic system to brainstem).21 Humans share with all pre-existing animals, at least as far back as reptiles, a core brainstem that regulates internal functions and processes instinctual responses to outside stimuli, such as the body's instant, unconscious reaction to danger. We share with mammals a limbic system (including the temporal lobes at the sides of the head) that evolved around the brainstem to process more complex emotions and learned behaviors.22 Like other primates, we also have an expanded neocortex as the outermost layer of our brain (with occipital lobes in the back of the head, parietal lobes at the top rear, and frontal lobes).23 However, humans evolved distinct functional areas on each side of the neocortex. The left neocortex has audioverbal, linear, causal, executive, prosocial, routine functions, in contrast to the right hemisphere's visuospatial, holistic, intuitive, devil's advocate, anxiety- biased, novelty-detecting processes.25 Distinctive language systems (syntax and semantics) are in the left hemisphere, in Broca's and Wernicke's areas,2' in nearly all right-handed people and most left-handed.2. The right brain has further ties to the emotional limbic system and instinctual brainstem, but the left tends to operate separately (especially in men28), expressing or inhibiting limbic emotions and right-cortical intuitions, through its rational language and executive controls. Specifically regarding theatrical mimesis, the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL) is used for recognizing "pantomimes executed by others" because it stores the "complex digrams" or schemas used in the "higher level intentional planning" of actions, while the right IPL is used for interpreting spatial orientation (Jacob and Jeannerod 253). Thus, certain left-cortical functions correlate with Lacan's Symbolic order of language, rules, and social codes, the right with the Imaginary, and the limbic system and brain- stem areas with the Real. Yet these three orders arc "inmixed" dimensions (Ragland-Sullivan 190), as are the corresponding areas of our brains. The Symbolic order resides primarily, but not solely within and between left brains, like the Imaginary in and between right hemispheres, and the Real in limbic systems and brainstems.2- I say "primarily" because there are also aspects of Symbolic language, involving imagery and emotions, in certain right-brain functions: making and interpreting metaphors, contextual meanings, puns, prosody, and non- verbal gestures (Ornstcin 103-08; Cozolino, Neuroscience of Psychotherapy 109). Thus, the right brain is used more for language, along with the left, by "expert" readers (Wolf 162). While the right brains Imaginary order is crucial for "sell-image" (Ornstein 132, 175-76), the spatial sense of ego also depends upon the left brain's "orientation area," as I will consider in the first chapter The general correspondence of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic orders to the brainstem/limbic system, right hemisphere, and left hemisphere is confirmed by research on developmental growth spurts in the neocortex during childhood. As in Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, with the infant's Imaginary ego initially developing through preverbal communication with the (m)Other, neuroscience shows that right-brain to right-brain "attunement" between the mother and child, during its first two years of life, profoundly shapes its emotional and perceptual pathways, especially its sense of self in relation to others (Cozolino, Neuroscience of Human 38, 66-75, 84-85; Neuroscience of Psychotherapy 191-92). The "prosocial self then shifts, through language development, into the left brain, with its growth in subsequent years (118; Wolf 185-88). This relates to the Lacanian Symbolic order of words and laws shaping the child more directly after the initial mirror stage, at 6-18 months. According to neuroscience, the self as a "distributed neural network that encompasses shared self-other representations" continues to be "right- hemisphere based" (Deccty and Sommerville 527). Recognition of one's own face can be lost when the right hemisphere is anesthetized (529)—demon- strating that the Imaginary perception of ego (or the Freudian "imago"), and its possible fading or Lacanian "aphanisis," is based in the right cortex.31 Regarding our potential for therapeutic and theatrical catharsis, there appears to be a crucial filter between Symbolic/Imaginary and Real orders (or superego /ego and id) in the prefrontal area of the neocortex, at the edge of the limbic system.3 Neurologists locate a "stimulus barrier" between the Freudian superego and id in the "ventromesial [or ventromedial regions of the prefrontal lobe [where it] merges into the limbic system" and protects the ego "from the incessant demands of instinctual life" (Kaplan-Solms and Solms 275-76).34 Here, cathartic changes may occur in how remnant natural instincts are expressed (or transformed through greater awareness), from mostly unconscious, limbic, Real emotions, through right-brain, Imaginary perceptions and fundamental fantasies, to the Symbolic order of language, rules, and self identity in relation to the social Other. Neurologists have also found four layers of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) with distinctive, nested, hierarchical functions (Koechlin et al.; Murphy and Brown 133-35). The premotor cortex, at the rear of the PFC, exerts sensory control, selecting specific motor (bodily action) responses to stimuli. The caudal lateral PFC, the next layer moving forward, adds contextual control regarding the current situation when stimuli are received. The rostral lateral PFC, a further anterior layer, then exerts episodic control over the other two, by tracking present and past information regarding general behavior, thus allowing for changing contingencies. (Murphy and Brown give the examples of answering the phone when it rings, not answering it at a friend s house, or answering it there because the friend IS in the shower and asks you to, as illustrating these three levels of stimulus response.) A fourth area is posited in the frontopolar cortex, used for cognitive branching and controlling the shifts between different episodes of behavior, while exerting control over the other three layers. Likewise, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) determines "reward value" choices, including the selection of "stimuli on the basis of familiarity and [selection of] responses on the basis of a feeling of Vightness" (Elliott et al. 308). The lateral regions of the OFC arc involved with "the suppression of previously rewarded responses." Brain imaging studies find that these areas are "fundamental" in behavioral choices, especially in "unpredictable situations." One might argue that the Lacanian Symbolic and Imaginary orders of cultural rules and personal perceptions connect with the Real of stimuli and actions through these areas of the PFC (just behind and above the ventrome- dial). The brain responds to familiar or unpredictable stimuli with inner theatrical representations and outer performances, through shifting, time-bound, contextual, sensory controls. Such controls are shaped in each human brain through learned cultural experiences of the social Other, which create further top-down constraints utilized by the PFC's layered functions, in relation to bottom-up stimuli. And yet, theatrical performances are ways that the Other, as well as the individual, may change. A culture can explore extended possibilities of Symbolic and Imaginary shifts in situation, context, and sensation, using a collective dreamlike space. This may also involve divine and demonic characterizations of top-down or bottom-up forces, experienced in nature, in the body and brain, or in social networks. Lacan's three orders relate not only to the brain's anatomy, but also to cognitive psychologist Merlin Donald's theory about the evolutionary stages of cultural development in our hominid ancestors. About two million years ago, early hominids evolved beyond the "episodic" experience of other animals (and prior australopithecines)— with the "mimetic" stage of human evolution.3 Donald cites the evidence of increasing brain size in our hominid ancestors,-' the first stone tools, big game hunting, a more group-oriented way of life, and thus "a cultural strategy for remembering and problem solving" (Mind 261).' Instead of being "immersed in a stream of raw episodic experience, from which they ... [could not] gain any distance," early hominids developed a new cognitive capacity, "mimetic skill, which was an extension of conscious control into the domain of action. It enabled playacting, body language, precise imitation, and gesture" (120, 261). This also included prosody, which is processed today in the brain's right hemisphere: "deliberately raising and lowering the voice, and producing imitations of emotional sounds. About a half million years ago, archaic Homo sapiens gradually evolved a "mythic" stage of culture and brain development, culminating with the emergence of our own subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, about 125,000 years ago (Donald, Mind 261). The mythic stage is evidenced by a much higher rate of innovation than in prior hominids: sophisticated tools, "beautifully crafted objects, improved shelters and hearths, and elaborate graves" (261-62). This stage included oral traditions of language and narrative thought — beyond the gesture, mime, and imitation of prior mimetic hominids, or the basic awareness and event sensitivity of episodic primates (260)." It thus involved a fundamental change in the human brain (and vocal tract): an "invasion" of the left parietal lobe by language, replacing spatial perception and movement, which then became a more distinctive function of the right parietal lobe (LcDoux, Synaptic 303, 318).40 Donald's mythic stage shows the evolution of the Symbolic order of mind and society, as well as our current left hemisphere functions. The mimetic stage correlates to right brain processing and the Lacanian Imaginary. Today's human brains also bear the remnant animal emotions and drives of primal episodic awareness in the limbic system and brainstem, as a lost yet disruptive Real or chora*1 Indeed, each child moves through similar developmental stages, recapitulating hominid phylogeny: from primal episodic awareness to the mimetic "interlinking of the infant's attentional system with those of other people" and then to narrative speech (Donald, Mind 255). Or, in Lacanian terms, a child moves from the Real of natural being to the Imaginary order of mirrored illusions of ego in the (m)Others desires and then, through verbal language, to the Symbolic order of superego incorporation, with the Others discourse and social rules, via the Name and No of the Father. This basic outline of Lacanian orders, brain anatomy, and hominid evolution shows that "theatre" (and dance) in the most primal sense — as Imaginary, mimetic performance —began about two million years ago. At that time, our ancestors developed a new skill that eventually became specialized in the visuospatial, prosodic, Imaginary functions of the right hemisphere, with ties to the emotional/instinctual Real of the limbic system and brain- stem. Later hominids developed oral language and myth-making, as further Symbolic orders, through distinct areas of the left brain about a half million years ago. As with the modern child's development from primary to higher- order consciousness, through the Real and Imaginary dimensions of the mirror stage and the later Symbolic acquisition of language and rules, these layers of the brain and of hominid culture continue to interact today — with each human being transformed by a particular family and society. As Donald points out, primal mimesis in early hominids relates not only to the current playacting of children (Mind 266), but also to the "many institutionalized versions of pretend play in theater and him, and [to the] imaginative role playing [that] is integral to adult social life" (263). A crucial aspect of this evolutionary skill is emotional regulation, which involves the germ of self-consciousness, through a "mimetic controller" in the brain, "a whole-body mapping capacity ... under unified command" (269). Thus, early hominids developed larger frontal lobes, setting the stage for the later evolution of a distinctive left hemisphere (271).'15 Like children today (starting with the Imaginary dimension of the Lacanian mirror stage), our hominid ancestors developed a "kinematic imagination" with the physical "image of self" becoming an anchor to experience and awareness (273). This involved rhythmic body movements, expressing temporal relations, through the intersubjective medium of performance, as a "public theatre of convention" (272-74). However, the full emergence of theatre as narrative performance began with oral storytelling during the hominid "mythic" stage, starting about a half million years ago. Then, about forty thousand years ago, humans evolved a further, "theoretic" stage, through the "externalization of memory ... [using] symbolic devices to store and retrieve cultural knowledge" (Donald, Mind2G2). During this current stage of hominid evolution, the tradition of recorded theatre and drama developed, along with other artistic technologies,44 a "Symptom" of being human that has vastly expanded in recent centuries.45 Thus, theatre in the theoretic sense may have started with Paleolithic cave art (as considered in the first chapter). Eventually, the theoretic technologies of theatre, externalizing and interconnecting the performance elements of the human brain, developed in various ways through different cultures — culminating in the current globalism 01 virtual media screens, often dominated by Western paradigms. Our theoretic stage with its evolving technologies continues to reshape the skills of prior stages and "liberate consciousness from the limitations of the brains biological memory systems" (305). However, such an external memory field can also be a "Trojan Horse," Donald warns, "a device that invades the innermost personal spaces of the mind. It can play our cognitive instrument, directing our minds toward predetermined end states along a set course" (316). Such a Trojan Horse potential, with good and evil effects, becomes even more significant through divine characters and godlike ideals, at various points in Western history, from stage to screen performances, as explored throughout this book. Donald's stages of cognitive psychology match with Stephen Mithens archeological theories and research.4fl According to Mithen, the early hominid social intelligence of Homo erectus> 1.6 million years ago, involved the communication of "contentment, anger or desire" through a "wide range of sounds (Prehistory 144) —as with the mimetic prosody theorized by Donald. Human verbal language with "a vast lexicon and a set of grammatical rules" began 500,000 to 200,000 years ago, with Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens, as evidenced by brain and throat structure, indicated in fossils of their bones (140-42, 208). This corresponds to Donald's mythic stage of hominid evolution. Mithen also cites archeological evidence that a dramatic shift occurred 40,000 years ago. Early humans in the Upper Paleolithic period changed from having separate types of intelligence—natural history intelligence (such as interpreting animal hoofprints), social intelligence (with intentional communication), and technical intelligence (producing artifacts from mental templates) — to a new cognitive fluidity between them, creating artifacts with "symbolic meanings ... i.e. art" (163-65).47 This shows the begin- ning of Donald's theoretic stage and relates to the possible shamanic visions and performances evidenced by Paleolithic cave art.48 The evolutionary stages, neurological layers, and psychoanalytic orders of self and Other awareness, developing through shared cultural performances, reflect what might be called an "inner theatre" of the brain.49 By this, I do not mean a "Cartesian theatre" with the mind inside the brain as a single ghostly spectator watching the machinery of inner scenes, or as a play-wright-homunculus inhabiting a central control area (the pineal gland, according to Descartes. 400 years ago). This theory has been fully critiqued by cognitive philosophers, from Gilbert Rylc to Daniel Dennett, as well as by current neurological evidence. However, cognitive scientist Bernard Baars uses theatrical terms in other ways to explain the global workspace of human consciousness. Less than 10 percent of brain activity is conscious, like a "spot- light" on the visible actors and scenery (Theater 46-47).5 The rest involves unconscious agents, like a legislative "audience," competing and collaborating to focus attention on particular perceptions and ideas onstage. There are Deep Goal and Conceptual Contexts, like "backstage" workers, as well as immediate expectations and intentions, forming an unconscious sense of self as "director" of the brains inner theatre (144-45).52

Conclusion Though the ethical responsibility of issuing this challenge to the concept of race is ceded through the glorification of the a , this responsibility is established even in the model of poststructuralism that holds such sway over contemporary thinking about social change, wherein the ultimate aim of the theory is not an essentialist but a strategic deployment of identity. In the poststructuralist vision, because the given identity is "never fully owned," it remains open to "urgent and expanding political purposes" that demand shifting allegiances across such lines as race, class and gender (Butler, 1993, p. 228). But while poststructuralism produces this politics driven by a metonymic shift in subjective positionality by assuming a center-less self untethered from all identity, I envision through psychoanalysis the subject's encounter with an excluded center masked by the illusions of this subject's embraced identities. Where belief in race threatens to bind the subject to the fantasies of wholeness secured by the object a , and where true poststructuralist resignification of race forecloses recognition of the deeper drives that guide the identity politics of the individual subject, such a potentially seminal moment in the reconfiguration of race offers the racialized subject a unique opportunity to attempt a Lacanian traversal of race that can ground individual political activity in deeper recognition of the subject's desire. Lacan specified that the object a "plays the role of obturator," inhibiting such recognition by facilitating the "closing of the unconscious" (1998b, p. 144). Aimed at an impossible wholeness, what the object a of race attempts is to fill the constitutive gaps in the subject, the spaces left unoccupied by the subject's absent being. But Lacanian theory stipulates that the "subject who has traversed the radical fantasy [can] experience the drive" that exudes from the space of these gaps (p. 273). Where this drive is an expression of the undirected libido whose "effective presence" is registered only in "desire," it is through the process of reorienting one's desire away from such fantasies as race that the subject may begin the process of experiencing and directing this internal tension of the drive (p. 153). Through the process of "mapping" one's own desire in one's cynical questioning of the object a presented by the Other (p. 273), the subject is placed upon the "track of something that is specifically [her] business," situating herself in relation to a desire and drive that is particularly her own belonging (1997, p. 319). It is perhaps most likely that the recent attention to repeated incidents of deadly violence to black men will not produce sustained social skepticism about the value of race, for "the loop" of the fundamental fantasy, Lacan stressed, "must be run through several times" if the subject is to free himself truly from the illusions of the Other. However, the unconscious gap opened up by this cynical response to race at the national level allows essential space for the initial movements of the individual subject of race along the path of this loop.

In “Love Thy Neighbor? No, Thanks!” Slavoj Zizek (1998) begins with some general musings on the bad press that psychoanalytic approaches to racism enjoy these days. Arguing against these critiques of “psychological reductionism” and an “abstract-psychologistic approach,” Zizek persuades us in his ever-entertaining ways that the psychoanalytic frame is exactly the lens that can diagnose the machinations of racism in northern-western cultures and, by exposing their internal inconsistencies, presumably help us to disrupt them. I agree with Zizek and much of the recent work in the intersections of psychoanalysis and race1 that the dynamics of psychoanalysis have much to offer to readings of race and racism in contemporary settings of Eurocentric cultures—particularly the dead-end, circular readings of social constructionism.2 However, I also suggest that these lenses of psychoanalysis have much to tell us about white inhabitants of these cultural symbolics of phallicized whiteness and, more particularly, some of the silent assumptions about space and embodiment which constitute that whiteness. Psychoanalysis may be an appropriate lens for diagnosing our cultural racism exactly because it enacts some of the central dynamics which sediment that racism. Of course, in carving out a space that I refer to as ‘our cultural symbolic,’ I am already at odds with most Lacanians’ understandings of ‘the symbolic.’ While I understand that Lacan was attempting to unravel the structures of signification and dynamics of subjectivation that occur within the symbolic, I wish to speak of this symbolic as a historicized and particular phenomenon. Referring to ‘our cultural symbolic,’ I am referring more specifically to the symbolic that dominates cultures of phallicized whiteness and structures signifiers in a way that gives disproportionate and abusive power to some persons— some bodies—over others. Following out Lacanian dynamics of signification and subjectivation, I am reading ‘our cultural symbolic’ as a process that signifies some bodies as more powerful, more valuable, and more meaningful than others—namely, those white male straight Christian propertied bodies that we have already encountered in the emergence of the neutral liberal individual.

The ontology of hegemony and counterhegemony produces a particular grid of intelligibility that places hegemonic structures at the forefront, assessing social movements by their capacity to constitute a counterhegemonic alternative and challenge hegemonic structures. Counterhegemony enables judgements about the significance and importance of social movements, based on their (incapacity to transform hegemonic structures. From this perspective, social movements will only be effective if they can articulate a basis of unity, creating broad-based alliances and translating their struggles into a mass movement, capable of effecting changes in the State and other institutions.¶ In this context, Richard Day criticizes what he calls "the hegemony of hegemony" which, he argues, produces the commonsensical assumption that meaningful social change can only be achieved through alterations to the nation-state and other institutions.84 Hegemony produces a certain conception of what meaningful social change must be: that which is intelligible as an alteration of (or alternative to) a hegemonic structure.¶ Day also argues that the ontology of hegemony is also normative: "the claim being made is not only that mass representation is necessary, but that it is desirable, because it is through processes of representation that... hegemonic blocs are formed, and social transformations are achieved."85 Day politicizes the operations of representation that are required by hegemony as a contingent part of struggle, rather than as a necessary condition of possibility of social change. Similarly, Warren Magnusson has argued that hegemonizing moves of social movements "had a stultifying effect on other critical social movements."86 Magnusson emphasizes the forms of exclusion that are necessary in order for a movement to be hegemonic (and universal), constituting itself against an outside that is articulated as foreign, alien, and dangerous.87 For both Day and Magnusson, what needs to be overcome is the perceived necessity of counterhegemony especially when it is conducted through representing one's interest to the State.¶ Perhaps the clearest example of the hegemony of hegemony is demonstrated by the ease with which theorists of hegemony are able to subsume and instrumentalize non-hegemonic social movements through the concept of counter-hegemony:¶ Clearly, non-branded tactics such as the impedance of institutions through blockades and the construction of temporary autonomous zones can be valuable in the conduct of a war of maneuver, just as development of activist networks and of communities based on mutual aid contributes to a war of position by building capacity for another world. But I doubt that these tactics, and the broader practice of structural renewal (rendering the system redundant by withdrawing energy from¶ its structures)... add up to a viable alternative to counter-hegemony.¶ Practices, concepts and tactics can easily be assimilated to the counterhegemonic project, as parts of Gramsci's wars of position and maneuver; however, the important point here is how the dismissal of Day's argument is made possible by repeating the structure of hegemony counterhegemony. The reason that these tactics are inadequate is because they don't add up to a viable alternative to counterhegemony. The structure of hegemon-counterhegemon is repeated in the dismissal of any alternative to counterhegemony: any challenge to the assumptions of counterhegemony must be sufficiently coherent and unified to present a (counterhegemonic) alternative. Attempts to articulate alternative logics of social change can be either subsumed or dismissed on the grounds that they lack what counterhegemony promises: a unified, coherent alternative. Counterhegemony produces its own tautological commonsense: defined as the only viable challenge to hegemony- any other form of change or transformation is necessarily inadequate compared to the dream of a unified, coherent, broad-based social movement.

However, the current crisis seems to call for a renewed analysis of this "spiritual" dimension. And, although a necessary first step, it is not sufficient to supplement the first ascetic spirit with another spirit associated with an ambiguous consumer and employee "freedom" and "autonomy." n7

What is, first, necessary is to grasp the exact way "spirits" function in over-determining social behavior and sustaining hegemonic orders, creating the inter-subjective network needed for the reproduction of (capitalist) relations of domination. We need, in other words, to enhance our understanding of the two spirits of capitalism, the spirit of ascetic prohibition and that of commanded enjoyment. Here Lacanian theory can greatly enhance the long, if marginalized, tradition highlighting the importance of the two spirits. For example, drawing on the enjoyment explosion surrounding us in consumer society, Lacanian theorist Todd McGowan has put forward the hypothesis that it marks a significant shift in the structure of the social bond and the organization of the social fabric: n8 the passage from a society of prohibition into a society of commanded enjoyment. n9 While more traditional forms of social organization "required subjects to renounce their private enjoyment in the name of social duty, today the only duty seems to consist in enjoying oneself as much as possible." n10

The great challenge that psychoanalysis poses for emancipatory politics — and for politics as such — is its absolute rejection of the good or the good society. In the opening of the Politics, Aristotle describes the good as the basic aim of political activity, and this aim has remained constant in the intervening 2,500 years.7 Aristotle never attempts to prove this constitutive remark in his treatise but simply takes it as an unassailable postulate of political thinking. For subsequent political thinkers, the question does not concern Aristotle’s claim about the good but in what the good consists. There is unanimity about the political pursuit of the good not just among political theorists but among almost everyone who thinks about politics at all. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, however, there is no good at all. The good society is unattainable not just as a result of the competing desires of the individuals within the society. The theory that aligns social conflict with the coexistence of competing individual desires fails to go far enough in envisioning the antagonistic nature of the social order. No matter how divergent individual desires are, one could always imagine reconciling them with each other through some sort of compromise. A thinker such as John Rawls can imagine a just society despite positing a society divided by innumerable competing desires on the level of the individual. Justice here would consist in the idea of fairness — using one’s imagination to envision society through what Rawls labels a “veil of ignorance” that allows one to make decisions about justice without taking into account one’s individual interests or desires or social position. This would facilitate a good society in which any inequality would be socially justifi ed, and it would thus reconcile competing individual desires with each other. Introduction But the barrier to the good society runs deeper than this. It derives from the very idea of the good, which Freud sees as fundamentally at odds with itself. The good itself, not our failures to achieve it, is the problem. This is the fundamental political insight that psychoanalysis brings to the table. It is at once the challenge that it poses to emancipatory politics and the basis for its implicit project for emancipation. As we get closer to the ideal of a good society, we simultaneously approach the emptiness concealed within the ideal. The notion of the good does not emerge simply from moral reasoning and speculation about the proper arrangement of society. We develop this notion only through the experience of its prohibition. That is to say, the prohibition of the good doesn’t form an obstacle to a preexisting ideal but constitutes the ideal as such. The good has no existence outside of the barriers that we erect around realizing it. As Jacques Lacan points out in one of his most important political statements, “The step taken by Freud at the level of the pleasure principle is to show us that there is no Sovereign Good — that the Sovereign Good, which is das Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and that there is no other good. Such is the foundation of the moral law as turned on its head by Freud.”9 The foundational link between the good and prohibition renders its pursuit completely contradictory. Every step toward the good occasions a corresponding step away from it. Th e closer we come, the more we undermine the social stability that we hoped to achieve. This occurs not just among the many utopian socialist projects that have failed but across all types of social structures. For psychoanalysis, the good is not just an unrealizable ideal but a deception incapable of orienting a coherent and sustainable politics. Th is critique threatens to undermine the very idea of a political project because political theorists write in order to help bring about change, which means moving society in the direction of the good (even if they admit that the ideal itself is not realizable). Conservative theorists seem immune to this critique, but they envision a return to the good or the creation of a social stability that they associate implicitly with the good.10 Political theorists of all stripes write to change the world and assist its progression (or its return to a better state), whereas psychoanalysis interprets the world and uncovers the repetition at work where it seems to be progressing. For this reason, Julia Kristeva theorizes the political project inherent in Introduction psychoanalysis as one of permanent revolt. Rather than forming a positive program, psychoanalysis, like modernist literature, exists simply as a negation of identity and power. In The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, she argues, “psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and a certain literature, on the other, perhaps constitute possible instances of revolt culture.” From Kristeva’s point of view, psychoanalysis is completely political insofar as it demands revolt, but this revolt can never become revolution. Psychoanalytic revolt is destined to remain revolt against some existing power structure toward which it will continue to provide resistance. Kristeva views psychoanalytic thought as a hiccup in the hegemony of scientific rationality and progress. Any attempt to create a positive psychoanalytic politics would obviate its role as a key part of revolt culture.

The paradoxical capacity of silence to engage opposites with regard to power— both to shelter power and to serve as a barrier against power— is rarely accented in Foucault’s thinking as a consequence of his emphasis (elsewhere) on discourse as a vehicle of power. In casting silence as a potential refuge from power, I do not think he is reneging on this emphasis or suggesting a prediscursive existence to things. Critical here is the difference between what Foucault calls unitary discourses, which regulate and colonize, and those that do not perform these functions with the same social pervasiveness, even while they do not escape the tendency of all discourse to establish norms by which it regulates and excludes. Through this distinction one can make sense of Foucault’s otherwise inexplicable reference to sex in the eighteenth century as being “driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence,” or his troubling example of the village simpleton whose “inconsequential” sexual game with a little girl was suddenly subjected to medical, judicial, and popular scrutiny and condemnation. 9 Neither in these cases nor in others where Foucault seems to imply a “freer,” because prediscursive, existence to certain practices does he appear to mean that they really occurred “outside” discourse; the point is rather that they had not yet been brought into the pervasive disciplinary or biopolitical discourses of the age— science, psychiatry, medicine, law, pedagogy. 10 Silence, as Foucault affirms it, is then identical neither with secrecy nor with not speaking. It instead signifies a particular relation to regulatory discourses, as well as a possible niche for the practice of freedom within those discourses.

Put differently, if discourses posit and organize silences, then silences themselves must be understood as discursively produced, as part of discourse, rather than as its opposite. Hence silences are no more free of organization by power than speech is, nor are they any more inventable or protectable by us than speech is. Yet, and paradoxically, silence— even that produced within discourse— may also function as that which discourse has not penetrated, as a scene of practices that escape the regulatory functions of discourse. It is this latter function that renders silence itself a source of protection and potentially even a source of power. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution may be understood as mobilizing precisely this power against discourse, even as the amendment itself functions discursively and leads a distinctly discursive life.

But what is the content and dynamic of these fears and anxieties? How would we begin to plumb these? Impossible to explore exhaustively in these few pages, I want to consider just one dimension of them, a dimension that many decades earlier Walter Benjamin termed "left melancholy." As most readers will know, Benjamin was neither categorically nor characterologically opposed to the value and valence of sadness as such, nor to the potential insights gleaned from brooding over one's losses. Indeed, he had a well-developed appreciation of the productive value of acedia, sadness, and mourning for political and cultural work, and in his study of Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin treated melancholia itself as something of a creative wellspring. But left melancholy is Benjamin's unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal-even to the failure of that ideal-than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present. In Benjamin's enigmatic insistence on the political value of a dialectical historical grasp of "the time of the Now," left melancholy represents not only a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present, that is, a failure to understand history in terms other than "empty time" or "progress." It signifies, as well, a certain narcissism with regard to one's past political attachments and identity that exceeds any contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or transformation. The irony of melancholia, of course, is that attachment to the object of one's sorrowful loss supersedes any desire to recover from this loss, to live free of it in the present, to be unburdened by it. This is what renders melancholia a persistent condition, a state, indeed, a structure of desire, rather than a transient response to death or loss. In Freud's 1917 meditation on melancholia, he reminds us of a second singular feature of melancholia: It entails "a loss of a more ideal kind [than mourning]. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love." Moreover, Freud suggests, the melancholic subject will often not know precisely what about the object has been loved and lost--"this would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious."2 The loss precipitating melancholia is more often than not unavowed and unavowable. Finally, Freud suggests that the melancholic subject-low in self-regard, despairing, even suicidal-has shifted the reproach of the once loved object (a reproach waged for not living up to the idealization by the beloved) onto itself, thus preserving the love or idealization of the object even as the loss of this love is experienced in the suffering of the melancholic. Now why would Benjamin use this term, and the emotional economy it represents, to talk about a particular formation on and of the Left? Benjamin never offers a precise formulation of left melancholy. Rather, he deploys it as a term of opprobrium for those more beholden to certain longheld sentiments and objects than to the possibilities of political transformation in the present. Benjamin is particularly attuned to the melancholic's investment in "things." In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he argues that "melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge," here suggesting that the loyalty of the melancholic converts its truth ("every loyal vow or memory") about its beloved into a thing, indeed, imbues knowledge itself with a thing-like quality. Another version of this formulation: "In its tenacious self-absorption [melancholy] embraces dead objects in its contemplation." More simply, melancholy is loyal "to the world of things," suggesting a certain logic of fetishism-with all the conservatism and withdrawal from human relations that fetishistic desire implies--contained within the melancholic logic.3 In his critique of Erich Klistner, a left-wing poet from the Weimar Republic, in which he first coins the phrase "left melancholy," Benjamin suggests that sentiments themselves become things for the left melancholic who "takes as much pride in the traces of former spiritual goods as the bourgeois do in their material goods."4 We come to love our left passions and reasons, our left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be aligned with them. Left melancholy, in short, is Benjamin's name for a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thing-like and frozen in the heart of the putative leftist. If Freud is helpful here, then this condition presumably issues from some unaccountable loss, some unavowably crushed ideal, contemporarily signified by the terms left, socialism, Marx, or movement. Certainly the losses, accountable and unaccountable, of the Left are many in our own time. The literal disintegration of socialist regimes and the legitimacy of Marxism may well be the least of it. We are awash in the loss of a unified analysis and unified movement, in the loss of labor and class as inviolable predicates of political analysis and mobilization, in the loss of an inexorable and scientific forward movement of history, and in the loss of a viable alternative to the political economy of capitalism. And on the backs of these losses are still others: We are without a sense of an international, and often even a local, left community; we are without conviction about the truth of the social order; we are without a rich moral-politicalv ision to guide and sustain political work. Thus, we suffer with the sense of not only a lost movement but a lost historical moment; not only a lost theoretical and empirical coherence but a lost way of life and a lost course of pursuits. This much many on the Left can forthrightly admit, even if we do not know what to do about it. But in the hollow core of all these losses, perhaps in the place of our political unconscious, is there also an unavowed loss—the promise that left analysis and left commitment would supply its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, and the true? Is it not this promise that formed the basis for much of our pleasure in being on the Left, indeed, for our self-love as leftists and our fellow feeling toward other leftists? And if this love cannot be given up without demanding a radical transformation in the very foundation of our love, in our very capacity for political love or attachment, are we not doomed to left melancholy, a melancholy that is certain to have effects that are not only sorrowful but selfdestructive? Freud again: "If the love for the object-a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up-takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering.5" Now our challenge would be to figure out who or what is this substitutive object. What do we hate that we might preserve the idealization of that romantic left promise? What do we punish that we might save the old guarantees of the Left from our wrathful disappointment? Two familiar answers emerge from recent quarrels and reproaches on the Left. The first is a set of social and political formations variously known as cultural politics or identity politics. Here the conventional charge from one portion of the Left is that political movements rooted in cultural identity- racial, sexual, ethnic, or gendered - not only elide the fundamental structure of modernity, capitalism, and its fundamental formation, class, but fragment left political energies and interests such that coalition building is impossible. The second culprit also has various names-poststructuralism, discourse analysis, postmodernism, trendy literary theory got up as political analysis. The murder charges here are also familiar: Post foundational theories of the subject, truth, and social processes undermine the possibility of a theoretically coherent and factually true account of the world, and also challenge the putatively objective grounds of left norms. Together or separately, these two phenomena are held responsible for the weak, fragmented, and disoriented character of the contemporary Left. This much is old news. But if read through the prism of left melancholy, the element of displacement in both sets of charges may appear more starkly, since we would be forced to ask: What aspects of left analysis or orthodoxy have wilted on the vine for its adherents but are safeguarded from this recognition through the scornful attention heaped on identity politics and poststructuralism? Indeed, what narcissistic identification with that orthodoxy is preserved in the lament over the loss of its hold on young leftists and the loss of its potency in the political field? What love for the promises and guarantees that a left analysis once held is preserved, as responsibility for the tattered condition of those promises and guarantees is distributed onto debased others? And do we here also see a certain thingness of the Left take shape, its reification as something that "is," the fantastical memory that it once "was," at the very moment that it so clearly is not/one? Now let us bring these speculations about a melancholic Left back to Hall's more forthrightly political considerations about the troubles of the contemporary Left. If Hall understands our failure as a Left in the last quarter century as a failure within the Left to apprehend this time, this is a failure that is only reiterated and not redressed by our complaints against those who are succeeding (liberal centrists, neoconservatives, the Right) or by our complaints against one another (antiracists, feminists, queer activists, postmodernists, unreconstructed Marxists). In Hall's understanding, this failure is not simply the consequence of adherence to a particular analytic orthodoxy-the determinism of capital, the primacy of class-although it is certainly that. Rather, this failure results as well from a particular intellectual straitjacket-an insistence on a materialism that refuses the importance of the subject and the subjective, the question of style, and the problematic of language. And it is the combination of these two that is deadly: "Our sectarianism," Hall argues in the conclusion of The Hard Road to Renewal, not only arises from a defensiveness toward the agendas fixed by now anachronistic political-economic formations (those of the 1930s and of 1945) but "is also due to a certain notion of politics, inhabited not so much as a theory, more as a habit of mind. We go on thinking a unilinear and irreversible political logic, driven by some abstract entity we call 'the economic' or 'capital,' unfolding to its preordained end. Whereas, as Thatcherism clearly shows, politics actually works more like the logic of language: you can always put it another way if you try hard enough." Certainly the course of capital shapes the conditions of possibility in politics, but politics itself "is either conducted ideologically, or not at all." Or, in another of Hall's pithy formulas, "Politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them." It is important to be clear here. Hall claims not that ideology determines the course of globalization but that it harnesses it for one political purpose or another, and when it is successful, the political and economic strategies represented by a particular ideology will bring into being certain political-economic formations within global capitalist developments: Now we are beginning ... to move into a "post-Fordist" society what some theorists call disorganized capitalism, the era of "flexible specialisation." One way of reading present developments is that "privatization is Thatcherism's way of harnessing and appropriating this underlying movement within a specific economic and political strategy and constructing it within the terms of a specific philosophy. It has succeeded, to some degree, in aligning its historical, political, cultural and sexual "logics" with some of the most powerful tendencies in the contemporary logics of capitalist development. And this, in part, is what gives it its supreme confidence, its air of ideological complacency: what makes it appear to "have history on its side," to be coterminous with the inevitable course of the future. The left, however, instead of rethinking its economic, political and cultural strategies in the light of this deeper, underlying "logic" of dispersal and diversification (which, after all, need not necessarily be an enemy of greater democratization), simply resists it. If Thatcherism can lay claim to it, then we must have nothing to do with it. Is there any more certain way of rendering yourself historically anachronistic? 7 If the contemporary Left often clings to the formations and formulations of another epoch, one in which the notion of unified movements, social totalities, and class-based politics appeared to be viable categories of political and theoretical analysis, this means that it literally renders itself a conservative force in history-one that not only misreads the present but installs traditionalism in the very heart of its praxis, in the place where commitment to risk and upheaval belongs. Benjamin sketches this phenomenon in his attack on Kastner, the subject of his left melancholy essay: "This poet is dissatisfied, indeed heavy-hearted. But this heaviness of heart derives from routine. For to be in a routine means to have sacrificed one's idiosyncrasies, to have forfeited the gift of distaste. And that makes one heavy-hearted."8 In a different tonality, Hall articulates this problem in the Left's response to Thatcherism I remember the moment in the 1979 election when Mr. Callaghan, on his last political legs, so to speak, said with real astonishment about the offensive of Mrs. Thatcher that "She means to tear society up by the roots." This was an unthinkable idea in the social-democratic vocabulary: a radical attack on the status quo. The truth is that traditionalist ideas, the ideas of social and moral respectability, have penetrated so deep inside socialist consciousness that it is quite common to find people committed to a radical political programme underpinned by wholly traditional feelings and sentiments.9 Traditionalism is hardly new in left politics, but it has become especially pronounced and pernicious in recent years as a consequence of (1) its righteous formulation as a defense against the Thatcher-Reagan-Gingrich "revolutions"(epitomized in the dismantling of the welfare state and the privatization of a number of public functions and services); (2) the development of cultural politics, in particular, sexual politics; and (3) the disintegration of socialist regimes and the severe discrediting of left political-economic aims that this disintegration occasioned. The combination of these three phenomena yields left formulations that tend to have as their primary content the defense of liberal New Deal politics--especially the welfare state on one hand, and the defense of civil liberties, on the other. In short, the Left has come to represent a politics that seeks to protect a set of freedoms and entitlements that confronts neither the dominations contained in both nor the limited value of those freedoms and entitlements in contemporary configurations of capitalism. And when this traditionalism is conjoined with a loss of faith in the egalitarian vision so fundamental to the socialist challenge to the capitalist mode of distribution, and a loss of faith in the emancipatory vision fundamental to the socialist challenge to the capitalist mode of production, the problem of left traditionalism becomes very serious indeed. What emerges is a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of things. But perhaps even more troubling, it is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing. What is entailed in throwing off the melancholic and conservative habits of the Left to invigorate it with a radical (from the Latin radix, meaning "root") critical and visionary spirit again? This would be a spirit that embraces the notion of a deep and indeed unsettling transformation of society rather than one that recoils at this prospect, even as we must be wise to the fact that neither total revolution nor the automatic progress of history will carry us toward whatever reformulated vision we might develop. What political hope can we nurture that does not falsely ground itself in the notion that "history is on our side" or that there is some inevitability of popular attachment to whatever values we might develop as those of a new left vision? What kind of political and economic order can we imagine that is neither state-run nor utopian, neither repressive nor libertarian, neither economically impoverished nor culturally gray? How might we draw creative sustenance from socialist ideals of dignity, equality, and freedom, while recognizing that these ideals were conjured from historical conditions and prospects that are not those of the present? My emphasis on the melancholic logic of certain contemporary left tendencies is not meant to recommend therapy as the route to answering these questions. It does, however, suggest that the feelings and sentiments--including those of sorrow, rage, and anxiety about broken promises and lost compasses-that sustain our attachments to left analyses and left projects ought to be examined for what they create in the way of potentially conservative and even self-destructive undersides of putatively progressive political aims.

The demands of student revolutionaries and antiglobalization protestors provide a set of opportunities for interrogating hysteria as a political practice. For the antiglobalization protestors cited earlier, demands to be added to a list of dangerous globophobes uncannily condense a dynamic inherent to all demands for recognition. But the demands of the Mexico Solidarity Network and the Seattle Independent Media project demand more than recognition: they also demand danger as a specific mode of representation. “Danger” functions as a sign of something more than inclusion, a way of reaffirming the protestors’ imaginary agency over the processes of globalization. If danger represents an assertion of agency, and the assertion of agency is proportional to the deferral of desire to the master upon whom the demand is placed, then demands to be recognized as dangerous are doubly hysterical. Such demands are also demands for a certain kind of love, namely, the state might extend its love by recognizing the dangerousness of the one who makes the demand. At the level [of] the demand’s rhetorical function, dangerousness is metonymically connected with the idea that average citizens can effect change in the prevailing order, or that they might be recognized as agents who, in the instance of the list of globalophobic leaders, can command the Mexican state to reaffirm their agency by recognizing their dangerousness. The rhetorical structure of danger implies the continuing existence of the state or governing apparatus’s interests, and these interests become a nodal point at which the hysterical demand is discharged. This structure generates enjoyment of the existence of oppressive state policies as a point for the articulation of identity. The addiction to the state and demands for the state’s love is also bound up with a fundamental dependency on the oppression of the state: otherwise the identity would collapse. Such demands constitute are affirmation of a hysterical subject position: they reaffirm not only the subject's marginality in the global system but the danger that protestors present to the global system. There are three practical implications for this formation. First, for the hysteric the simple discharge of the demand is both the beginning and satisfaction of the political project. Although there is always nascent political potential in performance, in this case the performance of demand comes to fully eclipse the desires that animate content of the demand. Second, demand allows institutions that stand in for the global order to dictate the direction of politics. This is not to say that engaging such institutions is a bad thing; rather, it is to say that when antagonistic engagement with certain institutions is read as the end point of politics, the field of political options is relatively constrained. Demands to be recognized as dangerous by the Mexican government or as a powerful antiglobalization force by the WTO often function at the cost of addressing how practices of globalization are reaffirmed at the level of consumption, of identity, and so on or in thinking through alternative political strategies for engaging globalization that do not hinge on the state and the state's actions. Paradoxically, the third danger is that an addiction to the refusal of demands creates a paralyzing [halting] disposition toward institutional politics. Grossberg has identified a tendency in left politics to retreat from the "politics of policy and public debate.” Although Grossberg identifies the problem as a specific coordination of "theory" and its relation to left politics, perhaps a hysterical commitment to marginality informs the impulse in some sectors to eschew engagements with institutions and institutional debate. An addiction to the state’s refusal often makes the perfect the enemy of the good, implying a stifling commitment to political purity as a pretext for sustaining a structure of enjoyment dependent on refusal, dependent on a kind of paternal no. Instead of seeing institutions and policy making as one part of the political field that might be pressured for contingent or relative goods, a hysterical politics is in the incredibly difficult position of taking an addressee (such as the state) that it assumes represents the totality of the political field; simultaneously it understands its addressee as constitutively and necessarily only a locus of prohibition.

When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embedded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea—whatever. To phrase “the object of desire” as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what is incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality, but as an explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises, some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In other words, all attachments are optimistic. That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing or the slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent’s typical misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form (see Ghent).

“Cruel optimism” names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility. What is cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition different than that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject’s desire to temporize an experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss.

To suffer the loss of political sovereignty, the exploitation of labor, the dispossession of land and resources is deplorable; yet, we might say in this light that to suffer colonization is unenviable unless one is enslaved. One may not be free, but one is at least not enslaved. More simply, we might say of the colonized: you may lose your motherland, but you will not ‘lose your mother’ (Hartman 2007). The latter condition, the ‘social death’ under which kinship is denied entirely by the force of law, is reserved for the ‘natal alienation’ and ‘genealogical isolation’ characterizing slavery. Here is Orlando Patterson, from his encyclopedic 1982 Slavery and Social Death:

I prefer the term ‘natal alienation’ because it goes directly to the heart of what is critical in the slave’s forced alienation, the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations. It also has the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It was this alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him [sic] by the master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master wished. And this was true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated. (Patterson 1982: 7–8)

For example, when you ask people about their personality, they will typically say that it really depends on the context or situation. “Sometimes I’m quite introverted, but other times I’m a real extravert.” However, when others think about them, they have no difficulties determining if they are introverted or extraverted. Most people will also tend to exaggerate how diverse and unpredictable are their tastes in music, food, and friends. We see ourselves as unpredictable free spirits equally capable of doing one thing or the exact opposite in any given situation, but that delusional fantasy is not shared by others.

It is also inconsistent with the facts: There is a repetitive pattern to our everyday behaviors. The main reason for this is that a sense of uniqueness tends to inflate our egos. It makes us feel creative, original, and interesting, and in our consumer society this signals higher status and sophistication.

This is perhaps the most contentious argument in favor of debate. Academic articles have been written criticizing switch side debate as a project of liberalism that contributes to the ideological maintenance of American exceptionalism by creating subjects whose public statements are separated from their convictions. The New York Times has even published an op-ed criticizing school debate competitions as creating closed-minded partisans because it teaches a “win at any cost” mindset. These views have merit. They should caution us from becoming devil’s advocates, especially in sensitive conversations. And the debate leagues around the country have created strong social norms against debating issues that are patently unethical like whether racism is good.

But they should not be taken as reasons against the process of debating both sides. Rusk and Razzak, writing in the Oxford Political Review, suggest that any alternative that does not force students to consider both sides of an issue only reinforces echo chambers. Switch side debate, meanwhile, increases the chance for good faith debates to emerge and helps strengthen your existing beliefs by helping you find weaknesses in them, both desperately needed in an age where partisanship has made good faith debate difficult if not impossible. This process of switching sides forces students who may never have been exposed to more leftist or radical views to evaluate them on their merits. It forces students to think about how to offer a defense of views they may disagree with, challenging previous strawmen they may have previously believed. Debate, then, provides an obvious mechanism for penetrating filter bubbles by exposing students to a range of views they have previously not considered. Finally, there is a worry about demarcating what counts as “debatable.” Some conservative debate leagues have deemed issues like critical race theory “undebatable.” Only the process of switching sides allows us to come to more robust conclusions about controversial issues that might otherwise have never been considered in the first place.

(Tyler, Candidate for Juris Doctor, University of Colorado Law School, 2014; Bachelor of Science, Chemical Engineering and Economics, Northwestern University, 2011.“Would Utility Models Improve American Innovation? Evidence From Brazil, Germany, And The United States,” pg online @ http://www.jthtl.org/content/articles/V12I1/JTHTLv12i1_Boschert.PDF //pa-ef)

Even if utility models have a positive effect on innovation generally, they may not be appropriate for the American case. Economic research on the subject of utility models suggests that "[w]here th[e] capacity [to conduct innovative research] exists . . . a system that provides incentives to conduct minor, incremental inventions [i.e. a utility model system] is more conducive to growth." 96 In contrast, utility model protection weakly affects innovation and growth in developed countries.97 This is consistent with the trend among developed countries away from utility models, even as the annual quantity of patent applications increases despite continued backlogs in most of the world's major patent offices. Even if decision-makers in the United States were to conclude that establishing some type of utility model protection would be beneficial for American innovation, implementing the utility model system would require changes to many aspects of American law;98 whether American business—and, perhaps more significantly, the American Congress—would have the political and economic stomach to

(Tyler, Candidate for Juris Doctor, University of Colorado Law School, 2014; Bachelor of Science, Chemical Engineering and Economics, Northwestern University, 2011.“Would Utility Models Improve American Innovation? Evidence From Brazil, Germany, And The United States,” pg online @ http://www.jthtl.org/content/articles/V12I1/JTHTLv12i1_Boschert.PDF //pa-ef)

The idea that the United States might benefit from the implementation of a utility model system, though not without its merits and its proponents,81 suffers from several flaws. As an initial matter, despite much hand-wringing in the press (not all of it unfounded), American technological innovation is not, in fact, in a state of all-out crisis. Although the United States ranks squarely in the middle of the pack in the IEI,82 this is largely driven by weakness in what might be termed "creative" or "non-technological" innovation; America ranks 75th (out of 87 countries with data) in national office trademark registrations83 and 41st (out of 62 countries with data) in Madrid Agreement trademark registrations.84 If the IEI were recalculated using only the "knowledge and technology" pillar of the innovation output score, the United States would rank 31st overall85—not an excellent showing, but a substantially better one.

(Dr. Uma Suthersanen, Chair in International Intellectual Property Law, Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom“Utility models: Do they really serve national innovation strategies?,” pg online @ https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3139963 //pa-ef)

Based on an analysis of various studies, it certainly is true that utility model protection may enhance or stimulate the behaviour of small and medium-seized enterprises. This may in turn encourage higher economic performance and develop the innovative capacity of certain economies at specific stages of their development. Indeed, minor innovations may be a stepping stone for developing more patentable inventions. Conversely, it is arguable that utility model protection may be the most appropriate mechanism to allow ‘developing economies to build up their indigenous innovative capacities’.65 However, once the innovative capacity of the country has been reached, and when the national economy and its industries reach higher levels of technological capacity, as in Japan and certainly Australia, it does appear that the disadvantages outweigh the perceived advantages.