Search the archive.

Universal Basic Income is a model where income is distributed universally meaning every citizen is given the same sum of money per month. UBI is unconditional, with no strings attached and no work or financial requirements, meaning the 1% and those in poverty receive the same cash (Pinto, 4). 

Guaranteed Basic Income provides cash payments to specific, targeted communities of people. This system specifically targets inequality by giving the money to those who need it: people living below the poverty line, those with inconsistent or no income, and marginalized communities, specifically communities of color. In this system, people who don’t struggle to meet their basic needs do not receive cash payments (Pinto 3). 

It’s time to ensure the financial security of all families by providing a guaranteed income. A guaranteed income program provides recurring cash payments, with no strings attached, to a targeted group of people. Unlike Universal Basic Income (UBI), a guaranteed income program channels money to people who truly need it. As a result, guaranteed income programs are more effective at reducing the racial wealth gap and increasing equity.

Last week,  that conservative welfare reformers need to focus on simplification. As a young crop of conservative policymakers announce a range of proposals, there’s some movement in that direction. Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s plan would move most of America’s existing welfare funding into a single “flex-fund” to be disbursed to the states. Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, partly inspired by the “universal credit” reforms of Britain’s Conservative government, proposes allowing states to combine different forms of federal anti-poverty funding—food stamps, housing assistance, and more—into a single funding stream. In a recent speech about fighting poverty, Utah Senator Mike Lee , “There’s no reason the federal government should maintain 79 different means-tested programs.”

Meanwhile, the intellectual wing of reform conservatism likes these plans because they reduce government and offer citizens more control, at least in theory. Yuval Levin, one of the authors of the reform-conservatism manifesto Room to Grow, , saying it would “give people more resources and authority and greater freedom to find new and more effective ways up from poverty.” , on the other hand, have claimed it’s actually a paternalistic program at odds with the traditional Republican desire for less-intrusive government, since it relies on providers who make decisions for beneficiaries.

Yet others have  that, in order to make a guaranteed income efficient, the transfers should be targeted only to those who are economically disenfranchised — a policy often referred to as minimum guaranteed income. Some economists, for example, have  that households earning more than $78,000 spent a very small fraction of the payments they received from the second stimulus package compared to low-income families. Moreover, evidence that increasing the relief that reached underprivileged households while reducing that of higher-earners would have allowed for the same stimulus effect at a much lower cost. 

While it might be some time until the United States adopts a guaranteed income program, there are reasons to remain optimistic. In March 2021, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer  pushing toward making the expanded Child Tax Credit from the American Rescue Plan Act permanent. The temporary expansion, which  the credit per child by more than $1,000 depending on the child’s age, was also made fully refundable for the 2021 fiscal year. This means that if the credit amount exceeded taxes owed, families could receive the difference through monthly payments starting in July 2021 — essentially creating a “guaranteed child allowance” for low and middle-income households. 

But while prominent names in technology are still involved today, especially when it comes to funding projects, the conversation has changed. Its center of gravity has shifted away from “universal basic income” aimed at counterbalancing the automation of work and toward “guaranteed income” aimed at addressing economic and racial injustices. 

How guaranteed income came to be

The fact that everything is an assemblage does not mean that anything can become one: there are some criteria to ascertain that a certain assemblage is a real and functioning entity and not merely a random aggregate of parts. First, an assemblage has to possess the power to affect its constituent parts.377 The ability to do this functions as the criterion of the assemblage’s reality. In theory, any two – or more – entities can be viewed as belonging to a same assemblage, but only those instances of co-existence which bring about a change in their parts can be considered as really forming an assemblage. For instance, I might concoct a relation between myself, the dark side of the moon and every phonograph record released in June 1958. Clearly, those parts listed are not affected by any super-individual unifying assemblage, however strongly I wished to believe in it. There has to be consistency for the assemblage to remain over time as the parts are able to reproduce the assemblage in repetition or retention. Then again, the assemblage of my university department is very much real, according to the effects it can have on me, my colleagues, my office furniture, my computer, et cetera. The appearance of emergent properties is the second criterion for assemblages.378 To continue the example of a university department, it can bring forth effects that its constituent parts cannot evoke in isolation. Likewise, the department fulfils the third feature of an assemblage, that of redundant causation. A university department is not the “sum” of the histories of its parts. In a way, a significant number of its sub-individual parts are interchangeable, and this is the reason for the power of its continuity through the years. Professors, lecturers, students and administrative staff can come and go, yet the department stays. Yet, the Simondonian point of the relationality of individuation must be brought up as a reminder: the department can, in turn, function as a sub-individual part in another assemblage, such as the university faculty or a certain professional sector.

To characterise the mode of being of the assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish two axes in it: material and expressive components, and processes that can be either stabilising (territorializing) or destabilising (deterritorializing). The material and expressive components can be roughly categorised as falling under the axis between “machinic assemblage of bodies” (affective materiality) and “collective assemblage of enunciation” (language, semiotics, “incorporeal transformations”).371 This can be schematised as follows: ASSEMBLAGE Material components (“states of bodies”) Territorializing processes Deterritorializing processes Expressive components (“incorporeal transformations”) An assemblage is, then, “an intermingling of bodies”, material and semiotic, which undergoes processes of strengthening or disassembling its current identity.372 An archetypal example of an assemblage would, thus, seem to be a social formation of some kind, such as a political party or an institution of state.373 These clearly consist of material conditions (workers, material assets, et cetera) and expressive components (rules and regulations, statements, symbolisations, et cetera) and they undergo phases of stabilisation and change. A forceful instance of this is the juridical system. It is composed of buildings, clerks, officials and judges, as well as semiotic components such as laws, conducts and practices. It effects corporeal transformations, producing prisoners and enclosing them in special quarters and, in addition, incorporeal transformations such as declaring people guilty or not guilty. Yet, despite the examples traversing the social field, it must be kept in mind that Deleuze and Guattari nominate every single thing as an assemblage. The world is constituted of affects: parts within parts, affecting one another. Phenomena-as-assemblages exist as “boxes” within boxes, or a set of Russian dolls, qualified according to spatio-temporal scale and perspective. There are components great and small, mountains and molecules, and likewise assemblages. I am an assemblage of myriads of parts: physico-chemical, biological, cultural, technical. The parts I consist of are assemblages, too, on their respective levels. The hands that I type this text with consist of formations of flesh, sinew, bones, nerves, arteries and so forth. They have an individual history as “my” hands, and a structural history of the assemblage of human hand evolving through generations of ancestors, as the hand is a deterritorialized paw. My fingertips, pressing the keys, are made of biological cells, which, in turn, consist of molecules which are aggregates of atoms. We can continue into the sub-atomic level and never encounter the foundational stratum of reality which would act as a strictly determining foundation for the “higher” levels.374 Likewise, there are many assemblages of which I am a part of. My family, my university department, my neighbourhood, my nationality, humankind, the whole animal kingdom, planetary organic matter, Earth, the stellar system, Milky Way, the local system of galaxies and so forth into massive scale cosmic structures. At any level of consideration we are dealing with populations, 375 not species, and with relations of parts to a (relative) whole. And, as mentioned above, there is also the question of emergence where different entities and attributes emerge not causally but statistically out of smaller-scale parts, without the larger-scale entities being reducible to their constitutive parts, as well as the wider assemblages affecting their components. As DeLanda phrases it, the world is composed of “nested” sets of individuals of different spatial and temporal scales.376

We've seen that sloppy or misleading use of ordinary language can seriously limit our ability to create and communicate correct reasoning. As philosopher John Locke pointed out three centuries ago, the achievement of human knowledge is often hampered by the use of words without fixed signification. Needless controversy is sometimes produced and perpetuated by an unacknowledged ambiguity in the application of key terms. We can distinguish disputes of three sorts: Genuine disputes involve disagreement about whether or not some specific proposition is true. Since the people engaged in a genuine dispute agree on the meaning of the words by means of which they convey their respective positions, each of them can propose and assess logical arguments that might eventually lead to a resolution of their differences. Merely verbal disputes, on the other hand, arise entirely from ambiguities in the language used to express the positions of the disputants. A verbal dispute disappears entirely once the people involved arrive at an agreement on the meaning of their terms, since doing so reveals their underlying agreement in belief. Apparently verbal but really genuine disputes can also occur, of course. In cases of this sort, the resolution of every ambiguity only reveals an underlying genuine dispute. Once that's been discovered, it can be addressed fruitfully by appropriate methods of reasoning. We can save a lot of time, sharpen our reasoning abilities, and communicate with each other more effectively if we watch for disagreements about the meaning of words and try to resolve them whenever we can. Kinds of Definition The most common way of preventing or eliminating differences in the use of languages is by agreeing on the definition of our terms. Since these explicit accounts of the meaning of a word or phrase can be offered in distinct contexts and employed in the service of different goals, it's useful to distinguish definitions of several kinds: A lexical definition simply reports the way in which a term is already used within a language community. The goal here is to inform someone else of the accepted meaning of the term, so the definition is more or less correct depending upon the accuracy with which it captures that usage. In these pages, my definitions of technical terms of logic are lexical because they are intended to inform you about the way in which these terms are actually employed within the discipline of logic. At the other extreme, a stipulative definition freely assigns meaning to a completely new term, creating a usage that had never previously existed. Since the goal in this case is to propose the adoption of shared use of a novel term, there are no existing standards against which to compare it, and the definition is always correct (though it might fail to win acceptance if it turns out to be inapt or useless). If I now decree that we will henceforth refer to Presidential speeches delivered in French as "glorsherfs," I have made a (probably pointless) stipulative definition. Combining these two techniques is often an effective way to reduce the vagueness of a word or phrase. These precising definitions begin with the lexical definition of a term but then propose to sharpen it by stipulating more narrow limits on its use. Here, the lexical part must be correct and the stipulative portion should appropriately reduce the troublesome vagueness. If the USPS announces that "proper notification of a change of address" means that an official form containing the relevant information must be received by the local post office no later than four days prior to the effective date of the change, it has offered a (possibly useful) precising definition.

To put this in the language of Deleuze, deliberative redescription can function as a war machine. The experimenting with resonating reasons in a public on the part of activists is an exercise in “plugging in” a resonance machine into the public sphere. The transformative power of the resonance machine, understood as an inventive redescription of our received practices, has the power to transform the way citizens see their shared world, their own interests, and the suffering of others. The work of counterpublics is to “smooth” the striated space of public political culture so as to displace old prejudices and allow new identities and claims to flourish.

But if this is so, then deliberative democracy does not stop here. This “weaponry” of redescription is of value only insofar as it opens up conceptual spaces for reason giving. It is here, along this destratified plane, that citizens and spectators have to make use of what Deleuze calls “tools” to build up reasoned but revisable agreements about what causes to pursue, what practices to quash, or which candidates to elect or kick out. Indeed, the creative work of redescription is only the mise-en-scène of a democratic praxis through which ordinary people offer and contest what they think to be good arguments and reasons about political issues. It is only through the reflective pursuit of overlapping agreement that collective action becomes possible. [End Page 287]

As long as, we are not willing to recognize education in the aforementioned sense as the scaffolding upon which any political movement should be built we are doomed to live in the status quo. Short of an unconditional prioritization of education, all we ever can hope for are quick fixes accompanied with phases of socio-political overexcitement which soon fizzle out, leading us to a position which was worse than before. Politics without education as its premise can never maintain its long-term traction. It effectively exempts itself from the concerns of the next generations. But what is a politics without the potential concerns for next generations—whoever or whatever they might be—if not an extension of our egotism and selfishness here and now? While I consider myself a leftist, I nevertheless think that my frustration with the left is precisely the issue of education. Look at something like left accelerationism: where is the acknowledgment of education or developmental psychology i.e. nurturing as the unconditional factor? Where is your logistical-financial and organizational plan for education? If you lack these then no matter how much you insist on egalitarian ends, you are not going to attain them. However, being the hopeless leftist that I am, I believe that left, has “in principle” more chance to concretely address the issue of education than the right.

I believe in something like a universalist paradigm of education or equality of minds. Here, the appellation universal does not mean a pre-conceived global paradigm that can be indiscriminately imposed upon everyone. Education is all about context sensitivity, fulfilling local exigencies. But at the same time, I think there are deep cognitive frameworks which are common to us all and can be augmented under a universal or global framework. I think Kant was onto something important. His hierarchies of faculties as elaborated under the rubric of transcendental psychology—i.e. the necessary conditions for the possibility for having a mind—are not merely a trivial or arbitrary list of faculties. They were as much a necessary list of abilities as they were an example of an epistemological inquiry into the specific modes of cognition required for critical and objective thinking. For example, what he calls sensibility, reproductive and productive imagination, understanding and reason are actually necessary “classes” or “types” for being a minded subject. If we believe in the equality of all minds then we ought to also believe in complex recipes that can universally augment such necessary classes, regardless of whether we belong to different geographic locations, ethnicities, or even species.

What we set out to analyze was the corruption of the principles of play, or preferably, their free expansion without check or convention. It was shown that such corruption is produced in identical ways. It entails consequences which seem to be inordinately serious. Madness or intoxication may be sanctions that are disproportionate to the simple overflow of one of the play instincts out of the domain in which it can spread without irreparable harm. In contrast, the superstitions engendered by deviation from alea seem benign. Even more, when the spirit of competition freed from rules of equilibrium and loyalty is added to unchecked ambition, it seems to be profitable for the daring one who is abandoned to it. Moreover, the temptation to guide one’s behavior by resort to remote powers and magic symbols in automatically applying a system of imaginary correspondences does not aid man to exploit his basic abilities more efficiently. He becomes fatalistic. He becomes incapable of deep appreciation of relationships between phenomena. Perseverance and trying to succeed despite unfavorable circumstances are discouraged.

Transposed to reality, the only goal of agon is success. The rules of courteous rivalry are forgotten and scorned. They seem merely irksome and hypocritical conventions. Implacable competition becomes the rule. Winning even justifies foul blows. If the individual remains inhibited by fear of the law or public opinion, it nonetheless seems permissible, if not meritorious, for nations to wage unlimited ruthless warfare.

In effect, play is essentially a separate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life, and generally is engaged in with precise limits of time and place. There is place for play: as needs dictate, the space for hopscotch, the board for checkers or chess, the stadium, the racetrack, the list, the ring, the stage, the arena, etc. Nothing that takes place outside this ideal frontier is relevant. To leave the enclosure by mistake, accident, or necessity, to send the ball out of bounds, may disqualify or entail a penalty.

The game must be taken back within the agreed boundaries. The same is true for time: the game starts and ends at a given signal. Its duration is often fixed in advance. It is improper to abandon or interrupt the game without a major reason (in children’s games, crying “I give up,” for example). If there is occasion to do so, the game is prolonged, by agreement between the contestants or by decision of an umpire. In every case, the game’s domain is therefore a restricted, closed, protected universe: a pure space.

An old aphorism about golf calls the game “a good walk spoiled.” That funny quip underscores a fundamental feature of games: games make no sense, and yet we take them seriously precisely because they make no sense. The philosopher Bernard Suits calls that seriousness “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” 15 Golf is a desirable experience because it distorts space and time in order to make the player’s experience of a landscape more deliberate. We seek out this deliberateness when we play.

Fun is not a feeling, it turns out. And it’s certainly not the feeling of enjoying ourselves by doing exactly what we want, by making something easy or by rewarding ourselves with points, as if life is some latent version of Space Invaders that turns chores into chortles. Instead, fun is a name for deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way. We can only have fun once we have accepted the truth of a situation and treated it for what it is. When we’ve agreed to suspend our disbelief in its preposterousness. Golf isn’t a good walk spoiled, but a way to transform landscapes into a centuries-long hobby.

Play entails a paradox: it is an activity of freedom and pleasure and openness and possibility, but it arises from limiting freedoms rather than expanding them. The boundaries of a playground, the contents contained within them. Their structures. Colloquial senses of game, play, and fun would hold that these activities amount to going outside the boundary of normal behavior, of doing whatever you want: “Don’t play with your food” or “stop fooling around.” But in fact the opposite is true: interesting play experiences arise from more constraints rather than fewer. Erecting barriers and boundaries more clearly delineates a system. As Bernard Suits puts it, play requires its participants to accomplish something “using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favor of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.” 21

Normally, we address a play experience like my daughter’s either as if it were separate from the trip to the mall or as if it were perpetrated in the service of the errand I had dragged her along on. On the one hand, we could construe my daughter’s activity as a distraction from the “real” work of running errands and therefore existing outside the domain of mall going, a play activity meant to release the boredom and unrest of being somewhere unpleasant. On the other hand, we could see her improvised play as a welcome and even a necessary distraction to help facilitate the rest of the afternoon’s errands. The first interpretation assumes the work-play differential— that the work of chores exists nearby but orthogonal to the play that would divert a young child from boredom. The second interpretation invokes the productive repurposing of play as a means to pleasure or sanity, a resource to be put to use in the interest of “real” effort.

If games had a finality, the only true player would be the cheater. Now, if a certain amount of prestige can be acquired by transgressing the law, there is no prestige in cheating or transgressing a rule. In truth, the cheater cannot transgress the rules since the game, not being a system of interdictions, does not have lines one can cross. One does not "trangress" a rule, one fails to observe it . And non-observance does not lead to a state of transgression ; it brings one back under the jurisdiction of the law. This is the case with the cheater, who denies or, even better, profanes the game's ceremonial conventions for economic reasons (or psychological reasons, if he cheats simply for the pleasure of winning), and thereby restores the laws of the real world. By introducing factors of an individual nature, he destroys the game's "duel" enchantment . If cheating was once punished by death and is still condemned strongly, it is because, as a crime, it resembles incest : cultural rules being broken to the sole profit of the "laws of nature." For the cheater, there is no longer anything at stake. He confuses the stakes with surplus-value. But the stakes are what enables one to play, and to turn them into the game's purpose is to abuse one's position of trust. In a similar manner, the rules establish the very possibility of playing, the space within which the sides confront each other. To treat the rules as ends (or as laws or truths) is to destroy both the game and its stakes. The rules have no autonomy, that quality which, according to Marx, characterizes commodities, both individually and in general, and is the sacrosanct value of the economic domain. The cheater too is autonomous: he establishes a law, his own law, against the arbitrary rituals of the rule - this is what disqualifies him. And he is free -this explains his downfall . Moreover, he is rather dreary, because he no longer exposes himself to the seduction of games, because he refuses the vertigo of seduction. By way of hypothesis, one might postulate that personal advantage is only an alibi: in reality he cheats in order to escape seduction ; he cheats because he is afraid of being seduced.

The Diary of the Seducer claims that in seduction the subject is never the master of his master plan, and even when the latter is deployed in full consciousness, it still submits to the rules of a game that goes beyond it . A ritual dramaturgy beyond the law, seduction is both game and fate, and as such pushes the protagonists towards their inevitable end without the rule being broken - for it is the rule that binds them. And the rule's basic dictum is that the game continue whatever the cost, be it death itself. There is, then, a sort of passion that binds the players to the rule that ties them together - without which the game would not be possible. Ordinarily we live within the realm of the Law, even when fantasizing its abolition. Beyond the law we see only its transgression or the lifting of a prohibition. For the discourse of law and interdiction determines the inverse discourse of transgression and liberation. However, it is not the absence of the law that is opposed to the law, but the Rule. The Rule plays on an immanent sequence of arbitrary signs, while the Law is based on a transcendent sequence of necessary signs. The one concerns cycles, the recurrence of conventional procedures, while the other is an instance based in an irreversible continuity. The one involves obligations, the other constraints and prohibitions. Because the Law establishes a line, it can and must be transgressed. By contrast, it makes no sense to "transgress" a game's rules; within a cycle's recurrence, there is no line one can jump (instead, one simply leaves the game). Because the Law - whether that of the signifier, castration, or a social interdiction - claims to be the discursive sign of a legal instance and hidden truth, it results in repression and prohibitions, and thus the division into a manifest and a latent discourse. Given that the rule is conventional and arbitrary, and has no hidden truth, it knows neither repression nor the distinction between the manifest and the latent. It does not carry any meaning, it does not lead anywhere; by contrast, the Law has a determinate finality. The endless, reversible cycle of the Rule is opposed to the linear, finalized. progression of the Law. Signs do not have the same status in the one as in the other. The Law is part of the world of representation, and is therefore subject to interpretation or decipherment. It involves decrees or statements, and is not indifferent to the subject. It is a text, and falls under the influence of meaning and referentiality. By contrast, the Rule has no subject, and the form of its utterance is of little consequence; one does not decipher the rules, nor derive pleasure from their comprehension - only their observance matters, and the resulting giddiness. This also distinguishes the passion for the game's rituals and intensity from the pleasure that attaches to obedience to the Law, or its transgression. In order to understand the intensity of ritual forms, one must rid oneself of the idea that all happiness derives from nature, and all pleasure from the satisfaction of a desire. On the contrary, games, the sphere of play, reveal a passion for rules, a giddiness born of rules, and a force that comes from ceremony, and not desire. Does the delight one experiences in a game come from a dream-like situation, where one moves free of reality, but which one can quit at any time? Not at all. Games, unlike dreams, are subject to rules, and one just doesn't leave a game. Games create obligations like those found in challenges. To leave a game is unsportsmanlike. And the fact that one cannot refuse to play a game from within - a fact that explains its enchantment and differentiates it from "reality" - creates a symbolic pact which compels one to observe the rules without reserve, and to pursue the game to the end, as one pursues a challenge to the end. The order instituted by the game, being conventional, is incommensurable with the necessary order of the real world: it is neither ethical nor psychological, and its acceptance (the acceptance of the rules) implies neither resignation nor constraint. As such, there is no freedom in our moral and individual sense of that term, in games. They are not to be equated with liberty. Games do not obey the dialectic of free will, that hypothetical dialectic of the sphere of the real and the law. To enter into a game is to enter a system of ritual obligations. Its intensity derives from its initiatory form - not from our liberty, as we would like to believe, following an ideology that sees only a single, "natural" source of happiness and pleasure. The game's sole principle, though it is never posed as universal, is that by choosing the rule one is delivered from the law. Without a psychological or metaphysical foundation, the rule has no grounding in belief. One neither believes nor disbelieves a rule - one observes it. The diffuse sphere of belief, the need for credibility that encompasses the real, is dissolved in the game. Hence their immorality : to proceed without believing in it, to sanction a direct fascination with conventional signs and groundless rules.

Having traced a major strand in the development of CRT, we turn now to the strands' effect on the relationships of CRATs with each other and with outsiders. As the foregoing material suggests, the central CRT message is not simply that minorities are being treated unfairly, or even that individuals out there are in pain - assertions for which there are data to serve as grist for the academic mill - but that the minority scholar himself or herself hurts and hurts badly.

An important problem that concerns the very definition of the scholarly enterprise now comes into focus. What can an academic trained to [*694] question and to doubt n72 possibly say to Patricia Williams when effectively she announces, "I hurt bad"? n73 "No, you don't hurt"? "You shouldn't hurt"? "Other people hurt too"? Or, most dangerously - and perhaps most tellingly - "What do you expect when you keep shooting yourself in the foot?" If the majority were perceived as having the well- being of minority groups in mind, these responses might be acceptable, even welcomed. And they might lead to real conversation. But, writes Williams, the failure by those "cushioned within the invisible privileges of race and power... to incorporate a sense of precarious connection as a part of our lives is... ultimately obliterating." n74

Detachment functions in this manner not by draining us of passion, but by helping to channel our intellectual passions in such a way as to insure collision with rival perspectives. In that collision, if anywhere, our thinking transcends both the idiosyncratic and the conventional. Detachment both socializes and deparochializes the work of intellect; it is the quality that fits an individual to participate fruitfully in what is essentially a communal enterprise. Objectivity is so much a product of social arrangements that individuals and particular opinions scarcely deserve to be called objective, yet the social arrangements that foster objectivity have no basis for existence apart from individual striving for detachment. Only insofar as the members of the community are disposed to set aside the perspective that comes most spontaneously to them, and strive to see things in a detached light, is there any likelihood that they will engage with one another mentally and provoke one another through mutual criticism to the most complete, least idiosyncratic, view that humans are capable of. When the ascetic effort at detachment fails, as it often does, we "talk past one another," producing nothing but discordant soliloquies, each fancying itself the voice of reason. The kind of thinking I would call objective leads only a fugitive existence outside of communities that enjoy a high degree of independence from the state and other external powers, and which are dedicated internally not only to detachment, but also to intense mutual criticism and to the protection of dissenting positions against the perpetual threat of majority tyranny. Some hypothetical examples may clarify what I mean by objective thinking and show how remote it is from neutrality. Consider an extreme case: the person who, although capable of detachment, suspends his or her own perceptions of the world not in the expectation of gaining a broader perspective, but only in order to learn how opponents think so as to demolish their arguments more effectively - who is, in* short, a polemicist, deeply and fixedly committed as a lifelong project to a particular political or cultural or moral program. Anyone choosing such a life obviously risks being thought boorish or provincial, but insofar as such a person successfully enters into the thinking of his or her rivals and produces arguments potentially compelling not only to those who already share the same views, but to outsiders as well, I see no reason to withhold the laurel of objectivity. 10 There is nothing objective about hurling imprecations at apostates or catechizing the faithful, but as long as the polemicist truly engages the thinking of the enemy he or she is being as objective as anyone. In contrast, the person too enamored of his or her own interpretation of things seriously and sympathetically to entertain alternatives, even for the sake of learning how best to defeat them, fails my test of objectivity, no matter how serene and even tempered. The most common failure of objectivity is preaching to the converted, proceeding in a manner that complacently presupposes the pieties of one's own coterie and makes no effort to appreciate or appeal to the perspectives of outsiders. In contrast, the most commonly observed fulfillment of the ideal of objectivity in the historical profession is simply the powerful argument-the text that reveals by its every twist and turn its respectful appreciation of the alternatives it rejects. Such a text attains power precisely because its author has managed to suspend momentarily his or her own perceptions so as to anticipate and take account of objections and alternative constructions -not those of some straw man, but those that truly issue from the rival's position, understood as sensitively and stated as eloquently as the rival him- or herself could desire. Nothing is rhetorically more powerful than this, and nothing, not even capitulation to the rival, could acknowledge any more vividly the force and respectability of the rival's perspective. To mount a telling attack on a position, one must first inhabit it. Those so habituated to their customary intellectual abode that they cannot even explore others can never be persuasive to anyone but fellow habitues. That is why powerful arguments are often more faithful to the complexity and fragility of historical interpretation - more faithful even to the irreducible plurality of human perspectives, when that is, in fact, the case -than texts that abjure position-taking altogether and ostentatiously wallow in displays of "reflexivity" and "undecidability." The powerful argument is the highest fruit of the kind of thinking I would call objective, and in it neutrality plays no part. Authentic objectivity has simply nothing to do with the television newscaster's mechanical gesture of allocating the same number of seconds to both sides of a question, or editorially splitting the difference between them, irrespective of their perceived merits

System walk out (alternatives ‘with guarantees’) enunciates a commitment to develop alternatives to modernity that will not reproduce its violences. Alternative communities and epistemologies are developed or reclaimed in spaces that may be external or marginal to mainstream institutions, either as supplementary, transitional, or wholesale alternatives. While ‘walking out’ often leads to remarkably creative and generative spaces, these spaces may nonetheless reproduce at least some of the same problems as modernity, as they are still broadly situated within its teleological grammar, particularly in its dialectically structured desire for an uncontaminated ‘outside’. This focus on alternatives ‘with guarantees’ tends to support the same affective investments (e.g. in fixed teleologies, normativity, consensus, and innocence) and can lead to the foreclosure of the complexities and complicities that arise in the making of alternatives.

System hacking involves creating spaces within the system, using its resources, where people can be educated about the violences of the system and have their desires re-oriented away from it. This requires ‘playing the game’ of institutions at the same time that rules are bent to generate alternative outcomes. This strategy can also be remarkably creative and generative; however, it can be difficult to recognize when one is ‘hacking’ the system or ‘being hacked’ by it. In addition, like system walk outs, the risk of reproducing modernity’s violence precisely when one is trying to move beyond it remains high as the success of initiatives is measured in identifiable outcomes, and identities may become scripted around vanguardist heroism that inadvertently recentres individuals.

When the evidence offered is the evidence of “experience,” the claim for referentiality is further buttressed – what could be truer, after all, than a subject's own account of what he or she has lived through? It is precisely this kind of appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation – as foundation upon which analysis is based – that weakens the critical thrust of histories of difference. By remaining within the epistemological frame of orthodox history, these studies lose the possibility of examining those assumptions and practices that excluded considerations of difference in the first place. They take as self-evidence the identities of those whose experience is being documented and thus naturalize their difference. They locate resistance outside its discursive construction and reify agency as an inherent attribute of individuals, thus decontextualizing it. When experience is taken as the origin or knowledge, the vision of the individual subject (the person who had the experience of the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence upon which explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one's vision is structured – about language (or discursive) and history – are left aside. The evidence of experience then becomes evidence for the fact of difference rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world.

To put it another way, the evidence of experience, whether conceived through a metaphor of visibility or in any other way that takes meaning as transparent, reproduces rather than contests given ideological system- those that assume that the facts of history speak for themselves and, in the case of histories of gender, those that rest on notions of a natural or established opposition between sexual practices and social conventions, and between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Histories that document the hidden world of homosexuality, for example, show the impact of silence and repression on the lives of those affected by it and bring to light the history of their suppression and exploitation. But the project of making experience visible precludes critical examination of the workings of the ideological system itself, it's categories of representation (homosexual/heterosexual, man/woman, black/white as fixed immutable identities), its premises about what these categories mean and how they operate, its notions of subjects, origin, and cause.