Voting aff allows the judge to collude with the 1AC to cleanse the public sphere – their linkage of identity politics and trauma maintains violent affective structures that undergird liberalism and capital accumulation – converges with and becomes indistinguishable from state-and-capital based sites of affective exchange

The concluding argument concerns late modern figurations of the body in pain. Spectacles of pain have proliferated in many forms in the contemporary American public sphere if indeed pain hasn't become its primary and all-pervading obsession. Confessional TV shows exchange narratives of personal trauma and hurt for public intelligibility; cinematic spectacles of suffering, from The Passion of the Christ (2004) to torture-porn favorite Hostel (2005), exhibit the body in pain for profit, thrill, and public outrage; news reports narrate national-scale catastrophes through individual testimonials of pain; reality game shows such as Survivor measure their contestants' bodily pain capacities against their resistance to (or aggressiveness in) traumatizing and abusive group dynamics. There is also a proliferation of political discourse disclosing the injuries caused by contemporary forms of governing: public movements raise consciousness for excluded and abjected forms of living, feeling, and aching in Western democracies; critical discourses continue to shed light on the structural violence of regimes of power; the interventions of identitarian movements and groups successfully expand public recognition of social and political injury, changing the scope of intelligibility in the process. These diverse affective phenomena are not always readily distinguishable in neoliberal regimes. Scholars such as Wendy Brown or Sara Ahmed have pointed out the coopting of identitarian politics in contemporary govermental regimes. These critical voices urge "Ic]aution ... against the assumption that 'speaking out' and 'making visible' within so-called radical politics can be separated from the conventions of self-expression in neo-liberal forms of governance" (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, 4). Bill Clinton's infamous tagline "I feel your pain" or Barack Obama's ongoing focus on a "politics of empathy" are only the presidential cases in point for an ongoing politics of pain that links recognition of suffering to democratic progress. Academic debates have matched this capitalization on pain and compassion as necessary ingredients to the development of politics, ethics, or community making, such as in Rosi Braidotti's call for the unification of feminist, gay, lesbian, and transgender identity politics under the label of a "community of the suffering."' The various diagnoses of America as "wound culture" (Seltzer 1998) or "trauma culture" (Kaplan 2005), in this view, describe a highly disparate, tension-laden, and ambivalent field of affective discourse, rather than a unified or unifying fixation on pain in contemporary Western societies. Lauren Berlant has argued that these politics of affect dictate the continuous envelopment of the political in sentimental rhetoric. Sentimentalism holds up the promise that subjectivity is granted in the recognition of pain and that democracy is realized as the participation in an ideal of common suffering and compassion. Sentimental discourses "locate the human in a universal capacity to suffer and romantic conventions of individual historical acts of compassion and transcendence. [They imagine a nonhierarchical social world that is ... 'at heart' democratic because good intentions and love flourish in it" (2008, 6). Sentimental rhetoric produces a public sphere assembled around pain bonded by feeling with what is unspeakable: a commonality of passionate and compassionate bodily subjects, or a "fantasy of generality through emotional likeness in the domain of pain" (Berlant 2008, 6). These arguments suggest a fundamental link between the sentimental evocation of pain and the discourses imagined as "at heart democratic." Indeed, the emancipatory project of democracy relies on articulations of pain, the recognition of those suffering, and a unified politics as remedy of this suffering. This is certainly true for American culture and its foundational ideas of promise and exceptionalism. The cultural sites I have pointed to participate in this evocation of a public sphere, where oppressive hurtings and social injuries are "counted in toward a better politics of integration, understanding, and recognition. The sentimental linkage of emancipation through the circulation of pain and compassion as politics indicates a larger genealogy that dominates American culture and that this book has tried to elucidate. This genealogy was traced back to America's emancipatory foundation as a nation freed from colonial injury, and informed by a national history of successful incorporations of marginalized subjects into the national project (suffrage, abolitionism). American dolorologies has related this discourse to an apparatus of cultural technologies such as compassion, testimony to oppression, and articulations of affect and pain, and the materializations of race and gender they covertly enact. My analysis concurs with Berlant's observation that the various claims to pain as identity disarticulate their marginalizing effects in a rhetoric of universalization: In the liberal tradition of the United States [testimony of pain] is not simply a mode of particularizing and puncturing self-description by minorities, but a rhetoric of universality located, not in abstract categories, but in what was thought to be, simultaneously, particular and universal experience. Indeed, it would not be exaggerating to say that sentimentality has long been a popular rhetorical means by which pain is advanced, in the United States, as the true core of personhood and citizenship. (2000, 34) This connection of pain, nation, and subjectivity has, on the one hand, led to the public sphere becoming more and more a site of intimate "affect" exchange. This transformation is visible in the proliferation of mediatized forms of confession, testimony, and other articulations of traumatized selfhood, such as reality TV or the culture of therapeutic discourse. These governmental forms of achieving public subjectivity through speaking pain imitate and appropriate the critical formulations of differential experience from identitarian movements, at times becoming indistinguishable from them: "We can also see a ... collusion between liberal, capitalist forms of mass entertainment and individualist therapies, and the feminist importance of the personal" (Ahmed 2000, 12). The achievement of public visibility through the articulation of trauma and pain is furthermore supplemented by mainstream political discourse becoming compassionate and revolving primarily around the recognition of bodies in pain.? Both forms of discourse-personal claims to pain as identity and hegemonic gestures of compassion, recognition, and inclusion--are intimately connected and dependent on each other, in that they both enact a paradoxical simultaneity of the particular and the universal: the hegemonic gesture transforms personal pain into universal concern ('I feel your pain"), and thus marks compassion as both ethical and democratic practice. Simultaneously, it fixates identity as social and corporeal injury, and via recognition, restabilizes its own ideal (of politics, law, nation) as "pain- free. 99 On the other hand, interventionist critiques articulate common histories of pain and injury against this fantasy and demand recognition and incorporation in that utopian space. They thus inevitably perform a "fetishization of the wound," an equation of identity and suffering fixating the "identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions" (Brown 1995, 27). Both positions are in this view invested in similar structures: the collusion of the sociopolitical and the bodily, where individual hurt is remedied by social redress; and, the ideal projection of the political as a pain-free space: "The object of the nation-state in this light is to eradicate systemic social pain, the absence of which becomes the definition of freedom" (Berlant 2000, 34). Furthermore, both employ a rhetoric of sentimentality that produces a quasi prediscursive, unspeakable, but incessantly evoked body in pain, which is simultaneously interpreted as specifically "suffering from in a sovereign sentimental gesture, which grounds differences in bodies. These sentimental discourses, while evoking a universal affective core of democracy that is reproduced by pain and compassion, are closely tied to what throughout this book I have called biopolitical meanings of pain. While the previous chapters have demonstrated the historical alignments of the sentimental uses of pain and the biologizing circumscription of feeling bodies, I'd like to briefly point to recent knowledge productions within the life sciences that illustrate how topical these alliances are. Especially neuroscience, which has repeatedly engaged in the issues of torture, painful affect, and compassion or empathy,+ currently rearticulates the biopolitical meanings of "feeling" and "feeling with." George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, for example explains compassion as a "biologically" democratic feeling: We now know from the study of mirror neuron systems in the brain that empathy is physical, a capacity built into our very bodies. It is what allows us to feel what others feel and appears to be the basis for human connection and the capacity to care about others. Our native neural capacities for empathy can be strengthened by how we are raised, or it can decay when empathy is not experienced or we can be trained to develop neural circuitry to bypass natural empathy. ... I have found, in studies of largely unconscious political conceptual systems, that empathy is the basis of progressive political thought, and the basis for the very idea of social, not just individual, responsibility.. It is the same neural system that creates human connections with others. And the same neural system that lies at the heart of political democracy. Turning it off is turning off humanity, and with it democracy. (2009; my italics) Lakoff's argument updates eighteenth-century views of the "fundamental sociability of man" • (Knott 2009, 6) with neuroscience vocabulary, and crucially demonstrates how scientific knowledge can serve to introduce the terms degeneration and heredity (see ch. 3) into the doctrine of democratic affect. By constructing compassion as a "neural capacity" that can "be strengthened" by murture or "decay" when it is not experienced, Lakoff invokes-in a fusion of nature and murture, of biology and the social the family (and by extension the nation) as the primary site where the individual body's capacity for democratic sentiment is healthily cultivated, "trained" to discipline, or abjected to morbidity. While thus-in a markedly Burkean fashion (see ch. 2) the "neural body" is retained as a site of universality, factors such as education, genetic disposition, neural training, or good/bad parenting install measures of differentiation between bodies that are properly "hardwired for democratic compassion and those that are not. Similar to the calculations of civilization levels at work in mineteenth-century eugenics, these knowledge productions deploy thus primarily a biopolitics of affect and compassion, which can facilitate discriminations within the biological domain between those bodies capable of reproducing democratic affect and those that beget regressive political sensibilities. Such biologizing discourses receive their modes of differentiation and categorial clarity from popular cultural archives that also deal in questions of humanity and affect, and articulate them in the urgent modes of sentimental discourse. Without trying to relativize the important empowering successes achieved through articulations of pain and social injury, my book has aimed for a "dialectical history of promise and damage" (Seitler 2003, 83) that sheds light on the objectivist discourses fueling, and the material repercussions resulting from, the persistent connection of pain/subjectivity and compassion/democracy. My historical account of pain and its biopolitical and sentimental uses concurs with Robyn Wiegman's remark on the problematic relation between today's critical, identitarian discourse and its historical precursors. She argues that contemporary political interventions often fail to attend to the continuity between the ideology in the text and our own politics and subject positions. Accordingly, she recommends that the rethinking of historical shapes of Western constructions of humanity and culture and thus the critical arsenal of cultural studies-should be a "vehicle for shifting the frame of reference in such a way that the present can emerge as somehow less familiar, less natural in its categories, its political delineations, and its epistemological foundations" (1995, 202). My readings, which have targeted a genealogy of the systematically and politically powerful evocation of different bodies in pain- a discursive constellation I call dolorology-thus aim at defamiliarizing the rhetoric of pain and trauma common to contemporary cultural studies and democratic discourse.