The alternative is to live as ungovernable: Aff arguments about the necessity of their plan are epistemologically flawed. This K may seem counter intuitive to you but this card will put your fears to rest

(HLT, Justice/SocialINquiry@ASU, Futures of Black Radicalism, ed: Johnson, Lubin)

That singular obsession with how we shall be governed should be a cause of great concern, especially for those whom Sara Ahmed calls "willful subjects"6— those who do not look to be ruled, as well as those who actively refuse to be ruled, including making themselves unavailable for governing. Indeed, democratic living, as a way of collectivizing, concerns itself not with how we should be governed, but with how we should live and relate to one another.7 In an era characterized by neoliberalism, wars, and empires, not to mention extreme wealth inequality, mass incarceration, police homicides, and deportations, livability may be predicated on democratic living, a praxis that can provide an alternative mode of being and of conducting critical social inquiries, especially about the future of Black radical thought and praxis.8 This essay builds on Cedric Robinson's critique in The Terms of Order of the political and political authority and revises James Scott's treatment of "the art of not being governed"9 to draw attention to the multiple ways in which ordinary people and communities resist governing by state and non-state rule-making projects. Historically runaway slaves looked to the North Star not to be ruled by it, but to use its illumination as a guide to freedom. The practice of marronage is embodied democratic living (however momentarily) and the willful attempt to resist being governed. Through community building, where the terror and violence of racial capitalism and white supremacy were temporarily suspended, free men and women negotiated their own terms of living, and in the process, negated the terms of order.10 Following Avery F. Gordon's suggestion that we need to "combine complex and acute social analysis with a vision of how some people have lived and do live today that is a model for how all of us could live," and Cedric Robinson's insistence that marronage (flight and fugitivity) proves the existence of Black radical consciousness and praxis, I look to the willful refusal to be governed as confirmation of democratic sensibility.11 This sensibility, I argue, is an antidote to the chronic state addiction that seems to affect many social and especially political theorists, and provides an imperative for thinking about and learning from Black radical thought and praxis. A DETOUR: STATE ADDICTION AND UNGOVERNABILITY Democratic living constitutes life forms that actively seek independence from rule making. This ungovernability from below constantly threatens the unjust peace of dominant orders, including settler colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and hetero-patriarchy.12 While contestations among the elites are frequent, they do not represent ungoverning and are quite different from the active refusal to be governed from below. The federal government shutdown, out-of-control police and prison guards, and unregulated hyper-speculative finance, for instance, are not ungoverning at the top. Instead, they are a form of governance that incites instability as a consequence of its incompetence and delinquency. In contrast, ungovernability from below represents the inability of state and other dominions to assert control over subjects; the ungovernable, therefore, are those individuals and communities that render themselves unavailable for governing. In this way, the refusal to be governed is at the core of popular resistance to all forms of dominions.13 The famed, British-trained, American political scientist Richard Rose famously stated, "Analytically, the concept of ungovernability is a nonsense."14 Rose argued that, first, "the question is not whether we shall be governed but how," second, "ungovernability can only be a temporary phase of anarchy and of civil war,"15 and, third, "for better or worse," being governed is a natural state, and being ungoverned is an aberration that needs to be corrected. This view naturalizes the idea of order and norms political authority as rational. Governability is thus ontological: we are the way we are governed, and being ungoverned is nonbeing. State evasion and other forms of avoidance of being governed are deviant behavior that necessitates disciplining, from reconditioning to total annihilation. Ideationally then, the ungovernable has been conscripted as a problem-subject, and one that needs reform. Sociologists, for instance, often focus on problem-people and communities, those who have been normed and scaled as the gendered and/or racialized other. At one time or another, indigenous people, Arabs, Mexicans, Muslims, Africans, single women, and LBGTQ people have been among the "other," who have been thought of as problem people in need of being governed, tamed, subdued, and, in certain circumstances, annihilated altogether. It is presumed and argued that these ungovernable cannot be reasoned with; they are evil and will only understand the language of force.16 Similarly, certain spaces, especially urban spaces, are seen as ungovernable. The West Side of Phoenix, Harlem, Cabrini Green, Watts, Detroit, large swaths of the Global South, and the entirety of the Third World are problem peoples and spaces because they are ungovernable, appearing together as a an entire cosmology, a fearsome Black planet. The poor, Black people of Ferguson, Chicago, East Los Angeles, and Harlem—and anywhere there are ungovernable lives—are problem subjects, especially in communities where Black lives matter. The rational choice that follow entails everything the capacious apparatuses and technologies of violence have to offer, including "evacuation," mass incarceration, deportation, tanks, guns, tear gas, and surveillance. In the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown and the ensuing protests, Ferguson became an ungovernable problem-space, with the majority of its people and even its police force deemed troublesome. Former attorney general Eric Holder was regularly dispatched to troubled/ungovernable regions, enforcing coherence on the progressively implausible imperial narrative about American exceptionalism.17 Then there is the frequent and increasingly amplified speechifying by the first Black president in defense of liberal democracies and their attendant ideologies, justifying the perpetual wars on the troublesome Middle East or South Asia or North Africa. All the while, in political science, ungovernability scandalously continues to be dismissed as analytical nonsense. While the framing of the ungovernable is used, with great frequency and utility, to cast and organize people and lands, to justify and wage permanent wars and even genocide, in political science —the field tasked with helping us understand how we come by these policies—its mandarins persist in their views that ungovernability is conceptually nonsensical. This scandalous intent suggests an ideography that owes its pathos to and possessive investments on an epistemological ordering that relies on state addiction. This affliction is a pathology that renders its sufferers entirely dependent on the state for sensibility and intelligence. The symptoms are many and obvious: most prominent is the tendency to conflate government with governing, authority with leadership, and rule with submission.18 State-centric analytics commit addicts to a certain notion of the state, even to the extent of the state becoming the very fiction that we fear.19 Take for instance the eminent architect of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida, who conflated sovereignty with transcendence. According to Derrida, "sovereignty is in a certain manner un-historical, it is a contract made with a history contracting itself into the punctiform event of an exceptional decision without temporal and historical expansion. Thus sovereignty also withdraws itself from language."20 So it is: timeless and outside of history; moreover, there is, "no sovereignty without violence, without the force of the stronger, the justification of which—as the right of the strongest—consists in its power over everything."21 The sovereign has power over everything, including life itself. Rather than imagining the future in terms of democractic living, sensibilities, and formations of justice, state addicts leave us dependent on the state for means of expressions and terms of engagement. Their imaginary domains22 are thus entirely dependent on the state's projections. The state's memory becomes our own memory. Just as Orlando Patterson's social death thesis fallaciously endows racial capitalism and white supremacy as cultural progenitors of Black life, so state analytics such as necropolitics23 render life sans state, more often than not, chaotic, miserable and inauthentic.24 Within the same frame of social death, as David Brion Davis has argued, Black enslaved people have "no legitimate, independent being, no place in the cosmos except as an instrument of [their] master's will."25 Similarly, life sans state, as Hobbes declared in the Leviathan, is "evil, brutish and short." Yet, empirically and intuitively, we know better. If rules are not about norms but about discovering new forms of life, as Giorgio Agamben argues in The Highest Poverty,26 then, in thinking about the modern state and rule making, the ungovernable and ungovernability are theoretical spaces that can help us think about life and the politics of living wherein ordinary people and communities assert their own renderings of life and living rather than those of the state, capital and other dominions' terms of order. As suggested by the Ethiopian proverb, it is prudent to recognize those instances when subversion disguises itself as submission or obedience because those who are oppressed cannot always exchange "a slap for a slap, an insult for an insult," tear gas for tear gas.27 Just as sounds are not always heard and fights are not always open, in the shadow of the real and Active narrations of governmentality and the awesome powers of the state, there have always lurked individuals and communities embodying governing's unsuccessful inscriptions and conscriptions. Individuals and communities remain frequently unscripted and unimpressed by the state, even as they live under constant surveillance and suppression. Life goes on, sometimes independently, all the while circumscribed by the so-called technologies of governing.28 In short, the analytical problem with ungovernability is not about empirical verification, but about the epistemological investments in political order and a modern ontological commitment to governability.29 This commitment to ruling conceals the fear of the ungovernable and ungovernablity from below. So even as we now understand that power is diffuse and relational (a la Foucault),30 state addiction ensures that; the state remains at the fulcrum of our understanding of political power31 and state reifification persists32—its promiscuous genealogy, its prodigious technologies, its capacious fantasies, and its monstrous realities.33 Within the context of an ever-growing global war on terror, the resurrection of works by the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt has granted little relief from our state addiction.34 If anything, his intervention further ensures that the specter of the elusive state is finally vanquished. In its place is a state more capable than the technologies it possesses, more intelligible than the apparatuses it readied, and more autonomous than the subjects it has claimed.35 Students of the Black Radical Tradition, however, are familiar with this phenomenon. Just as "every slave holder seeks to impress his slave with a belief in the boundlessness of slave territory, and of his own almost [limitless] power,"36 so, too, it seems, is the case with other dominions, including discursive ones. It is also the case that slaves did run away, and many ran away successfully! Because the state presupposes the ungovernable, it points to ungovernability as the reason for its existence and its capacious fantasies, justifying both, even as its very existence produces insecurity.37 But life as we know it is quite complicated.38 That we can speak of "governmentality"—as the conduct of statehood and a logic of governing—is precisely because complex personhood throws up ungovernability every time the state and other dominions mess with it. Population management is critical to the conduct of government precisely because the people have to be made into governable subjects. People have to be rendered governable because they are ungoverned as a precondition, and therefore are not legible to the state. It is not that our presence and complex person-hood incite governing. Rather, governing incites its prodigious technologies as it encounters life countering it or independent of it. Governing is a possessively jealous beast! So Rose, however famed he was, must be famously wrong! Throughout history, as noted, individuals and communities have always resisted modernity's state- building and rule-making projects. In addition to anti- state-building projects such as those by the hill peoples of Zomia (as documented by James Scott39), campaigns for bodily and community sovereignty, sometimes understood as forms of self-government, are well documented. These are often in reaction to or in anticipation of state-building and rule-making projects. Maroon societies are thus the embodiment of this refusal of rule making. James Scott characterizes the hill peoples as runaways and fugitives.40 In addition to these state-evaders, however, there is the motley crew of rule-evaders who elude rules and rule making that are outside of the state's perogatives. Runaways, border-crossers, gender-benders, and general nonconformists are such examples of failures of or resistance to codified practices of governing. These legacies of resistance,41 replete with women and men actively countering the many faces, structures, and technologies of violence, cruelty, and death, cannot be dismissed simply as nonsense. While we may never be able to completely escape state addiction and it would be foolish to stop interrogating the state altogether, the state's memory, however, must not be our only memory. Those who seek a more just present and future must, therefore, remain vigilantly skeptical of this affliction in order to recognize how others live, especially other genealogies and life forms that are independent of the imaginaries of the state and of capital.42 In The Terms of Order, Cedric Robinson calls for a social philosophy that rejects the political as an "ordering principle," maintaining that social order is folklore of the state, political order is an alien concept, and social leaders, more often than not, are "capricious, incompetent and mischievous."43 To demystify social order is also to interrogate how in the West, the very idea of freedom is singularly wedded to the idea of an autonomous and rational individual, yet the collectivity always requires governing44 By pivoting to ungovernability instead of the naturalness of the need to be governed, we expose the unnaturalness and illegitimacy of order. People rendering themselves unavailable for governing trips up the system, more often than not, leading to crises of authority and further exposing elite incompetence and delinquencies 45 Be it in Ferguson or Syria, the ungovernable withhold both consent and legitimation, and, in the process, render the state and its allies more transparently incompetent, brutal, and imperial. How many years has it been since the United States commenced bombing the Middle East? How long has patriarchy desired to tame the proverbial shrew? The ungovernable is thus an empirical verification of the ever-present democratic sensibility, belying the state's and its enablers' claims of intelligence, overwhelming force, and the power of exception,46 not to mention the various economic, political, racial, or biological fantasies and life forgeries. As midwives of civil strife, the ungovernable are intent on impeding and negating the unjust peace of the organized practices that render subjects governable. What Toni Morrison calls "rememory,"47 particularly fugitive rememory, is a necessary tool in the evaders' and rebels' quest for wholeness, or what Robinson calls "the preservation of [an] ontological totality."48 As Robinson insisted in Black Movements in America, running away and community building in the form of maroon societies are powerful counterexamples of the conceit of slavery—the claims of naturalness of people as property and the arrogant assumption that a people, any people, can be controlled, dominated totally. Totalitarianism frequently fails for a reason.