The alternative is an act of study that interrogates and disrupts the foundation of the university and the emancipatory claims the 1AC depends on. Only through opening up an alternative form of subjectivity can we overcome the 1AC’s drive for collective productivity that limit out alternative modes of existence.

Although it may now seem like another lifetime, the global Occupy Wall Street movements in 2011 showed that we were in a position to entertain the impossible in a way that had seemed impossible only a short time before the protests began.11 After all, who would have predicted Occupy Wall Street even two years before it happened? The Occupy movement and its offshoot, the Occupy Student Debt campaign, seem, to my mind, a powerful lever, in Derridas sense, with which to orient our thinking about the university and beyond precisely because they highlight the socially shared experience of indebtedness, whether in the realm of global finance or student debt loading. To speak of debt peonage is also, as the Occupy sites demonstrated, to imagine alternative forms of indebtedness and of the public good, in which current structures of debt would be inconceivable. As Richard Diensťs The Bonds of Debt suggests, the valences of indebtedness are multiple and cut many ways: they are forms of indenture, sociality, division, and solidarity, the privilege of the i% and the potential of the 99%. As Dienst writes, "[i]t is only in the experience of the insistence of indebtedness that one can keep faith with the need to be rid of it, and the desire to construct different bonds in common" (136). Likewise, to speak of a new kind of theory, as Horkheimer does, in which the critic s "profession is the struggle of which his own thinking is a part and not something self-sufficient and separable from the struggle" (216) is to imagine a future university in which current structures of thought would be unrecognizable, a future in which the university itself would have no future. Two recent approaches to and critiques of the university are instructive here: Stefano Harney and Fred Motens work on the undercommons, and the attempts underway in Canada, in response to the calls to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to Indigenize the university. In The Undercommons , Harney and Moten characterize the university in the United States as synonymous with professionalization and the project of enlightenment: professionalization, as they describe it, drawing on the history of colonization and the enclosure of the commons, is best thought of as "a circling, an encircling of war wagons around the last camp of indigenous women and children" (34). Precluded in this "encircling act" is any ability or desire to question the foundation of the university or to confront "antifoundation out of faith in the unconfrontable foundation" (34). No wonder, they write, that pragmatism and critical realism rule the day: "These loyalties banish dialectics with its inconvenient interest in pushing the material and abstract, the table and its brain, as far as it can, unprofessional behavior at its most obvious" (34). In the face of the university's refusals and limits, the only stance possible, as Harney and Moten put it, is a "criminal one" (26) in which subversive intellectuals work at once within and against the university to undermine its mission, steal its resources, and join with those who have been excluded - the shipped, the Maroons, the poor, the queers - to destroy it.12 Against calls for either the restoration or the reform of the university - the former epitomized by Fish's mantra to "always academicize," the latter by Readings's approach, among others - Harney and Moten want instead to sabotage the university, to leave it behind, and to reclaim in its wake its so-called waste, those who are excluded, whose labor escapes the enlightenment dictates of the university. For, at its broadest, the university's dictates privatize the social individual and, on the ground, they destroy any meaningful form of critical thinking. In this sense, the university has always been "in ruins," or, more accurately, an agent of ruin: professionalization is not only a "matter of administering the world, but of administering away the world (and with it prophecy [their term for a form of organization that is defined by acting in the world])" (36). As their notion of prophetic organization as opposed to institutional administration indicates, Harney and Motens project is not only a negative one: coupled with the necessity of working within and against the university is the need to work with and for an alternative, dissonant form of thinking that would no longer go by the name of theory.13 Along with critique and refusal, then, Harney and Moten shift our attention away from the university toward what they call "study," a form of intellectual activity which is continually taking place outside or beyond the constraints of the university - or, as their use of the term undercommons is meant to highlight, in a space that surrounds or forms the under-side of the university. "Study" is everything from being in a workshop to sitting on a porch to working in a factory together; it is the "incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities," the recognition of which "allows [us] to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought" ("Studying through the Undercommons"). Against the institutional structures of the university, the undercommons and the practice of study are constituted by the kinds of common bonds to which Dienst refers. Equally, the undercommons and the conceptual terms and tools that animate Harney and Motens vision of struggle and resistance are indebted to the Black radical tradition and specifically, as they note, to Black radical women.14 "To enter this space," Harney and Moten explain, "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 gives refuge, where the refuge gives commons" ( Undercommons 28). Crucially, this space not only contains and enacts an "alternative history of thought" but also an alternative form of subjectivity, which is "about not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it is about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood" (28). The title of Motens recent trilogy, "consent not to be a single being," succinctly captures the nature of this sense of dispossessed subjectivity. In The Undercommons , Harney and Moten liken this form of subjectivity to the way hobos would "ride the blinds" or hide between cars when they hopped trains in order to remain undetected. For them, "riding the blinds" embodies "a kind of radical, non-locatability," or "the impossibility of being located" (139), a kind of homelessness that is not solely about deprivation, but instead a recognition of the genocidal damage done by the embrace of home: "Homelessness," Moten acknowledges, is undoubtedly "hard." But, he goes on, home is harder. And it's harder on you, and it's harder on every-god-damnbody else too [...]. The horrible difficulties that the settler imposes upon himself are not my first concern, though in the end they are a real thing. It's the general "imposition of severalty," to use Theodore Roosevelt's evil terms, that I'm trying to think about and undermine. He knew that possessive individualism - that self-possessed individual, was as dangerous to Native Americans as a pox-infested blanket. Civilisation, or more precisely civil society, with all its transformative hostility, was mobilized in the service of extinction, of disappearance. The shit is genocidal. Fuck a home in this world, if you think you have one. (140)15 As the many figures of the undercommons attest, no reform or transformation of the university, however far-reaching, could in any way house the maroon or the "cosmic hobo," since their very being and mode of study embodies something that cannot be institutionalized, encircled, or enforced, that refuses the university as a "ministry of information," that imagines knowledge and the world otherwise.