They take an overly pessimistic approach to the role of debate and the university. Voting aff builds the connection between theory and practice as a unified force against racial capitalism.

While Robinson’s thought demonstrates that there are more productive ways to construct emancipatory knowledge systems, ones that do not revolve around disciplined categories for knowing the world, there is still more to be said about why the latter resonate: They are recognizable. We are all trained to think and categorize reality in this way. Breaking up is hard to do. But there is more, even for those committed to unthinking. There is the methodological concern that these projects by constructing different ways of knowing, if approached haphazardly, could end up replicating other forms of silence. How do we imagine, as Hortense Spillers does, the kinds of instruments we might use to “play” these sorts of tunes?54 First, we might address other attempts to play. Many Black studies compositions have been uncommitted to the playing of instruments imagined as necessary by Spillers and others and have thus been insufficiently attuned to the ways that racial subjectivities necessarily incorporated sexual ones, to the detriment of truly liberatory sounds. Not only were these initial compositions insufficient, but they also misread the Black radical tradition through a particularly Western “bodily” framing—ones that reified male identity as normative. Black thought in its most freeing manifestations might create a model that undoes projects of race, undoes projects of gender, so that what Wynter called “the human” might emerge. 55 There, too, is the conceptual concern that revolves around how expansive these models might be and/or how closed they should be. Does antidisciplinary work require permeable boundaries, and if so, where would we mark their conceptual limits? These are critical issues to be resolved. As a consequence, Black studies— insofar as it seeks to claim for itself the goal of emancipation—remains undone, unfinished. And depending on how one resolves the above concerns, it might be conceived as perpetually incomplete, if the task is to consistently comprehend the real. What remains to be seen is whether we can take the energies consumed by projects of inclusion and diversity and the impulse to frame intellectual work as contributing to silences at the core of Western traditions of knowledge, and replace them with a project that does not require such silencing, even as it engages these knowledges, à la Robinson. Part of that requires unearthing the deep philosophical basis of the need to respond to silences. Lewis Gordon writes of African philosophers and their approach to the question of erasure, not as a project of addressing silences, but from a deeper need to address the “disappearance” of ancestors who must remain in view, as they must inhabit our present as much as our past: For the African philosopher and intellectual historian, the narrative is about ancestors and their deeds and thoughts and their suffering. If part of their suffering was their “disappearance,” which may be in effect similar to the wrong of an improper burial, then the act of getting the past right is also a corrective act of justice through the resources of truth. It makes the role of the African philosopher, whether that philosopher likes it or not, more than secular notions of method and procedure, and it poses a challenge that transcends aspirations enmeshed in the dialectics of professional recognition.56 The way from here to there is less a question of intellectual capacity than it is one portending other kinds of concerns. Creating proper ways of correcting centuries of Africans subjected to “improper burials” has been sacrificed at the behest of the “academic” concern of professional viability. Disciplines have made “realizing ourselves” a professional liability. And thus the kind of reimagining that Gordon, Robinson, Wynter, and others suggest is deeply political and vivifying them requires resistance.57 The tools necessary for this reimagining require different kinds of training and modes of knowledge that resist the formations in which we find ourselves. As Lisa Lowe suggests, and as responses to our often misplaced desire to address silences reveal, there are many “matters absent, entangled, and unavailable” to practices founded under the rubric of formations devoted to academic study.58 One possibility for another formation comes from the oft-cited work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. In their reading, those committed to Black radical praxis should take our locations in the academy and convert them into “the undercommons.” Harney and Moten’s framing of fugitive Black study resonates as a place committed to the unthinkable and to the unthinking of disciplinary silences that, absent an undoing, will perpetuate the role they have played in the power structures that enslave us. It is only by creating refuge for those whose life was “stolen by the Enlightenment”—by creating a space to think that is free of the academic and disciplinary justifications for that Enlightenment knowledge project—that we can develop a sort of foundation to think anew.59 This must become the only meaning, the only relations of our presence in the university. The academy is nothing to us if not a site to perpetuate the tradition of spaces like the Communiversity, the Centre for Black Education, the New School of Afro-American Thought, and other, more recent formations.60 Yet it must be remembered that there is a danger to institutionalizing the undercommons. The undercommons is the space for thinking about the formation and connecting to existing spaces that animate other ways of being and existing; it is not the formation. The formation requires a different world.We do not simply oppose the silences. We recognize they constitute a reality. A reality we would like to change. But we do not need to address these silences, on terms set by the silencers, to change our realities. A new reality only requires us to take what was never here, in those silences, to enliven what is always there, in our consciousness of what is possible; our song.