Turns solvency—framing the aff as counter-hegemonic makes the aff cooptable and containable

I will suggest that hegemony—and the political imperatives it generates—gets it backwards. Privileging hegemony and understanding movements based on their capacity to confront this hegemony leads into a trap. Hegemony is about the production of common sense, and the ways in which dominant institutions use this common sense to maintain their hold on us. So isn’t counterhegemony just a different common sense? Is it possible that the imperative of counterhegemony reproduces the problems of discipline and homogenization that the new social movements seemed to be disrupting? If one assumes a need for unity, is one asking social movements to reify themselves?

I will argue that representation isn’t simply the way social movements advance their aims by explaining themselves, but also a dangerous trap that makes them amenable to judgment, containment, and absorption. It naturalizes a particular way of conceiving social movements where ‘aims’ either exist from the outset or are formed as the social movement ‘matures’. But is it possible to orient ourselves to social movements without reifying representations of them? Without representing them ourselves? How else would it be possible to think about them? From the perspective of hegemony and the state, social movements that do not represent themselves may be simply unintelligible. Or, they maybe intelligible only in negative terms, as an amorphous ‘outside’ that disrupts, subverts and resists but has no positive content. Can one think about their positivity in ways that don’t reify them? Are there practices that are not geared towards representation and intelligibility, and can they be thought without resorting to merely negative terms (the non-representative, the unintelligible)? Are representation and coherence coextensive with intelligibility? What would it mean to think about social movements that aren’t advancing any claims or demands at all?