Fugitivity Negative Supplement v2 - Michigan 7 2024 BDKLS

Intellectual Fugitivity v2 Neg Supplement
Notes
This is a negative supplement to help answer v2 of the Intellectual Fugitivity aff from the CFMP lab. It contains some additional evidence that can be used to beat the case, as well as some K links or pics that apply. This should be used in conjunction with the already existing files, such as the K Aff Neg, the k answer updates, and any neg files already put out.
Thanks to Zoe, Sophia, Smaritha, Ryan, Julia, Hermes, Eric, Aidan, Abel, and Aaron for their help with the K neg supplement files.
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Switch Side Debate Good
SSD allows for good-faith debate, while the aff model traps us in an echo chamber that makes us worse advocators. Debate reduces extremism and promotes racial justice --- it exposes students to perspectives that are foreign to them and increases critical thinking skills
Zhou 20 (Lawrence Zhou, “Why we should teach kids how to debate”, 10/25/2021, Acc 7/25/2024, https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/10/why-we-should-teach-kids-to-debate) 顏
This is perhaps the most contentious argument in favor of debate. Academic articles have been written criticizing switch side debate as a project of liberalism that contributes to the ideological maintenance of American exceptionalism by creating subjects whose public statements are separated from their convictions. The New York Times has even published an op-ed criticizing school debate competitions as creating closed-minded partisans because it teaches a “win at any cost” mindset. These views have merit. They should caution us from becoming devil’s advocates, especially in sensitive conversations. And the debate leagues around the country have created strong social norms against debating issues that are patently unethical like whether racism is good.
But they should not be taken as reasons against the process of debating both sides. Rusk and Razzak, writing in the Oxford Political Review, suggest that any alternative that does not force students to consider both sides of an issue only reinforces echo chambers. Switch side debate, meanwhile, increases the chance for good faith debates to emerge and helps strengthen your existing beliefs by helping you find weaknesses in them, both desperately needed in an age where partisanship has made good faith debate difficult if not impossible. This process of switching sides forces students who may never have been exposed to more leftist or radical views to evaluate them on their merits. It forces students to think about how to offer a defense of views they may disagree with, challenging previous strawmen they may have previously believed. Debate, then, provides an obvious mechanism for penetrating filter bubbles by exposing students to a range of views they have previously not considered. Finally, there is a worry about demarcating what counts as “debatable.” Some conservative debate leagues have deemed issues like critical race theory “undebatable.” Only the process of switching sides allows us to come to more robust conclusions about controversial issues that might otherwise have never been considered in the first place.
All of these benefits have led Robert E. Litan to argue for an approach he called DCI or “debate-centered instruction,” a proposal he outlines in his 2020 book Resolved. He argues that the skills of listening, persuading, and research that debate teaches is necessary to help heal the growing political divide and improve the quality of our democracy. He even goes so far as to argue that debate provides a way to moderate extremism, reduce vitriol in political discourse, and promote racial justice. I think Litan has the right approach—promoting debate as an educational model can do much for an entire generation of students by making them more resistant to right-wing propaganda. And Litan is right to focus on high school because I fear that teaching these skills in college is simply too late.
Predictability Good
Predictability is key to effective discourse --- the 1AC’s warrantless rejection of predictability is rooted in narcissism and a refusal to engage in critical discussion. Empirically, the embracing of predictability is casually correlated with happiness
Premuzic 19 (Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the Chief Innovation Officer at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and Columbia University, cofounder of deepersignals.com, and an associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab, “Why being predictable is actually a great thing according to science”, 12/20/2019, Acc 7/23/2024, https://www.fastcompany.com/90444591/why-being-predictable-is-actually-a-great-thing-according-to-science) 顏
For example, when you ask people about their personality, they will typically say that it really depends on the context or situation. “Sometimes I’m quite introverted, but other times I’m a real extravert.” However, when others think about them, they have no difficulties determining if they are introverted or extraverted. Most people will also tend to exaggerate how diverse and unpredictable are their tastes in music, food, and friends. We see ourselves as unpredictable free spirits equally capable of doing one thing or the exact opposite in any given situation, but that delusional fantasy is not shared by others.
It is also inconsistent with the facts: There is a repetitive pattern to our everyday behaviors. The main reason for this is that a sense of uniqueness tends to inflate our egos. It makes us feel creative, original, and interesting, and in our consumer society this signals higher status and sophistication.
Scientific research has also linked the need for uniqueness to narcissistic tendencies and alarmingly shows that the tendency to see ourselves as unique and special has been rising significantly during the last few decades, particularly among U.S. college students.
So yes, we are all unique, just like everybody else. Perhaps it is time to actually embrace predictability? In fact, psychological studies indicate that there are several disadvantages to being (and seeing yourself as) unpredictable.
First, people who think of themselves as more predictable and less complex tend to enjoy positive life events more.
Second, though a lot of organizations pretend to celebrate disruptors, creatives, and unpredictable personalities, the reality is that you are much more likely to get rewarded at work if you behave in more consistent and predictable manners. For instance, most people prefer to work for a boss who is predictable and consistent, to the point of being boring.
The reason is rather obvious: People want to avoid stress and anxiety in their everyday life, and few things are more stressful than an unpredictable boss. Bosses also prefer employees who deliver according to expectations, which involves operating within a well-defined model of talent or potential, with predefined behavipreors.
Third, there are innumerable benefits to understanding your default patterns of behaviors and typical dispositions. The only way you can successfully plan ahead in any area of life is to have an idea of what you are likely to prefer, think, feel, or do in the future. If people learned to predict their own behavior better, no matter how good, bad, rational, or irrational such behaviors are, more poor decisions could be avoided.
The more unpredictable you think you are, the less effective you will be at influencing other people. The naïve belief that you can control your reputation as you please and create whatever persona you like in order to make an impression on others, accounts for many disappointments in life, such as not getting a job interview or promotion, failing to impress an audience during a presentation, or not getting any likes on your social media posts.
Afropessimism K
Link
Fugitivity reentrenches colonization by assuming there is an ‘outside’ and end to slavery -- slaveness is anywhere and everywhere for the black
Sexton, 10 -- Professor, African American Studies School of Humanities. Ph.D. [‘The Curtain of the Sky’: An Introduction. Critical Sociology, 36(1), 11-24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920509347136] //cia
To suffer the loss of political sovereignty, the exploitation of labor, the dispossession of land and resources is deplorable; yet, we might say in this light that to suffer colonization is unenviable unless one is enslaved. One may not be free, but one is at least not enslaved. More simply, we might say of the colonized: you may lose your motherland, but you will not ‘lose your mother’ (Hartman 2007). The latter condition, the ‘social death’ under which kinship is denied entirely by the force of law, is reserved for the ‘natal alienation’ and ‘genealogical isolation’ characterizing slavery. Here is Orlando Patterson, from his encyclopedic 1982 Slavery and Social Death:
I prefer the term ‘natal alienation’ because it goes directly to the heart of what is critical in the slave’s forced alienation, the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations. It also has the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It was this alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him [sic] by the master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master wished. And this was true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated. (Patterson 1982: 7–8)
True even if elevated by the income and formal education of the mythic American middle class, the celebrity of a Hollywood icon, or the political position of the so-called Leader of the Free World. 4 The alienation and isolation of the slave is not only vertical, canceling ties to past and future generations and rendering thereby the notion of ‘descendants of slaves’ as a strict oxymoron. It is also a horizontal prohibition, canceling ties to the slave’s contemporaries as well. Reduced to a tool, the deracination of the slave, as Mannoni and Fanon each note in their turn, is total, more fundamental even than the displacement of the colonized, whose status obtains in a network of persecuted human relations rather than in a collection or dispersal of a class of things. Crucially, this total deracination is strictly correlative to the ‘absolute submission mandated by [slave] law’ discussed rigorously in Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 Scenes of Subjection: the slave estate is the most perfect example of the space of purely formal obedience defining the jurisdictional field of sovereignty (Agamben 2000). Because the forced submission of the slave is absolute, any signs whatsoever of ‘reasoning … intent and rationality’ are recognized ‘solely in the context of criminal liability’. That is, ‘the slave’s will [is] acknowledged only as it [is] prohibited or punished’ (Hartman 1997: 82, emphasis added). A criminal will, a criminal reasoning, a criminal intent, a criminal rationality: with these erstwhile human capacities construed as indices of culpability before the law, even the potentiality of slave resistance is rendered illegitimate and illegible a priori.
The disqualification of black resistance by the logic of racial slavery is not unrelated to the longstanding cross-racial phenomenon in which the white bourgeois and proletarian revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic can allegorize themselves as revolts against slavery, while the hemispheric black struggle against actually existing slavery cannot authorize itself literally in those same terms. The latter must code itself as the apotheosis of the French and American revolutions (with their themes of Judeo-Christian deliverance) or, later, the Russian and Chinese revolutions (with their themes of secular messianic transformation) or, later still, the broad anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America of the mid-20th century (with their themes of indigenous reclamation and renaissance). 5 One of the defining features of contemporary political and intellectual culture remains this metaphoric transfer that appropriates black suffering as the template for non-black grievances, while it misrecognizes the singularity of black struggles against racial slavery and what Loïc Wacquant calls its ‘functional surrogates’ or what Hartman terms its ‘afterlife’. Put differently, ‘the occult presence of racial slavery’ continues to haunt our political imagination: ‘nowhere, but nevertheless everywhere, a dead time which never arrives and does not stop arriving’ (Marriott 2007: xxi). Hartman’s notion of slavery’s afterlife and Wacquant’s theorization of slavery’s functional surrogates are two productive recent attempts to name the interminable terror of slavery, but we are still very much within the crisis of language – of thinking and feeling, seeing and hearing – that slavery provokes. Both scholars challenge the optimistic idea of a residual ‘legacy’ of slavery, precisely because it requires the untenable demarcation of an historic end in Emancipation. The relations of slavery live on, Hartman might say, after the death knell of formal abolition, mutating into ‘the burdened individuality of freedom’. The functions of the chattel system are largely maintained, Wacquant might say, despite the efforts of Reconstruction, preserved in surrogate institutional form under Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison. Slavery lives on, it survives, despite the grand attempts on its institutional life forged by the international movements against slavery, segregation and mass imprisonment (Davis 2003).
But what if slavery does not die, as it were, because it is immortal, but rather because it is non-mortal, because it has never lived, at least not in the psychic life of power? What if the source of slavery’s longevity is not its resilience in the face of opposition, but the obscurity of its existence? Not the accumulation of its political capital, but the illegibility of its grammar? On this account, for those that bear the mark of slavery – the trace of blackness – to speak is to sound off without foundation, to appear as a ghost on the threshold of the visible world, a spook retaining (only) the negative capacity to absent the presence, or negate the will to presence, of every claim to human being, even perhaps the fugitive movement of stolen life explored masterfully by Fred Moten (2008). We might rethink as well the very fruitful notion of ‘fugitive justice’ that shapes the prize-winning 2005 special issue of Representations on ‘Redress’. Co-editors Saidiya Hartman and Stephen Best are posing the right question: ‘How does one compensate for centuries of violence that have as their consequence the impossibility of restoring a prior existence, of giving back what was taken, of repairing what was broken?’ (Hartman and Best 2005: 2) That is to say, they are thinking about ‘the question of slavery in terms of the incomplete nature of abolition’, ‘the contemporary predicament of freedom’ (2005: 5, emphasis added). Yet, the notion subsequently developed of a fugitive life ‘lived in loss’ – spanning the split difference between grievance and grief, remedy and redress, law and justice, hope and resignation – relies nonetheless on an outside, however improbable or impossible, as the space of possibility, of movement, of life. Returning to our schematization of Fanon, we can say that the outside is a concept embedded in the problématique of colonization and its imaginary topography, indeed, the fact that it can imagine topographically at all. But, even if the freedom dreams of the black radical imagination do conjure images of place (and to do here does not imply that one can in either sense of the latter word: able or permitted); what both the fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black name for us, in their discrepant registers, is an anti-black world for which there is no outside. 6 ‘The language of race developed in the modern period and in the context of the slave trade’ (Hartman 2007: 5). And if that context is our context and that context is the world, then this is the principal insight revealed by the contemporary predicament of freedom: there is no such thing as a fugitive slave.
their desire for ‘intellectual fugitivity’ provides a false send of continuity and purpose, and the allure keeps them tethered to their attachments
Berlant 07, [Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, with a Ph.D. from Cornell, 2007, “Cruel optimism: on Marx, loss and the senses,”]
When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embedded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea—whatever. To phrase “the object of desire” as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what is incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality, but as an explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises, some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In other words, all attachments are optimistic. That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing or the slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent’s typical misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form (see Ghent).
“Cruel optimism” names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility. What is cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition different than that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject’s desire to temporize an experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss.
One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are problematic, in that investments in them and projections onto them are less about them than about the cluster of desires and affects we manage to keep magnetized to them. I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad. But some scenes of optimism are crueler than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalizing or animating potency of an object/scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place. This might point to something as banal as a scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, patriotism, a career, all kinds of things. One makes affective bargains about the costliness of one’s attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition. To understand cruel optimism as an aesthetic of attachment requires embarking on an analysis of the modes of rhetorical indirection that manage the strange activity of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling. I learned how to do this from reading Barbara Johnson’s work on apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of in

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