Moten K - Michigan 2024 KLAB

Moten Kritik --- K Lab 2024
Special thanks to the whole 2024 K Lab crew:
Meryem Anderoglu
Owen Chen
Shubh Doshi
Elizabeth Lai
Davis Liang
Skylen Lundquist
Paloma Oh
Maggie Shonka
Max Wong
Emma Yu
Please email joshharr@umich.edu if you have any questions!
1NC
1NC --- Shell
The AFF’s creditor-debtor relationship is not neutral, but a violent, asymmetric relation that results in the foreclosure of choice itself for marginalized populations.
Kim ’22 [Jodi Kim, Professor in the English and Creative Writing Departments at Dartmouth College, PhD from UC Berkeley; “PERVERSE TEMPORALITIES: Primitive Accumulation and the Settler Colonial Foundations of Debt Imperialism” in “Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries”; Duke University Press; doi.org/10.1215/9781478022923; accessed via University of Michigan Libraries, 07-12-2024] dliang
Debt as the Foreclosure and Effect of Freedom
The colonial and capitalist nexus of race, gender, and sexuality distributes debt and vulnerability to debt unevenly. This uneven distribution, or debt as governmentality, is what I call the necropolitics of the promise. The etymology of promise, from the Old French promesse, is a pledge, vow, guarantee, or assurance. From Latin, promissum is the noun use of the neuter past participle of promittere, which is to send forth, let go, foretell, or assure beforehand. Keeping in mind this temporal dimension of what a promise means and what it means to promise, I contend that the United States’ abandonment of the gold standard has ushered in a fatal double standard. Even as the United States rolls over its debts indefinitely, it imposes structural adjustment policies, austerity measures, and foreclosures on other debtor countries and populations. Variously labeled Third World debtors, subprime borrowers, and “Heavily Indebted Poor Countries” or the HIPCs of sub-Saharan Africa, these debtors are compelled to keep their promises, for failure to do so results in punishment and discipline. Some promises demand repayment more than others, and some must conform to the homogeneous time of repayment more than others.
As I have been arguing, the debtor/creditor relationship is governed not simply through the borrowing and lending of money but is animated and enforced by an already existing asymmetry in power relations. As such, debt indexes not only the state and sum of money owed but a broader social relation structured by violent disciplinary protocols compelling the indebted to conduct themselves in a manner that will maximize the likelihood of repayment. In this sense, to be indebted is not simply to owe money. It is to inhabit a subjectivity that robs one of the possibility of having multiple futures, multiple ways of conducting oneself and being in the world. This, then, is the relationship between debt and time; debt neutralizes time so that it conforms to the homogeneous time of repayment.55 Writing on the ascendance of neoliberalism and the debt economy since the 1970s, and following Friedrich Nietzsche as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on Christian theology’s notion of indebtedness and guilt derived from original sin, Maurizio Lazzarato observes that unlike labor, which deploys our physical and intellectual abilities, the credit relation mobilizes the debtor’s morality, mode of existence, and ethos. What the debt economy thus exploits and appropriates is not simply chronological labor time but also crucially nonchronological time, meaning time as action, choice, decision, or a wager on the events and forces that make action and choice possible in the first place.56 Indeed, as Curtis Marez writes, debt colonizes the future, “tying present activities to plans for servicing its imperitives . . .”57 Precisely because debt forecloses multiple possible futures in this way, it is not, as I observed earlier, reducible to regimes of labor. This is the case whether one is economically or affectively indebted, for both forms of debt demand continual repayment.
Indeed, whole nations and populations of the world have been saddled with permanent debt and cannot liberate themselves from the debt bind.58 They are subjected to what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls “credit-baiting,” and what Miranda Joseph more recently has called a “pedagogy of ‘entrepreneurial’ subjectivity.”59 On a broader level, in a critique of development discourse and the presumption that it is only driven by an economic rationality, Sylvia Wynter writes of “the phenomenon of the debt burden, whose oracular mechanism transfers wealth steadily from the South to the North, from the inner cities to the suburbs, and intensifies a systematic misallocation of resources.”60 Wynter uses the term oracular and italicizes it to emphasize the systemic rather than purely economic nature of this transfer of wealth. The debt burden, in other words, is not simply economic. More fundamentally, the indebted, that is to say the “underdeveloped,” are also marked with a metaphysical lack through the epistemological or what Wynter calls the “culture-systemic” logic of the North/West. So the debtor/creditor relation is determined not by economics but rather predetermined by the broader culture-systemic valence that constitutes “the a priori premises of the discourse of economics itself.” As such, the solution to this problem in which economic underdevelopment is presumed to be merely an epiphenomenon of a deeper metaphysical lack cannot be an economic one that follows the path to greater “development.” Rather, Wynter proposes that the only viable strategy is an epistemological revolution.61
This epistemological revolution would lay bare how the culture-systemic order of the Global North effects a sleight of hand. Indeed, we witness a role reversal in which the actual debtors have transmogrified into creditors, and vice versa. As Frantz Fanon writes, “Europe is the literal creation of the Third World.”62 That is, insofar as what was violently extracted from the Global South (via colonialism, racial chattel slavery, and labor exploitation) made possible the riches that developed the Global North, we must ask: Who owes what to whom? The Global North owes a huge debt to the world that created it. Yet the afterlife of colonial plunder persists through the neocolonial policies, for example, of institutions like the IMF and World Bank, whose officials are “the conquistadors of today.”63 For persons and places marked by a debt that “cannot be settled even with death,” what is a debt?64 As I see it, debt in this instance is itself both a relation and instrument of violence converted by the strange math of militarist settler imperialism and racial capitalism into a promissory note that binds for some but not for others. To promise, and to be promised, can mean radically different things depending on where the debtor, whether a nation or an individual, is located within asymmetries of power that are at once shifting and enduring.
[Links]
Property law and ownership claims reinforce the racialized flows of capital and enforces debt---whiteness acts as a veneer for legal relationships exclusively afforded to white people while excluding Black relationality.
Karuka ‘19 [Manu Karuka, Associate Professor of American Studies at Barnard College. Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad, Jan. 2019, Accessed Jul. 12.]//max
Was this the emancipation of the enslaved, or was it the emancipation of capital? Shareholder whiteness is a cover for law-breaking, an enfranchisement of whiteness over Indigenous and Black modes of relationship. Corporations slithered between legal conceptions of “real” person and “collective aggregate” in ways that allowed them to capture legal and political rights while shirking responsibilities and obligations. The context for these maneuvers was a historical transformation of the concept of personhood and the emergence of the singular individual, harnessing the idea of free labor to the idea of free trade as constituent elements of liberal imperialism.23 By delinking from claims on actual existing assets, which represent the capital of a corporation, and instead organizing around future claims on corporate assets, the share, in the present moment, multiplies the capital in circulation for a given set of tangible assets, such as land, resources, or labor. As these fictitious capitals developed, they were reified and fetishized as things in their own right, and capital itself began to be understood as equally productive as labor. In the United States, this “fetishization of money capital,” the basis of the dominance of market ideologies beginning in the midnineteenth century, grew out of interactions with fetishized whiteness, and the corresponding dominance of nationalist myths of frontier and lost-cause masculinities. Once slave property claims were removed from the balance 160 • c h a p t e r 8 sheet, property claims in future revenues became depersonalized and increasingly immaterial, seeming to take on a personality of their own. The withdrawal of capitalists from the production process, henceforth to be supervised by managers, facilitated the development of shares and other forms of credit, but it also reflected the large-plantation model of management by overseers. The modern corporation bears traces of the antebellum plantation.24 Against an emerging ideal of “shareholder democracy,” corporate power increasingly emphasized managers and directors, technocrats and experts, over a democracy of property owners. Shifting accountability from public governance to the structures of corporate capitalism, shareholder democracy involved a concentration of economic and political power, transforming relationships within and beyond whiteness, splitting the ownership of industrial capital from money capital, multiplying the actual assets of a corporation. A divide between those with rights in the corporation, and those who “are merely ‘owed’,” reflects a divide in whiteness, between the technocratic administrators of racial and colonial capital, and the beneficiaries of imperialist futures. Capturing and controlling corporate assets as common property would fail to resolve the colonial and racial contradictions that shape corporate assets. Railroad unions that actively excluded Black workers from membership and employment, sometimes striking to demand the elimination of Black workers, fulfilled shareholder whiteness.25 In the post-emancipation era, corporate property was defined through legislation and judicial reasoning, rated and regulated by state institutions, the sanctity of individual property claims upheld, in the final instance, by the police and the army. Compulsory Black labor, justified by notions of Black indebtedness to the United States, shaped a transition to a new racial regime. This transition took place in a context of mass white terrorism under state sanction; Ida B. Wells pointed to the legal impunities of racist violence as a constituent feature of the law itself. Expansion of police powers informed the Indian Appropriations Act, passed by Congress in March 1871, in which Congress declared that it would unilaterally suspend the treaty process with tribal nations, thereby evacuating the international diplomatic protocols governing the U. S. “national” interior. While the United States continued to acknowledge the presence of “independent tribes, nations, or powers” it would not recognize these as distinct political actors “within the territory of the United States,” expanding the scope and claims of the federal government.26 S h a r e hol de r W h i t e n e s s • 161 While the United States was suspending diplomatic relations with Indigenous nations, a debate over the legal status of corporations was shaped, in part, by relations of debt. Amidst land grants to railroad corporations, and a growing international market in railroad securities, U. S. courts began to reconceive the corporation as an entity apart from its shareholders, focusing on the terms of contract between the corporation and its shareholders. If the corporation was a person, it was indentured to its shareholders. This was a very different form of debt than the racial and civilizational debt invoked to valuate Indigenous and Black modes of relationship. Corporate debt was, instead, an enabling sort of debt.27
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.
Lesjak 19 [Carolyn Lesjak, professor and chair of the Department of English at Simon Fraser University, 2019, “The Perils of the Present, Theory, and the University,” American Studies, Vol. 64, No.4, jstor, pgs. 515-531]
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 i

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