Bad Education Supplement - Michigan 7 2024 KLAB

AFF Supplement---Bad Education
2AC---Cruel Optimism
Conceptualizing a future of liberation for queer folk results in a cruelly optimistic attachment of progress that is scripted by heteronormative temporalities.
Paszkiewicz ’22 -- [Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (Associate Professor in English and Film Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands), “Tipped over, but still growing’: Cruel Optimism and Queer Temporalities in The Florida Project,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 39:1, 139-169, DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2020.1819731, accessed 07-24-24 (2022)] eyu
The relationship between Berlant’s investment in the idea of the normal as a utopian desire mediated through and reflected in popular culture (which can be traced back to ‘Sex in public’),21 and her later reflection on the rise of an economic precarity that cuts across different identity markers in Cruel Optimism, deserves further, more nuanced attention. As Sianne Ngai observes in her incisive reading of the latter book, Berlant’s critique of the normative fantasy of the good life is deeply informed by her earlier work on sexuality, exemplifying ‘how queer theory, still regarded by many as a minoritizing-only discourse whose “proper object” must be limited to sex and issues related to sexual object choice, can directly contribute to debates about the universalizing concept of “precarity”’ (2013). Berlant’s reflection on the painful, injurious or, one could say, ‘negative’ attachments in contemporary social, cultural and political life aligns her work with the antisocial paradigm in queer studies, and the exploration of negativity that followed, as illustrated by Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman and, in more recent discussions of negative affect (though with a number of notable differences), by Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Heather Love and Sianne Ngai, among many others.22 More specifically, one could relate Berlant’s cruelly optimistic orientation toward the future, in a time when the fantasies of ‘upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy’ are fraying, to the heteronormative temporal regimes in Western cultures examined by these scholars. Writing in the context of the 1980s at the peak of the AIDS crisis in the United States, Bersani scrutinizes how the disease was discursively constructed as a threat to the (white, heterosexual, middle-class) family unit at the heart of capitalist society, the ‘homosexual body’ having been opposed to marriage, parenthood and property. Rather than actively countering this stigmatization, and the identification of queerness with social failure, Bersani embraces the politics of negativity as a form of resistance to the heteronormative social order. Following Bersani, Edelman draws on the antisocial thesis to rethink the questions of queer temporality and futurity. In his influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman shows how the symbolic figure of ‘the Child’, standing in for the future horizon and the promise of a better tomorrow, is deeply rooted in the heterosexual nuclear family ideal and its temporal regime, ‘rendering unthinkable [ … ] the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations’. 26 Edelman celebrates queerness as invested in ‘no future’ – that is, as the threat to the ‘reproductive futurism’ 27 – refocusing, as Berlant also does, on the critical presentness and, in the process, challenging everyday notions of temporality (including linear narrative, teleology, progress, history, and so on).28 While coinciding with Edelman’s argument that we should focus on pathologized modes of living and the politics of negativity to undermine a normative future, Halberstam turns to ‘the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child-rearing’. 29 Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘way of life’, Halberstam suggests that queerness can be detached from sexual identity when it is thought of as ‘an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices’. 30 Queer subjects are also those who live outside the logic of capitalist accumulation (crucially, not only deliberately, but also accidentally or of necessity): ‘those [ … ] who live without financial safety nets, without homes, without steady jobs, outside the organizations of time and space that have been established for the purposes of protecting the rich few from everyone else’. 31 Thus, Halberstam’s work, like Berlant’s, allows us to trace the connections between queerness, ‘strange temporalities’ and the scenarios of survival in the 21st-century landscape of precarity.
The commitment to futurity is a cruelly optimistic attachment to the idealized narrative of progress that drives queerness into invisibility which causes psychic violence to queer bodies.
Fredenburg ’19—[Tara Fredenburg (Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Creative Writing from Rhodes College), “QUEER LIFE IS TRAGIC Lauren Berlant’s “Cruel Optimism” and Lee Edelman’s Negative Queerness in Life is Strange,” sprinkle: An Undergraduate Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies | Volume 12 – 2019] eyu
But such a reading of Life is Strange (2015) would be incomplete. This application of cruel optimism works as a personal critique that emphasizes Max and Chloe’s character flaws: they both need to learn to accept what they cannot control—particularly to accept what is fated. The impulse to deny the inevitable is crazymaking. This lesson of compliance may not seem dangerous on the surface, but it brings to mind one question: How should queer people address oppression? Surely not through acceptance. Maybe Max’s experience with cruel optimism is not exclusive to her desire for Chloe but also applies to her potential to adhere to heterosexist reproductive futurity. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, critical theorist Lee Edelman (2004) asserts that queerness is the antithesis of reproductive futurity, which is the habitual reiteration of oppressive practices that hold up hegemonic structures throughout time. Reproductive futurity imposes “an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations” (Edelman, 2004, p. 2). Because so many of our society’s institutions— especially the financial—rely on and benefit from the heterosexual, nuclear family configuration, the idea of queerness is systematically driven into invisibility. Even attempts at justice that aim to assimilate LGBT-identified people into cisgender and heterosexual society succeed only in recreating the nuclear family with slight changes. Edelman says this assimilatory practice does nothing to rectify the unjust expectations of heteropatriarchal society. Max is surrounded by pressure to comply with gendered expectations, which is exaggerated by Max’s nightmare in episode five, “Polarized.” In the dream, her teacher mentions Max was once “pure and innocent,” implying this is no longer true, likely as a result of her same-sex attraction. Her principal calls her a bad influence. Warren, a male friend who is the other romantic option aside from Chloe, is also present in the nightmare, guilt-tripping her for not loving him. This reveals the subconscious psychological impact of misogyny and heteronormativity on Max’s perception of herself and on the world with which she must interact. She is aware that she must uphold certain female expectations, like purity and emotional availability, in order to achieve the goals she had before gaining the ability to time travel. This is where cruel optimism strikes In “Cruel Optimism,” Berlant analyzes three literary pieces in terms of her theory. The first is an untitled John Ashbery poem about a secret, ephemeral queer moment in a suburban, religious neighborhood. She says the following: Cruel optimism about imminence[...]grows from a perception about the reasons people[...]do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to. Or perhaps they move to normative form to get numb with the consensual promise and to misrecognize that promise as an achievement. (Berlant, 2011, p. 23) The cruel optimism in this case is about suffering discontent or even damage in order to conform to the hegemonic system in which one is born. There are psychologically and physically enforced incentives to comply with what is “normal.” It is an achievement to comply so effectively that nobody notices that one is actively self-assimilating. Berlant is fascinated by Ashbery’s poem because it is the documentation of an “impasse” within the systematic regime of cruel optimism—of reproductive futurity. She writes, “Queerness substitutes itself for religious affect’s space of reverence: in the end, life is at the best imaginable of impasses[...]where the people are now lost but alive and unvanquished in their displacement” (Berlant, 2011, p. 25). The same can and cannot be said about Max and Chloe. The two are not damaging themselves or corrupting each other through the act of queer desire but are actually grasping for control under an oppressive heterosexist regime with little success. Berlant (2011) says that Geoff Ryman’s historical novel, Was, contains several stories that are all about “the cruelty of optimism for people without control over the material conditions of their lives and whose relation to fantasy is all that protects them from being destroyed by other people and the nation” (p. 33). Max has no control over what must happen, but she attempts to subvert the impending devastation by trying to gain the upper hand on fate. Her fantasy is that her time-traveling ability came about for the purpose of saving Chloe as proof that Chloe deserves to be saved. The “other people and the nation” are the systemic force—futurity. In Life is Strange (2015), cruel optimism on a macro rather than interpersonal level is the supernatural realm of endlessly forward-marching temporality which comes to represent Edelman’s systemic reproductive futurity. Max’s resistance against this forward-marching temporality is her ability to travel time. She reaches back to the past in an attempt to alter the present, opening up a kind of queer impasse in the now, and she procrastinates the reproductive future she expects to soon inhabit in favor of the love and commitment that she has for Chloe. But the universe gave and the universe has taken away. Her timetravel ability turns out to be catastrophic. The impasse must fail.
2AC---Identity Ptx/Frames k
Their attempt to solidify queerness with an identitarian frame reveals the desire for ontological capture and destruction
Edelman ‘22
[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 3, Duke University Press]//owen
Thinking alongside Antonio Viego, whose important book, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies, he cites at the end of the following quotation, Benedicto voices “a sense of wariness about how the disavowal of the urge to dissolution—an urge that would indeed attest to a universal condition of loss—runs the risk of conjuring, explicitly or implicitly, the queer of color as a figure unfractured by any death instinct, and in turn of repeating, if only by leaving them unremarked, ‘the themes of wholeness, completeness, and transparency . . . (that) provide racist discourse with precisely the notion of subjectivity that it needs in order to function most effectively.’”41 Proceeding to consider “the relationship of homosexuality to death,” Benedicto acknowledges, like Eric Stanley and Calvin Warren, that “the threat of literalization [the literalization of homosexuality as a figure of the self ’s annihilation] . . . does not fall on all equally.”42 Writing about Luka Magnotta, who “murdered, dismembered, and decapitated Jun Lin, a Chinese international student whom he allegedly met on Craigslist, and on whose butchered body he performed acts of necrophilia and cannibalism,” Benedicto compellingly theorizes Lin’s “forced racial migration” by Magnotta from “benign invisibility” to “the nonontological place of those whose lives do not matter, the site of blackness.”43 In this context Benedicto asks, “What . . . might prompt Magnotta’s racism other than the fear of seeing, mirrored back at him, reflected in the other’s skin, the condition of nonbeing that is, by virtue of his [i.e., Lin’s] queerness, also necessarily his [i.e., Magnotta’s]?”44 Lin’s racialized Asian body comes to figure the Black body’s racial construction as the catachresis of Blackness itself, as an ontological negation conceivable only by (mis)taking that catachresis for a literal (id)entity: the Black, whose body can thereby signify, in its apparent legibility, nonbeing. At the same time, as Benedicto implies, Lin’s figural “blackness” (borrowed from the equally figural Blackness of those who are culturally literalized as Black) serves to figure, for Magnotta, a queerness that is equally catachrestic and equally literalized in whomever a culture designates as queer. This literalization of catachresis, which turns nonbeing into identity, repeats, of course, the zero’s sublimation into a one. It also shapes the (mis)readings of No Future by Ruti, Coffman, and Cole, all of whom base their arguments on misleading literalizations. Ruti’s contention that No Future advocates “selfdissolution,” for example—despite the book’s repeated assertion that those a culture reads as queer are always “Symbolic subjects consigned to figure the Symbolic’s undoing” (emphasis mine)—finds its counterpart in Coffman’s claim that No Future refuses “politics, futurity, and the symbolic order.”45 Cole then reminds us that such an escape from the Symbolic is impossible: “The real, contrary to Edelman’s claim, is not a place that queers or anyone else could occupy.”46 No Future, however, makes no such claim; instead, it makes the very point that Cole adduces against it: “The figural burden of queerness . . . is that of the force that shatters the fantasy of Imaginary unity, the force that insists on the void (replete, paradoxically, with jouissance) always already lodged within, though barred from, symbolization: the gap or wound of the Real that inhabits the Symbolic’s very core[.] Not that we are, or ever could be, outside the Symbolic ourselves; but we can, nonetheless, make the choice to accede to our cultural production as figures . . . for the dismantling of such a logic and thus for the death drive it harbors within.”47 Each of these critics thus literalizes what No Future describes as figural. By discrediting the straw men they conjure, Ruti, Coffman, and Cole obscure the antagonism that follows from Symbolic division and defend a progressive politics founded, like politics tout court, on the literalization of identities (national, racial, sexed, etc.) essential to the political fantasy “that knowledge could produce a totality.” Such literalizations, insofar as they posit a figural designation as literal, conform to the figural logic that is always, in its essence, a form of misnaming. To say this is not to reify the distinction between the literal and the figurative, but to show that those literalizations themselves aspire to such reification. Inseparable from every politics and therefore mobilized by the right and the left alike, they function as catachrestic identities (the Black, the woman, the alien, the queer) to give local habitation and a name to what, as nonbeing, undoes identity. We might call them, therefore, id-entities: entities, ones, created to embody the libidinal danger of the id’s resistance to the conscious subject’s “being”; entities called into being to be excluded as manifestations of nonbeing. The right repeats this ontological exclusion (which pertains to impossibility) in the form of a social exclusion (which pertains to prohibition). It generates for itself the enjoyment of exclusion by excluding embodiments of enjoyment from the social totality it promotes. The left, pursuing a different path toward the goal of totalization, normalizes the social identities of those produced to embody “nothing”—affirming the positivization that turns the zero into one—as part of an inclusive community whose coherence, in this like its right-wing counterpart’s, excludes the zero of jouissance it rests on nonetheless. Whatever figures that jouissance (the racist, the fascist, the homophobe) persists as a threat to community. To put this somewhat differently: politics functions allegorically, turning the social relations among persons into relations among types of persons (citizen and noncitizen, for example), some of whom come to stand in for the undoing of personhood as such. Once literalized, these identities permit us to know and to regulate a social body whose totality requires the exclusion of those id-entities that materialize ab-sens.48 As Judith Butler observes, “The question of who and what is considered real and true is apparently a question of knowledge. But it is also, as [Michel] Foucault makes plain, a question of power.”49 Allegory, as the figure of the knowledge achieved by negating, through narrative sequence, irony’s negation of determinate sense, expresses, as Walter Benjamin writes, “the voluptuousness with which significance rules, like a stern sultan in a harem of objects.”50 In its “voluptuous” display of power, allegory conjures the meaningfulness that irony empties out, proposing, through the temporal movement between past and present, between then and now, the possibility of arriving at knowledge, or, in Benjamin’s phrase, at “the ‘opening of the eyes.’”51 Insofar as it positivizes irony, though, by resolving it into sense, allegory itself is a figure of the irony it means to sublimate. Paul de Man expresses this cryptically: “To say then, as we are actually saying, that allegory (as sequential narration) is the trope of irony (as the one is the trope of zero) is to say something that is true enough but not intelligible.”52
2AC---AT: Affect
Placing faith in affect is anti-black---it presumes a myth of relationality that obscures fungibility AND papers over the violence that strips black linguistic transgression of transformative capacity.
Palmer 17, writer and PhD candidate in African American studies at Northwestern University. (Tyrone S., Fall 2017, “’What Feels More Than Feeling?’: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect”, Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 pg. 36-38, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.2.0031)
Perhaps the most overt instantiation of this resistance to difference can be found in the introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, where Gregg and Seigworth position affect (theory) as a transcendent force that allows us to move beyond the body’s “seeming surface-boundedness” by theorizing “bodies defined not by an outer skin-envelope . . . but by their potential to reciprocate or co-participate in the passages of affect.”31 One can interpret this as a gesture toward, and a moving-beyond, the “surface-boundedness” of race, in general, and blackness in particular, which is always already inscribed onto the skin. Implicit in much of the work within affect theory—even that which explicitly engages “race”32—is that an understanding of affect is central to moving beyond static conceptions of racial difference.
In her essay “Affective Economies,” Sara Ahmed mobilizes a Marxist framework in order to consider the ways in which affects/emotions circulate between bodies and objects. She argues that “emotions are not simply ‘within’ or ‘without’ . . . emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities . . . through the very intens

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