Afropessimism Updates - Michigan 2024 CCFMP

Afropessimism Updates—CFMP
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Link—Omission—1NC/2NC
Omission of Blackness from the 1AC is a voting issue.
McDougall, 19—University of California, Irvine (Taija, “Left Out: Notes on Absence, Nothingness and the Black Prisoner Theorist,” Anthurium, 15(2): 8, 1–10, dml)
Enforcement of nothingness yet again presents us uncomfortable theoretical terrain. This nothingness, firstly, is distinct from the nothing in the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ Yet, this question spurs on its inverse: ‘why is there nothing rather than something?’ This nothingness made visible in the references of Anti-Oedipus should be conceived of as an instant, an opening into both possibility and impossibility where something should be but is not. We could envision this nothingness as a bounded and bracketed omission and a void that could pull everything into its orbit. Omission in the case of the nothingness found in Deleuze and Guattari’s book is key; it is where something could have been, but is not. Moreover, it is where something should have been but is not.
Omission in this case can and should be understood as concomitant with the violence of anti-blackness. The opening of a space for an omission to then occur, a rendering into blankness, is not the opening of multiple possibilities for integration into the structure, practice and politics of citation, but rather as nothingness, a strange echo of partus sequiter ventrem. The blank space strangely visible in the text is not an erasure, which would suggest there was something there before that had been removed, blotted out, papered over or scrubbed away. Instead we might view the blankness, the nothingness as an irresistible vacuum, a black hole. It presents us with a peculiar puncture in the fabric of thought, which could pull everything into its orbit, which could deform everything around its edges. These edges around the nothingness of the missing citation, the nothingness that Jackson is considered if we follow the logic of even an unconscious disavowal of his work.
On the side of enforcement, the bounding and bracketing are the limits of the anti-black world that press in upon what it perceives as nothing. According to the structures and strictures of liberal humanism, the being Jackson should be present, but we are faced with a situation in which this being is not. The prisoner Jackson should be present, but is not, even in their documentation. Thus, the theorist Jackson should be present, but is not. His status as a nothing in the gaze of the world, a criminal in the gaze of the prison, is held this way. Attempts to be brought into the world, into the human fold, into the world outside the prison, fail repeatedly. The various discursive apparatuses that Jackson comes up against in his text, such as the parole board, enforce his nothingness, just as the gap present in Anti-Oedipus enforces his nothingness in the sense of the theoretical world.
Connected to these problems of the enforced nothingness of the Black figure, the incarcerated figure, and the blank space where Jackson should be is the problem posed by Foucault’s claim that the prisoner is reduced to his paperwork. He writes that those caught within the carceral network are transformed into a case, a collection of documentation from parole applications, incident reports, evidence log sheets, what Foucault terms a “network of writing … a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them” (Foucault 189). Once again, to take this claim when faced with the situation of Jackson’s omission from Deleuze and Guattari’s text, questions and problems posed by their answers teem to the surface.
Just like carceral writing and documentation, systems of citational practice do work to capture and fix not only those subjects deemed worthy of authority, but also capture and fix the logic of the practice itself. Circulation and re-circulation are granted to those deemed to have the authority to midwife the reproduction of worlds around certain, specific bodies, pace Sara Ahmed. This should be extended further to reproducing the world around those whose bodies can be reduced to flesh, following Spillers, with that constant violent possibility of being reduced to documentation (64–81). Jackson’s omission and subsequent rendering into nothingness in the citational record of Anti-Oedipus comes into ironic confrontation with the network of writing. The disciplinary and control surveillance of the world, of which the carceral network and systems of citation are part, should afford Jackson documentation within the assemblage of structures, up to and including Anti-Oedipus. And yet, the absence remains. The bracketed and bounded space where ostensibly a node of the network of writing that would constitute Jackson as an object of the carceral gaze remains empty. Of course, other documents exist for Jackson, but he cannot be reduced to them.
Impact—Extinction—2NC
Saving Black people saves the world.
Towns, 22—associate professor in Communication and Media Studies, Carleton University (Armond, “The Reparations of the Earth,” On Black Media Philosophy, Conclusion, 164-165, dml)
In order for us to save the planet, to save us all, we must save Black people. This is not tantamount to saying we must save Black people first or even we must only save Black people, which seem closer to the U.S.-focused, racial reparations debates. Instead, it is to say, much like Rodney, that Black people are a global people, inseparable from the tentacles of Western colonial rule.57 It is also to say, much like Davis, that to consider how Black people are affected in the United States and to solve such problems extends out to solving other problems as well. For example, both Davis and Atiya Husain contend that to end the militarization of policing in Black ghettoes could impact U.S. militarized approaches to the war on terror, which also has inspired other country’s approaches to the war on terror.58 In a similar vein, to take seriously the raced, gendered, and sexual assumptions of nature in our climate crisis discussions would not only point toward Black people, but toward the role of the Western-led climate crisis on the lives and futures of non-Western locales that have been deemed unworthy of saving by the West. In such a context, racial reparations are not solely about U.S. Black people, even as they are about us; reparations become inseparable from considerations of saving our environment—the time-space where we all live.
Ontology—2NC
Theorizing anti-Blackness ontologically is necessary for Black well-being.
Diatta, 22—Ph.D. from Monash University's Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (Myriam, “Freezing ontologies: making visible the messiness of working with theory,” Text and Performance Quarterly, 42:2, 97-110, dml)
I close with a set of qualities I enacted to engage with complex, stirring arguments in an essay like Day’s. While the medium I use to demonstrate my approach is Day’s essay, what I discuss here is about the more everyday experience of being confronted by writing about “the ways the world is made up.” I allow performativity in practice to lead this research project. Traditionally, the purpose for a researcher to establish their ontological grounds is to allow them to have a sense of what they are and are not investigating, to ask how they know what they know, and to articulate the relationships between the components of the research project. Alternatively, I argue that the purpose of situating scholarly work in theoretical foundations can be beyond an abstract, haughty asking, articulating, or even sensing.
I assert that, for some, this project of establishing an ontological position is a highly personal, existential matter. In this essay, these concerns are not attended to with objectivity, distance, abstraction, or even a passionate dedication to the given issue. Jared Sexton argues, for Black folk, having one or not can be a matter of health and psychopolitical necessity. Some of us need a stable conception of how the world works to cling to precisely because of its everyday incoherence and its tortured logic. Knowing the world is first an embodied thing (Diatta 45–46) that comes in the form of terror and illegibility—far before this knowledge is ever theorized on by scholars. Terror and incoherence can serve as “structures of feeling” in order to think critically (Sexton). Finding a worldview to stand on is important to this extent because we must also swiftly survive the structuring irrationality 1 that makes white life coherent (Wilderson). From my non-white, Black, Asian, Senegalese, Japanese, North American, Queer, immi- grant to the United States positionality, tugging at the threads of these kinds of “ontological” or “epistemological” frames matters at the level of existence; not only to the degree of asking or articulating. The process of naming worldviews in this essay is for survival, not primarily in terms of physical persistence, but at the level of consciousness. In this work, it is specifically through an understanding of white supremacist structures (i.e. Anti-Indi- geneity, Anti-Blackness, etc.) that some sense can be made of our complex positionalities.
AT: Folk Politics
Labeling us as “folk politics” and expecting us to forward positive demands for anti-capitalist organizing is methodological whiteness. Reject them for epistemological racism.
Van Milders, 21—Assistant Professor in Critical Security Studies at the University of Groningen (Lucas, “Precarity/Coloniality,” Theory & Event, Volume 24, Number 4, October 2021, pp. 1068-1089, dml)
Although this argument is not without merit, its ultimate dismissal of a rather essentialized and reified conception of folk politics in favor of less anti-systemic politics and more state-based methods is in the end a form of methodological whiteness that fails to acknowledge lasting contribution that these politics—which are indeed often steeped in decolonial, feminist, and indigenous types of knowledge—have made.16 Following Gurminder K. Bhambra, methodological whiteness “fails to recognize the dominance of “‘whiteness’ as anything other than the standard state of affairs and treats a limited perspective—that deriving from white experience—as a universal perspective.” 17 This is not to say that Srnicek and Williams do not criticize the subversive universalism of Eurocentrism and its relation to the so-called dark side of European modernity (i.e., the history of colonial dominion, indigenous genocide, slave trade, and colonial extraction) or that they do not recognize some the positive effects of folk politics.18 Yet the fundamental problem with their discussion of folk politics—which they argue has produced critiques that are “largely accurate”—is that it tends to enshrine these contributions as historical tactics that have either accommodated existing power structures that have corrupted the new left, or have remained marginal and therefore unable to trans- form society more broadly. 19 Although this is not the same as directly whitewashing the colonial and racial violence that continues to struc- ture the majority of working and living conditions in the non-western world—dismissing decolonial, feminist, and indigenous politics simply because they “aren’t winning” 20 is deeply problematic, for it contributes to the normalization of a discussion of Eurocentrism that fails or omits to account for its epistemological racism or indeed meth- odological whiteness. Without being firmly rooted in an engagement with coloniality, the discussion of folk politics—which as a term is itself deeply colonial 21 —leaves the argument as a whole fatally impeded from discussing the extent to which conditions of coloniality continue to structure global flows of labor as well as the waves of resistance against them. Indeed, the entire project seems to be premised on the goal of reinvigorating white western leftism. It is for these reasons that Srnicek and Williams regard folk politics as a welcome yet never sufficient step in overcoming the capitalist order. Their frequent refer- ence to anti- and decolonial movements thereby fits within a typical Eurocentric narrative of referencing decolonial, feminist, and indig- enous interventions into the operations of coloniality yet ultimately dismissing them for not heralding the monumental rupture of the capitalist order. Of specific importance for the present argument is the fact that their account of a future-oriented politics is one that does not shy away of making tactical use of state power, as theirs is indeed a project on the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism as opposed to dismantling the state as a fundamentally colonial institution that enables and maintains distributions of racial violence.22 On a theoretical level, their argu- ment is all but explicitly aimed at John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. Yet Holloway’s argument is by no means a naive, folk-political celebration of horizon- talism and localism. Changing the world without taking power entails starting from a more profound analysis of global capitalism and its effects on both the construction of the subject and the composition of class power. More than mere hyper-individuality, capitalism—through its emergence from colonial slavery and exploitation—has reconsti- tuted the subject in a fundamentally dehumanized form. Indeed, colo- nial capitalism was fundamentally a project of turning people into things. The subject is not just atomized and violently separated from its entanglement in the social world but also stripped of its dignity and capacity to flourish and live with dignity as a human being. Holloway therefore argues that a struggle that only frames itself as a positive one in terms of explicit demands negates the dehumanized conditions that determine the lives of a global surplus population:
To treat the subject as positive is attractive but it is inevitably a fic- tion. In the world that dehumanizes us, the only way in which we can exist as humans is negatively, by struggling against our dehumanization. To understand the subject as positively autonomous (rather than potentially autonomous) is rather like a prisoner in a cell imagining that she is already free: an attractive and stimulat- ing idea, but a fiction, a fiction which leads on to other fictions, to the construction of a whole fictional world.23
Although Holloway falls short in explicitly framing this negative struggle as one against the distribution of colonial and racial violence that has shaped and maintained the western world, his engage- ment and experiences with the Zapatista movement in Chiapas have profoundly affected and readjusted his Marxist focus on capitalism and class struggle. I will return to this in the last section of this paper. It will suffice to emphasize at this point that Holloway’s emphasis on autonomy—quickly sidelined by Srnicek and Williams—is not only necessary in fighting for a post-capitalist order, but also essential to facilitating the very waging of such a struggle in the first place. In other words, the difference between a refusal of work steeped in state-based methods and politics, and a negative struggle for autonomy waged from a vantage point that acknowledges and engages colonial and racial violence, is that the latter does not fail to capture the way human subjects are inhibited from raising demands by their own entanglement in a system of dehumanization. In other words, what seems to undermine the demand for a future without work is the fact that there is no political subject capable of raising this demand in the first place. Indeed, the distribution of colonial violence, which has relegated racialized others to the realm of negated humanity, is what characterizes the living and working conditions that have gradually enmeshed global surplus populations into stratifications of precarity. What is lacking in these recent calls for a future without work is there- fore not merely an acknowledgement that precarity omits any sense of future orientation (or indeed the notion of futurity itself) but also the awareness of decolonial, feminist, and indigenous scholarship that has highlighted and exposed the distribution of colonial and racialized violence within and through contemporary relations of labor exploita- tion. Untangling this nexus will be the focus of the next section.
AT: Fugitivity Bad/Webb/Shulman/Etc
Flash-in-the-pan transgression is good.
Mubimurusoke, 22—Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies, Claremont McKenna College (Mukasa, “Black Hospitality,” Black Hospitality, Chapter 3, 143-181, SpringerLink, dml)
‘This revolt’ is also an invitation to the other to observe not just the unethical world of antiblackness, but the more elusive ethical im-possibility that escapes that world and its worldliness; the invitation to be other than human escapes in fugitive moments like these and it can only be acknowledged in and through passing because of its impropriety. Sukie is not freed in this act, in fact, the condition of her unfreedom is brought into full relief, but there is something else besides her political unfreedom, that is, a fugitive escape. This is to say, the fugitive nature of blackness that cannot be contained, that which is a thinginess that transcends objectivity, is also traceable through the revulsion of the other that cannot bear to witness and yet must; and also in the transmission of a story of blackness doing the impossible, that is, of revolting from a position of non-being, if only for a moment, as escape; not freedom. The political conditions are never fully transcended but are instead highlighted in a flash; and that flash is a beckoning, an ethical invitation, for all to embrace black hospitality..
The ethics of Sukie’s transgression is where the political ontology of whiteness, the first yes, is transgressed, for a moment, by a second yes of black social fugitivity. Sukie is the transgressive host and the criminal stranger, as she is forced to welcome the other at the threshold, but she also brings to light the im-possibility of an unconditional black hospitality through a gesture at the social level that unveils the intangible and fugitive breech of decorum that is blackness. She is constitutively indecent and improper, and the impossible flashing of her black body vivifies this sordid ontology—which is just one of many names for paraontology. The act’s fugitive brevity is not a temporal iteration, but a logical anomaly, an escaping moment, where the object bears resistance to an idea of the human that cannot be reconciled with itself or its ‘other’. In this sense she welcomes her guests to the auction block—the black home —to the realities of black life, the impossibility of domesticity, with a curtsey and a threat. That ethical moment does not come to us, now, firsthand, directly, but escapes through the archive, through black social life, through Fannie, through Hartman, through the others within … the black home .
Again, transgressive acts of black hospitality do not take place at the political ontological level or merely in the symbolic register; instead, they expose the political in sometimes exorbitantly violent, but often mundane and everyday, acts of ‘welcoming’. These acts of black hospitality take place in common courtesy or violent contestation of the ‘Other’s’ violation, with different fugitive scenes of rejection in and by the black home . Most importantly we need to emphasize that these acts of transgression are not just irresponsible acts that serve to highlight the historical hostility aimed towards black bodies. Criminal blackness is the only way we can recognize the structural role of transgression in relation to the unconditional law of hospitality. Criminal blackness both gestures to an idea of criminalization that is affiliated with black people throughout history in an att

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