K vs K Aff Supplement - Michigan 7 2024 BFHR

Thanks to Amanti, Ava, Lucia, and Russell for their hard work on this file. Some additions will be in the patchwork supplement. Email khirn10@gmail.com with any questions or concerns.
Afro-Pessimism
Link – queer theory
Starting Points: Queerness as liminal subject vs. Blackness as object-status
Warren, 14 -- Assistant Professor of American Studies @ The George Washington University [Calvin, “Onticide: Afropessimism, Queer Theory, & Ethics,” p. 19-21] //cia
My analysis is predicated on the belief that ‘queerness’ is an experience of unfreedom and not an ontological position. Jackson rightfully critiques identity and argues, instead, for a rigorous examination of ‘identification.’ She argues that “queerness” exceeds identity and that queerness could be thought “as the ontology of blackness” (361). We might ask how anything could serve as the ontology of blackness? Queerness becomes a synonym for ontology itself (we might also ask, given this synonymity, what is not queer?). It is equated with the object-position of blackness and not the liminal form of humanity within the antagonism. Liminality and object- status are not interchangeable, equivalent, or synonymous. Frank Wilderson insightfully notes that any rider that we attach to blackness is a conceptual fallacy and results in nothing more than a “structural adjustment”—the attempt to incorporate blacks into the fold of humanity through the grammar of another’s suffering. The queer subject is constructed as degenerate and transgressive, but the fundamental distinction between the ‘degenerate queer’ and the ‘derelict black-as-object’ is that one possesses a grammar to express unfreedom and the other lacks communicability altogether.
We can approach this from a different angle: A person understood as “queer” could purchase a black-object from the auction block like his/her hetero-normative counterpart. In those rare instances where the black-asobject was able to participate in this economy and purchase a black-object as well, the black purchaser could, at any moment, become another commodity—if found without freedom papers or validation from a white guardian—the system of fungible blackness made any black interchangeable and substitutional. This movement between object and subject is not a problem for queerness, but is an unresolvable problem for blackness. This is the important difference between the two. Queerness does not inhabit the position of the object—which is the ontology of blackness. Blackness is much more than deviance; it is the object that allows the distinction between deviance and normativity to have any meaning at all. To equate blackness with queerness because of shared discourses of deviance, transgression, and perversity misses the “existential negation” of blackness. While we can talk about the non-normativity of liminal subjects, blackness does not travel within the Symbolic the way queerness does and must be conceptualized with different terms.
What, then, is queer about blackness? Nothing. In using the grammar of queerness to explicate the structure of blackness, we equate fungability with the repertoire of non-normative sexualities that constitute conditions of human suffering. In this sense, we get a nuanced interpretation of Hortense Spillers’s profound suggestion that under captivity “the customary aspects of sexuality, including ‘reproduction,’‘motherhood,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘desire’ are all thrown into crisis” (221). Blackness does rupture sexuality and gender in that it is (mis)applied. This creates something like personification, but in this case, it is the application of human qualities to a sentient object. Sexuality is dubiously appropriate because it belongs to the human, and the signifier “queerness” cannot sidestep this fact or resolve this problematic—despite its desire to exceed identity, sexual practices, etc. We do not have a proper grammar outside of humanism to describe the domain of “pleasure,”“desire,”“sexuality,” and “gender” for the socially dead object. This is part of the torment and dereliction of blackness; it is placed outside of life and its customary lexis. And this is what it means to inhabit the position of the “unthought” and the incommunicable.
Queer theory fractures around the black queer body and human-washes the experiences of quare bodies, sustaining the humanist frameworks that makes quare emancipation impossible.
Warren, 14 -- Assistant Professor of American Studies @ The George Washington University [Calvin, “Onticide: Afropessimism, Queer Theory, & Ethics,” p. 19-21] //cia
The term “black queer” is a philosophical conundrum, or problem space, precisely because it carries this antagonism, the ethical dilemma of humanism, within its discursive structure. It brings two crises into juxtaposition creating somewhat of a theoretical fatality, a devastating crime scene. At the site of this fatality lies a mutilated, supine black body we cannot quite place within the symbolics of identity, politics, history, sociology, or law. In cases like these, we put “theory” and “philosophy” into service to figure out who did “it,” what was the murder weapon, and what was the injury—if we can even call it an injury. This situation frustrates the researcher (researcher as detective, philosopher, and medical examiner all at once) in that he lacks a coherent grammar to make this suffering legible, the assaulting party is more like a structural phenomenon, and the fatality is a precondition of the world itself. In this sense, the fatality is rendered banal, diurnal, and quotidian, as it sustains the very field of existence.
The theoretical and philosophical instruments that we have to examine and explain this scenario—which I will call “queer theory” and “Afro-pessimism”—fracture around the “black queer,” endlessly encircling it, but never able to approach it. In fact, queer theory and Afro- pessimism are located in different philosophical registers, which are incompatible and irreconcilable. These discourses collide, or crash, at the site of the “black queer”—the black queer becomes a blind spot distorting the field of vision for both discourses, and the result is fatal. The desire to find synthesis and common ground between the two enterprises often results in theoretical misrecognition, false analogies, and impoverished ethics. The “black queer,” then, is theoretically homeless and vulnerable to the impact of discourses traveling at high velocity. Perhaps we ask too much of theory and philosophy. This essay meditates on this itinerancy.
What is seductive about queer theory is that it provides a grammar of suffering for this fatality. The metaphorical space of the closet, freedom from injustice, heterosexist violence, among other concepts makes queer theory almost irresistible to the theorist yearning for a grammar to communicate the horrors of anti-black and non-heteronormative violence. The horizon of queer communicability, however, is not that of the black—as the black-as-object is situated out of space, time, and the world itself. Can we address the being fallen off the map of conceivability? We depend on the grammar of queer theory to salvage this being, to reconstitute it within the logics of life and death (a redemptive “hodological space”). This temptation presents an ethical crisis because the grammar of queer theory is predicated upon the very dissolution of the being it is called upon to salvage. The “black queer” signifies a double-death, a redoubling of the internecine processes of erasure. Indeed,“queerness” is impossible without the derelict being of blackness—its grammar, object, and predicating “subject” emerge through the death sentence of blackness. Queer theory is always already in a relationship with blackness, but not as an “ally.”
We might think of queer theory as a particular humanism (a “closeted humanism”), even as it announces its intention to unravel, displace, and discredit the very humanism that sustains it. It is a disavowed humanism—a humanism that must sustain itself through technologies of forgetfulness, historical suppression, and reanimated/reconfigured social violence. This form of humanism, hiding behind walls of radical proclamations (“emancipatory meditations”), denies itself only to reconstitute itself in the final outcome. In other words, queer theory is caught in a tortuous bind that neither provides ethical relief nor emancipatory transformations for blackness; it parasitically feeds off of the black body and needs this mutilated body as its site of constitution. Many will argue that the queer is not a human, but ruptures humanity and becomes more like a “non-human” or an “anti-human.” For these scholars, queerness is inimical to humanism and presents a serious challenge of its presumptions. This, I would argue, is not the case. The fundamental assumptions about human capacity and space orientation are quite present in queer theory. The anti-humanist thread in queer theory is really a reconstitution of the liberal subject—a liberal subject that divests its privilege. Divestiture retains the old subject under suspicion and, at the same time, disavows this retention. Abnegation and divestiture are still entangled in the “sinews of capacity and power,” as Wilderson would call it; furthermore, only a “subject” situated in space and time, with certain entitlements, capacities, and privilege can surrender, or give up, privilege. It is precisely this “subject” that emerges from the antagonistic violence of humanism, and it is this subject that is inimical to the black-as-object.
Afro-pessimism refigures theory from the position of the derelict object. It acknowledges that the black-asobject is situated outside of space, time, and the world, and therefore, the black “does not exist” in the world because it lacks symbolic placement (Fanon). Blackness is pure object delimiting the boundaries between the human subject and its predicating verbs. As an object, it is fungible (Hartman) and accumulated (Wilderson), and lacks a coherent grammar of suffering. Hortense Spillers reminds us that the captive “is reduced to a thing, to being for the captor”, and that “identities,” or differences, are stripped from this being, neutralizing the multi- dimensionality of its flesh and reducing it to a homogenous commodity of exchange in a pulverizing libidinal economy (i.e.“body” as a unit of exchange). This, then, is the ultimate scandal or ontological violation of the New World: black flesh is reduced to devastating sameness, and becomes interchangeable, or fungible, within an economy of exchange. The violence of captivity expelled the African from Difference, or the Symbolic—the order of differentiating subjects—and relegated it to the vacuous space of undifferentiation. This is a space outside the differentiating function of the Father’s Name and his Law. The captive is pure object—a body without flesh (if we read Deleuze and Guattari through Spillers). This body becomes, as Hortense Spillers reminds us,“ a site of irresistible sensuality,” for the captor, but because this body lacks subjectivity, it cannot desire but is, instead, desired upon. It is this initial murder occurring “over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise,” that sustains the antagonism for modernity.
This condition of being expelled from Difference and reduced to the object-space of undifferentiation presents a crisis for Afro-pessimism that it neither set into motion, nor could it theorize away. We can call this the “double-bind of communicability.” Black suffering is illegible and incommunicable because it lacks a proper grammar of enunciation. Suffering belongs to the human; it is an inescapable feature of the ‘human condition.’ The “violation of the flesh,” however, is a murderous practice without a ‘proper name’ or any name that is recognizable within the Symbolic. Queer theory and its grammar of suffering fails the black-asobject here; its posture toward emancipation and freedom, do not fit the (non)ontology of blackness. Anti-black violence is, indeed, constitutive of the ‘object,’ but does this constitution occur uniformly? Do certain objects receive unique forms of anti-blackness— specific technologies of pulverization designed for particular objects? Are there “differences” between black-objects or are these objects homogenous? Fungability, although a productive way of understanding the crude object-position of blackness, presents anti-black violence as homogenous and predictable. In other words,‘difference’ is the province of the “human,” but without difference, we lack a conceptual apparatus to articulate the way antiblackness impacts objects distinctively. To claim difference would be to claim humanity, which is erroneous, but to insist on undifferentiation would make certain objects more vulnerable to forms of violence not easily recognized as anti-blackness (i.e. what we call ‘heterosexism’ or anti-gay violence might be a particular form of anti-black violence). This is the double-bind that renders ‘black queers’ non-existent in both registers of thought.
This is more than an inquiry of whether “black queers” are black. The issue of internal exclusion is an important issue that overlaps significantly with the agenda here and others have addressed this issue quite powerfully. The “black queer” cannot claim an ontology outside of blackness, outside the nonontological space of crude object form. If we settle the question, at least theoretically, and answer in the affirmative (black queers are in fact black), we still face the problem of grammar—a grammar of suffering. It is the particularity of injury that cuts the object in multiple ways, and this injury, or “suffering,” is compounded by the fact that the “black queer” does not exist either as a human-subject or a “distinct” homogenous-object. Any particular injury directed at this object is incomprehensible and unthinkable— symbolically and ethically. The “black queer,” then, is a catachresis. The problem I am laying out here is not merely the impossibility of folding the black queer into humanity (humanism) or the ‘community’ of objects (internal exclusion), but whether the injury directed at this being is registered as anti-blackness at all. The prevailing problem is that the injury sustaining this catachresis is so incomprehensible that it is doubly erased, and this is what I will call ‘onticide.’
Link – performance as resistance
The aff’s focus on “performance as resistance” pre-suppose black relationality and reproduce anti-black violence
Wilderson, 9 -- assistant professor in the Department of Drama and the Program in African American Studies at UC Irvine [Frank, “GRAMMAR & GHOSTS: THE PERFORMATIVE LIMITS OF AFRICAN FREEDOM,” Theatre Survey 50:1] //cia *edited for gendered language
A major conceptual framework that underwrote the conference was “diaspora,” so much so that a plenary panel and a roundtable were devoted to it. The conviction with which the concepts of diaspora and performance were sutured evinced a collective belief in the analytic integrity of this suture and a collective faith in the promise it holds for social change. A related theme of the conference was the impact of specific performances as sites of and strategies for local resistance. This included papers on the AIDS pandemic and community- based theatre; the politics of contemporary African performance in the United Kingdom; theatre as a mode of intervention in postelection, violence-torn Nairobi; dance and the representation of intra-African genocide; performers who refused to play Sun City during apartheid; and the transformative power of graffiti in the slums of Dakar.¶ The conference was seeking, not always explicitly, not always consciously, the grammar with which to address the ghosts that haunted it. But all too often it was seduced by an overvaluation of performance art’s sociopolitical effectiveness. Having delineated the methods, syntax, and social context of a given performance or performance practice, a speaker would make a leap of faith and assert a causal link between the performance and the emancipation of the black people who produced and consumed it—as though art was the very essence of, rather than an accompaniment to, structural change. Such assertions were typically hobbled by a mix of rhetorical registers, one analytic, the other sentimental—with the sentimental register going unacknowledged as such, and often hastily tagged on at the end of a paper or conversation. This substitution of sentiment for analysis mystifies instead of clarifies the grammar and ghosts of Africa’s structural violence, a structural violence that is not analogous to that of Asians, working-class Europeans, or Latinos. Attention to it problematizes the articulation between performance and emancipation. This easy, largely intuitive articulation of performance and emancipation was also manifest in the declarations of performers themselves. On several occasions, artists declared that they wanted to be known simply as artists and not as Africans or black artists. As with any demand that is charged with high emotion, this one was not always made with rhetorical scaffolding and extended explanation—in part, because such statements were often made during Q & A sessions or in the buzz between sessions. As a critical theorist, it would be easy for me to deconstruct these cries and demonstrate their dependency on outdated notions of a unitary self. Freud and Marx, to name but two, have long ago compelled us to come to grips with the partitioned “nature” of our existence. And Lacan pushed the prospects of self-knowing beyond hope of retrieval with his assertion that “the wall of language” guarantees our capacity for relationality while simultaneously severing us from the Real. There is no self to be known; hence, there is no artist whose status is free of the “taint” of race and place.¶ But if we think of this demand not as a wish to disavow relationality, but as a wish to be imbued with relationality, then something else emerges. Freud, Marx, and Lacan’s subjects don’t suffer from the violence of enslavement, which is an explicit interdiction against relationality; they suffer from having imbibed the mystifications of the ruling class (Marx), the ego (Freud), or the Imaginary (Lacan). There was something in the force of the performance artists’ cry just to be artists that resonated with the force that first turned subjects into cargo. Lest we think that this force is merely the grammar and ghosts of blacks in the “New” World, that somehow Africans of the twentieth and twenty-first century have an altogether different rebar of ontology, we should note Achille Mbembe’s argument that, once Hegel (as a placeholder for all the punishing discourse of the Maafa, or African Holocaust) renders Africa “territorium nullius,” “the land of motionless substance and of the blinding, joyful, and tragic disorder of creation,” even the African who was not captured was a slave in relation to the rest of the world, his or her freedom from chains and distance from the Middle Passage notwithstanding.3 Though this “free” African may know him/herself [themselves] through coherent cultural accoutrements unavailable to the black American or black Caribbean, s/he is [they are] positioned, paradigmatically, as someone unable to “attain[ ] to immanent differentiation or to the clarity of self-knowledge.”4 S/he is [they are] recast as an object in a world of subjects. “Even the status of free blacks,” Saidiya Hartman argues, is “shaped and compromised by . . . slavery.”5¶ Here, the prohibition against attaining differentiation or self-knowledge rests, in the first ontological instance, with a structural violence that removes black “people” from the world. The cry to be known and appreciated as an artist and not as an “African” or “black” artist operates on several levels, 

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