Queer/Trans K’s

Assemblages- Puar

The alternative is assemblage theory – affective politics is the only way to avoid control society’s infiltration

Puar 7 – Professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University [Jasbir K., 2007, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Duke University Press] AMarb

Identity is one effect of affect, a capture that proposes what one is by masking its retrospective ordering and thus its ontogenetic dimension— what one was—through the guise of an illusory futurity: what one is and will continue to be. However, this is anything but a relay between stasis and flux; position is but one derivative of systems in constant motion, lined with erratic trajectories and unruly projectiles. If the ontogenetic dimensions of affect render affect as prior to representation—prior to race, class, gender, sex, nation, even as these categories might be the most pertinent mapping of or reference back to affect itself—how might identity-as-retrospective-ordering amplify rather than inhibit praxes of political organizing? If we transfer our energy, our turbulence, our momentum from the defense of the integrity of identity and submit instead to this affective ideation of identity, what kinds of political strategies, of ‘‘politics of the open end,’’≤∫ might we unabashedly stumble upon? Rather than rehashing the pros and cons of identity politics, can we think instead of affective politics? Displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly, audibly, legibly, or tangibly evident—the seemingly queer body in a ‘‘cultural freezeframe’’ of sorts—assemblages allow us to attune to movements, intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, and textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities. Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information. Further, in the sway from disciplinary societies (where the panoptic ‘‘functioned primarily in terms of positions, fixed points, and identities’’) to control societies, the diagram of control, Michael Hardt writes, is ‘‘oriented toward mobility and anonymity. . . . The flexible and mobile performances of contingent identities, and thus its assemblages or institutions are elaborated primarily through repetition and the production of simulacra.’’ Assemblages are thus crucial conceptual tools that allow us to acknowledge and comprehend power beyond disciplinary regulatory models, where ‘‘particles, and not parts, recombine, where forces, and not categories, clash.’’≥≠ Most important, given the heightened death machine aspect of nationalism in our contemporary political terrain—a heightened sensorial and anatomical domination indispensable to Mbembe’s necropolitics—assemblages work against narratives of U.S. exceptionalism that secure empire, challenging the fixity of racial and sexual taxonomies that inform practices of state surveillance and control and befuddling the ‘‘us versus them’’ of the war on terror. (On a more cynical note, the recent work of Eyal Weizman on the use of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Guy Debord by the Israeli Defense Forces demonstrates that we cannot afford to ignore concepts such as war machines and machinic assemblages, as they are already heavily cultivated as instructive tactics in military strategy.) For while intersectionality and its underpinnings—an unrelenting epistemological will to truth—presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, or, perhaps more accurately, prematurely anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever, assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming beyond or without being.

We offer this debate as a queer convivial gather, a becoming with, imagining an unpredictable becoming with rather than an overdetermined effacement of queer alterity, its inability to move or escape, which characterizes the status quo

Puar 10. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 19, No. 2, July 2009, pg. 168

Out of the numerous possibilities that ‘‘assemblage theory’’ offers, much of it has already begun to transform queer theory, from Elizabeth Grosz’s crucial re-reading of the relations between bodies and prosthetics (which complicates not only the contours of bodies in relation to forms of bodily discharge, but also complicates the relationships to objects, such as cell phones, cars, wheelchairs, and the distinctions between them as capacity-enabling devices) (1994), to Donna Haraway’s cyborgs (1991), to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘BwO’’ (Bodies without Organs – organs, loosely defined, rearranged against the presumed natural ordering of bodily capacity) (1987). I want to close by foregrounding the analytic power of conviviality that may further complicate how subjects are positioned, underscoring instead more fluid relations between capacity and debility. Conviviality, unlike notions of resistance, oppositionality, subversion or transgression (facets of queer exceptionalism that unwittingly dovetail with modern narratives of progress in modernity), foregrounds categories such as race, gender, and sexuality as events – as encounters – rather than as entities or attributes of the subject. Surrendering certain notions of revolution, identity politics, and social change – the ‘‘big utopian picture’’ that Massumi complicates in the opening epigraph of this essay – conviviality instead always entails an ‘‘experimental step.’’ Why the destabilization of the subject of identity and a turn to affect matters is because affect – as a bodily matter – makes identity politics both possible and yet impossible. In its conventional usage, conviviality means relating to, occupied with, or fond of feasting, drinking, and good company – to be merry, festive, together at a table, with companions and guests, and hence, to live with. As an attribute and function of assembling, however, conviviality does not lead to a politics of the universal or inclusive common, nor an ethics of individuatedness, rather the futurity enabled through the open materiality of bodies as a Place to Meet. We could usefully invoke Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘‘encounter value’’ here, a ‘‘becoming with’’ companionate (and I would also add, incompanionate) species, whereby actors are the products of relating, not pre-formed before the encounter (2008, 16). Conviviality is an ethical orientation that rewrites a Levinasian taking up of the ontology of the Other by arguing that there is no absolute self or other,15 rather bodies that come together and dissipate through intensifications and vulnerabilities, insistently rendering bare the instability of the divisions between capacity-endowed and debility-laden bodies. These encounters are rarely comfortable mergers but rather entail forms of eventness that could potentially unravel oneself but just as quickly be recuperated through a restabilized self, so that the political transformation is invited, as Arun Saldhana writes, through ‘‘letting yourself be destabilized by the radical alterity of the other, in seeing his or her difference not as a threat but as a resource to question your own position in the world’’ (2007, 118). Conviviality is thus open to its own dissolution and self-annihilation and less interested in a mandate to reproduce its terms of creation or sustenance, recognizing that political critique must be open to the possibility that it might disrupt and alter the conditions of its own emergence such that it is no longer needed – an openness to something other than what we might have hoped for. This is my alternative approach to Lee Edelman’s No Future, then, one that is not driven by rejecting the figure of the child as the overdetermined outcome of ‘‘reproductive futurism’’ (2004),16 but rather complicates the very terms of the regeneration of queer critique itself. Thus the challenge before us is how to craft convivial political praxis that does not demand a continual reinvestment in its form and content, its genesis or its outcome, the literalism of its object nor the direction of its drive.

Vote neg even if the 1AC is true. Their claims are part of a will to truth that fixes subjects in place and enables the logic of the war on terror. Assemblages are a prior question because they constitute the field of emergence for subjectivities.

Puar 7. Jasbir, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 214

Linked to this is what Massumi calls "ontogenetic difference" or "ontogenetic priority," a concept that rescripts temporality exterior to the sheer administrative units that are mobilized to capture the otherwise unruly processes of a body:

To say that passage and indeterminancy "come first" or "are primary" is more a statement of ontological priority than the assertion of a time sequence. They have ontological privilege in the sense that they constitute the field of emergence, while positionings are what emerge. The trick is to express that priority in a way that respects the inseparability and contemporaneousness of the disjunct dimensions: their ontogenetic difference.

And later: "The field of emergence is not pre-social. It is open-endedly social. ... One of the things that the dimension of change is ontogenetically 'prior to' is thus the very distinction between individual and the collective, as well as any given model of their interaction. That interaction is precisely what takes form."' The given models of interaction would be these bifurcated distinctions between the body and the social (its signification) such that the distinctions disappear. Massumi's move from ontology (being, becoming) to ontogenesis is also relevant to how he discusses affect and cognition and the processes of the body: "Feedback and feed forward, or recursivity, in addition to converting distance into intensity, folds the dimensions of time into each other. The field of emergence of experience has to be thought of as a space-time continuum, as an ontogenetic dimension prior to the separating-out of space and time. Linear time, like position- gridded space, would be emergent qualities of the event of the world's self- relating. " 2 7

This ontogenetic dimension that is "prior" but not "pre" claims its priorness not through temporality but through its ontological status as that which produces fields of emergence; the prior and the emergence are nevertheless "contemporaneous." "Ontological priority" is a temporality and a spatialization that has yet to be imagined, a property more than a bounded- ness by space and time. The ontogenetic dimension that articulates or occupies multiple temporalities of vectors and planes is also that which enables an emergent bifurcation of time and space.

Identity is one of affect, a capture that proposes what one is by masking its retrospective ordering and thus its ontogenetic dimension- what one was- through the guise of an illusory futurity: what one is and will continue to be. However, this is anything but a relay between stasis and flux; position is but one derivative of systems in constant motion, lined with erratic trajectories and unruly projectiles. If the ontogenetic dimensions of affect render affect as prior to representation-prior to race, class, gender, sex, nation, even as these categories might be the most pertinent mapping of or reference back to affect itself-how might identity-as-retrospective-ordering amplify rather than inhibit praxes of political organizing? If we transfer our energy, our turbulence, our momentum from the defense of the integrity of identity and submit instead to this affective ideation of identity, what kinds of political strategies, of "politics of the open end,"" might we unabashedly stumble upon? Rather than rehashing the pros and cons of identity politics, can we think instead of affective politics?

Displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly, audibly, legibly, or tangibly evident-the seemingly queer body in a "cultural freeze-frame" of sorts-assemblages allow us to attune to movements, intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, and textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities. Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information. Further, in the sway from disciplinary societies (where the panoptic "functioned primarily in terms of positions, fixed points, and identities") to control societies, the diagram of control, Michael Hardt writes, is "oriented toward mobility and anonymity. . . . The flexible and mobile performances of contingent identities, and thus its assemblages or institutions are elaborated primarily through repetition and the production of simulacra. "29 Assemblages are thus crucial conceptual tools that allow us to acknowledge and comprehend power beyond disciplinary regulatory models, where "particles, and not parts, recombine, where forces, and not categories, clash. "30

Most important, given the heightened death machine aspect of nationalism in our contemporary political terrain-a heightened sensorial and anatomical domination indispensable to Mbembe's necropolitics-assemblages work against narratives of U.S. exceptionalism that secure empire, challenging the fixity of racial and sexual taxonomies that inform practices of state surveillance and control and befuddling the "us versus them" of the war on terror. (On a more cynical note, the recent work of Eyal Weizman on the use of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Guy Debord by the Israeli Defense Forces demonstrates that we cannot afford to ignore concepts such as war machines and machinic assemblages, as they are already heavily cultivated as instructive tactics in military strategy.) For while intersectionality and its underpinnings- an unrelenting epistemological will to truth- presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, or, perhaps more accurately, prematurely anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever, assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming beyond or without being.32