Three important notes about this file

-AT Our Authors Are Inclusive

Efforts at inclusion are meant to dodge criticism- they merely institutionalize alternative discourse into the neoliberal mainstream

Kothari 05- Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester, (Uma, “Authority and Expertise: The Professionalisation of International Development and the Ordering of Dissent,” Antipode//MGD)

Accordingly, in the 1980s the World Bank and other multi- and bilateral development agencies appeared to encourage these seemingly alternative approaches incorporating concerns around issues of participation, gender, empowerment and environment onto their agenda (see World Bank, World Development Reports). Forms of alternative development become institutionalised and less distinct from conventional, mainstream development discourse and practice (Pieterse 1998). Following co-optation, these discourses became increasingly technicalised in order to fit into the more formalised development planning frameworks and models favoured by these organisations. This process was enabled by the relatively weak theoretical rootedness of some of these formative approaches that allowed them to be more easily encompassed. This strategy of appropriation reduced spaces of critique and dissent, since the inclusion and appropriation of ostensibly radical discourses limited the potential for any challenge from outside the mainstream to orthodox development planning and practices: ‘‘the conscription of critical discourses into the mainstream is often accompanied with a watering down of the challenges and political commentary that went with their construction’’ (Kothari and Minogue 2002:11). As these approaches were adopted they were embedded within a neoliberal discourse (Rist 1997) and became increasingly technicalised, subject to regimes of professionalisation which institutionalised forms of knowledge, analytical skills, tools, techniques and frameworks. These competencies were, in turn, acquired through training schemes and courses of study, producing professional ‘‘experts’’ ready to go into the field and apply these criteria in the practice of development. Indeed, as Francis writes, ‘‘PRA’s distinctive combination of personal transformation, political empowerment and methodological practice is above all embodied in and transmitted through specialized training’’ (2001:79).

*AT Ks

AT AfroPessimism

Perm

Permutation do both:

Afro pessimism is not a totalizing rejection of black social life, just an acknowledgment that the social life is not lived in the world everyone else occupies

Sexton 11 [Jared, University of California, Irvine (Program in African American Studies);] “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism” http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jaredsextonarticle.pdf //liam]

[24] To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death—all of this is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by inhabiting it and vitalizing it. A living death is as much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor—the modern world system. Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro-pessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That’s the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed- upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed.

AfroPessimism Good

Regardless of social reforms, the black body is still excluded from the social order. An antagonistic is the only accurate way to describe the suffering.

Wilderson ’10 [Frank, Assoc prof of African American Studies – Cal-Irvine, Red, White, & Black, pp 2-5 //liam]

What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Give Turtle Island back to the "Savage." Give life itself back to the Slave. Two simple sen- tences, fourteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An "ethical modernity" would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of antagonisms, such as class struggle, gender conflict, and immigrants' rights. One cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if the filmogra-phies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is that what can so easily be spoken is now (500 years and 250 million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these fourteen words not only render their speaker "crazy" but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable.2 In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not Should the United States be overthrown? or even Would it be overthrown? but when and how—and, for some, what would come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the United States writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of Students for Democratic Society, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to Bobby Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic Zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of "success," but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing case—by way of a paradigmatic analysis—that the United States was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (as a U.S. attorney general) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.3 One could (and many did) acknowledge America's strength and power. This seldom rose to the level of an ethical assessment, however, remaining instead an assessment of the "balance of forces." The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to wed the United States and ethics credibly. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all—retreated as did White radicals and progressives who "retired" from the struggle. The question lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, or thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the "crazies" shout at passersby. Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices that effected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary Zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the Slave estate's4 destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse when this dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets or of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is "no" in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed on in screenplays and in scholarly prose, but "yes" in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments, such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptoms—it registers in both cinema and scholarship as a symptom of awareness of the structural antagonisms. The election of President Barack Obama does not mitigate the claim that this is a taciturn historical moment. Neoliberalism with a Black face is neither the index of a revolutionary advance nor the end of anti-Blackness as a constituent element of U.S. antagonisms. If anything, the election of Obama enables a plethora of shaming discourses in response to revolutionary politics and "legitimates" widespread disavowal of any notion that the United States itself, and not merely its policies and practices, is unethical. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinemati-cally and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. From 1980 to the present, however, Blackness and Redness manifest only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (i.e., a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of "family values"), the nonnarrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontology—or nonontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible.5 Likewise, the grammar of political ethics— the grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering—which underwrites film theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and which underwrites cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is also unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a structure of suffering. And this structure of suffering crowds out others, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in question.
The Affirmative makes a fundamentally flawed assumption that there can be a reconciliation between the apparatus of white America and Red and Black bodies.

The West is only able to maintain its hegemony because it disavows the genocidal act of clearing that maintains the coherence of the white body.

Wilderson 10 [Frank “Unspeakable Ethics”, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, 141-5, //liam]
Well over twenty thousand Westerns and frontier films have been shot and released since the dawn of cinema.5 Even though they may only appear in a small percentage of the films and for relatively few minutes, Native Americans are central to the libidinal economy of the entire genre. The Western's cinematic imaginary casts the "Savage" as a "clear and probable" danger lurking just beyond the Settler's clearing. The clearing, then, is imagined by the Western as a space whose safety is under constant, if sometimes unspoken threat from "Savages" who inhabit the "frontier" or who, typically at the beginning of a film, have inexplicably "jumped the reservation." Clearing, in the Settler/"Savage" relation, has two grammatical structures, one as a noun and the other as a verb. But the Western only recognizes clearing as a noun. Westerns call on us to bow our heads reverently, to give this noun a proper name and refer to it fondly, the way Christians gave the child a proper name and called it "the Little Baby Jesus." Similarly, the Western interpellates us with such reverence to the clearing, whose proper name might be the Little Baby Civil Society, a genuflection bestowed on the clearing by, for example, Stagecoach and other films by John Ford. But prior to the clearing's fragile infancy, that is, before its cinematic legacy as a newborn place name, it labored not across the land as a noun but as a verb on the body of the "Savage," speaking civil society's essential status as an effect for genocide. What would happen to the libidinal economy of civil society if, over the course of one hundred years, it had been subjected to twenty thousand cinematic mirrors, films about itself in which it was cast not as an infant cartography of budding democratic dilemmas, but as a murderous projection, a juggernaut for extermination? Given the centrality of the White child, the infant, to the Western's cinematic solicitation of faith in the ethics of the Little Baby Civil Society, how shattered might that faith become were the films to reveal that the newborn babe suckled Indian blood instead of White breast milk?6 The sinews of civil institutionality could not sustain themselves libidi-nally under such conditions. And civil society would lose its mid- to late twentieth-century elasticity. There would be, for example, no social space for the White cultural progressive who revels in Native American lore, studies Indian place names, or otherwise derives pleasure and an enhanced sense of purpose from his or her respect for Indian culture—just as there would be no social space for the White person who romanticizes the history of the pioneering West while neglecting the genocide that clears the space for this history. (These two personas are not so far apart.) Anyone who was White and did not speak, socially and libidinally, in what would be a hyperarticulate and thoroughly self-conscious anti-Indian fascism would find him- or herself unable to broker relations with other members of civil society, for the ruse of social, sexual, and political hybridity which Whiteness manages to convince itself of, would become untenable at best, treasonous at worse. One could not, for example, be in favor of Native American sweat lodge ceremonies, fishing or gaming rights and be, simultaneously, enfranchised within civil society. Such postcolonial or democratic questions would become structurally impossible: one would either be among the living or among the dead—but not, as is assumed today, both. Cinema comes into existence during the 1890s, precisely when the Little Baby Civil Society was being weaned from its self-image as a murderous projection and establishing itself as a site where the leadership of ideas (hegemony) replaces direct relations of force, a place where a robust political, sexual, and social hybridity counteracts crude Manichean negotiations of violence. Early cinema is on the cusp of that attempt. A moment when the "we" of White subjectivity is moving from "We are murderers" toward "We are citizens." What is important for our investigation is the centrality of "Savage" ontology and the institutionality of cinema to the rhetoric, rather than the actual history, of this transition (where, as I have indicated, "transition" is merely a euphemism for disavowal).

Blackness is a condition of ontological death – a vocabulary to describe this loss doesn’t exist – the only way to break out of this structure is a complete destruction of civil society and the epistemological foundations it rests on.

Wilderson No Date [Frank, Ass. Prof of African American Studies UC-Irvine “Afro Pessimism” http://uc-ipc.com/members/2008/06/23/afro-pessimism/ //liam]
Afro-Pessimism theorizes Blackness as a position of accumulation and fungibility (Saidiya Hartman); as condition—or relation—of ontological death; rather than celebrate it as an identity of cultural plenitude. One of the guiding questions of my engagement with Afro-Pessimism is: How are the political stakes of analysis and aesthetics raised and altered if we theorize the structural relation between Blacks and Humanity as an antagonism (an irreconcilable encounter) as opposed to a conflict? The following question was asked on a graduate student exam for a Critical Theory Seminar, entitled “Sentient Objects and the Crisis of Critical Theory,” that I taught Fall Quarter 2006. Question: Why are the theorists under consideration [in this seminar] called “Afro-Pessimists,” and what characteristics do they have in common? “Afro-Pessimists are framed as such…because they theorize an antagonism, rather than a conflict—i.e. they perform a kind of ‘work of understanding’ rather than that of liberation, refusing to posit seemingly untenable solutions to the problems they raise.” “[The Afro-Pessimists argue] that violence toward the black person happens gratuitously, hence without former transgression, and the even if the means of repression change (plantation was replaced by prison, etc.), that doesn’t change the structure of the repression itself. Finally (and this is important in terms of the self-definition of the white person), a lot of repression happens on the level of representation, which then infiltrates the unconscious of both the black and the white person…Since these structures are ontological, they cannot be resolved (there is no way of changing this unless the world as we know it comes an end…); this is why the [Afro-Pessimist relational-schema] would be seen as the only true antagonism (while other repressive relations like class and gender would take place on the level of conflict—they can be resolved, hence they are not ontological).” “[The Afro-Pessimists] work toward delineating a relation rather than focus on a cultural object.” “Something that all the Afro-Pessimists seem to agree upon regarding social death are notions of kinship (or lack there of), the absence of time and space to describe blackness…There is no grammar of suffering to describe their loss because the loss cannot be named.” “[The Afro-Pessimists] theorize the workings of civil society as contiguous with slavery, and discuss the following as bearing witness to this contiguity: the inability of the slave (or the being-for-the-captor) to translate space into place and time into event; the fact that the slave remains subject to gratuitous violence (rather than violence contingent on transgression); the natal alienation and social death of the slave.” “[T]he Afro-Pessimists all seek to…stage a metacritique of the current discourse identified as “critical theory” by excavating an antagonism that exceeds it; to recognize this antagonism Jared, Frank, Taehyung forces a mode of death that expels subjecthood and forces objecthood [upon Blacks].” “For Fanon, the solution to the black presence in the white world is not to retrieve and celebrate our African heritage, as was one of the goals of the Negritude project. For Fanon, a revolution that would destroy civil society, as we know it would be a more adequate response. I think the Afro-Pessimist such as Hartman, Spillers, and Marriott would argue there is no place for the black, only prosthetics, techniques which give the illusion of a relationality in the world.” Like the work of Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, David Marriott, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Joy James, and others, my poetry, creative prose, scholarly work, and film production are predicated on the notion that slavery did not end in 1865; the United States simply made adjustments to the force of Black resistance without diminishing the centrality of Black captivity to the stability and coherence of civil society.
Recent social advances don’t mean anything – the conditions of slavery might seem nicer, but at the end of the day you’re still a slave.

Wilderson and Howard 10 [Frank, Assoc prof of African American Studies, Percy, Psychotherapist, “Frank Wilderson, Wallowing in the Contradictions, Part 2” http://percy3.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/frank-wilderson-wallowing-in-the-contradictions-part-2/ //liam]
FW Yeah. Orlando Patterson wrote a book called “Slavery and Social Death”, and I’m not sure Patterson would agree with where I’ve taken this but what I like about his book is he says that work is an experience of slavery but it doesn’t define slavery. He says that slavery is general dishonor, that the being is dishonored regardless of what he or she does natal alienation of the being whose family ties or kinship structure in his or her mind is not respected by anyone else. (Slavery is also punctuated by) openness to gratuitous violence, which is a body that you can do anything with. And what interests me is that if that becomes the definition of a slave, the slave can work, but the slave can also sit on a divan and eat bon-bons.

PH Absolutely.

FW You know? In my hometown of New Orleans in the days of physical slavery you could buy the slave to inject them with poisons to watch them die. So what’s interesting to me is that, as I was saying earlier today, there’s a way in which the Arabs and the Europeans came to a consensus (not sitting down at a table but over years), that Africa is a place where people are generally dishonored, where we do not respect their kinship structures and where their bodies are available to us to do to them whatever we would. This has been our (Black people’s) place ever since then. Once I got to that and started thinking that through it occurred to me that cinema was just another place in which the Black Body was possessed and deployed in the way that one would possess and deploy a slave in any other context.

PH Right.

FW And that there is no reformist program for ridding ourselves of that. I mean, it’s like if we’re gonna get out of that we’re gonna be in a whole new world order.

PH Right. And it’s interesting because you look at film as just a context, a context for this process to occur. You know, one can I think Say the same thing about the NBA.

FW Exactly, yeah.

PH It brings back the scenario in which the slave can eat bon-bons and make $20-million a year.

FW Exactly, exactly.

PH But you’re still a slave, because to me, that really sort of encapsulates the whole conceptualization of fungibility.

The current order derives its ontological consistency in opposition to blackness, trying to work within this system is definitionally impossible. Instead, striving for impossible reparations is the only way to create a politics beyond current comprehension.

Wilderson and Howard 10 [Frank, Assoc prof of African American Studies, Percy, Psychotherapist, “Frank Wilderson, Wallowing in the Contradictions, Part 1” http://percy3.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/frank-b-wilderson-%E2%80%9Cwallowing-in-the-contradictions%E2%80%9D-part-1/ //liam]
FW Reparations suggests a conceptually coherent loss. The loss of land, the loss of labor power, etc. In other words, there has to be some form of articulation between the party that has lost and the party that has gained for reparations to make sense. No such articulation exists between Blacks and the world. This is, ironically, precisely why I support the Reparations Movement; but my emphasis, my energies, my points of attention are on the word “Movement” and not on the word “Reparation.” I support the movement because I know it is a movement toward the end of the world; a movement toward a catastrophe in epistemological coherence and institutional integrity—I support the movement aspect of it because I know that repair is impossible; and any struggle that can act as a stick up artist to the world, demanding all that it cannot give( which is everything ), is a movement toward something so blindingly new that it cannot be imagined. This is the only thing that will save us. PH As a Psychotherapist, I was very interested to see your contrasting Frantz Fanon and Lacan concerning their conceptualizations of potential paths to “emancipation in the libidinal economy”, as you put it. I am ashamed to admit that I have never read Fanon, but have read Lacan. Please illuminate  your idea that the stark difference in their conceptualizations of conflict/antagonism differ are based on the fact that Lacan would  still see Blacks as fundamentally situated in personhood, but that Fannon (and yourself) see Blacks as “situated a priori in absolute dereliction”. FW This is a big question, too big for a concise answer—I think I take about thirty to forty pages to try and get my head around this in the book. But the key to the answer lies in the concept of “contemporaries.” Fanon rather painfully and meticulously shows us how the human race is a community of “contemporaries.” In addition, this community vouchsafes its coherence (it knows its borders) through the presence of Blacks. If Blacks became part of the human community then the concept of “contemporaries” would have no outside; and if it had no outside it could have no inside. Lacan assumes the category and thus he imagines the analysand’s problem in terms of how to live without neurosis among ones contemporaries. Fanon interrogates the category itself. For Lacan the analysands suffer psychically due to problems  extant within the paradigm of contemporaries. For Fanon, the analysand   suffers due to the existence of the contemporaries themselves and the fact that s/he is a stimulus for anxiety for those who have contemporaries. Now, a contemporary’s struggles are conflictual—that is to say, they can be resolved because they are problems that are of- and in the world. But a Blacks problems are the stuff of antagonisms: struggles that cannot be resolved between parties but can only be resolved through the obliteration of one or both of the parties. We are faced—when dealing with the Black—with a set of psychic problems that cannot be resolved through any form of symbolic intervention such as psychoanalysis—though addressing them psychoanalytically we can begin to explain the antagonism (as I have done in my book, and as Fanon does), but it won’t lead us to a cure.