Three important notes about this file

Wilderson- White Body Bad

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).

Wilderson- AT Social Reform

Regardless of social reforms, the black body is still excluded from the social order. An antagonistic method 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.

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.