Narrative PIC

Blocks

1nc
TextYou can endorse the entirety of the 1ac except for their
choice to deploy the narratives they read.
It solves the parts of the case about ______________ avoiding the
reasons why their introduction of these narratives is politically
disenfranchising. Its also less than their advocacy, which
makes it competitive with the aff.
Net Benefit:
The demand for recognition as victims via the process of
narration re-inscribes the master-slave relation that created
the oppression in the first place, turns the case and creates
more oppression.
Oliver 04
Kelly, Chair of the Philosophy Department and Professor of Womens Studies at
Stony Brook University Witnessing and Testimony Parallax, 2004, vol. 10, no. 1, 79
88 http://www.vanderbilt.edu/ AnS/philosophy/faculty/parallax.pdf
Contemporary debates in social theory around issues of multiculturalism have focused on the
demand or struggle for recognition by marginalized or oppressed people, groups, and
cultures. The work of Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth, in particular, have
crystallized issues of multiculturalism and justice around the notion of
recognition.1 In Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, I challenge what has become
a fundamental tenet of this trend in debates over multiculturalism, namely,
that the social struggles manifest in critical race theory, queer theory, feminist
theory, and various social movements are struggles for recognition.2
Testimonies from the aftermath of the Holocaust and slavery do not merely
articulate a demand to be recognized or to be seen. Rather, they witness to
pathos beyond recognition. The victims of oppression, slavery, and torture are
not merely seeking visibility and recognition, but they are also seeking
witnesses to horrors beyond recognition. The demand for recognition manifest in
testimonies from those othered by dominant culture is transformed by the accompanying demands
for retribution and compassion. If, as I suggest, those othered by dominant culture
are seeking not only, or even primarily, recognition but also witnessing to
something beyond recognition, then our notions of recognition must be
reevaluated. Certainly notions of recognition that throw us back into a Hegelian masterslave relationship do not help us to overcome domination. If recognition is conceived as being
conferred on others by the dominant group, then it merely repeats the dynamic of hierarchies,
privilege, and domination. Even if oppressed people are making demands for recognition, insofar
as those who are dominant are empowered to confer it, we are thrown back into the hierarchy of
domination. This is to say that if the operations of recognition require a
recognizer and a recognizee then we have done no more than replicate the master-slave,
subject-other/object hierarchy in this new form. Additionally, the need to demand
recognition from the dominant culture or group is a symptom of the pathology
of oppression. Oppression creates the need and demand for recognition. It is
not just that the injustices of oppression create the need for justice. More than

this, the pathology of oppression creates the need in the oppressed to be

recognized by their oppressor, the very people most likely not to recognize
them. The internalization of stereotypes of inferiority and superiority leave the
oppressed with the sense that they are lacking something that only their
superior dominators have or can give them. The very notion of recognition as it
is deployed in various contemporary theoretical contexts is, then, a symptom
of the pathology of oppression itself. Implied in this diagnosis is the conclusion
that struggles for recognition and theories that embrace those struggles may indeed presuppose
and thereby perpetuate the very hierarchies, domination, and injustice that they attempt to
overcome. The notion of recognition becomes more problematic in models where
what is recognized is always only something familiar to the subject.3 In this
case, the subject and what is known to him and his experience are once again
privileged. Any real contact with difference or otherness becomes impossible
because recognition requires the assimilation of difference into something
familiar. When recognition repeats the master-slave or subject-object
hierarchy, then it is also bound to assimilate difference back into sameness.
The subject recognizes the other only when he can see something familiar in
that other; for example, when he can see that the other is a person too. Only
when we begin to think of the recognition of what is beyond recognition can
we begin to think of the recognition of difference.

2nc
The CP solves all of the reasons why US is racist, and our own
individual complicity with an anti black state.
Theyll never be able to win offense for the stories they read,
because none of their evidence assumes the way it is used in
the debate, which waters them down by deploying them in a
competitive format, highlighting them down, and spewing it
all for the instrumental end of capturing a ballot. Even if in
theory narratives can be part of a productive approach to
politics, their particular use in this debate should be viewed
with the utmost suspicion.
Coughlin 95

Anne M. Coughlin, Associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. Regulating the Self:
Autobiographical Performances in Outsider Scholarship. Virginia Law Review. August 1995.

These speculations suggest that we must qualify, perhaps significantly, the

outsiders' assertions concerning the revolutionary power of their narratives.
Just like the legal discourse that the outsiders condemn, narrative "presupposes
some criteria of relevance" that guide the storyteller's selection, arrangement for emphasis, and
causal reordering of the events to be included in the story. n91 As one historian explains,
"the narrative can be said to [*1256] determine the evidence as much as the
evidence determines the narrative" because the "evidence only counts as
evidence and is only recognized as such in relation to a potential narrative."
n92 Even if we reject White's suspicion that the criterion that guides all
narrative accounts of real events is "law, legality, legitimacy, or, more
generally, authority," n93 his theory of narrative meaning still exposes the
ambivalent political allegiances of the outsider autobiographies. In these texts,
no less than in legal opinions or traditional legal scholarship, our system of law
is enthroned as the "central organizing principle of meaning." n94 Law and the
legal academy are the subjects that link together, indeed, call forth, each of
the personal experiences recounted. The texts are not a desultory collection of
personal reminiscences. Rather, they record only those events that support
particular claims against or on behalf of law and the academy . For example,
Professor Robin West describes her own promiscuity to support her charge that
the definition of "consensual sex" applied by law in rape cases conceals the
danger of violent male sexuality that women endure. n95 Professor Patricia
Williams elaborates the racist content of episodes from her [*1257] life to
create an occasion for her to display her intellectual prowess and professional
accomplishments to an academy reluctant to admit African-American women.
n96 And Professor Richard Delgado recalls conversations in which senior
colleagues warned him to avoid writing about "civil rights or other "ethnic'
subjects" to provide evidence of the jealous insularity and undemocratic
character of the mainstream civil rights academy. n97 These texts reveal that

the law and its specific institutional interests, both in practice and in the academy, already
define the relevant points of intersection for the experiences recounted in the outsider narratives. In
other words, the law and the academy implicitly supply the appropriate points of contention for
outsider narrators. Just as legal doctrine determines the facts that judges will find,
so the conventions, practices, and concerns of law and the academy furnish the
space for debate and perhaps even produce the truth that outsider stories report by determining
which events are significant (or real) enough to be represented. This is one of a variety of ways,
then, in which the narrative form distinctly mitigates the subversive intention of outsider
storytelling.

Even autobiography props up the hegemonic cultural norms

that the 1ac criticizes
Coughlin 95
Anne M. Coughlin, Associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. Regulating the Self: Autobiographical
Performances in Outsider Scholarship. Virginia Law Review. August 1995.

In this paper, I will argue that autobiography is not simply a transparent

medium through which the self may give voice to what [*1232] it alone
knows. Nor is autobiography an unconditioned mode of representation that
opens up subjective spaces hitherto unexplored. For one thing, an
autobiographical narrative makes the same ontological commitments to
readers as legal discourse. Autobiography places limitations on the range of available
meanings similar to those imposed by law. In addition, many literary critics and historians have
suggested that autobiography and the experiences it constructs are shaped by the same cultural
values reflected in law. Far from eluding the constraints of legal discourse and cultural bias,
therefore, autobiography may lead outsiders to become the unwitting proponents of the very values
they most want to resist. Perhaps more crucially, the outsiders' intention to liberate discourse
from dogmatic or culture-bound types of objectivity is threatened by the possibility that their works
will merely achieve a simple reversal of academic orthodoxy. By celebrating individual
perspectives, reliance on autobiography may establish authorial subjectivity as the new form of
unassailable dogma, the new tale that wags our legal discourse. Despite its potential
complicity in a culture the outsiders decry, storytelling is an attractive enterprise
because it is remunerative. Yet this feature of outsider storytelling raises additional questions about
the role of these ostensibly resistant texts, particularly the meaning that context imposes on them.
The scholars who tell the stories receive material rewards for publishing them. The authors are also
lawyers or, at least, critics of the law, whose purpose in offering the stories is instrumental to
some end. By recounting painful, personal experiences to an audience willing to pay for them, the
authors use themselves and their suffering as a market commodity. Similarly, because the
storytellers want lawmakers to recognize and remedy their suffering, they must make their stories
intelligible (and in some sense marketable) to the audience whose understanding and
intervention they seek, even as they rebuke it. Thus, the storyteller is never free from the
constraints imposed by her audience's expectations. While autobiographies may possess a
transformative power, one must wonder what they transform. Will the practice
of telling one's own stories transform legal culture, as the outsiders claim? Or
will that practice more likely transform the self who tells the story? [*1233]

Narratives are generated through normatively structured

performances and interactions, because of their
conventionalized character our narratives are likely to
reproduce ideological effects and hegemonic assumptions. We
are too often shackled by the stories we tell.
Baron and Epstein 97
Jane B. Baron and Julia Epstein ( Peter j. Liacouras Professor of Law, Temple
University school of law, Barbara Riley Levin, Professor of comparative literature,
Haverford College.Buffalo Law Review, 45 Buffalo L. Rev. 141, Winter) 1997
Again, nothing guarantees that any particular story or set of stories will create doubts about what
can be known. As Patrick Ewick and Susan Silbey have explained: Narratives are
cultural productions. Narratives are generated interactively through normatively structured
performances and interactions[.] Because of the conventionalized character of narrative, . . our
stories [*182] are likely to express ideological effects and hegemonic assumptions. We are as
likely to be shackled by the stories we tell (or that are culturally available for our
telling) as we are by the form of oppression they might seek to reveal . n137
Notwithstanding some of the more exaggerated claims that have been made
on behalf of storytelling, it is not the case that a story will cause a rethinking of assumptions
or a recognition of perspectivism merely because it is a story. n138 Some stories
may be "subversive" and "liberatory" n139; others may--advertently or inadvertently-reinforce the status quo. n140 To the extent that [*183] narrative scholarship aims
to raise questions about what is usually taken for granted, or to create insight
about the inevitably partial (incomplete, biased) nature of any particular point
of view, stories of the latter sort may reasonably be deemed unsuccessful.

2nc AT Perm
This debate isnt about a perm1) Impossible -- The 1AC establishes the framework for the
debate that the ballot serves as a choice between distinct
performative and methodological strategies. There's no
explanation for how it is possible to incorporate our distinct
approach for resolving the harms outlined in the 1AC within
their methodological framework.
2) Reciprocity -- They makes a strategic decision to forego a
traditional plan in the 1AC. They should not be entitled to
permutations which are meant to test the competition between
two policies.
3) No Net Benefit -- If we win the net benefit it proves there is
no advantage to the method outlined by the 1AC.
Perm fails- it includes the language of the 1AC narrativeThe origin of language matters- using the language of the
oppressor makes liberation impossible
Cutter 96

Matha Cutter is a University of Connecticut Institute for African American Studies

director, English professor and editor of MELUS - Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United
States. Martha, "Dismantling "The Master's House": Critical Literacy in Harriet
Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," Callaloo, 19.1, 1996,
muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/summary/v019/19.1cutter.html, accessed 2-11-13,
mss.
In 1861, Harriet Jacobs published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a
pseudonymous account of her life in slavery. Although Jacobs states in her
preface that she "earnestly desire[s] to arouse the women of the North to a
realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in
bondage," she also remarks, "it would have been more pleasant to me to have
been silent about my own history" (1). What accounts for Jacobs' desire for
"silence," despite her ardent political purpose? Jacobs' desire for silence
reflects an understanding of the problematic nature of speaking in a language
which denies her subjectivity, as well as her understanding of the uses and
abuses of white, phallocratic discourse. Throughout her twenty-one years in
slavery, Jacobs is typified, abused, sexually harassed, and attacked by racist
and sexist discourses. Language is also wielded by her owner, Dr. Flint (James
Norcom), in a way which is directly phallocratic: he seeks to induce her to
become his mistress through a form of sexual abuse which uses language as
its mechanism for power. The problem Jacobs faces in her narrative, then, is
how to use language as a way of achieving liberation , when language itself is a
large part of her oppression. How can Jacobs use her literacy in a way which
liberates her from the dominant discursive practices of her society? To speak
in the "master's" language is to remain trapped within a system of
discourse which denies her subjectivity. Audre Lorde has said that "the

master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (99). One cannot
overcome oppression by using the master's tools, and if language is an
instrument of oppression, simply taking hold of it will not lead to liberation, nor
will it lead to a dismantling of the master's house. For a time, Jacobs does try
to use the "master's tools" to dismantle his house; she tries to use language
against the master without rejecting its abusive and coercive underpinnings.
Ultimately, however, she realizes the oppressive nature of "the master's tools"
and strives to move beyond them.

2ac Narratives/Personal Experiance

Personal narratives reproduce hegemonic power relations and
inequality protects dominant narratives from criticism this
is an epistemological indict
Ewick and Silbey 95
Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey Law & Society Review, 00239216, 1995, Vol. 29,
Issue 2
In the previous section, we discussed how narratives, like the lives and
experiences they recount, are cultural productions. Narratives are generated
interactively through normatively structured performances and
interactions. Even the most personal of narratives rely on and invoke
collective narratives symbols, linguistic formulations, structures, and
vocabularies of motive without which the personal would remain
unintelligible and uninterpretable. Because of the conventionalized character
of narrative, then, our stories are likely to express ideological effects
and hegemonic assumptions.[ 10] We are as likely to be shackled
by the stories we tell (or that are culturally available for our telling) as we
are by the form of oppression they might seek to reveal. In short, the
structure, the content, and the performance of stories as they are defined and
regulated within social settings often articulate and reproduce existing
ideologies and hegemonic relations of power and inequality. It is
important to emphasize that narratives do more than simply reflect or
express existing ideologies. Through their telling, our stories come to

constitute the hegemony that in turn shapes social lives and

conduct "The hegemonic is not simply a static body of ideas to which
members of a culture are obliged to conform" (Silberstein 1988:127). Rather,
Silberstein writes, hegemony has "a protean nature in which dominant

relations are preserved while their manifestations remain highly flexible .

The hegemonic must continually evolve so as to recuperate
alternative hegemonies." In other words, the hegemonic gets produced
and evolves within individual, seemingly unique, discrete personal
narratives. Indeed, the resilience of ideologies and hegemony may
derive from their articulation within personal stories. Finding
expression and being refashioned within the stories of countless
individuals may lead to a polyvocality that inoculates and
protects the master narrative from critique. The hegemonic
strength of a master narrative derives, Brinkley Messick (1988:657) writes,
from "its textual, and lived heteroglossia [, s]ubverting and
dissimulating itself at every turn"; thus ideologies that are encoded in
particular stories are "effectively protected from sustained critique" by
the fact that they are constituted through variety and contradiction.
Research in a variety of social settings has demonstrated the hegemonic
potential of narrative by illustrating how narratives can contribute to the
reproduction of existing structures of meaning and power. First, narratives

can function specifically as mechanisms of social control (Mumby 1993).

At various levels of social organization ranging from families to nation-states

storytelling instructs us about what is expected and warns us of the
consequences of nonconformity. Oft-told family tales about lost fortunes or
spoiled reputations enforce traditional definitions and values of family life
(Langellier & Peterson 1993). Similarly, bureaucratic organizations exact

compliance from members through the articulation of managerial

prerogatives and expectations and the consequences of violation or
challenge (Witten 1993). Through our narratives of courtship, lost accounts,

and failed careers, cultures are constructed; we "do" family, we "do"

organization, through the stories we tell (Langellier & Peterson 1993). Second,

the hegemonic potential of narrative is further enhanced by narratives'

ability to colonize consciousness. Well-plotted stories cohere by
relating various (selectively appropriated) events and details into a
temporally organized whole (see part I above). The coherent whole, that

is, the configuration of events and characters arranged in believable plots,

preempts alternative stories. The events seem to speak for themselves;
the tale appears to tell itself. Ehrenhaus (1993) provides a poignant example of
a cultural meta-narrative that operates to stifle alternatives. He describes the
currently dominant cultural narrative regarding the United States's
involvement in the Vietnam War as one that relies on themes of dysfunction
and rehabilitation. The story, as Ehrenhaus summarizes it, is structured as a
social drama which characterizes both the nation and individual Vietnam
veterans as having experienced a breakdown in normal functioning only
recently resolved through a process of healing. This narrative is persuasive

because it reiterates and elaborates already existing and dominant

metaphors and interpretive frameworks in American culture concerning

what Philip Rieff (1968) called the "triumph of the therapeutic" (see also Crews
1994). Significantly, the therapeutic motif underwriting this narrative depicts
veterans as emotionally and psychologically fragile and, thus, disqualifies
them as creditable witnesses. The connection between what they saw and
experienced while in Vietnam and what the nation did in Vietnam is severed. In
other words, what could have developed as a powerful critique of warfare

as national policy is contained through the image of illness and

rehabilitation, an image in which "'healing' is privileged over 'purpose'
[and] the rhetoric of recovery and reintegration subverts the emergence
of rhetoric that seeks to examine the reasons that recovery is even
necessary" (Ehrenhaus 1993:83). Constituent and distinctive features of
narratives make them particularly potent forms of social control and
ideological penetration and homogenization. In part, their potency
derives from the fact that narratives put "forth powerful and persuasive
truth claims claims about appropriate behavior and values that are
shielded from testing or debate" (Witten 1993:105). Performative
features of narrative such as repetition, vivid concrete details,
particularity of characters, and coherence of plot silence
epistemological challenges and often generate emotional
identification and commitment. Because narratives make implicit

rather than explicit claims regarding causality and truth as they are
dramatized in particular events regarding specific characters, stories elude
challenges, testing, or debate. Van Dijk (1993) has reported, for
instance, that stories containing negative images and stereotypes of
nonwhite persons are less subject to the charge of racism when they
recount personal experiences and particular events. Whereas a general
claim that a certain group is inferior or dangerous might be contested on
empirical grounds, an individual story about being mugged, a story which
includes an incidental reference to the nonwhite race of the assailant,
communicates a similar message but under the protected guise of simply
stating the "facts." The causal significance or relevance of the assailant's race
is, in such a tale, strongly implied but not subject to challenge or falsifiability.
Thus representations, true and/or false, made implicitly without either

validation or contest, are routinely exchanged in social interactions and

thereby occupy social space. Third, narratives contribute to hegemony to
the extent that they conceal the social organization of their
production and plausibility. Narratives embody general
understandings of the world that by their deployment and repetition
come to constitute and sustain the life-world. Yet because narratives
depict specific persons existing in particular social, physical, and
historical locations, those general understandings often remain
unacknowledged. By failing to make these manifest, narratives draw on
unexamined assumptions and causal claims without displaying these
assumptions and claims or laying them open to challenge or testing.
Thus, as narratives depict understandings of particular persons and events,

they reproduce, without exposing, the connections of the specific story

and persons to the structure of relations and institutions that made the
story plausible. To the extent that the hegemonic is "that order of signs
and practices, relations and distinctions, images and epistemologies
that come to be taken-for-granted as the natural and received shape of
the world and everything that inhabits it" (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991), the
unarticulated and unexamined plausibility is the story's contribution to
hegemony. The following two examples drawn from recent sociolegal research
illustrate the ways in which legally organized narrativity helps produce the
taken-for-granted and naturalized world by effacing the connections
between the particular and the general. Sara Cobb (1992) examines
the processes through which women's stories of violence are
"domesticated" (tamed and normalized) within mediation sessions. Cobb
reports that the domestication of women's stories of violence are a
consequence of the organization of the setting in which they are told:
within mediation, the storyteller and her audience are situated within a
normative organization that recognizes the values of narrative
participation over any substantive moral or epistemological code or
standard. Being denied access to any external standards, the stories the
women tell cannot therefore be adjudged true or compelling. The stories are
interpreted as one version of a situation in which "multiple perspectives

are possible." Cobb demonstrates how this particular context of elicitation

specifically buries and silences stories of violence, effectively
reproducing women's relative powerlessness within their families. With
women deprived of the possibility of corroboration by the norms of the
mediation session, their stories of violence are minimized and
"disappeared." As a consequence, the individual woman can get little relief

from the situation that brought her to mediation: she is denied an individual
legal remedy (by being sent from court to mediation) and at the same time
denied access to and connections with any collective understanding of or
response to the sorts of violence acknowledged by the law (through the
organization of the mediation process). Through this process, "violence, as
a disruption of the moral order in a community, is made familiar (of the
family) and natural the extraordinary is tamed, drawn into the place
where we eat, sleep and [is] made ordinary" (ibid., p. 19). Whereas
mediation protects narratives from an interrogation of their truth claims, other,
formal legal processes are deliberately organized to adjudicate truth claims.
Yet even in these settings, certain types of truth claims are disqualified and
thus shielded from examination and scrutiny. The strong preference of courts
for individual narratives operates to impede the expression (and validation) of
truth claims that are not easily represented through a particular story.
Consider, for example, the Supreme Court's decision in the McClesky case
(1986). The defendant, a black man who had been convicted of the murder of
a police officer, was sentenced to death. His Supreme Court appeal of the
death sentence was based on his claim that the law had been applied in a
racially discriminatory way, thus denying him equal protection under the law.
As part of McClesky's appeal, David Baldus, a social scientist, submitted an
amicus brief in which he reported the results of his analysis of 2,000 homicide
cases in that state (Baldus 1990). The statistical data revealed that black
defendants convicted of killing white citizens were significantly more likely to
receive the death sentence than white defendants convicted of killing a black
victim. Despite this evidence of racial discrimination, the Court did not
overturn McClesky's death sentence. The majority decision, in an opinion
written by Justice Powell, stated that the kind of statistical evidence submitted
by Baldus was simply not sufficient to establish that any racial discrimination
occurred in this particular case. The court declared, instead, that to
demonstrate racial discrimination, it would be necessary to establish that the
jury, or the prosecutor, acted with discriminatory purpose in sentencing
McClesky.[ 11] Here, then, an unambiguous pattern of racial inequity was
sustained through the very invocation of and demand for subjectivity (the
jury's or prosecutor's state of mind) and particularity (the refusal to interpret
this case as part of a larger category of cases) that are often embodied in
narratives. In this instance, relative powerlessness and injustice (if one is to
believe Baldus's data) were preserved, rather than challenged, by the demand
for a particular narrative about specific concrete individuals whose interactions
were bounded in time and space. In other words, the Court held that the
legally cognizable explanation of the defendant's conviction could not be a
product of inferential or deductive comprehension (Mink 1970; Bruner 1986).
Despite its best efforts, the defense was denied discursive access to the
generalizing, and authoritative, language of social logico-deductive science

and with it the type of "truths" it is capable of representing. The court insists
on a narrative that effaces the relationship between the particular and the
general, between this case and other capital trials in Georgia. Further, the
McClesky decision illustrates not only how the demand for narrative
particularity may reinscribe relative powerlessness by obscuring the
connection between the individual case and larger patterns of institutional
behavior; it also reveals how conventionalized legal procedures impede the
demonstration of that connection.[ 12] The court simultaneously demanded
evidence of the jurors' states of mind and excluded such evidence. Because
jury deliberations are protected from routine scrutiny and evaluation, the
majority demanded a kind of proof that is institutionally unavailable. Thus, in
the McClesky decision, by insisting on a narrative of explicit articulated
discrimination, the court calls for a kind of narrative truth that court
procedures institutionally impede. As these examples suggest, a reliance on
or demand for narrativity is neither unusual nor subversive within legal
settings. In fact, given the ideological commitment to individualized

justice and case-by-case processing that characterizes our legal system,

narrative, relying as it often does on the language of the particular and
subjective, may more often operate to sustain, rather than
subvert, inequality and injustice. The law's insistent demand for
personal narratives achieves a kind of radical individuation that
disempowers the teller by effacing the connections among persons and
the social organization of their experiences. This argument is borne out if

we consider that being relieved of the necessity, and costs, of telling a story
can be seen as liberatory and collectively empowering. Insofar as particular
and subjective narratives reinforce a view of the world made up of autonomous
individuals interacting only in immediate and local ways, they may hobble
collective claims and solutions to social inequities (Silbey 1984). In fact, the
progressive achievements of workers' compensation, no-fault divorce, no-fault
auto insurance, strict liability, and some consumer protection regimes derive
directly from the provision of legal remedies without the requirement to
produce an individually crafted narrative of right and liability.

Expert > Narrative

Defer to expert assessments of systemic conditions allowing
any opinion misdiagnoses the problem and causes more harm
to disenfranchised communities
Hart 2013
Hart is an associate professor of psychology in the departments of psychiatry and
psychology at Columbia University, is a research fellow at the Institute for Research
in African-American Studies at Columbia and a research scientist at the New York
State Psychiatric Institute (Carl, Keep to Your Expertise,
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/02/04/do-black-intellectuals-need-totalk-about-race/on-race-issues-academics-should-keep-to-their-expertise)
The strange proposition that black intellectuals regardless of their
training are race experts mainly because they are black is nave
and potentially dangerous. That black academics have a special obligation
to address social and racial issues outside of the academy is a misguided
notion. I speak from my own expertise as a neuropsychopharmacologist. In
the 1980s, a common perception was that drugs in general, and crack
cocaine specifically, were destroying the black community. Many black
thinkers, both liberal and conservative, added their voice to the chorus that
blamed drugs for everything from premature death to child abandonment and
neglect to grandmothers being forced to raise a second generation of children.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson said, Our culture must reject drugs. Weve lost more
lives to dope than we did to the Ku Klux Klan rope. Thomas Sowell, the
conservative economist, added drugs are inherently a problem for the
individual who takes them. Notably, these sentiments were frequently
expressed by individuals with no training on drug effects. Their
statements were inaccurate, shortsighted and mere hyperbole. For
example, although crack was often blamed for child abandonment and for the
raising of children by grandparents, this happened in my family as well as
others long before crack hit the streets. The primary reason for this was
poverty, not drugs. And the view that drugs are a problem for all who use
them is inconsistent with the scientific evidence. Eighty-five percent or more of
drug users whether they use alcohol, caffeine, prescription medications or
drugs deemed illegal do not have a problem. The ignorant remarks made
about drugs were insidious: they helped shape an environment in
which there was an unwarranted and unrealistic goal of eliminating
certain types of drug use at any cost to our citizens. In the late 1980s,
Congress passed the now infamous legislation setting a 100 times
harsher penalty for crack than for powder cocaine convictions. The law
stated that a person convicted of possessing 5 grams of crack cocaine was
required to serve a minimum sentence of five years in prison. To receive the
same sentence for trafficking in powder cocaine, an individual needed to
possess 500 grams of cocaine. A whopping 85 percent of those sentenced for
crack cocaine offenses were black, despite the fact that the majority of users
of the drug are white. Today, many find the crack/powder laws abhorrent
because, although they were altered in 2010, they still disproportionately
target blacks. Few, however, critically examine the role played by so-

called black public intellectuals in their passage and reform. I

strongly discourage any intellectuals, regardless of race, from speaking
on matters for which they have limited or no expertise. Too often illinformed rhetoric has led to emotional hysteria that obfuscates solid
evidence regarding the real problems faced by poor people , and in
overwhelmingly great proportions, by black people. I urge instead
that qualified intellectuals, of any race, raise their voices louder in
speaking to social and racial issues. They, like the black academic, have
an obligation to address these complex issues, when and where they are
knowledgeable. In my view, this is a part of our civic and ethical duties as
informed, educated members of society. And the listening community has the
obligation of distinguishing informed opinion from tweets.

A2 Only Personal Experience Matters

Their arg that ONLY personal experience determines the
validity of arguments stifles dialogue and is reductionistwe
will defend the basis for our claims and bracketing them out
means adv is a DA
Bridges 01

David Bridges, Centre for Applied Research in Education, University of East Anglia,
2001, The Ethics of Outsider Research, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 35,
No. 3
First, it is argued that only those who have shared in, and have been
part of, a particular experience can understand or can properly
understand (and perhaps `properly' is particularly heavily loaded here) what it
is like. You need to be a woman to understand what it is like to live as a
woman; to be disabled to understand what it is like to live as a disabled person
etc. Thus Charlton writes of `the innate inability of able-bodied people,
regardless of fancy credentials and awards, to understand the disability
experience' (Charlton, 1998, p. 128). Charlton's choice of language here is
indicative of the rhetorical character which these arguments tend to assume.
This arises perhaps from the strength of feeling from which they issue, but it
warns of a need for caution in their treatment and acceptance. Even if ablebodied people have this `inability' it is difficult to see in what sense it is
`innate'. Are all credentials `fancy' or might some (e.g. those reflecting a
sustained, humble and patient attempt to grapple with the issues) be pertinent
to that ability? And does Charlton really wish to maintain that there is a single
experience which is the experience of disability, whatever solidarity disabled
people might feel for each other? The understanding that any of us have of our
own conditions or experience is unique and special, though recent work on
personal narratives also shows that it is itself multi-layered and inconstant, i.e.
that we have and can provide many different understandings even of our own
lives (see, for example, Tierney, 1993). Nevertheless, our own understanding
has a special status: it provides among other things a data source for others'
interpretations of our actions; it stands in a unique relationship to our own
experiencing; and no one else can have quite the same understanding. It is
also plausible that people who share certain kinds of experience in common
stand in a special position in terms of understanding those shared aspects of
experience. However, once this argument is applied to such broad
categories as `women' or `blacks', it has to deal with some very
heterogeneous groups; the different social, personal and situational
characteristics that constitute their individuality may well outweigh
the shared characteristics; and there may indeed be greater barriers
to mutual understanding than there are gateways. These arguments ,
however, all risk a descent into solipsism : if our individual
understanding is so particular, how can we have communication with
or any understanding of anyone else? But, granted Wittgenstein's
persuasive argument against a private language (Wittgenstein, 1963, perhaps
more straightforwardly presented in Rhees, 1970), we cannot in these

circumstances even describe or have any real understanding of our

own condition in such an isolated world. Rather it is in talking to each
other, in participating in a shared language, that we construct the
conceptual apparatus that allows us to understand our own situation
in relation to others, and this is a construction which involves understanding differences as well as similarities. Besides, we have good reason to
treat with some scepticism accounts provided by individuals of their
own experience and by extension accounts provided by members of a
particular category or community of people. We know that such accounts can
be riddled with special pleading, selective memory, careless error, selfcentredness, myopia, prejudice and a good deal more. A lesbian scholar
illustrates some of the pressures that can bear, for example, on an
insider researcher in her own community: As an insider, the lesbian has an
important sensitivity to offer, yet she is also more vulnerable than the
non-lesbian researcher, both to the pressure from the heterosexual world--that
her studies conform to previous works and describe lesbian reality in terms of
its relationship with the outside-- and to pressure from the inside, from
within the lesbian community itself--that her studies mirror not the
reality of that community but its self-protective ideology. (Kreiger, 1982, p.
108) In other words, while individuals from within a community have
access to a particular kind of understanding of their experience, this
does not automatically attach special authority (though it might attach
special interest) to their own representations of that experience.
Moreover, while we might acknowledge the limitations of the understanding which someone from outside a community (or someone other
than the individual who is the focus of the research) can develop, this does
not entail that they cannot develop and present an understanding or
that such understanding is worthless . Individuals can indeed find
benefit in the understandings that others offer of their experience in, for
example, a counselling relationship, or when a researcher adopts a supportive
role with teachers engaged in reflection on or research into their own practice.
Many have echoed the plea of the Scottish poet, Robert Burns (in `To a louse'):
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!3 --even if
they might have been horrified with what such power revealed to
them. Russell argued that it was the function of philosophy (and why not
research too?) `to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and
free them from the tyranny of custom . . .It keeps alive our sense of wonder by
showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect' (Russell, 1912, p. 91). `Making
the familiar strange', as Stenhouse called it, often requires the assistance of
someone unfamiliar with our own world who can look at our taken-for-granted
experience through, precisely, the eye of a stranger. Sparkes (1994) writes
very much in these terms in describing his own research, as a white,
heterosexual middle- aged male, into the life history of a lesbian PE teacher.
He describes his own struggle with the question `is it possible for
heterosexual people to undertake research into homosexual
populations?' but he concludes that being a `phenomenological stranger'
who asks `dumb questions' may be a useful and illuminating
experience for the research subject in that they may have to return to first

principles in reviewing their story. This could, of course be an elaborate piece

of self-justification, but it is interesting that someone like Max Biddulph, who
writes from a gay/bisexual stand- point, can quote this conclusion with
apparent approval (Biddulph, 1996). People from outside a community
clearly can have an understanding of the experience of those who are
inside that community. It is almost certainly a different understanding
from that of the insiders. Whether it is of any value will depend among other
things on the extent to which they have immersed themselves in the world of
the other and portrayed it in its richness and complexity; on the empathy and
imagination that they have brought to their enquiry and writing; on whether
their stories are honest, responsible and critical (Barone, 1992). Nevertheless,
this value will also depend on qualities derived from the researchers' externality: their capacity to relate one set of experiences to others (perhaps from
their own community); their outsider perspective on the structures which
surround and help to define the experience of the community; on the reactions
and responses to that community of individuals and groups external to it.4
Finally, it must surely follow that if we hold that a researcher, who (to take the
favourable case) seeks honestly, sensitively and with humility to understand
and to represent the experience of a community to which he or she does not
belong, is incapable of such understanding and representation, then how can
he or she understand either that same experience as mediated through the
research of someone from that community? The argument which excludes
the outsider from under- standing a community through the effort of
their own research, a fortiori excludes the outsider from that understanding
through the secondary source in the form of the effort of an insider researcher
or indeed any other means. Again, the point can only be maintained by
insisting that a particular (and itself ill-defined) understanding is the
only kind of understanding which is worth having. The
epistemological argument (that outsiders cannot understand the
experience of a community to which they do not belong) becomes an ethical
argument when this is taken to entail the further proposition that they ought
not therefore attempt to research that community. I hope to have shown that
this argument is based on a false premise . Even if the premise were
sound, however, it would not necessarily follow that researchers
should be prevented or excluded from attempting to under- stand
this experience, unless it could be shown that in so doing they would cause
some harm. This is indeed part of the argument emerging from disempowered
communities and it is to this that I shall now turn.

Reject identity-policing
Innes 09

Robert Alexander Innes, member of Cowessess First Nation and an assistant

professor in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Saskatchewan,
2009, "Wait a Second. Who Are You Anyways?", American Indian Quarterly, 33.4
Insider scholars, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, challenge the research
conducted by outsiders for its colonial nature, which ignores,
silences, [End Page 441] and/or diminishes insider perspectives.3 This
critique originated with African American scholars in the 1960s and led

to an emergence of what Robert Merton describes as the "Insider doctrine,"

namely, that members of a particular group should research their own group.4
Feminists, for example, advocate that women should research women's issues.
As Sherna Gluck and Daphine Patai state, it should be "by, for, and about
women."5 The result of these assertions has been the development
and implementation of research methods designed for insider
researchers, which, in turn, has generated discussion among scholars.
Specifically, scholars have questioned what actually constitutes insider
research, the validity of the data obtained by insiders, and to what
degree the insiders are, in fact, insiders. Over thirty years ago sociologist
Robert Merton addressed the research conducted by insiders. According to
Merton, the central notion of the insider doctrinethat only members
of a particular group possess the ability to undertake research of
their groupis "solipsistic." The solipsism of the insider doctrine, Merton
believes, "can be put in the vernacular with no great loss in meaning: you
have to be one to understand one."6 For Merton, a major shortcoming
of this exclusiveness is that it leads to fragmentation , for groups
necessarily contain additional subgroups: Thus, if only whites can
understand whites, and blacks, blacks, and only men can understand
men, and women, women, this gives rise to the paradox which
severely limits both premises: for it then turns out, by assumption, that
some Insiders are excluded from understanding other Insiders with
white women being condemned not to understand white men, and black
men, not to understand black women, and so through the various
combinations of status subsets.7 The issue of insider research validity has
also garnered much discussion among scholars. Insider researchers' bias has
been a frequent target due to alleged close ties to the research group. Insiders'
close ties have led some scholars to point out "the dangers of over-rapport."
Over-rapport occurs when a researcher closely identifies with the research
group's perspectives and fails to approach research situations in a critical
manner.8 That is, as John L. Aguilar states, "the conduct of research from
home often inhibits the perception of structures and patterns of
social and cultural life. [T]oo much is too familiar to be noticed or to
arouse the curiosity essential to research."9 Insider researchers' close
relationship with the researched group means that significant
observation can "easily be overlooked, including many taken-for
granted assumptions about social behavior and the blindness to
common, everyday activities; these are hazards of intimate familiarity."10
Scholars have additionally argued that insider researchers, unlike outsiders,
are more likely to have difficulty "intellectually and emotively" distancing
themselves from the research group.11 In contrast to insider researchers,
outsider researchers see themselves as being better equipped to provide
objective accounts of the research population. Merton cites Georg Simmel, who
states that an outsider or stranger to the research group is "freer, practically
and theoretically. . . . [H]e surveys conditions with less prejudice; his criteria
for them are more general and more objective ideals; he is not tied down in his
action by habit, piety, and precedent." Merton adds, "It is the stranger, too,
who finds what is familiar to the group significantly unfamiliar and so is
prompted to raise questions for inquiry less apt to be raised at all by
Insiders."12 While insider researchers have to contend with obstacles that

prevent them from probing into some areas, outsider research "involves a
comparative orientation in which contrast promotes both perception
and curiosity. The researcher undergoes a kind of heuristic culture
shock that operates through curiosity as an impetus to
understanding."13 These views emphasize the idea that "only outsiders can
conduct valid research on a given group; only outsiders, it is held, possess the
needed objectivity and emotional distance [and that] insiders invariably
present their group in an unrealistically favorable light."14 Some feminists
have become critical of the insider research favored by many feminist
scholars. Melissa Gilbert's research experience led her to question the feminist
research methodology: "The fact that I was not doing my research in the 'Third
World' or in any other country, and yet felt like an 'outsider' suggests that we
need to question the assumptions underlying much of 'feminist'
methodology." For Gilbert, " the insider/outsider dichotomy is not
useful because the very act of conducting research places an 'insider'
in an 'outsider' position."15 Other insider researchers like Gilbert have
found that simply being a member of the researched community does
not guarantee insider status. Class, gender, sexuality, nationality, age,
education, ethnicity, race, culture, [End Page 443] level of familiarity, physical
appearance, types of clothing, and lingering distrust of research could all
prevent insider researchers from obtaining the trust and credibility necessary
for gaining access to research participants.16 Insider researchers have also
identified physical appearance as a barrier to gain insider status with some
research participants. These researchers found that, like outsider researchers,
they went through a period in which they and the research participants had to
negotiate their relationship, a period whereby the researcher had to gain the
confidence of his or her participants.17 These researchers reached the same
conclusion set out by Merton many years ago: "We are all, of course, both
insiders and outsiders, members of some groups and, sometimes
derivatively, not of others; occupants of certain statuses which
thereby exclude us from occupying other cognate statuses."18 Unlike
Gilbert, however, these recent scholars maintain that their status as an insider
was not completely undermined by factors that made them an outsider. They
were aware or were made aware of these differences and had to navigate their
way in a research relationship to enhance their insider status so that their
research participants accepted them and their differences.

2NC Confession DA
Narrative is a technique of subjugation leaves dominant
powers untouched and reproduces the violence they criticize
Brown 96

Wendy Brown is Professor of Women's Studies and Legal Studies, and is Co-Director
of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The
University of Chicago Law School Roundtable. 1996
But if the silences in discourses of domination are a site for insurrectionary
noise, if they are the corridors we must fill with explosive counter-tales, it is also
possible to make a fetish of breaking silence. Even more than a fetish, it is possible
that this ostensible tool of emancipation carries its own techniques of subjugation-that it converges with non-emancipatory tendencies in contem- porary culture (for example,
the ubiquity of confessional discourse and rampant personalization of political
life), that it establishes regulatory norms, coincides with the disciplinary power of confession, in
short, feeds the powers we meant to starve. While attempting to avoid a simple reversal
of feminist valorizations of breaking silence, it is this dimension of silence and
its putative opposite with which this Article is concerned. In the course of this
work, I want to make the case for silence not simply as an aesthetic but a
political value, a means of preserving certain practices and dimensions of
existence from regulatory power, from normative violence, as well as from the
scorching rays of public exposure. I also want to suggest a link between, on
the one hand, a certain contemporary tendency concerning the lives of public
figures--the confession or extraction of every detail of private and personal life
(sexual, familial, therapeutic, financial) and, on the other, a certain practice in
feminist culture: the compulsive putting into public discourse of heretofore
hidden or private experiences--from catalogues of sexual pleasures to litanies
of sexual abuses, from chronicles of eating disorders to diaries of homebirths,
lesbian mothering, and Gloria Steinam's inner revolution. In linking these two
phenomena--the privatization of public life via the mechanism of public
exposure of private life on the one hand, and the compulsive/compulsory
cataloguing of the details of women's lives on the other--I want to highlight a
modality of regulation and depoliticization specific to our age that is not simply
confessional but empties private life into the public domain, and thereby also
usurps public space with the relatively trivial, rendering the political personal in a
fashion that leaves injurious social, political and economic powers unremarked and untouched. In
short, while intended as a practice of freedom (premised on the modernist
conceit that the truth shall make us free), these productions of truth not only bear the
capacity to chain us to our injurious histories as well as the stations of our small lives but
also to instigate the further regulation of those lives, all the while depoliti- cizing their conditions.

That creates new and worse forms of domination

Brown 1996 Wendy Brown is Professor of Women's Studies and Legal Studies,
and is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable
These questions suggest that in legally codifying a fragment of an insurrectionary discourse as a timeless truth, interpellating women as unified in their

victimization, and casting the "free speech" of men as that which "silences"

and thus subordinates women, MacKinnon not only opposes bourgeois liberty
to substantive equality, but potentially intensifies the regulation of gender
and sexuality in the law, abetting rather than contesting the production of gender
identity as sexual. In short, as a regulatory fiction of a particular identity is
deployed to displace the hegemonic fiction of universal personhood, the
discourse of rights converges insidiously with the discourse of disciplinarity
to produce a spectacularly potent mode of juridical-regulatory domination.
Again, let me emphasize that the problem I am seeking to delineate is not
specific to MacKinnon or even feminist legal reform. Rather, MacKinnon's and
kindred efforts at bringing subjugated discourses into the law merely
constitute examples of what Foucault identified as the risk of re-codification
and re- colonisation of "disinterred knowledges" by those "unitary discourses,
which first disqualified and then ignored them when they made their
appearance." n23 They exemplify how the work of breaking silence
can metamorphose into new techniques of domination, how our truths
can become our rulers rather than our emancipators, how our
confessions become the norms by which we are regulated.

Their prioritization of experience cements an attachment to

injury this prevents overcoming that injury, homogenizes
group identities, and silences those whose experiences do not
parallel theirs creates new zones of sacrifice
Brown 96
Wendy Brown is Professor of Women's Studies and Legal Studies, and is Co-Director
of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The
University of Chicago Law School Roundtable. 1996
If, taken together, the two passages from Foucault we have been consider- ing
call feminists to account in our compulsion to put everything about women into
discourse, they do not yet exhaust the phenomenon of being ensnared 'in the
folds of our own discourses.' For if the problem I have been discussing is easy
enough to see--indeed, largely familiar to those who track techniques of cooptation--at the level of legal and bureaucratic discourse, it is altogether

more disquieting when it takes the form of regulatory discourse in our

own sub- and counter-cultures of resistance . . . when confessing injury
becomes that which attaches us to the injury, paralyzes us within it, and
prevents us from seeking or even desiring a status other than injured. In
an age of social identification through attributes marked as culturally
significant--gender, race, sexuality, and so forth-- confessional discourse,

with its truth-bearing status in a post-epistemological universe, not only

regulates the confessor in the name of freeing her as Foucault described
that logic, but extends beyond the confess- ing individual to
constitute a regulatory truth about the identity group. Confessed
truths are assembled and deployed as "knowledge" about the group.
This phenomenon would seem to undergird a range of recurring troubles in

feminism, from the "real woman" rejoinder to post-structuralist

deconstructions of her, to totalizing descriptions of women's experience that
are the inadvertent effects of various kinds of survivor stories. Thus, for
example, the porn star who feels miserably exploited, violated and humiliated
in her work invariably monopolizes the truth about sex work; as the girl with
math anxieties constitutes the truth about women and math; as eating disorders have become the truth about women and food; as sexual abuse and violation occupy the knowledge terrain of women and sexuality. In other words,
even as feminism aims to affirm diversity among women and women's experiences, confession as the site of production of truth and its convergence
with feminist suspicion and deauthorization of truth from other sources tends
to reinstate a unified discourse in which the story of greatest suffering
becomes the true story of woman. (I think this constitutes part of the rhetorical
power of MacKinnon's work; analytically, the epistemological superiority of
confes- sion substitutes for the older, largely discredited charge of false
consciousness). Thus, the adult who does not suffer from her or his childhood
sexual experi- ence, the lesbian who does not feel shame, the woman of color
who does not primarily or "correctly" identify with her marking as such--these
figures are excluded as bonafide members of the categories which also claim
them. Their status within these discourses is that of being "in denial,"
"passing" or being a "race traitor." This is the norm-making process in

feminist traditions of "breaking silence" which, ironically, silence and

exclude the very women these traditions mean to empower. (Is it

surprising, when we think in this vein, that there is so little feminist writing on
heterosexual pleasure?) But if these practices tacitly silence those whose
experiences do not parallel those whose suffering is most marked (or
whom the discourse produces as suffering markedly), they also condemn

those whose sufferings they record to a permanent identification

with that suffering. Here, we experience a temporal ensnaring in 'the
folds of our own discourses' insofar as we identify ourselves in speech in
a manner that condemns us to live in a present dominated by the past.
But what if speech and silence aren't really opposites? Indeed, what if to
speak incessantly of one's suffering is to silence the possibilities of
overcoming it, of living beyond it, of identifying as something other than it?
What if this incessant speech not only overwhelms the experiences of
others, but alternative (unutterable? traumatized? fragmentary?
inassimilable?) zones of one's own experience ? Conversely, what if a
certain modality of silence about one's suffering--and I am suggesting that we
must consider modalities of silence as varied as modalities of speech and
discourse--is to articulate a variety of possibilities not otherwise available to
the sufferer?

2NC Deliberation DA
Advocacy which prioritizes personal experience makes public
deliberation impossible opponents dont have room to speak
because any challenge is reduced to a personal attack
Subotnik 98
Professor of Law, Touro College, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center. 7 Cornell J. L. & Pub.
Pol'y 681
Having traced a major strand in the development of CRT, we turn now to the
strands' effect on the relationships of CRATs with each other and with
outsiders. As the foregoing material suggests, the central CRT message is
not simply that minorities are being treated unfairly, or even that
individuals out there are in pain - assertions for which there are data to serve
as grist for the academic mill - but that the minority scholar himself or
herself hurts and hurts badly. An important problem that concerns the very
definition of the scholarly enterprise now comes into focus. What can an
academic trained to [*694] question and to doubt n72 possibly say to
Patricia Williams when effectively she announces, "I hurt bad"? n73
"No, you don't hurt"? "You shouldn't hurt"? "Other people hurt too"? Or,
most dangerously - and perhaps most tellingly - "What do you expect when
you keep shooting yourself in the foot?" If the majority were perceived as
having the well- being of minority groups in mind, these responses might be
acceptable, even welcomed. And they might lead to real conversation. But,
writes Williams, the failure by those "cushioned within the invisible
privileges of race and power... to incorporate a sense of precarious
connection as a part of our lives is... ultimately obliterating." n74
"Precarious." "Obliterating." These words will clearly invite responses
only from fools and sociopaths; they will, by effectively precluding
objection, disconcert and disunite others. "I hurt," in academic
discourse, has three broad though interrelated effects. First, it
demands priority from the reader's conscience. It is for this reason
that law review editors, waiving usual standards, have privileged a
long trail of undisciplined - even silly n75 - destructive and, above all,
self-destructive arti cles. n76 Second, by emphasizing the emotional
bond between those who hurt in a similar way, "I hurt" discourages
fellow sufferers from abstracting themselves from their pain in order
to gain perspective on their condition. n77 [*696] Last, as we have
seen, it precludes the possibility of open and structured conversation
with others. n78 [*697] It is because of this conversation-stopping
effect of what they insensitively call "first-person agony stories" that Farber
and Sherry deplore their use. "The norms of academic civility hamper
readers from challenging the accuracy of the researcher's account; it would be
rather difficult, for example, to criticize a law review article by questioning the
author's emotional stability or veracity." n79 Perhaps, a better practice would
be to put the scholar's experience on the table, along with other relevant
material, but to subject that experience to the same level of scrutiny. If
through the foregoing rhetorical strategies CRATs succeeded in

limiting academic debate, why do they not have greater influence on public
policy? Discouraging white legal scholars from entering the national
conversation about race, n80 I suggest, has generated a kind of
cynicism in white audiences which, in turn, has had precisely the reverse
effect of that ostensibly desired by CRATs. It drives the American public to
the right and ensures that anything CRT offers is reflexively rejected.
In the absence of scholarly work by white males in the area of race, of course,
it is difficult to be sure what reasons they would give for not having rallied
behind CRT. Two things, however, are certain. First, the kinds of issues raised
by Williams are too important in their implications [*698] for American life
to be confined to communities of color. If the lives of minorities are
heavily constrained, if not fully defined, by the thoughts and actions of the
majority elements in society, it would seem to be of great importance
that white thinkers and doers participate in open discourse to bring
about change. Second, given the lack of engagement of CRT by the community
of legal scholars as a whole, the discourse that should be taking place at the
highest scholarly levels has, by default, been displaced to faculty offices and,
more generally, the streets and the airwaves.

This turns the altallowing them to universalize the

experience of the oppressed grants them ownership over
experience for the purpose of a ballot. This silences the
oppressed they attempt to liberate.
Donofrio 10
Donofrio is a doctoral fellow in the Department of Communication at the University
of Maryland (Theresa Ann, Ground Zero and Place-Making Authority: The
Conservative Metaphors in 9/11 Families Take Back the Memorial Rhetoric,
Western Journal of Communication Vol. 74, No. 2, MarchApril 2010, pp. 150169)
Regardless of the 9/11 family members success in emblazoning such a
narrative of innocence onto the memorial at Ground Zero, their endeavors to
attain placemaking authority raise larger questions about where the
authority to transform space to place ultimately lies and illustrates
the tensions between top-down and bottom-up approaches to
defining place. Traditionally, we expect that space is transformed into place
from the top down. The victors in warfare carve up disputed territories.
Legislators gerrymander districts. Yet, place-making authority is not
always located in positions of power. For example, environmental
activists advance claims to placemaking authority in battling
hegemonic discourses of industrialization over their conceptions of
nature as a place (DeLuca 7677). In terms of other memorial efforts, John
Bodnar cites the struggle over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a
representative anecdote showcasing the tension between official and
vernacular expressions of public memory. Official expressions of public
memory account for the viewpoints that emanate from those in positions of
power or authority while vernacular expressions represent specialized
interests (14). As a result of this tensions role in shaping the face of public
memorials, Bodnar argues to speak of public memory is to speak primarily
about the structure of power in society (15). The mnemonic battles over

Ground Zero exemplify this power struggle between the official and the
vernacular or the top-down and bottom-up approaches to defining place.
Though TBM activists seek the power to define place from the
disempowered position of loss, ultimately their memorial efforts will
only be successful insofar as they are recognized by the powers that
possess the literal not the metaphoricownership rights to the
site. Still, what remains unique to TBM activists is the extent to which
their authority is derived from subjectivities of suffering, meriting
critical attention to the ways in which rhetorical tropes of suffering
function ideologically. Those thought to be sufferingand particularly
individuals who are in the throes of grief are ceded privileged status as
their claims become unassailable in many respects. When advocates
operate from a subjectivity of suffering, the ethos of their argument
is bound up in their personal experience of loss. As a result of such
conflation, to challenge the argument of the sufferer is to border on
declaring their feelings illegitimate. Few viable means of countering
arguments advanced from subjectivities of suffering exist because
of the leeway culturally afforded to the bereaved in making meaning
of their loss coupled with the general poignancy of their discourse. By
contrast, those who do attempt to offer challenges concerning how the
bereaved make meaning of loss (in this instance, the commercial, political, and
academic voices) are more easily refuted for their acts of effrontery in failing
to acknowledge the authority of the sufferer to make meaning of tragedy. But
what TBM members are producing is not idiosyncratic meaning of 9/11,
they are offering their interpretation of the event as the appropriate
way of collectively understanding the attacks. Herein is where the
authority ceded to the sufferer is rendered problematic. Of course,
each individual should be afforded the latitude to make meaning of
loss howsoever he or she pleases; yet to claim my experience with
suffering trumps the voices of non-sufferers is to shut down
discourse and foreclose alternative means of understanding
traumatic events. 9/11 must be understood as more than the aggregate of
nearly three thousand individual deaths. To read the event through such a
lens is to lapse into the process of historical and political abstraction
and the promotion of rhetorics of American innocence and
blamelessness (Sturken, Tourists of History). To be sure, the voices of
those suffering demand an ear, but to conclude they are the only
voicesor even the chief voicesmeriting consideration is to truncate
our ways of understanding trauma.

Experience kills deliberative politics - Prioritizing personal

experience makes deliberation impossibleno way to
communicate with people who dont share the same
experience
Bridges 2001
Centre for Applied Research in Education, University of East Anglia (David, The
Ethics of Outsider Research, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 35, No. 3)
First, it is argued that only those who have shared in, and have been
part of, a particular experience can understand or can properly
understand (and perhaps `properly' is particularly heavily loaded here) what it
is like. You need to be a woman to understand what it is like to live as a
woman; to be disabled to understand what it is like to live as a disabled person
etc. Thus Charlton writes of `the innate inability of able-bodied people,
regardless of fancy credentials and awards, to understand the disability
experience' (Charlton, 1998, p. 128). Charlton's choice of language here is
indicative of the rhetorical character which these arguments tend to assume.
This arises perhaps from the strength of feeling from which they issue, but it
warns of a need for caution in their treatment and acceptance. Even if ablebodied people have this `inability' it is difficult to see in what sense it is
`innate'. Are all credentials `fancy' or might some (e.g. those reflecting a
sustained, humble and patient attempt to grapple with the issues) be pertinent
to that ability? And does Charlton really wish to maintain that there is a single
experience which is the experience of disability, whatever solidarity disabled
people might feel for each other? The understanding that any of us have of our
own conditions or experience is unique and special, though recent work on
personal narratives also shows that it is itself multi-layered and inconstant, i.e.
that we have and can provide many different understandings even of our own
lives (see, for example, Tierney, 1993). Nevertheless, our own understanding
has a special status: it provides among other things a data source for others'
interpretations of our actions; it stands in a unique relationship to our own
experiencing; and no one else can have quite the same understanding. It is
also plausible that people who share certain kinds of experience in common
stand in a special position in terms of understanding those shared aspects of
experience. However, once this argument is applied to such broad
categories as `women' or `blacks', it has to deal with some very
heterogeneous groups; the different social, personal and situational
characteristics that constitute their individuality may well outweigh
the shared characteristics; and there may indeed be greater barriers
to mutual understanding than there are gateways. These arguments ,
however, all risk a descent into solipsism : if our individual
understanding is so particular, how can we have communication with
or any understanding of anyone else? But, granted Wittgenstein's
persuasive argument against a private language (Wittgenstein, 1963, perhaps
more straightforwardly presented in Rhees, 1970), we cannot in these
circumstances even describe or have any real understanding of our
own condition in such an isolated world. Rather it is in talking to each
other, in participating in a shared language, that we construct the
conceptual apparatus that allows us to understand our own situation

in relation to others, and this is a construction which involves understanding differences as well as similarities. Besides, we have good reason to
treat with some scepticism accounts provided by individuals of their
own experience and by extension accounts provided by members of a
particular category or community of people. We know that such accounts can
be riddled with special pleading, selective memory, careless error, selfcentredness, myopia, prejudice and a good deal more. A lesbian scholar
illustrates some of the pressures that can bear, for example, on an
insider researcher in her own community: As an insider, the lesbian has an
important sensitivity to offer, yet she is also more vulnerable than the
non-lesbian researcher, both to the pressure from the heterosexual world--that
her studies conform to previous works and describe lesbian reality in terms of
its relationship with the outside-- and to pressure from the inside, from
within the lesbian community itself--that her studies mirror not the
reality of that community but its self-protective ideology. (Kreiger, 1982, p.
108) In other words, while individuals from within a community have
access to a particular kind of understanding of their experience, this
does not automatically attach special authority (though it might attach
special interest) to their own representations of that experience.
Moreover, while we might acknowledge the limitations of the understanding which someone from outside a community (or someone other
than the individual who is the focus of the research) can develop, this does
not entail that they cannot develop and present an understanding or
that such understanding is worthless . Individuals can indeed find
benefit in the understandings that others offer of their experience in, for
example, a counselling relationship, or when a researcher adopts a supportive
role with teachers engaged in reflection on or research into their own practice.
Many have echoed the plea of the Scottish poet, Robert Burns (in `To a louse'):
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!3 --even if
they might have been horrified with what such power revealed to
them. Russell argued that it was the function of philosophy (and why not
research too?) `to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and
free them from the tyranny of custom . . .It keeps alive our sense of wonder by
showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect' (Russell, 1912, p. 91). `Making
the familiar strange', as Stenhouse called it, often requires the assistance of
someone unfamiliar with our own world who can look at our taken-for-granted
experience through, precisely, the eye of a stranger. Sparkes (1994) writes
very much in these terms in describing his own research, as a white,
heterosexual middle- aged male, into the life history of a lesbian PE teacher.
He describes his own struggle with the question `is it possible for
heterosexual people to undertake research into homosexual
populations?' but he concludes that being a `phenomenological stranger'
who asks `dumb questions' may be a useful and illuminating
experience for the research subject in that they may have to return to first
principles in reviewing their story. This could, of course be an elaborate piece
of self-justification, but it is interesting that someone like Max Biddulph, who
writes from a gay/bisexual stand- point, can quote this conclusion with
apparent approval (Biddulph, 1996). People from outside a community

clearly can have an understanding of the experience of those who are

inside that community. It is almost certainly a different understanding
from that of the insiders. Whether it is of any value will depend among other
things on the extent to which they have immersed themselves in the world of
the other and portrayed it in its richness and complexity; on the empathy and
imagination that they have brought to their enquiry and writing; on whether
their stories are honest, responsible and critical (Barone, 1992). Nevertheless,
this value will also depend on qualities derived from the researchers' externality: their capacity to relate one set of experiences to others (perhaps from
their own community); their outsider perspective on the structures which
surround and help to define the experience of the community; on the reactions
and responses to that community of individuals and groups external to it.4
Finally, it must surely follow that if we hold that a researcher, who (to take the
favourable case) seeks honestly, sensitively and with humility to understand
and to represent the experience of a community to which he or she does not
belong, is incapable of such understanding and representation, then how can
he or she understand either that same experience as mediated through the
research of someone from that community? The argument which excludes
the outsider from under- standing a community through the effort of
their own research, a fortiori excludes the outsider from that understanding
through the secondary source in the form of the effort of an insider researcher
or indeed any other means. Again, the point can only be maintained by
insisting that a particular (and itself ill-defined) understanding is the
only kind of understanding which is worth having. The
epistemological argument (that outsiders cannot understand the
experience of a community to which they do not belong) becomes an ethical
argument when this is taken to entail the further proposition that they ought
not therefore attempt to research that community. I hope to have shown that
this argument is based on a false premise . Even if the premise were
sound, however, it would not necessarily follow that researchers
should be prevented or excluded from attempting to under- stand
this experience, unless it could be shown that in so doing they would cause
some harm. This is indeed part of the argument emerging from disempowered
communities and it is to this that I shall now turn.

Their choice to focus on a story of themselves is the core of

egocentric public discoursecrushes the public sphere
Levasseur and Carlin 01
DAVID G. LEVASSEUR AND DIANA B. CARLIN, David G. Levasseur is Assistant
Professor of Communication Studies at West Chester University in West Chester,
Pennsylvania. Diana B. Carlin is Professor of Communication Studies and Dean of
the Graduate School and International Programs at the University of Kansas
EGOCENTRIC ARGUMENT AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE; CITIZEN DELIBERATIONS ON
PUBLIC POLICY AND POLICYMAKERS, Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 4, No. 3, 2001, pp.
407-431]
Argument is a key discursive form within the public sphere.^^
Citizens within our discussion groups argued as they formed a
communicative space to discuss political issues. Within this space,

their arguments fell into distinct patterns, and thesepatterns ran

counter to concepts of a healthy public sphereas described by most
scholars. These patterns shared one commonality: they all contained a
core element of egocentrismthe view that individuals should focus
on their owninterests and experiences.One group participant in Illinois
ably described this egocentrism in his portrait of the debate viewing process:
Ml: I think part of the attraction to debates is sitting and watching the
candidates try to make the issues relevant to you as a viewer. I think part of it
is sitting there and saying, what they're talking about, how does that affect
me? If you say, "Well, health care, doesn't affect me, I'm 22," then you're not
going to get anything out of the debates. But if you sit there and watch and
say, "Health care, now how does that affect me?" It's more the sense of this is
something that's important. Otherwise, they wouldn't be talking about it, so
how can it be made relevant to me? I think that's probably why I found that
everything they talked about affected me in a certain way, because I was
looking for it. In this case, the viewer watched the debate with a focus on the
selflooking for connections between the self and public policy. Such a
viewer was likely to generate political arguments with an egocentric
foundation. Such egocentrism has a long history in the United States. In
nineteenth-century America, Tocqueville observed a self-interested
individualism that he labeled as "egoism." He warned that a neglect of
associated life could lead to a disintegration of democracy.'^ The
egocentrism that Tocqueville feared has, over time, become
entrenched within the U. S. ideological traditions of individualism and
liberalism.^'* Thisentrenched American ideology portrays "individuals as
autonomousrational agents who seek to pursue their own lifeplans,
their own interests, without interference from other agents."^^ This
ideology is the "public philosophy of contemporary American politics" and
"most of our debates proceed within its terms."^^ An ego-centered
ideology creates difficulties for the public sphere because a public
sphere, by its very nature, should compel citizens to arrive at
collective outcomes. In fact, the normative conceptions of the public sphere
and deliberative democracy generally contend that citizens' arguments must
further the common good rather than individual self-interest. For example,
JurgenHabermas's model of the bourgeois public sphere rests upon the notion
that discourse will focus on the common good rather than private interests.
John Dryzek argues that discourse in the public sphere should "restrain
[the] pursuit of self-interest." John Rawls contends that in an ideal
deliberative democracy arguments would be grounded in a
"conception of the common good," and Zarefsky defines the public sphere
as a discursive space where citizens focus on "the best interest of the larger
community."^^ While others have alluded to egocentrism in the United States,
they have not shown how this egocentrism is embodied within specific
argument forms in the public sphere. In our discussion groups, this
egocentrism emerged within three specific patterns of argument: (1)
citizens framed arguments in terms of self-interest; (2) citizens
grounded public policy evaluation in personal experience; and (3)
citizens engaged in cynical public policy evaluation.

Deliberation allows us to reframe nationhood to account for

historical violence
Brubaker 4
Rogers Brubaker, Department of Sociology, UCLA, 2004, In the Name of the Nation:
Reflectionson Nationalism and Patriotism, Citizenship Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2,
www.sailorstraining.eu/admin/download/b28.pdf
This, then, is the basic work done by the category nation in the context of
nationalist movementsmovements to create a polity for a putative nation. In
other contexts, the category nation is used in a very different way. It is
used not to challenge the existing territorial and political order, but to
create a sense of national unity for a given polity. This is the sort of work
that is often called nation-building, of which we have heard much of late. It is
this sort of work that was evoked by the Italian statesman Massimo DAzeglio,
when he famously said, we have made Italy, now we have to make Italians. It
is this sort of work that was (and still is) undertakenwith varying but on the
whole not particularly impressive degrees of successby leaders of postcolonial states, who had won independence, but whose populations were and
remain deeply divided along regional, ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines. It is
this sort of work that the category nation could, in principle, be mobilized to
do in contemporary Iraqto cultivate solidarity and appeal to loyalty in a way
that cuts across divisions between Shiites and Sunnis, Kurds and Arabs, North
and South.2 In contexts like this, the category nation can also be used in
another way, not to appeal to a national identity transcending
ethnolinguistic, ethnoreligious, or ethnoregional distinctions, but rather to
assert ownership of the polity on behalf of a core ethnocultural nation
distinct from the citizenry of the state as a whole, and thereby to define or
redefine the state as the state of and for that core nation (Brubaker, 1996,
p. 83ff). This is the way nation is used, for example, by Hindu nationalists in
India, who seek to redefine India as a state founded on Hindutva or Hinduness,
a state of and for the Hindu ethnoreligious nation (Van der Veer, 1994).
Needless to say, this use of nation excludes Muslims from membership of the
nation, just as similar claims to ownership of the state in the name of an
ethnocultural core nation exclude other ethnoreligious, ethnolinguistic, or
ethnoracial groups in other settings. In the United States and other relatively
settled, longstanding nation-states, nation can work in this exclusionary
way, as in nativist movements in America or in the rhetoric of the
contemporary European far right (la France oux Francais, Deutschland
den Deutshchen). Yet it can also work in a very different and
fundamentally inclusive way.3 It can work to mobilize mutual
solidarity among members of the nation, inclusively defined to
include all citizensand perhaps all long-term residentsof the state. To
invoke nationhood, in this sense, is to attempt to transcend or at least
relativize internal differences and distinctions. It is an attempt to get people to
think of themselves to formulate their identities and their interestsas
members of that nation, rather than as members of some other collectivity. To
appeal to the nation can be a powerful rhetorical resource, though it is not
automatically so. Academics in the social sciences and humanities in the
United States are generally skeptical of or even hostile to such invocations of
nationhood. They are often seen as depasse, parochial, naive, regressive, or
even dangerous. For many scholars in the social sciences and humanities,

nation is a suspect category. Few American scholars wave flags, and many of
us are suspicious of those who do. And often with good reason, since flagwaving has been associated with intolerance, xenophobia, and militarism, with
exaggerated national pride and aggressive foreign policy. Unspeakable
horrorsand a wide range of lesser evilshave been perpetrated in the
name of the nation, and not just in the name of ethnic nations, but in the
name of putatively civic nations as well (Mann, 2004). But this is not
sufficient to account for the prevailingly negative stance towards the nation.
Unspeakable horrors, and an equally wide range of lesser evils, have been
committed in the name of many other sorts of imagined communities
as wellin the name of the state, the race, the ethnic group, the class, the
party, the faith. In addition to the sense that nationalism is dangerous, and
closely connected to some of the great evils of our timethe sense that, as
John Dunn (1979, p. 55) put it, nationalism is the starkest political shame of
the 20th-century there is a much broader suspicion of invocations of
nationhood. This derives from the widespread diagnosis that we live in a postnational age. It comes from the sense that, however well fitted the category
nation was to economic, political, and cultural realities in the nineteenth
century, it is increasingly ill-fitted to those realities today. On this account,
nation is fundamentally an anachronistic category, and invocations of
nationhood, even if not dangerous, are out of sync with the basic principles
that structure social life today.4 The post-nationalist stance combines an
empirical claim, a methodological critique, and a normative argument. I will
say a few words about each in turn. The empirical claim asserts the declining
capacity and diminishing relevance of the nation-state. Buffeted by the
unprecedented circulation of people, goods, messages, images, ideas, and
cultural products, the nation-state is said to have progressively lost its ability
to cage (Mann, 1993, p. 61), frame, and govern social, economic, cultural,
and political life. It is said to have lost its ability to control its borders, regulate
its economy, shape its culture, address a variety of border-spanning problems,
and engage the hearts and minds of its citizens. I believe this thesis is greatly
overstated, and not just because the September 11 attacks have prompted an
aggressively resurgent statism.5 Even the European Union, central to a good
deal of writing on post-nationalism, does not represent a linear or
unambiguous move beyond the nation-state. As Milward (1992) has argued,
the initially limited moves toward supranational authority in Europe worked
and were intendedto restore and strengthen the authority of the nationstate. And the massive reconfiguration of political space along national lines in
Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War suggests that far from
moving beyond the nation-state, large parts of Europe were moving back to
the nation-state.6 The short twentieth century concluded much as it had
begun, with Central and Eastern Europe entering not a post-national but a
post-multinational era through the large-scale nationalization of previously
multinational political space. Certainly nationhood remains the universal
formula for legitimating statehood. Can one speak of an unprecedented
porosity of borders, as one recent book has put it (Sheffer, 2003, p. 22)? In
some respects, perhaps; but in other respectsespecially with regard to the
movement of peoplesocial technologies of border control have continued to
develop. One cannot speak of a generalized loss of control by states over their
borders; in fact, during the last century, the opposite trend has prevailed, as

states have deployed increasingly sophisticated technologies of identification,

surveillance, and control, from passports and visas through integrated
databases and biometric devices. The worlds poor who seek to better their
estate through international migration face a tighter mesh of state regulation
than they did a century ago (Hirst and Thompson, 1999, pp. 301, 267). Is
migration today unprecedented in volume and velocity, as is often asserted?
Actually, it is not: on a per capita basis, the overseas flows of a century ago to
the United States were considerably larger than those of recent decades, while
global migration flows are today on balance slightly less intensive than those
of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century (Held et al., 1999, p. 326).
Do migrants today sustain ties with their countries of origin? Of course they
do; but they managed to do so without e-mail and inexpensive telephone
connections a century ago, and it is not clearcontrary to what theorists of
post-nationalism suggestthat the manner in which they do so today
represents a basic transcendence of the nation-state.7 Has a globalizing
capitalism reduced the capacity of the state to regulate the economy?
Undoubtedly. Yet in other domainssuch as the regulation of what had
previously been considered private behaviorthe regulatory grip of the state
has become tighter rather than looser (Mann, 1997, pp. 4912). The
methodological critique is that the social sciences have long suffered from
methodological nationalism (Centre for the Study of Global Governance,
2002; Wimmer and Glick-Schiller, 2002)the tendency to take the nationstate as equivalent to society, and to focus on internal structures and
processes at the expense of global or otherwise border-transcending processes
and structures. There is obviously a good deal of truth in this critique, even if it
tends to be overstated, and neglects the work that some historians and social
scientists have long been doing on border-spanning flows and networks. But
what follows from this critique? If it serves to encourage the study of social
processes organized on multiple levels in addition to the level of the nationstate, so much the better. But if the methodological critique is coupled as it
often iswith the empirical claim about the diminishing relevance of the
nation-state, and if it serves therefore to channel attention away from statelevel processes and structures, there is a risk that academic fashion will lead
us to neglect what remains, for better or worse, a fundamental level of
organization and fundamental locus of power. The normative critique of the
nation-state comes from two directions. From above, the cosmopolitan
argument is that humanity as a whole, not the nation- state, should define the
primary horizon of our moral imagination and political engagement
(Nussbaum, 1996). From below, muticulturalism and identity politics celebrate
group identities and privilege them over wider, more encompassing affiliations.
One can distinguish stronger and weaker versions of the cosmopolitan
argument. The strong cosmopolitan argument is that there is no good reason
to privilege the nation-state as a focus of solidarity, a domain of mutual
responsibility, and a locus of citizenship.8 The nation-state is a morally
arbitrary community, since membership in it is determined, for the most part,
by the lottery of birth, by morally arbitrary facts of birthplace or parentage.
The weaker version of the cosmopolitan argument is that the boundaries of the
nation-state should not set limits to our moral responsibility and political
commitments. It is hard to disagree with this point. No matter how open and
joinable a nation isa point to which I will return belowit is always

imagined, as Benedict Anderson (1991) observed, as a limited community. It is

intrinsically parochial and irredeemably particular. Even the most adamant
critics of universalism will surely agree that those beyond the boundaries of
the nation-state have some claim, as fellow human beings, on our moral
imagination, our political energy, even perhaps our economic resources.9 The
second strand of the normative critique of the nation-statethe
multiculturalist critiqueitself takes various forms. Some criticize the nationstate for a homogenizing logic that inexorably suppresses cultural differences.
Others claim that most putative nation-states (including the United States) are
not in fact nation-states at all, but multinational states whose citizens may
share a common loyalty to the state, but not a common national identity
(Kymlicka, 1995, p. 11). But the main challenge to the nation-state from
multiculturalism and identity politics comes less from specific arguments than
from a general disposition to cultivate and celebrate group identities and
loyalties at the expense of state-wide identities and loyalties. In the face of this
twofold cosmopolitan and multiculturalist critique, I would like to sketch a
qualified defense of nationalism and patriotism in the contemporary American
context.10 Observers have long noted the Janus-faced character of nationalism
and patriotism, and I am well aware of their dark side. As someone who has
studied nationalism in Eastern Europe, I am perhaps especially aware of that
dark side, and I am aware that nationalism and patriotism have a dark side not
only there but here. Yet the prevailing anti-national, post-national, and transnational stances in the social sciences and humanities risk obscuring the good
reasonsat least in the American contextfor cultivating solidarity, mutual
responsibility, and citizenship at the level of the nation-state. Some of those
who defend patriotism do so by distinguishing it from nationalism.11 I do not
want to take this tack, for I think that attempts to distinguish good patriotism
from bad nationalism neglect the intrinsic ambivalence and polymorphism of
both. Patriotism and nationalism are not things with fixed natures; they
are highly flexible political languages, ways of framing political
arguments by appealing to the patria, the fatherland, the country, the nation.
These terms have somewhat different connotations and resonances, and the
political languages of patriotism and nationalism are therefore not fully
overlapping. But they do overlap a great deal, and an enormous variety of
work can be done with both languages. I therefore want to consider them
together here. I want to suggest that patriotism and nationalism can be
valuable in four respects. They can help develop more robust forms of
citizenship, provide support for redistributive social policies, foster the
integration of immigrants, and even serve as a check on the development of
an aggressively unilateralist foreign policy. First, nationalism and patriotism
can motivate and sustain civic engagement. It is sometimes argued that liberal
democratic states need committed and active citizens, and therefore need
patriotism to generate and motivate such citizens. This argument shares the
general weakness of functionalist arguments about what states or societies
allegedly need; in fact, liberal democratic states seem to be able to muddle
through with largely passive and uncommitted citizenries. But the argument
need not be cast in functionalist form. A committed and engaged citizenry may
not be necessary, but that does not make it any less desirable. And patriotism
can help nourish civic engagement. It can help generate feelings of solidarity
and mutual responsibility across the boundaries of identity groups. As Benedict

Anderson (1991, p. 7) put it, the nation is conceived as a deep horizontal

comradeship. Identification with fellow members of this imagined community
can nourish the sense that their problems are on some level my problems, for
which I have a special responsibility.12 Patriotic identification with ones
countrythe feeling that this is my country, and my governmentcan help
ground a sense of responsibility for, rather than disengagement from,
actions taken by the national government. A feeling of responsibility for
such actions does not, of course, imply agreement with them; it may
even generate powerful emotions such as shame, outrage, and anger
that underlie and motivate opposition to government policies.
Patriotic commitments are likely to intensify rather than attenuate such
emotions. As Richard Rorty (1994) observed, you can feel shame over your
countrys behavior only to the extent to which you feel it is your country.13
Patriotic commitments can furnish the energies and passions that
motivate and sustain civic engagement .

2NC Black Body Link Wall

Their advantage uses indigenous suffering as a tool of the
ballot, conflating that with empathetic identification of the
other - this makes blackness a commodity.
Hartman 97 Associate Professor of English @ UC BERKLEY 1997
Saidiya V.- SCENCES OF SUBJECTION: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America; pp. 20-21
. Why is pain the conduit of
identification? This question may seem to beg the obvious, given the
violent domination and dishonor constitutive of enslavement, the
acclaimed transformative capacities of pain in sentimental culture, the
prevalence of public displays of suffering inclusive of the pageantry of the trade, the spectacle of punishment,
As well, we need ask why the site of suffering so readily lends itself to inviting identification

circulating reports of slaverys horrors, the runaway success of Uncle Toms Cabin, and the passage through the bloodstained gate, which was a
convention of the slave narrative, all of which contributed to the idea that the feelings and consciousness of the enslaved were most available at this site.

if the scene of beating readily lends itself to an

identification with the enslaved, it does so at the risk of fixing and
naturalizing this condition of pained embodiment and, in complete defiance of Rankins good
However, what I am trying to suggest is that

intention, increases the difficulty of beholding black suffering since the endeavor to bring pain close exploits the spectacle of the body in pain and oddly

If, on one hand, pain extends

humanity to the dispossessed and the ability to sustain suffering leads to
transcendence, on the other, the spectral and spectacular character of this
suffering, or, in other words, the shocking and ghostly presence of pain,
effaces and restricts black sentience. As Rankin himself states, in order for this suffering to induce a reaction and
confirms the spectral character of suffering and the inability to witness the captives pain.

stir feelings, it must be brought close. Yet if sentiment or morality are inextricably tied to human proximity, to quote Zygmunt Bauman, the problem is
that in the very effort to bring it near and inspect it closely it is dissipated. According to Bauman, morality conforms to the law of optical perspective.
It looms large and thick close to the eye. So, then, how does suffering elude or escape us in the very effort to bring it near? It does so precisely because it
can only be brought near by way of a proxy and by way of Rankins indignation and imagination. If the black body is the vehicle of the others power,

the
elusiveness of black suffering can be attributed to a racist optics in which
black flesh is itself identified as the source of opacity, the denial of black
humanity, and the effacement of sentience integral to the wanton use of
the captive body.
pleasure, and profit, then it is no less true that it is the white or near-white body that makes the captives suffering visible and discernible. Indeed,

This turns the case, spilling their harms over to the debate
space
Hartman 97 Associate Professor of English @ UC BERKLEY 1997 Saidiya V.-

SCENCES OF SUBJECTION: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century

America; pp. 21-23
By slipping into the black body and figuratively occupying the position of
the enslaved, Rankin plays the role of captive attester and in so doing
articulates the crisis of witnessing determined by the legal incapacity of slaves or free blacks to act as witnesses
against whites. Since the veracity of black testimony is in doubt, the crimes of slavery must not only be
confirmed by unquestionable authorities and other white observers but
also must be made visible, whether by revealing the scarred back of the
slave-in short, making the body speak-or through authenticating devices, or, better yet, by enabling reader and audience member to experience
vicariously the tragical scenes of cruelty. If Rankin as a consequence of his abolitionist sentiments was willing to occupy the unmasterly position,
sentimentalism prescribed the terms of his identification with the enslaved, and the central term of this identification was suffering. For Rankin, the
pageantry of the coffle and for others who also possessed antislavery sentiments

, the attempt to understand the

inner feelings of the enslaved only effaced the horrors of slavery and
further circumscribed the captives presumably limited capacity for
suffering. For many eyewitnesses of the coffle, the terrors of slavery were
dissipated by song and violence was transformed into a display of agency
and good cheer. What concerns me here is the spectacular nature of black suffering and, conversely, the dissimulation of suffering
through spectacle. In one respect, the combination of imagined scenes of cruelty with those culled from unquestionable authority evidences the crisis of

At the same time, the spectacular dimensions

of slavery engender this crisis of witnessing as much as the repression of
black testimony since to the degree that the body speaks it is made to speak the masters truth and augments his power through the
witnessing that results from the legal subjection of slaves.

imposition and intensification of pain. All this is further complicated by the half-articulate and incoherent song that confounds the transparency of
testimony and radically complicates the rendering of slavery. In light of these concerns, this chapter wrestles with the following questions: Does the
extension of humanity to the enslaved ironically reinscribe their subjugated status? Do the figurative capacities of blackness enable white flights of
fantasy while increasing the likelihood of the captives disappearance? Can the moral embrace of pain extricate itself from pleasures borne by subjection?
In other words, does the scene of the tyrannized slave at the bloodstained gate delight the loathsome master and provide wholesome pleasures entangled
with the wielding of power and the extraction of enjoyment? Does the captives dance allay grief or articulate the fraught, compromised, and impossible
character of agency? Or does it exemplify the use of the body as an instrument against the self? The scenes of subjection considered here-the coerced
spectacles orchestrated to encourage the trade in black flesh; scenes of torture and festivity; the tragedy of virtuous women and the antics of outrageous

The affiliation of performance and

blackness can be attributed to the spectacularization of black pain and
racist conceptions of Negro nature as carefree, infantile, hedonistic, and indifferent to suffering and to
darkies-all turn upon the simulation of agency and the excesses of black enjoyment.

an interested misreading of the interdependence of labor and song common among the enslaved. The constitution of blackness as an abject and degraded

Moreover, blacks were envisioned

fundamentally as vehicles for white enjoyment, in all of its sundry and unspeakable expressions; this
condition and the fascination with the others enjoyment went hand in hand.

was as much the consequence of the chattel status of the captive as it was of the excess enjoyment imputed to the other, for those forced to dance on the
decks of slave ships crossing the Middle Passage, step it up lively on the auction block, and amuse the master and his friends were seen as the purveyors
of pleasure. The amazing popularity of the darkies of the minstrel stage must be considered in this light. Contending variants of racism, ranging from the
proslavery plantation pastoralism to the romantic racialism of abolitionists, similarly constituted the African as childish, primitive, contented, and endowed

This history is of
central importance when evaluating the politics of pleasure, the uses of
slave property, the constitution of the subject, and the tactics of
resistance. Indeed, the convergence of terror and enjoyment cannot be understood outside it. The pageantry of the coffle, stepping it up lively
with great mimetic capacities. Essentially, these characteristics defined the infamous and renowned Sambo.

on the auction block, going before the master, and the blackface mask of minstrelsy and melodrama all evidenced the entanglements of terror and

and the instrumental recreations

of plantation management document the investment in and obsession
with black enjoyment dissimulate the extreme violence of the institution
enjoyment. Above all, the simulated jollity and coerced festivity of the slave trade

and disavow the pain of captivity. Indeed, the transubstantiation of abjection into contentment suggested that the traumas of slavery were easily
redressed and, likewise, the prevalence of black song confirmed blacks restricted sentience and immunity to sorrow. Most important, enjoyment defined
the relation of the dominant race to the enslaved. In other words, the nefarious uses of chattel licensed by the legal and social relations of slavery
articulated the nexus of pleasure and possession and bespoke the critical role of the diversion in securing the relations of bondage. In this way, enjoyment
disclosed the sentiments and expectations of the peculiar institution.

Their advantage uses attempts to put indigenous suffering on

a display of spectacular blackness it becomes a tool of the
state to justify voting for UNT which then makes the oppressed
body a possession of the master
HARTMAN Associate Professor of English @ UC BERKLEY 1997
Saidiya V.- SCENCES OF SUBJECTION: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America; pp. 20-21
And as noted earlier, this is further complicated by the repressive underside of an optics of morality that insists upon the other as a mirror of the self and
that in order to recognize suffering must substitute the self for the other. While Rankin attempts to ameliorate the insufficiency of feeling before the

, this attempt
exacerbates the distance between the readers and those suffering by
literally removing the slave from view as pain is brought close . Moreover,
we need to consider whether the identification forged at the site of
suffering confirms black humanity at the peril of reinforcing racist
assumptions of limited sentience, in that the humanity of the enslaved and the violence of the institution can only be brought into view by
extreme examples of incineration and dismemberment or by placing white bodies at risk. What does it mean that the violence of
spectacle of the others suffering, this insufficiency is, in fact, displaced rather than remedied by his standing in. Likewise

slavery or pained existence of the enslaved, if discernible, is only so in the most heinous and grotesque examples and not in the quotidian routines of
slavery? As well, is not the difficulty of empathy related to both the devaluation and the valuation of black life? Empathic identification is complicated

further by the fact that it cannot be extricated from the economy of chattel slavery with which it is at odds, for this projection of ones feeling upon or into
the object of property and the phantasmic slipping into captivity, while it is distinct from the pleasures of self-augmentation yielded by the ownership of
the captive body and the expectations fostered therein, is nonetheless entangled with this economy and identification facilitated by a kindred possession
or occupation of the captive body, albeit on a different register. In other words, what I am trying to isolate are the kinds of expectations and the qualities
of affect distinctive to the economy of slavery. The relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both the figurative and literal
senses, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the slave-that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects

the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an

abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others feelings ,
ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the
enslaved is the surrogate for the masters body since it guarantees his
disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion.
Thus, while the beaten and mutilated body presumably establishes the brute materiality of existence, the materiality of suffering regularly
eludes (re)cognition by virtue of the bodys being replaced by other signs of value, as well as other bodies. Thus the desire to
don, occupy, or possess blackness or the black body as a sentimental
resource and/or locus of excess enjoyment is both founded upon and
enabled by the material relations of chattel slavery. In light of this, is it too extreme or too obvious
and persons. Put differently,

to suggest that Rankins flight of imagination and the excitements engendered by suffering might also be pleasurable? Certainly this willing abasement
confirms Rankins moral authority, but what about the pleasure engendered by this embrace of pain-that is the tumultuous passions of the flightly
imagination stirred by this fantasy of being beaten? Rankins imagined beating is immune neither to the pleasures to be derived from the masochistic
fantasy nor to the sadistic pleasure to be derived from the spectacle of sufferance. Here my intention is not to shock or exploit the perverse but to
consider critically the complicated nexus of terror and enjoyment by examining the obviated and debased diversions of the capricious master; the
pleasure of indignation yielded before the spectacle of sufferance; the instability of the scene of suffering; and the confusion of song and sorrow typical of
the coffle, the auction block, performing before the master, and other popular amusements.

Ballot Commodification Cards

1NC
Trading autobiographical narrative for the ballot commodifies
ones identity and has limited impact on the culture that one
attempts to reform when autobiographical narrative wins,
it subverts its own most radical intentions by becoming an
exemplar of the very culture under indictment
Coughlin 95associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. (Anne,
REGULATING THE SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER
SCHOLARSHIP, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1229)
Although Williams is quick to detect insensitivity and bigotry in remarks made by
strangers, colleagues, and friends, her taste for irony fails her when it comes to
reflection on her relationship with her readers and the material benefits that her
autobiographical performances have earned for her. n196 Perhaps Williams should
be more inclined to thank, rather than reprimand, her editors for behaving as
readers of autobiography invariably do. When we examine this literary faux pas the incongruity between Williams's condemnation of her editors and the
professional benefits their publication secured her - we detect yet another
contradiction between the outsiders' use of autobiography and their desire to
transform culture radically. Lejeune's characterization of autobiography as a
"contract" reminds us that autobiography is a lucrative commodity . In our
culture, members of the reading public avidly consume personal stories, n197
which surely explains why first-rate law journals and academic presses have been
eager to market outsider narratives. No matter how unruly the self that it
records, an autobiographical performance transforms that self into a form
of "property in a moneyed economy " n198 and into a valuable intellectual
[*1283] asset in an academy that requires its members to publish. n199
Accordingly, we must be skeptical of the assertion that the outsiders' splendid
publication record is itself sufficient evidence of the success of their endeavor. n200
Certainly, publication of a best seller may transform its author's life, with the
resulting commercial success and academic renown. n201 As one critic of
autobiography puts it, "failures do not get published." n202 While writing a
successful autobiography may be momentous for the individual author,
this success has a limited impact on culture . Indeed, the transformation of
outsider authors into "success stories" subverts outsiders' radical
intentions by constituting them as exemplary participants within
contemporary culture , willing to market even themselves to literary and
academic consumers . n203 What good does this transformation do for outsiders
who are less fortunate and less articulate than middle-class law professors? n204
Although they style themselves cultural critics, the [*1284] storytellers generally
do not reflect on the meaning of their own commercial success, nor ponder its
entanglement with the cultural values they claim to resist. Rather, for the most
part, they seem content simply to take advantage of the peculiarly

American license, identified by Professor Sacvan Bercovitch, "to have your

dissent and make it too ." n205

Performance is not a mode of resistance - it gives too much

power to the audience because the performer is structurally
blocked from controlling the (re)presentation of their
representations. Appealing to the ballot is a way of turning
over ones identity to the same reproductive economy that
underwrites liberalism
Phelan 96chair of New York University's Department of Performance Studies
(Peggy, Unmarked: the politics of performance, ed published in the Taylor & Francis
e-Library, 2005, 146
Performances only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved,
recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of
representations of representations : once it does so, it becomes something
other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter
the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its
own ontology. Performances being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here,
becomes itself through disappearance.
The pressures brought to bear on performance to succumb to the laws of
the reproductive economy are enormous. For only rarely in this culture is
the now to which performance addresses its deepest questions valued.
(This is why the now is supplemented and buttressed by the documenting camera,
the video archive.) Performance occurs over a time which will not be repeated. It
can be performed again, but this repetition itself marks it as different. The
document of a performance then is only a spur to memory, an
encouragement of memory to become present.

Empowerment Turn
resistance/empowerment via the ballot can only instill an
adaptive politics of being and effaces the institutional
constraints that reproduce structural violence
Brown 95prof at UC Berkely (Wendy, States of Injury, 21-3)
For some, fueled by opprobrium toward regulatory norms or other mo- dalities of domination, the language of
"resistance" has taken up the ground vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom. For others, it
is the discourse of empowerment that carries the ghost of freedom's valence 22. Yet as many have noted,
insofar as resistance is an effect of the regime it opposes on the one hand, and
insofar as its practitioners often seek to void it of normativity to
differentiate it from the (regulatory) nature of what it opposes on the other, it is
at best politically rebellious; at worst, politically amorphous. Resistance stands
against , not for; it is re- action

to domination, rarely willing to admit to a desire for it,

and it is neutral

with regard to possible political direction . Resistance is in no way constrained to a radical or emancipatory
aim. a fact that emerges clearly as soon as one analogizes Foucault's notion of resistance to its companion terms in Freud or Nietzsche. Yet in some ways
this point is less a critique of Foucault, who especially in his later years made clear that his political commitments were not identical with his theoretical
ones (and un- apologetically revised the latter), than a sign of his misappropriation. For Foucault, resistance marks the presence of power and expands our
under- standing of its mechanics, but it is in this regard an analytical strategy rather than an expressly political one. "Where there is power, there is

resistance is never in a position of exteriority to

power. . . . (T]he strictly relational character of power relationships . . . depends
upon a multiplicity of points of resis- tance: these play the role of
adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations.*39 This appreciation of the extent to
which resistance is by no means inherently subversive of power also reminds us that it is
resistance, and yet. or rather consequently, this

only by recourse to a very non-Foucaultian moral evaluation of power as bad or that which is to be overcome that it is possible to equate resistance with
that which is good, progressive, or seeking an end to domination. If popular and academic notions of resistance attach, however weakly at times, to a
tradition of protest, the other contemporary substitute for a discourse of freedomempowermentwould seem to correspond more closely to a tradition

The language of resistance implicitly acknowledges the extent

to which protest always transpires inside the regime ; empowerment, in
contrast, registers the possibility of generating ones capacities , ones self-esteem,
ones life course, without capitulating to constraints by particular regimes of power. But in so doing, contemporary discourses
of empowerment too often signal an oddly adaptive and harmonious
of idealist reconciliation.

relationship with domination insofar as they locate an individuals sense

of worth and capacity in the register of individual feelings, a register implicitly located
on some- thing of an otherworldly plane vis-a-vis social and political power. In this regard,
despite its apparent locution of resistance to subjection, contem- porary
discourses of empowerment partake strongly of liberal solipsism the radical
decontextualization of the subject characteristic of 23 liberal discourse that is key to the fictional sovereign individualism of liberalism. Moreover,

in

its almost exclusive focus on subjects emotionalbearing and self-regard,

empowerment is a formulation that converges with a regimes own
legitimacy needs in masking the power of the regime . This is not to suggest that talk of
empowerment is always only illusion or delusion. It is to argue, rather, that while the notion of empowerment articulates that feature of freedom

contemporary
deployments of that notion also draw so heavily on an undeconstructed subjectivity
that they risk establishing a wide chasm between the (experience of)
concerned with action, with being more than the consumer subject figured in discourses of rights and eco- nomic democracy,

empowerment and an actual capacity to shape the terms of political,

social, or economic life. Indeed, the possibility that one can feel
empowered without being so forms an important element of legitimacy
for the antidemocratic dimensions of liberalism .

Should Plan for the Future

The affs narrative is grounded in injuries of the past with no
guide for the future---this reinscribes exclusion and
foreclosures social justice
Bhambra 10U WarwickANDVictoria MargreeSchool of Humanities, U
Brighton (Identity Politics and the Need for a Tomorrow,
http://www.academia.edu/471824/Identity_Politics_and_the_Need_for_a_Tomorrow_)
2 The Reification of Identity We wish to turn now to a related problem within identity politicsthat can be best described as the problem of

the

reification of politicised identities . Brown (1995) positions herself within thedebate about identity politics by seeking
to elaborate on the wounded character of politicised identitys desire (ibid: 55);
thatis, the problem of wounded attachments whereby a claim to identity
becomes over-invested in its own historical suffering and perpetuates its
injury through its refusal to give up its identity claim. Browns argument is that where
politicised identity is founded upon an experience of exclusion, for example,
exclusion itself becomes perversely valorised in the continuance of that
identity . In such cases, group activity operates to maintain and reproduce the
identity created by injury (exclusion)

rather than and indeed, often

in opposition to

resolving the injurious social relations that generated claims around that
identity in the first place. If things have to have a history in order to have af uture, then the problem becomes that of how
history is con-structed in order to make the future. To the extent that, for Brown, identity is associated primarily
with (historical) injury, the future for that identity is then already
determined by the injury as

both

bound to the history that produced it

and as a

reproach to the present which embodies that history (ibid 1995: 73). Browns sug-gestion that as it is not possible to undo the past, the focus back- wards

Politicised identity,
obtains its unifying coherence through the politicisation

entraps the identity in reactionary practices, is, we believe,too stark and we will pursue this later in the article.
Brown maintains, emerges and

of exclusion from an ostensible universal , as a protest against exclusion

Its continuing existence requires both a belief in the legitimacy of the
universal ideal (for example, ideals of opportunity, and re- ward in proportion to effort) and enduring exclusion
from those ideals. Brown draws upon Nietzsche in arguing that such identi-ties, produced in
(ibid: 65).

reaction to conditions of disempowerment

andinequality, then

become invested in

their own impotence through practices of , for example, reproach, complaint, and revenge .
These are reactions in the Nietzschean sense since they are substitutes for actions or
can be seen as negative forms of action. Rather than acting to remove
the cause(s) of suffering, that suf-fering is instead ameliorated

(to some extent)

through the estab-lishment of suffering as the measure of social virtue

(ibid 1995:70),

and is compensated for by the vengeful pleasures of recrimi-

nation . Such practices , she argues, stand in sharp distinction to in fact, provide obstacles to
practices that

would

seek to dispel the conditions of exclusion.

Brown casts the dilemma

discussed above in terms of a choicebetween past and future, and adapting Nietzsche, exhorts theadoption of a (collective) will that would become the
redeemer of history (ibid: 72) through its focus on the possibilities of creat-ing different futures. As Brown reads Nietzsche, the one thingthat the will

cannot exert its power over is the past, the it was.Confronted with its impotence with respect to the events of thepast, the will is threatened with
becoming simply an angry spec-tator mired in bitter recognition of its own helplessness. The onehope for the will is that it may, instead, achieve a kind
of mastery over that past such that, although what has happened cannotbe altered, the past can be denied the power of continuing to de-termine the
present and future. It is only this focus on the future, Brown continues, and the capacity to make a future in the face of human frailties and injustices that
spares us from a rancorous decline into despair. Identity politics structured by ressentiment that is, by suffering caused by past events can only break
outof the cycle of slave morality by remaking the present againstthe terms of the past, a remaking that requires a forgetting of that past. An act of
liberation, of self-affirmation, this forgettingof the past requires an overcoming of the past that offers iden-tity in relationship to suffering, in favour of a
future in whichidentity is to be defined differently. In arguing thus, Browns work becomes aligned with a posi-tion that sees the way forward for
emancipatory politics as re-siding in a movement away from a politics of memory (Kilby 2002: 203) that is committed to articulating past injustices
andsuffering. While we agree that investment in identities prem-ised upon suffering can function as an obstacle to alleviating the causes of that suffering,

we share a concern about any

turn to the future that is figured as a complete abandonment of the past .
This is because for those who have suffered oppression and exclusion, the injunction to
give up articulating a pain that is still felt may seem cruel and impossible to
meet. We would argue instead that the turn to the future that theorists such as Brown and Grosz callfor, to revitalise feminism and
we believe that Browns argument as outlined is problematic. First, following Kilby (2002),

other emancipatory politics,

need not be conceived of as a brute rejection of the past .

Indeed, Brown herself recognises the problems involved here, stating that [since] erased histories and historical invisibility are themselves suchintegral
elements of the pain inscribed in most subjugated identities[then] the counsel of forgetting, at least in its unreconstructedNietzschean form, seems
inappropriate if not cruel (1995: 74). She implies, in fact, that the demand exerted by those in painmay be no more than the demand to exorcise that pain
throughrecognition: all that such pain may long for more than revenge is the chance to be heard into a certain release, recognised intoself-overcoming,
incited into possibilities for triumphing over, and hence, losing itself (1995: 74-75). Brown wishes to establish the political importance of remembering
painful historical events but with a crucial caveat: that the purpose of remembering pain is to enable its release . The challenge then, according to her,is

this
may be a pass where we ought to part with Nietzsche (1995: 74), then Freud may be a more
suit-able companion. Since his early work with Breuer, Freuds writ-ings have suggested the (only apparent) paradox that remember-ing
is often a condition of forgetting. The hysterical patient, who is doomed to
repeat in symptoms and compulsive actions a past she cannot adequately
recall, is helped to remember that trau-matic past in order then to move
beyond it: she must remember inorder to forget and to forget in order to
be able to live in the present. 7 This model seems to us to be particularly helpful for thedilemma articulated by both Brown
to create a political culture in which this project does not mutate into one of remembering pain for its own sake. Indeed, if Brown feels that

(1995) and Kilby (2002),insisting as it does that forgetting (at least, loosening the holdof the past, in order to enable the future) cannot be achieved
without first remembering the traumatic past. Indeed, this wouldseem to be similar to the message of Beloved , whose central motif of haunting (is the
adult woman, Beloved, Sethes murderedchild returned in spectral form?) dramatises the tendency of theunanalysed traumatic past to keep on
returning, constraining, asit does so, the present to be like the past, and thereby, disallow-ing the possibility of a future different from that past. As Sarah
Ahmed argues in her response to Brown,

in order to break the seal of the past , in order to move away from

we must first bring them into the realm of political action

(2004: 33). We would add that the task of analys-ing the traumatic past, and thus opening up
the possibility of political action, is unlikely to be achievable by individuals
on their own, but that this, instead, requires a community of
participants dedicated to the serious epistemic work of rememberingand interpreting the objective social conditions that made up thatpast
and continue in the present. The pain of historical injury is not simply an individual
psychological issue, but stems from objective social conditions which
perpetuate, for the most part, forms of injustice and inequality into the
present. In sum, Brown presents too stark a choice between past andfuture. In the example of Beloved with which we began thisarticle, Paul Ds
attach-ments that are hurtful,

acceptance of Sethes experiences of slavery asdistinct from his own, enable them both to arrive at new under-standings of their experience. Such
understanding is a way of partially undoing the (effects of) the past and coming to terms with the locatedness of ones being in the world (Mohanty
1995). As this example shows, opening up a future, and attending to theongoing effects of a traumatic past, are only incorrectly under-stood as
alternatives. A second set of problems with Browns critique of identity poli-tics emerge from what we regard as her tendency to individualise social

the problems
associated with identity politics can be overcome through a shift in the
character of political expression and politi-cal claims common to much politicised identity (1995: 75). She defines this
shift as one in which identity would be expressed in terms of desire rather than
problems as problems that are the possession and theresponsibility of the wounded group. Brown suggests that

of ontology by supplanting the lan-guage of I am with the language of

I want this for us

(1995:75). Such a reconfiguration, she argues, would create an opportu-nity to rehabilitate the memory of

desire within identificatory processesprior to [their] wounding (1995: 75).

It would fur-ther refocus attention

on the future possibilities present in theidentity as opposed to the

identity being foreclosed through its attention to past-based grievances .

Ballot gets Commodified

They make the ballot a commodity that makes social
transformation impossible
Bryant 13philosophy prof at Collin College (Levi, The Paradox of Emancipatory

Political Theory, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/the-paradox-ofemancipatory-political-theory/)

Theres a sort of Hegelian contradiction at the heart of all academic political theory
that has pretensions of being emancipatory. In a nutshell, the question is that of
how this theory can avoid being a sort of commodity . Using Hegel as a model, this contradiction
goes something like this: emancipatory political theory says its undertaken for the sake of emancipation from x. Yet with rare exceptions, it is only
published in academicjournals that few have access to, in a jargon that only other academics or the highly literate can understand, and presented only at
conferencesthat only other academics generally attend.

reveals itself

in its truth

Thus , academic emancipatory

political

theory

as something that isnt aimed at political change or

intervention at all, but rather only as a move or moment in the ongoing

autopoiesis of academia . That is, itfunctions as another line on the CVand is
one strategy through which the university system carries outits autopoiesis or
self-reproduction across time. It thus functions the issue isnt here one of the
beliefs or intentions of academics, but how things function as something like a
commodity within the academic system . The function is not to intervene
in the broader political system despite what all of us doing political theory say and how we think
about our work but rather to carry out yet another iteration of the
academic discourse

(there are other ways that this is done, this has just been a particularly effective rhetorical strategy for the

autopoiesis of academia in the humanities).

Were the aim political change, then the discourse would have to find a way
to reach outside the academy, but this is precisely what academic
politicaltheory cannot do due to the publication and presentation structure, publish or
perish logic, the CV, and so on. To produce political change, the academic political theorist would have to sacrifice his or her
erudition or scholarship, because they would have to presume an audience that doesnt have a high falutin intellectual background
in Hegel, Adorno, Badiou, set theory, Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek, Foucault (who is one of the few that was a breakaway figure), etc. They
would also have to adopt a different platform of communication. Why? Because they would have to address an audience beyond
the confines of the academy, which means something other than academic presses, conferences, journals, etc. (And here I would

scholasticism that
presents a fundamental contradiction between the
form of their discourse only other experts can understand it and the content; they want
to produce change). But the academic emancipatory political theorist cant do either of these things. If they
say that us Marxists are often the worst of the worst. We engage in a discourse bordering on medieval
only schoolmen can appreciate, which

surrender their erudition and the baroque nature of their discourse, they surrender their place in the academy (notice the way in
which Naomi Klein is sneered at in political theory circles despite the appreciable impact of her work). If they adopt other platforms
of communication and this touches on my last post and the way philosophers sneer at the idea that theres a necessity to
investigating extra-philosophical conditions of their discourse then they surrender their labor requirements as people working
within academia. Both options are foreclosed by the sociological conditions of their discourse.

emancipatory academic political discourse is thus that it is formally and

functionally apolitical. At the level of its intention or what it says it aims to effect political change and intervention,
but at the level of what it does, it simply reproduces its own discourse and labor
conditions without intervening in broader social fields ( and no, the
The paradox of

classroom doesnt count ). Unconscious recognition of this paradox might be

why, in some corners, were seeing the execrable call to re-stablish the party. The party is
the academic fantasy of a philosopher-king or an academic avant gard that
simultaneously gets to be an academic and produce political change for all
those dopes and illiterate that characterize the people (somehow the issue of how the party eventually becomes an end in

itself, aimed solely at perpetuating itself, thereby divorcing itself from the people never gets addressed by these neo-totalitarians).

The idea of the party and of the intellectual avant gard is a symptom of
unconscious recognition of the paradox Ive recognized here and of the political theorist that
genuinely wants to produce change while also recognizing that the sociological structure of the academy cant meet those

Given these reflections, one wishes that the academic thats

learned the rhetoric of politics as an autopoieticstrategy for reproducing the university
discourse would be a little less pompous and self-righteous , but everyone has to feel
requirements.

important and like their the best thing since sliced bread, I guess.