Framing

Framing issue on the kritik-Blackness is not ontological---their

very articulation of their critique proves that the concept of
humanity is malleable and not subject to closure this takes out
2nr shitstorm of all the reasons why anti blackness comes first
Tuch 7 [Steven A., professor of sociology, GWU and * Yoku Shaw-Taylor, The Other
African Americans: Contemporary African and Caribbean Immigrants in the United
States]

Accompanying the expansion of counmes whose consolidation became known as Europe were
emerging differences in the order of knowledge through which human beings were
classified. As scholars such as V. Y. Mudimbe (1988). Oyrnk Oyewm (1997). and Cor nd West (2002)
have shown, drawing upon the resources of archaeo logical and genealogical poststructuralism, the
emergence of systematic forms of inquiry premised upon white supremacy as the basis of
human normality resulted in notions of deviation that structured black people in a
derivative relationship with whites. In other words, a link between the formation of knowledge and
processes of inquiry, on the one hand, and mechanisms of power and the effecting of new and
differentiating forms of life/identities, on the other, emerged with their correlative subjectivities. From
aesthetic criteria for human beauty to measurements of intelligence, blacks became the comparison model of
deviation instead of ever serving as the standard. Even worse, the very production of their classificationas blacks

blacks are, in other words,

as Franiz Fanon (1967) declared, white constructions. The account suffers, however, in
that it simply declares the conditions for the emergence of certain forms of
phenomena: it does not articulate the lived reality of such phenomena,
especially in terms of the consciousness that experiences them . For even
such a consciousness would be subjected to discursive determinations of its
emergence: it would, in other words, be accepted if, and only if, theorized from its
outside, that is, in terms of what constitutes it as such. So meaning, form, definition,
and determination cannot make sense inside of things. Given the conceptual
work brought to bear in making things meaningful, there is always an
outside, public, hence social, dimension to the constitution of meaning.
We should thus study not the essence of the thing but how such an
essence is formed. A problem is raised, however. by a thing that is capable of raising
such questions, a thing that can raise the question of its own meaning and
subjectivity. In effect, it subjects itself, or is able to raise the problem of its existence to
itself. This means that it faces a paradox: in the face of the rejection of an inner
logic of the self, it poses the question of itself as an external matter from inside of
itself This rather complex development amounts to saying that the thing in question
is not fully a thing. It is a human being. The human being poses a challenge to
mechanisms of discursive closure. This means that there is always a world of relations of
subjectiv ities and intersubjectivities. of a shared experience of meanings that are
at the least. niggers at worst was a function of a logic that was not their own:

Takes out Wilderson 7 and the framing argument on the K

Link
Turn the Link-their arg is the worst form of negativity and
cripples the alternative
Robinson 4 [Reginald Leamon, prof law @ Howard U, researcher on the relation
between race and academic thought Human Agency, Negated Subjectivity, and
White Structural Oppression: An Analysis of Critical Race Practive/Praxis American
University Law Review 53, no.6 (August 2004): 1361-1419]

Yamamoto argues that left scholars must serve ordinary peoples practical
needs.25 Right now, these scholars do not relate to political lawyers and community
activists. By existing in separate worlds, neither group has helped to co-create26
racial justice. As such, theoretical writings and traditional civil rights strategies
move institutions not toward racial justice, but toward liberal solutions.27 So long as
Under Praxis,

this gap continues, law will retreat from racial justice. In surmounting this gap, Yamamoto requires scholars,
lawyers, and activists to work together (e.g., consortium). Under Practice or Praxis, Williams and Yamamoto intend

This end promises to

give to ordinary people, especially those engaged in interracial conflict, the human agency (or
empowerment) that they lack. For example, Yamamoto advocates for a racial group agency, one oddly
standing on racial identity and personal responsibility.29 Unfortunately, Practice and Praxis cannot
achieve this end. Relying on classical CRT methodology, Williams and Yamamoto assume that
ordinary people like blacks lack human agency and personal responsibility. They
presume that white structural oppression buries ordinary people alive under the
weight of liberal legalisms like Equal Protection, rendering them subtextual
victims.30 I disagree. Pure consciousness is always prior, and all sentient
beings have agency. Despite the sheer weight of the legal violence, slaves never
forgot their innate right to be free; they retained a pure consciousness that never
itself was enslaved.31 Moreover, slaves acted purposefully when they picked cotton
and when they fought to be free. Slaves planned revolts, killed masters, overseers,
and each other, ran away, picked cotton, and betrayed other co-conspirators; all
examples of human agency. Today, despite danger and violence, ordinary people co-create
lives of joy, peace, and happiness. Antebellum slaves co-created spaces in which
they knew joy, peace, and happiness . In the modern era, ordinary people like blacks
have pure consciousness and human agency too . Despite daily examples of human
agency, Williams and Yamamoto posit that ordinary people lack real, practical
control over their lives.32 By taking this position, they reproduce a major premise in
CRT: slavery, Jim Crow, racism, and racial discrimination have subordinated the lives
of ordinary people.33 Put succinctly, white structural oppression (e.g., supremacy) impacts the
micropractices of ordinary people. By implication, it negates their racial identity, social
values, and personal responsibility. If so, then criminal courts mock ordinary people
like blacks when the state punishes them for committing crimes .34 If so, the New York
to pursue a justice concept, in which antisubordination becomes the singular end.28

Times unfairly punished Jayson Blair, and he was correct to fault it for encouraging plagiarism and for rewarding his
unprofessional behavior.35

Failing to address these implications, Williams and Yamamoto

direct us to white structural oppression and divert us from the real, practical

control that ordinary people exercise when they go to work or commit a

crime. In this way,

The affirmative labeling of socially dead, reinforces the logic

that makes dehumanization possible in the first place.
Peterson 06 [Christopher, The Return of the Body: Judith Butler's Dialectical
Corporealism, Discourse, 28.2&3, Spring & Fall 2006, pp. 153-177 (Article)]
In contemporary cultural studies, the body is laden with intense desires and
expectations. Emerging with the eclipse of poststructuralism in the late 1980s, the
body promised to weigh in on contemporary political debates, to give material
substance to a discipline supposedly evacuated by what some felt to be the
excessively linguistic or textual focus of contemporary theory. But what if the
very turn to the body occasioned a certain return of the metaphysics of
presence, only now bearing the name, or rather, the spirit of the body? Indeed,
scholars in race, gender, and sexuality studies have often invoked the body as a
marker of both identity and self-presence. Given the violence of erasure,
invisibility, and death (both social and material) to which minority bodies have
historically been subjected, it has also seemed to many that the ontology of these
bodies must be insisted upon in the face of this nihilistic threat. As Sharon Holland
announces in Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity,
bringing back the dead (or saving the living from the shadow of death) is the
ultimate queer act.1 And in the introduction to her seminal, 1991 collection of
essays on queer theory, Inside/Out, Diana Fuss notes how a striking feature of
many of the essays collected in this volume is a fascination with the specter of
abjection, a certain preoccupation with the figure of the homosexual as specter and
phantom, as spirit and revenant, abject and undead.2 Yet, queer scholarship for
the most part has addressed the problem of the spectral only by way of contesting
its pervasiveness in dominant representations of homosexuality. If saving us from
the shadow of death names the ultimate queer act, such so-called raising of the
dead relieves us of any sustained engagement with what Jacques Derrida calls
spectrality, understood, in part, as an originary process of mourning that is the
condition of all life, indeed, of any body. For Derrida, spectrality does not originate
with ones social or biological death. As he argues in a brief reading of Poes The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, our future absence divides our
present/presence from the very beginning. Derrida takes Valdemars catachrestic
utterance-I have been sleeping-and now-now-I am dead3-to make a
point about the function of language: My death is structurally necessary to the
pronouncing of the I. . . . The utterance I am living is accompanied by my beingdead and its possibility requires the possibility that I be dead; and conversely. This
is not an extraordinary story by Poe here, but the ordinary story of language. . . . I
am thus originally means I am mortal.4 While Derridas point is that the iterability of
a speech act requires the possibility of ones absence from future scenes of
utterance (and thus already implies ones absence in the present), this living death
also names the experience of being more generally. As Heidegger puts it, being
is always already dying in its beingtowardits-end.5 For Heidegger, death is
not a punctual event that one might mark on a calendar; rather, death always

already belongs to our being. The conventional reduction of death to a calculable

moment is precisely what Poes story parodies. While his doctors assert that his
disease [is] of that character which would admit of exact calculation in respect to
the epoch of its termina- tion in death, Valdemar (aided by the magic of
mesmerism) continues to live beyond the estimated moment of decease, a
prolongation of dying that allegorizes how life stretches along a path marked at
every step by death (51). Valdemars protracted dying also echoes Emily
Dickinsons poem Because I could not stop for death, in which death kindly
stops for the speaker and bears her forward through each stage of life. If, as in
Dickinsons poem, death haunts our being from the very beginning, then the
spectral condition of sexual minorities is not reducible to a problem of
representation, or rather, mis-representation, as queer scholarship tends to
suppose. When Holland caricatures postmodernism as the attractive zombie
theory of the academy, a place where the living travel through death and are reborn
to utter the truths of such a journey, she suggests that postmodernism articulates
a dialectical relation between life and death, a sublation of being and nonbeing that
ultimately triumphs over finitude (166). Such a dialectical view of the relation
between life and death, however, opposes itself to the spectral, which is
neither present nor absent. But perhaps Hollands caricature is to be expected,
for as Derrida notes in Specters of Marx, the traditional scholar does not believe in
ghostsnor in all that one would call the virtual space of spectrality. 6 If the
traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts, that is because there has never been
a scholar who, as such, did not believe in the clear-cut distinction between the real
and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and
non-being (34). For Derrida, a capacity to speak to ghosts would be the mark of a
scholar.7 Although it might seem odd to yoke queer critics to the figure of the
traditional scholar, so ingrained is the anti-spectral character of queer scholarship
that Holland can declare the ultimate queerness of raising the dead as a fact, and
support this claim only by referring us to ACT UPs famous political slogan: silence
= death. To insist on this fact, however, is to sidestep the problem of
finitude altogether. When scholars in race, gender, and sexuality studies write
about the body, what is typically invoked is the living body,

Links non unique, post the world of the alternative futuristic

through tstill happnes

Alt
Perm do both
1. solvency

Their alternative reifies anti-black structures by presenting

contingent social configurations as inevitable
Marriott 12 [David Marriott, Ph.D. in literature from the University of Sussex,
wrote a book called Incognegro two years before Frank Wilderson did, 2012, Black
Cultural Studies, Years Work Crit Cult Theory 20(1), p. 47-49]
For example, in Chapter One (The Structure of Antagonisms), written as a theoretical introduction, and which

Wilderson
is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond analogy, it also refigures
the whole of being: the essence of being for the White and non-Black position is non-niggerness,
opens explicitly on the Fanonian question of why ontology cannot understand the being of the Black,

consequently, [b]eing can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then

It is not hard when reading such sentences to suspect a kind of

absolutism at work here, and one that manages to be peculiarly and dispiritingly
dogmatic: throughout Red, White, and Black, despite variations in tone and emphasis, there is always
the desire to have black lived experience named as the worst, and the politics of
such a desire inevitably collapses into a kind of sentimental moralism: for the
claim that Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form means merely that
the black has to embody this abjection without reserve (p. 38). This logicand the
denial of any kind of ontological integrity to the Black/Slave due to its endless
traversal by force does seem to reduce ontology to logic, namely, a logic of nonrecuperabilitymoves through the following points: (1) Black non-being is not capable of symbolic
as niggerness (p. 37).

resistance and, as such, falls outside of any language of authenticity or reparation; (2) for such a subject, which
Wilderson persists in calling death, the symbolic remains foreclosed (p. 43); (3) as such, Blackness is the record of
an occlusion which remains ever present: White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or
oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity (p. 45); (4) and, as an example of the institutions or discourses

Wilderson describes White (or non-Black) film

theory and cultural studies as incapable of understanding the suffering of the Black
the Slave (they cannot do so because they are erroneously wedded to humanism and to the psychoanalysis
of Jacques Lacan, which Wilderson takes as two examples of what the Afro-pessimist should avoid) (p. 56); as a
corrective, Wilderson calls for a new language of abstraction, and one centrally
concerned with exposing the structure of antagonisms between Blacks and
Humans (p. 68). Reading seems to stop here, at a critique of Lacanian full speech: Wilderson
wants to say that Lacans notion of the originary (imaginary) alienation of the subject is
still wedded to relationality as implied by the contrast between empty and full
speech, and so apparently cannot grasp the trauma of absolute Otherness that is the
Blacks relation to Whites, because psychoanalysis cannot fathom the structural, or
absolute, violence of Black life (pp. 74; 75). Whereas Lacan was aware of how language precedes and
involving violence, antagonisms and parasitism,

exceeds us, he did not have Fanons awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks (p. 76). The
violence of such abjectionor incapacityis therefore that it cannot be communicated or avowed, and is always

Whence the suspicion of an ontology

reduced to a logic (of abjection). Leaving aside the fact that it is quite mistaken to
limit Lacans notion of full speech to the search for communication (the unconscious
already delimited by desubjectification and dereliction (p. 77).

according to Wildersons own logic, his

description of the Black is working, via analogy, to Lacans notion of the real but, in
his insistence on the Black as an absolute outside Wilderson can only duly reify
this void at the heart of universality. The Black is beyond the limit of
contingencybut it is worth saying immediately that this beyond is indeed a foreclosure
that defines a violence whose traces can only be thought violently (that is, analogically),
and whose nonbeing returns as the theme for Wildersons political thinking of a nonrecuperable abjection. The Black is nonbeing and , as such, is more real and primary
than being per se: given how much is at stake, this insistence on a racial metaphysics of
injury implies a fundamental irreconcilability between Blacks and Humans (there is
cannot be confined to parole), it is clear that,

really no debate to be had here: irreconcilability is the condition and possibility of what it means to be Black).

2. The af
Futurism inevitable, post the world of the alternative there is nothing that prevents
it from forming again

Wilderson misreads Fanon seeing an alternative conception

of humanity outside of race isnt the same as social death
this ethical absolutism results in conservative resignation that
locks in place the structures they criticize
Marriott 12 [David Marriott, Ph.D. in literature from the University of Sussex,
wrote a book called Incognegro two years before Frank Wilderson did, 2012, Black
Cultural Studies, Years Work Crit Cult Theory 20(1), p. 46-47]

In the concluding pages of Darker Than Blue, Gilroy restates why he finds the ongoing attachment to the idea of
race in the US so very unsatisfactory in comparison, say, to the anti-racism of Frantz Fanon: [ Fanons]

audacious commitment to an alternative conception of humanity reconstituted

outside race [...] is something that does not endear Fanons work to todays
practitioners of the facile antihumanism and ethnic absolutism so
characteristic of life on US college campuses , where class-based homogeneity
combines smoothly with deference to racial and ethic particularity and with
resignation to the world as it appears. Fanon disappoints that scholastic
constituency by refusing to see culture as an insurmountable obstacle between
groups, even if they have been racialized. He does not accept the strategic award of
an essential innocence to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth . Their past
and present sufferings confer no special nobility upon them and are not invested with redemptive insights.

Sufering is just sufering, and Fanon has no patience with those who would
invoke the armour of incorrigibility around national liberation struggles or minority
cultures. (pp. 1578, my emphasis) Whatever one might think of the cogency of these remarks (if only because
the notion of a non-racial life is predicated on the idea that the human can somehow reside outside of race, a

the question of
whether US culture can ever escape racial antagonism is the primary focus of Frank B.
Wilderson IIIs powerful Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, as part of a more
general reading of US film culture. And indeed Fanons anti-philosophical philosophical critique of
humanism that would always then be constitutively compromised by the racism at its frontier),

racial ontology (historically blacks were seen as part of existence but not, as yet, part of human being, a notyet that forces Fanon to rethink the teleological form of the human as already and essentially violent in its

forms a major part of Wildersons

conception of anti-blackness as the major structural antagonism of US history and culture.
It is against the conception that racism could ever be simply contingent to black
experience that Wilderson protests, reflecting on the fact that racial slavery has no
parallel to other forms of suffering, and perhaps most strikingly social death is the
constitutive essence of black existence in the US . In brief, slavery remains so originary,
in the sense of what he calls its accumulation and fungibility (terms borrowed from Saidiya Hartman), it not
only has no analogy to other forms of antagonism Wildersons examples are the Holocaust
and Native American genocide there is simply no process of getting over it, of recovering
from the loss (as wound, or trauma): as such, slavery remains the ultimate structure of
antagonism in the US. Whether at a personal level or at the level of historical process, if black slavery is
separation from the state of nature from which it has come)

foundational to modern Humanism, then any teleological appeal to a humanism beyond racism is doomed from the

The problem with Wildersons argument, however, is that it remains of a

piece with the manichean imperatives that beset it , and which by definition
are structurally uppermost, which means that he can only confirm those
imperatives as absolutes rather than chart a dialectical path beyond them ,
insofar as, structurally speaking, there is no outside to black social death and alienation , or
no outside to this outside, and all that thought can do is mirror its own enslavement
by race. This is not so much afro-pessimism a term coined by Wildersonas
thought wedded to its own despair.
start (p. 22).