Aff

Reconceptualizing Race Good

The 1AC’s reconceptualization of race is necessary to repress static notions of being

Rai 12

/2012, Amit Rai is a Professor of Communication @ Stanford, Race and Ontologies of Sensation, googlebooks, spark/

Note: this card is from Chapter 13 of Arun Saldanha and Jason Michael Adams’ book called Deleuze and Race – Race and Ontologies of Sensation = name of that chapter

In his provocative analysis of the intersection between ecological philosophy and cognitive science, Andy Clark, in Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment Action and Cognitive Extension, argues that an important characteristic of embodied, embedded cognition may be called the Principle of Ecological Assembly (PEA). ‘According to the PEA, the canny cognizer tends to recruit, on the spot, whatever mix of problemsolving resources will yield an acceptable result with a minimum of effort’ (2008: 13; original italics). Intensive, autoreferential ecologies evolve slowly by correlating sensory, motor and neural capabilities, and hence, after a threshold, reach a balance between the organismic bundle and its ecological niche. Ecological assembly further complexifies this tendency of correlation by tracking a kind of near-instantaneous version of such overall balance: the balanced use of a set of potentially highly heterogeneous resources assembled on the spot to solve a given problem. ‘Ecological balance of this latter kind is what a flexible ecological control system seeks to achieve’ (ibid.). What are the implications of Clark’s argument for an engagement with race and virtual philosophy? In a recent posting (2011) on the blog Larval Subjects, Levi Bryant suggests that Clark’s arguments can help transform social and political analysis. Bryant notes that Clark’s extended mind hypothesis has a number of implications for ‘feminist, racial, queer, and Marxist thought’. If it is true that mind is extended, he writes, then a crucial part of understanding ‘race and gender will involve careful and nuanced investigation of the worldly scaffolding that comes to structure race and gender’. Bryant notes, moreover, that this also concerns sexuality and its institutions. ground heteronormativity? What are the scaffoldings that ground patriarchy and male privilege? These scaffoldings, additionally, should be seen as simultaneously channeling men and women, queer and straight, white and brown, etc. If we don’t engage in object-oriented archaeologies of these scaffoldings then we will be unable to develop universal-egalitarian political interventions that respond to them. What does the practice of feeding back into worldly scaffoldings have to teach us about questions of race, sexuality, gender and class in a Deleuzian ontology of becoming? In this chapter, drawing on examples from contemporary media assemblages in India, I argue that forms of ‘racialisation’ (not a common concept in Indian sociological discourse, we should note) must be approached through an affirmation of becoming in ecologies of sensation. My itinerary follows an elaboration of affirmation in virtual philosophy and its implication for an ethical practice of race racing in the first section, and a pragmatic definition of ecology and sensation in the second section. Throughout these two sections I offer various speculative examples from contemporary art and filmic cultures in globalising India that actualise affects of ecologies of sensation. The reason why Gilles Deleuze continues to exert a defining influence on contemporary thought is because he made an affirmation of becoming. Throughout his work, Deleuze shows us that the first effort in the process of such an affirmation is to diagram differential forces, senses and values of our contemporary habits, bodily capacities and sensorimotor circuits: the processes of composing multiplicities. This immanent differentiation is the first affirmation. What is the second? Deleuze pointed out that the diagram of our habits must include matter, memory, durations, technologies, biomass and energies with which bodies form open, far-from equilibrium assemblages, ecologies, planes of immanence. To affirm by experimenting, then, with these immanent differentiations, would be to make an affirmation of becoming itself. This double affirmation sharply diverges from the mass of current criticism of processes of racialisation, which remain, by and large, representational and social-constructivist. For instance, in the work of Sarah Ahmed, the bodily dimension of affect is reduced to the racist symptom that inhabits the psychic apparatus (2010: 143; for a very different take on similar processes, see Puar 2007). On the contrary, it is our argument that racial becomings occur through correlated, functionally resonant characterised by gradients of intensity, force, sense and value (Thrift 2005). To affirm becoming, we need a plan or diagram of intensity, not yet another interpretation of representation, no matter how polysemic or aporetic (Vitale 2011). By postrepresentational I do not mean that representation does not exist or that it has been overcome. Rather, in a virtual ontology, representation (or signification) must be situated as actualised (relatively congealed) forms of affectivity abstracted from the flow of bodily-machinic intensity – blocs of sensation, sensorimotor circuits – that is its plane of potentiality. It is in this congealed form that affectivity becomes emotion, as Brian Massumi so persuasively argues (2002: 27). Representation is itself material, in so far as perception emerges from material forces, spectrums of light, tactile frissons, muscle memory, sensorimotor habituations and neuronal fluxes. In other words, representation is involved / evolved in the dynamic affective charges of the body’s affordances; representational and postrepresentational do not form a binary because representation is already embodied in affection-images. In contemporary cultural critique, the postrepresentational and the representational are usually only contrasting methods of thought. But affection-images are preindividual and intensive. Second, by diagram I mean something like a ‘plan’ in the sense of an intersection of vectors, or processes of composition, which suggests that diagrammatic thought pursue ethical experimentations with sensation (Deleuze 1988: 122–8; I return to this below). Thought is diagrammatic to the extent that its concepts attain an affective intensity, or what amounts to the same thing, an ethical validity. Thus, the critique of the critique of racism is multiply affirmative in so far as it accomplishes at least three things through its procedures. The first is to bring into a diagrammatics of race the specific embodied, qualitative differences that give to race its immanent, durational, intensive variability across and within populations: to push, in other words, the critique of race toward a thought of race racing (the being of race’s speedily becoming) as both qualified and qualifying, that is, as a virtual multiplicity (Ansell Pearson 2002). This would enable a topology and typology of the will to power as a virtual force, real but not actual. Deleuze writes in Nietzsche and Philosophy: what does ‘the will to power manifests itself’ mean? The relationship between forces in each case is determined to the extent that each force is affected by other, inferior or superior, forces. It follows that will to power is manifested as a capacity for being affected. This capacity is not an parts, and they are immanent to the interaction of those parts (DeLanda 2010; Clark 2008). On the other hand, this capacity is not a physical passivity; the only passive affects are those not adequately caused by the given body (Deleuze 2006: 61–2). We must carefully consider Deleuze’s different conceptions of affect and affection, something that is relegated in the too-quick assimilation of affect to emotion or even to sentiment in some contemporary criticism (Colman 2010: 12; Massumi 2002: 27). In his wide-ranging engagement with Baruch Spinoza, Deleuze notes that affections are ‘that which happens to the mode [what we have been referring to as an intensive multiplicity], the modifications of the mode, the effects of other modes on it’ (1988: 48). As I hinted above, Deleuze gives a definition of these modifications that involves us in thinking about representation in a materialist, affective manner. As modifications of the mode, affections are images or ‘corporeal traces’, and their ideas involve both the nature of the affected body and that of the affecting external body. Deleuze quotes Spinoza thus: ‘The affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present in us, we shall call images of things . . . And when the mind regards bodies in this way, we shall say that it imagines’ (1988: 48). These image-affections or ideas affect, in turn, the state of the body, pushing it along gradients of intensity, strengthening or decomposing its capacities to affect and be affected: from one state to another, from one image or idea to another, there are transitions, passages that are experienced, durations through which we pass to a greater or a lesser perfection. Furthermore, these states, these affections, images or ideas are not separable from the duration that attaches them to the preceding state and makes them tend toward the next state. These continual durations or variations of perfection are called ‘affects’, or feelings (affectus). (Deleuze 1988: 48–9)

Faciality leads to violence

Saldanha ‘7 /Arun, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Environment, and Society, University of Minnesota and Senior Lecturer of Social Sustainability at Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pg.194-196/

My disagreement is not with Fanon’s and Martín Alcoff’s insistence on embodiment and emotion, but with their reliance on a Hegelian notion of recognition to explain encounter. Because of this they tend to treat white and nonwhite not only as a dyad, but as almost naturally opposed entities. There is, then, little attention paid to the complicated processes whereby some racial formations become dominant, that is, how racial formations emerge from material conditions and collective interactions, which greatly exceed the spatiality of self versus other. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality is not based on an intersubjective dialectics enlarged to world-historical scope. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari strongly distance themselves from phenomenology and psychoanalysis. First of all, for them, it isn’t consciousness but an abstract machine of faciality that arranges bodies into relations of power. And second, faciality constantly invents new faces to capture deviant bodies, multiplying possible positions far beyond any binaries such as black/white (though binarization can be an important effect). That is precisely its strength. There are thousands of encounters, thousands of trains. Deleuze and Guattari believe faciality’s imperialism arose with institutional Christianity. Being imposed in lands populated by different phenotypes, faciality became a matter of imperialist racialization. That faciality originated in Renaissance humanism and depictions of Jesus seems a plausible if one-sided interpretation. It is less relevant than Deleuze and Guattari’s unusual theory of contemporary racism: If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second or third category. They are also inscribed on the [white] wall [of signification], distributed by the [black] hole [of subjectivity]. They must be Christianized, in other words, facialized. European racism as the white man’s claim has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped as an “other.” Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic...). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be.5 For Anjuna’s psy-trance parties, there were “no people on the outside.” Locals, domestic tourists, charter tourists, and beggars would join the white Goa freaks on the dance floor, sometimes even in Nine Bar. In fact, as with the United Colors of Benetton, it will be remembered that the rhetoric of PLUR demonstrated faciality’s inclusiveness—the parties were supposed to be open to all. But immediately, the faciality machine would place all bodies in relation to the Goa freak standard, both spatiotemporally and subjectively, measuring their acceptability through increasingly meticulous signs: sociochemical monitoring, scene savviness, chillum circles, sexual attractiveness. Many nonfreaks felt uneasy being pigeonholed like this—especially domestic tourists, who would retreat to the darker corners. The result was viscosity, bodies temporarily becoming impenetrable—more or less. It would seem to me that to understand the intricate hierarchies of racism, a framework that allows for gradual and multidimensional deviances is preferable to a dialectical model. Faciality also explains why after colonialism, with television and tourism, there is scarcely place left for any “dark others.” Everyone is included; everyone is facialized. At the same time, Euro-American ways of life continue to spread, and White Man (Elvis Presley, Sylvester Stallone, David Beckham) remains the global standard against which all other faces are forced to compete. What this account of racism has in common with the Fanonian is that whiteness is the norm, even in our “post”-colonial era. Where it differs, however, is that deviance is based not on lack of recognition or negation or annihilation of the other, but on subtle machinic differentiations and territorializations. The virtual structures behind racial formations don’t look like formal logic (a/not-a); they continually differentiate as actual bodies interact and aggregate. Racism, then, can’t be countered with a Hegelian sublation into the universal.

Affirm the multiplicity of identity

Saldanha ‘6 /Arun, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Environment, and Society, University of Minnesota and Senior Lecturer of Social Sustainability at Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, “Reontologising race: the machinic geography of phenotype”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2006, volume 24, pages 9-24, DOI:10.1068/d61j/

Every time phenotype makes another machinic connection, there is a stutter. Every time bodies are further entrenched in segregation, however brutal, there needs to be an affective investment of some sort. This is the ruptural moment in which to intervene. Race should not be eliminated, but proliferated, its many energies directed at multiplying racial differences so as to render them joyfully cacophonic.