2ac nommo

Their dialogic process is not a justification for voting NEG --- asserting that they should
win because of a rewriting of linguistic codes shuts down deliberation because its linked
exclusively to a privatized rejection --- specifically true for Nommo
Lynn Clarke, Department of Communication Studies and Theatre, Vanderbilt University,
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2004., p. 319-21
Notwithstanding the importance of creative speech to philosophy of language and to a community’s self-formation, it remains
unclear whether the collective resistance embodied in AAL meets certain interests expressed by those in whose name it is
theorized. To be sure, and as Yancy argues, oppositional speech matters to the lives of the oppressed. Yet, questions remain about
there is no account of whether
the terms and relations of Nommo’s creativity and its significance for AAL. Conceptually,
Nommo is oriented toward coerced or communicatively reasoned terms of communal harmony.
This absence raises a question of relation: Should AAL be understood as linguistic resistance without intent
to relate to self-defined black individuals who disagree with black majoritarian terms? Put another
way, do the terms of Yancy’s AAL community open a space of interaction within “Black America”
for the sort of opposition that Yancy’s linguistic framework defends? Equally important, do these
terms direct attention to speech practices that have the potential to render the dissent
productive of black people’s deliberation on the legitimacy of their community’s self-
understanding? Extending the boundaries of humane community a bit further, might the power of Nommo move beyond the
constitution of African American identity, experience, and community, to promote the intersubjective transformation of oppressive
social norms as Fanon both worked for and hoped (Fanon 1967, 100, 222)? Asked in brief, these questions may be folded into two
queries: what compass of creative power should a philosophy of language attribute to (the speech
of) AAL, and how might this power be held accountable to the very members of the community
in whose name(s) AAL is said to create? If there is good reason to commend the presupposition of shared
nonidentity that informs these two questions, neither a sheerly instrumental Nommo nor a sheerly
oppositional theory of AAL may do.2 Addressing the second question first, the problem of holding power
accountable to those in whose name it speaks is apparent in certain deployments of Nommo as
instrumental force. The speech practice of “call and response” is a striking example. In Yancy’s
invocation of Nommo to account for this dynamic “co-signing and co-narrating of a shared communicative reality,” a speaker
makes “a verbal point” to an audience charged with responding (293). The conceived, expected
response is one of “approval.” If not received, the audience will likely be deemed “‘dead.’” Knowles-
Borishade, who comes closest to thinking the question of Nommo and dissent, offers a somewhat different account. In it, responders
co-create the caller’s “message—the Word” by either sanctioning or rejecting it “spontaneously during the speech,” based on “the
perceived morality and vision of the Caller” and “the relevance of the message” (Knowles- Borishade 1991, 497–98). According to
Knowles-Borishade, call and response aims at “consensus” determined by “the people themselves” (493–94). Through the process
in Yancy’s
of “checks and balances” that constitutes call and response, “levels of perfected social interaction” are promoted. Yet,
and Knowles- Borishade’s discussions of call and response, an account of disagreement and its
potential to hold power accountable does not appear . At most, disagreement is figured as
privatized rejection . The grounds of this response remain unknown to the speaker and
audience members, among whom reasons for dissent may vary. In the face of silent rejection, the accounts
of AAL’s call and response are mum on what ought happen next. The dead audience plays no transparent
cognitive- practice role. The caller is free to cast his word-spell. The absense of accountability in a sheerly
productive word appears more readily in Asante’s conception of African communication. In it, the group is thought to take
precedence over the individual (Asante 1998, 74). To Asante, this “strong collective mentality” warrants a focus on the aesthetic
dimension of speech in “traditional African public discourse.” The focus is relatively narrow, prompting a declaration that, “The
African speaker means to be a poet; not a lecturer,” inducing “compulsive relationships” and invoking the audience’s “inner needs”
through “the inherent power” of “concrete images” (91). Though reason may matter on this account of Nommo, it is tough to see how
of reason appears relatively unimportant in Asante’s “traditional” understanding
and why. Indeed, talk
of African public discourse (75, 90–91). Creativity’s “highlight” shines in the absence of an explicit
role for communicative reason in public speech.3 Accountability appears as a non-issue, lurking
uncomfortably in the shadow of creative power.

Only evaluate arguments that implicate the consequences of the plan’s implementation---

placing discourse first is self-serving---chosen after the 1AC to artificially invoke a neg-
biased lit base---disagreement with the wording of the plan without a functional
difference moots 99% of the 1AC, which is built to defend function---
debates about discourse are regressive because they focus on unprovable initial
assumptions about people’s responses
This trades off with policy discussions of the optimal solution to material violence.
Debate as a forum is most useful when used to compare functionally distinct methods
for addressing oppression---ideas and proposals can only improve through testing. The
impact is the 1AC---we’ve already explained why that matters

All of this justifies perm do their advocacy. Nothing they’ve said disproves the primary
argument of the 1AC.

And, perm do both – nommo does not deny the importance of professional language –
language is fluid, but it does possess meaning – our arguments still are true insofar as
you can understand them – language is always changing, but in-depth testing is a better
means to hybridize language and channel it towards disruption
David E. Kirkland 10, English prof at NYU, “English(es) in Urban Contexts: Politics, Pluralism,
and Possibilities”, English Education, V42, N3
By definition, language once uttered begins to break apart. Its many pieces assemble a history
from their various shards, which “from top to bottom . . . represent[s] the co-existence of socio-
ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-
ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 291). These languages—
Englishes, in this case—which have been traded on through various public and private transactions, have constructed a world of
their own, governed by what Bakhtin calls “new socially typifying ‘languages’” (p. 291). These languages,
Englishes housed in American cities and throughout the globe, have coalesced into what Nero (2005) sees as the lingua franca of the
modern era. Hence, Englishes, as opposed to English, are relevant to the twenty-first century conversations of English education. This
does not
mean that the “old” English education is irrelevant. Conversations about English traditions continue as part of new English
education (Kirkland, 2008). However, promoting
linguistic pluralism means fully appreciating the hybrid and
textured nature in which English is practiced and performed by inner-city youth (see Paris, 2009) as
elemental to new English education. The exclusive foci on the study of high dialects can bastardize a language’s fluidity, marginalize its speakers who
embody pluralistic identities through their troubled tongues (Ahmad, 2007), and presuppose the process of learning to teach by restricting students’
right to their own language (Kinloch, 2005; Kirkland & Jackson, 2009). Placed in this context, language as a monolithic construct
loses importance in the pluralized/ hybridized linguistic lives of urban youth, and the processes of English
education lose emphasis in postmodern classrooms. Indeed, we in English education should be concerned, for according to Bakhtin (1981), “It
might even seem that the very word ‘language’ loses all meaning in this process—for apparently
there is no single plane on which all these ‘languages’ might be juxtaposed to one another” (p.
291). In this way, Canagarajah (2003) expands the definition of English due, in part, to political concerns that grow out of such “language rights issues
[that] are still vexing and controversial” (p. ix). For Canagarajah, “the scope of language issues [in the United States] emphasizes the ongoing presence
of multiple versions of English in all our classrooms, linked to real issues of personal and ethnic identity” (p. ix). From this perspective, to
understand English teaching today, one must recognize the pliant forces that tug at it and
destabilize language standardization, generating an internal variability that locks diversity into
any given language system (Fecho, 2003). Students are exposed to these forces whenever language(s) become the subject of
classroom study. In his reflective study of critical language awareness practices, Fecho (2003) explains how his students were suspicious of language
and the monolingual hegemony of “mainstream codes” in their city classroom: Robert grasped that many codes were within his reach, but also grasped
that these codes brought advantages and costs. He came to realize that it was difficult at best to operate and sound natural in a language code with
which one had little practice using or had mixed feeling about acquiring. . . . What I learned was that, for these students and others like them, it was a
matter of if they were able to speak and write in the mainstream codes . . . but was more a matter of figuring out why they would feel disposed to do so.
(p. 67; emphasis in original) Fecho’s student’s suspicion of a mainstream code is not surprising. For these students, appropriating this code was not a
politically innocent act. Rather, it “brought advantages and costs.” That is, the appropriation of any code is about the politics of language, the
competition among codes. It is also about relevance in a world that requires certain ways of speaking, certain sounds and social postures pronounced
pluralistic view of English, then, is key for highlighting the sociopolitical
in various sociopolitical accents. A
tensions reflected in students’ worlds. Englishes (as opposed to English) seem to better capture the
complexities of students’ lives for conceptualizing their worlds in words and “specific world
views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 292). As
languages hybridize, new Englishes emerge for students “to make sense of the world around
[them] . . . [for] deepening their views on race and its impact in society” (Fecho, 2003, p. 67). Calls for
extending the conversation in English education are far from new. It has been four years since Swenson, Young, McGrail, Rozema, and Whitin (2006)
called for an evolved conception of English education due to “newer technologies [that] are reshaping our lives and communities” (p. 353), definitions of
texts, and conceptions of reading and writing, of readers and writers. For Swenson et al., these “new literacies” invite English educators to rethink the
evolving contexts of our work. Boyd and colleagues (2006) also express this need, arguing, “Never in the history of education in the United States has
there been a more urgent need for educators to join forces to create literacy classrooms that meet the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse
learners” (p. 329). The new English education is “crossing cultural boundaries” (p. 335), recognizing “student’s funds of knowledge” (p. 337) by
fostering for students “varied educational experiences” (p. 340) through “socially responsive and responsible teaching” (p. 338). All
students
should be “taught mainstream power codes/discourses and become critical users of language
while also having their home and street codes honored” (p. 344). While I find merit in Boyd et al.’s (2006) call for
rethinking English education for the twenty-first century, I tend to agree with Smitherman and Villanueva (2003), who contend that paying
tribute to linguistic diversity isn’t enough. English by definition is diverse, pluralistic, and always
changing. And the dynamism of English (plural) can be witnessed from New York (Fisher, 2007) to Los Angeles (Alim, 2006), from the United
States (Gee, 1996) to South Africa (Ball, 2009; Sailors, Hoffman, & Matthee, 2007; Smitherman, 2006) to Australia (Luke, 2004). In each context, brave
new voices are emerging. These voices are evident among urban youth in the United States, who are bending vowels and verbs, shattering stale
syntaxes and sounds, and embodying the vernacular Englishes that constitute new century spaces—online social communities (Kirkland, in press),
multiethnic communities (Paris, 2009), and global communities (Nero, 2005).The transnational dispersion of Englishes into
the urban, digital, global, and youth mainstreams has not taken place without complexities.
These complexities usually appear in heated debates over what constitutes English and increasingly
are highlighted in urban education language debates (Beykont, 2002; Kinloch, 2005; Kirkland & Jackson, 2009; Smitherman, 1999), where
English can never be accurately described as stable, fixed, or singular. The pluralistic, dynamic,
hybrid, and fluid nature of English swells, shifts, and is ultimately transformed in urban contexts,
which are themselves complicated by linguistic legacies of survival and oppression.
Their near exclusive focus on language lapses into solipsism, preventing effective
engagement by subjecting us and the debate community to endless authenticity tests –
evaluate the implications and consequences of their politics
Lawrence J. Biskowski 95 – PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE --- assistant professor of
political science, University of Georgia, “Politics versus Aesthetics: Arendt's Critiques of
Nietzsche and Heidegger,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 57, No. 1, Winter, 1995
Compelling explorations of the more tyrannical aspects of instrumental and subject-centered reason, moral
systems
based upon intrinsic purposes or teloi, grand narratives, and the like have led thinkers in the Nietzschean
tradition to embrace aesthetics as a paradigm for thinking about the self and its various
relationships to itself, to others, and to the world. Aesthetic ways of thinking appear to many contemporary
theorists to be the best alternative—in some cases the sole alternative—to the instrumental or technological
logics increasingly pervading virtually all other spheres of modern life, to the problematic assumptions and
hidden violence of various "command" and neo-Kantian moral theories, and to the transcendental egoism of attempts to anchor
identity in various perceptions of natural law, intrinsic purpose, or potential consensus. But this shift to aesthetics seems to
require a radical departure from previous means of understanding human interaction and orienting ourselves in the world.
Thus, to take an extreme, seemingly bizarre, but nevertheless illustrative example, Jean Baudrillard insists
that "we live everywhere already in an '[a]esthetic' hallucination of reality." 9
Everything, "even if it be the everyday and banal reality, falls by this token under the sign of art, and
becomes [a]esthetic."10 The attractions of aesthetic thinking in a world still recovering from its metaphysical
hangover—and still largely lacking in alternatives and curatives—are enormous. Indeed, as Lawrence Scaff puts it,
aesthetics and aesthetic ways of thinking seem to have invaded everywhere, now threatening to
subordinate independent orders, such as the ethical or political, to its own standards
and forms . Aesthetic indifference to "substance" and an overriding concern with the
perfection of "form" encourage a kind of action and judgment oriented toward impression,
rhythm, tempo, gesture, symbolization— in a word, toward style ." The criteria and logics of aesthetics expand to fill the roles
formerly filled by the criteria and logics associated with now-discredited or putatively obsolete institutions, practices, traditions,
moral systems, and religions. Concern
with style follows from the accession of a public life based
largely on image and increasingly devoid of any other sense of reality for many people. The
leap to Baudrillard's insistence that we live in an "aesthetic hallucination of reality" is a surprisingly short one. Style, however, is
not beauty. Even aesthetics—insofar as it was formerly concerned with supposedly objective, public, or at least widely shared
standards of beauty—is undermined among contemporary intellectuals by the same radical historicism which, by undermining
other logics, institutions, understandings, and so forth, provided the conditions for its expansion and elevation. Standards of
beauty are no more objective and universal than standards of justice, virtue, and truth; their adoption is always an imposition
underwritten by some manifestation of power. With all such public standards discredited, individuals are thrown back on
themselves or, rather, on their will and, more typically, on their impulses, as their only grounds for practical choices. Coupled
with an increasing recognition of how identity is formed and stabilized, this experience leads to a diminished sense of the unity
and consistency of the self,12 which in turn leads to the enormous surge in interest among contemporary theorists in the politics
of identity, the nature of the self, and the political and moral implications of a de-centered subjectivity. Thus in at least some
significant respects, and for good or for ill, the
aestheticism being proffered in somewhat different ways
in both public and intellectual life is an aestheticism of self-fascination and self-
absorption . The self, understood as a multiplicity, must be at the center of all authentic choices and
values (which may, of course, be contradicted at any time), or the criteria for such choices at least should come from within.
Moral or aesthetic or political criteria imposed upon the individual from the outside cannot
be legitimate. Of paramount concern, therefore, are the forces of external coercion, including, especially, the surreptitious
and intrusive socialization technologies by which the self and its various understandings and values have heretofore been
shaped, and the means by which these technologies may be overcome so that one may finally be free to be what one authentically
is, if indeed one believes this goal remains within the realm of the possible. This turn inward and toward the self,
surely the product of liberating insights, is not without its dangers. To the extent that the
aesthetic supersession of morality means that individuals are thrown back on themselves or
their impulses as their only grounds for practical choices, they are left in a state of
indeterminacy and unfreedom , ultimately unable to determine even their own identities except
in one rather limited way. In the absence of legitimate moral criteria of any source or kind, they are in effect
controlled by changing whims and arbitrary impulses; they confront other people and the
world in much the same way that a sculptor confronts a block of marble, that is, as (at least) potential sources of aesthetic
enjoyment, as potential sources of resistance to the realization of one's projects), and ultimately as something that exists solely
or mainly as a medium for self-expression. As Hegel described an earlier version of this doctrine: [t]his type of subjectivism not
merely substitutes a void for the whole of ethics, rights, duties, and laws...but in addition its form is a subjective void, i.e., it
knows itself as this contentless void and in this knowledge knows itself as absolute.13 For Hegel, freedom under these conditions
was emptied of all direction and purpose. Perhaps more
startling yet are the other political (and moral)
implications: Laws, rights, duties, and obligations, but also people, institutions, things, and
the world itself can become our playthings, little more than media for our impulses and caprices lionized
as self-expression.
 fixed identity bad

evaluate args not speakers—otherwise they’re impossible to dispute, have perverse

incentives to exaggerate, and leads to endless authenticity showdowns to see who’s
more activist than whom
Moore 99 – prof @ Cambridge
(John, with Johan Muller, University of Cape Town “The Discourse of Voice and the Problem of
Knowledge and Identity in the Sociology of Education,” British Journal of Sociology of Education
20 (2) p. 199-200)

The pedagogic device (Bernstein, 1990) of voice discourse promotes a methodology in which the
explication of a method's social location precludes the need to examine the content of its
data as grounds for valid explanation. Who says it is what counts, not what is said. This
approach favours an ethnography that claims to reveal the cultural specificity of the category--the
'voice' of membership. What is held to be the facts, to be the case, is only so-and can only be so-from a
particular perspective. The world thus viewed is a patchwork of incommensurable and
exclusive voices or standpoints. Through the process of sub-division, increasingly more particularised identity categories come into
being, each claiming the unique specificity of its distinctive experience and the knowledge authorised by it. The consequence of the
abolition of the knowledge boundary that follows from the epistemological theses of
postmodernism is the increasing specialisation of social categories (see Maton, 1998). Maton describes this
process of proliferation in terms of the way such 'knower' discourses, ... base their legitimation upon the
privileged insight of a knower, and work at maintaining strong boundaries around their definition
of this knower-they celebrate difference where 'truth' is defined by the 'knower' or 'voice'. As
each voice is brought into the choir, the category of the privileged 'knower' becomes smaller,
each strongly bounded from one another, for each 'voice' has its own privileged and specialised
knowledge. The client 'knower' group thus frag- ments, each fragment with its own
representative ... The procession of the excluded thus becomes, in terms of the privileged 'knower', an accretion of adjectives, the
'hyphenation' which knower modes often proclaim as progress. In summary, with the emergence of each new category of
knower, the categories of knowers become smaller, leading to proliferation and fragmentation
within the knowledge formation. (ibid., p. 17) As Maton argues, this move promotes a fundamental change in the principle of
legitimation-from what is known (and how) to who knows it. The device that welds knowledge to standpoint, voice and
experience, produces a result that is inherently unstable, because the anchor for the voice is an
interior authenticity that can never be demonstrated, only claimed (Taylor, 1992; Siegel, 1997; Fuss, 1990,
1995). Since all such claims are power claims, the authenticity of the voice is constantly prone to a
purifying challenge, 'If you do not believe it you are not one of us' (Hammersly & Gomm, 1997, para. 3.3) that
gears down to ever more rarefied specialisations or iterations of the voice category; an unstoppable spiral that Bernstein (1997,
p. 176) has referred to as the 'shrinking of the moral imagination [10]. As Bernstein puts it, 'The voice of a social category (academic
discourse, gender subject, occupational subject) is constructed by the degree of specialisation of the discursive
rules regulating and legitimising the form of communication' (1990, p.23). If categories of either agents or discourse
are specialised, then each category necessarily has its own specific identity and its own specific boundaries. The speciality of each
category is created, maintained and reproduced only if the relations between the categories of
which a given category is a member are preserved. What is to be preserved? The insulation
between the categories. It is the strength of the insulation that creates a space in which a category can become specific. If a category
wishes to increase its specificity, it has to appropriate the means to produce the necessary insulation that is the prior condition to its appropriating
specificity. (ibid.) Collection codes employ an organisation of knowledge to specialise categories of person, integrated codes employ an organisation
 The instability of the social categories
of persons to specialise categories of knowledge (Bernstein, 1977, pp. 106-111).
associated with voice discourse reflects the fact that there is no stable and agreed-upon way of
constructing such categories. By their nature, they are always open to contestation and further
fragmentation. In principle, there is no terminal point where 'identities' can finally come to rest. It
is for this reason that this position can reappear so frequently across time and space within the
intellectual field-the same move can be repeated endlessly under the disguise of
'difference'. In Bernstein's terms, the organisation of knowledge is, most significantly, a device for the regulation of consciousness. The
pedagogic device is thus a symbolic ruler of consciousness in its selective creation, positioning
and oppositioning of pedagogic subjects. It is the con- dition for the production, reproduction,
and transformation of culture. The question is: whose ruler, what consciousness? (1990, p. 189) The
relativistic challenge to epistemologically grounded strong classifications of knowl- edge
removes the means whereby social categories and their relations can be strongly theorised
and effectively researched in a form that is other than arbitrary and can be challenged by
anyone choosing to assert an alternative perspective or standpoint.

Biologism bad—prioritizing lived experience reduces identity to a single characteristic.

Even with anti-racist intentions, this process turns case by making identity categories
barriers to mutual understanding—turns all of solvency
Ireland, 2002 [Craig , American Culture—Bilkent “The Appeal to Experience and its
Consequences,” Cultural Critique 52 Fall 2002 p.87-89]

In their bid to circumvent ideological mediation by turning

More is involved here than some epistemological blunder.
to the presumed immediacy of experience, Thompsonian experience-oriented theories advance an
argument that is not so much theoretically specious as it is potentially dangerous: there is nothing within the
logic of such an argument that precludes the hypostatization of other nondiscursive bases for
group membership and specificity—bases that can as readily be those of a group's immediate
experiences as they can be those of a group's presumed materially immediate biological
characteristics or physical markers of ethnicity and sexuality. If the criterion for the disruptive antihegemonic
potential of experience is its immediacy, and if, as we have just seen, such a criterion can readily lead to a
fetishization of the material body itself, then what starts out as an attempt to account for a
nonmediated locus of resistance and agency [End Page 95] can end up as a surenchère of
immediacy that by but a nudge of a cluster of circumstances can propel toward what Michael Piore's Beyond Individualism calls
"biologism"—an increasingly common trend whereby "a person's entire identity resides in a single
physical characteristic, whether it be of blackness, of deafness or of homosexuality" (quoted in Gitlin,
6). Blut und Boden seem but a step away. The step from a wager on immediate experience, whether from theories hoping to account for agency or
from groups struggling for cultural recognition, to rabid neoethnic fundamentalisms is only a possible step and not a necessary one; and the link
between these two trends is certainly not one of affinity, and still less one of causality. What the parallelism between the two does suggest, however, is
that in spite of their divergent motivations and means, they both attempt to ground group
specificity by appealing to immediacy—by appealing, in other words, to something that is less a
historical product or a mediated construct than it is an immediately given natural entity, whether
it be the essence of a Volk, as in current tribalisms, or the essence of material experiences specific to groups, as in
strains of Alltagsgeschichte and certain subaltern endeavors. If a potential for biologism and the specter of
neoethnic tribalism are close at hand in certain cultural theories and social movements, it is
because the recourse to immediate experience opens the back door to what was booted out the
front door—it inadvertently naturalizes what it initially set out to historicize. The tendency in appeals to
experience toward naturalizing the historical have already been repeatedly pointed out by those most sympathetic to the motivations behind such
appeals. Joan W. Scott—hardly an antisubaltern historian—has argued, as have Nancy Fraser, Rita Felski, and others, that it is precisely by
predicating identity and agency on shared nonmediated experiences that certain historians of difference and cultural theorists in fact "locate resistance
outside its discursive construction and reify agency as an inherent attribute of individuals"—a move that, when pushed to its logical conclusion,
"naturalizes categories such as woman, black, white, heterosexual and homosexual by treating them as given characteristics of individuals" (Scott,
777). Although such a tendency within experienceoriented theories is rarely thematized, and rarer still is it intended, it nevertheless logically follows
from the argument according to which [End Page 96] group identity, specificity, and concerted political action have as their condition of possibility the
nonmediated experiences that bind or are shared by their members. On the basis of such a stance, it is hardly surprising that currents of gay identity
politics (to take but one of the more recent examples) should treat homosexuality, as Nancy Fraser has noted, "as a substantive, cultural, identificatory
positivity, much like an ethnicity" (83). It may seem unfair to impute to certain experience-oriented theories an argument that, when carried to its logical
conclusion, can as readily foster an emancipatory politics of identity as it can neoethnic tribalism. The potential for biologism hardly represents the
intentions of experience-oriented theories; these, after all, focus on the immediacy of experience, rather than on the essence of a group, in order to
if there cannot be
avoid strong structural determination on the one hand, and the naturalizing of class or subaltern groups on the other. But
a discursive differentiation of one experience from another—the counterhegemonic potential of
experience is predicated on its prediscursive immediacy, and mediation is relegated to a
supplemental and retrospective operation—and if a nondiscursive or ideologically
uncontaminated common ground becomes the guarantor of group authenticity, then the criterion
for group specificiy must be those elements that unite groups in nondiscursive ways. And such
elements can as readily be those of a group's shared nonmediated experience, such as
oppression, as they can be those of a group's biological characteristics. At best, "the evidence
of experience," Scott notes, "becomes the evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of
exploring how differences are established" (796); at worst, the wager on the immediacy of experience
fosters tribalistic reflexes that need but a little prodding before turning into those rabid,
neoethnic "micro fascisms" against which Félix Guattari warned in his last essay before his death (26-27).