1AC

1] The attempted incorporation of minority identity into a hegemonic society is a

trap. The faciality machine is always there grading the subject’s deviance from the
majoritarian model, causing mass oppression. Bignall 12:

Simone Bignall, [University of New South Wales] “Dismantling the Face: Pluralism and the
Politics of Recognition” Deleuze Studies 6.3 pages 389-410 Edinburgh University Press, 2012
(KhMA)
Faciality describes a ‘pure abstraction’, a conceptual topography which diagrams the
intersection of the two semiotic systems operating as signification and subjectivation (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 115). The ‘face’ is ‘a surface . . . the face is a map’, which is comprised of a
broad featureless space – a ‘formless white wall’ of signification – marked by ‘dimensionless
black holes’ of subjectivity (170). These black depths disturb the blank surface to suggest
‘faciality’: ‘a suggestive whiteness, a hole that captures, a face’ (168). Thus, ‘faciality’ is a
concept intended to convey diagrammatically the structuring dynamic of emergence of a
dominant system of meaning, the particular regime of signs defined by Deleuze and Guattari
as ‘despotic-authoritarian’, which corresponds with distinct ‘patterns of sanctioned action’
and particular modes of subject formation (Bogue 2003: 86). Accordingly, ‘facialisation’
describes the process that causes semantic events to be captured and represented by the two
semiotic orders of signifier and subject. For Deleuze and Guattari, the face takes a particular
form – it is a concrete assemblage – but is always produced by an abstract machine of
‘faciality’ (1987: 168). The face takes shape alongside the ‘ensemble of material connections in
which bodies and things are drawn . . . People become facialised not because of ideology,
repression, or texts, but because of their commingling with places, tools and each other’
(Saldanha 2007: 100–1). Habits of connectivity draw constituting elements into regular
assemblages or arrangements, thus establishing structures of coherence. In the process of
facialisation, the function of the subject is to establish the rhythm of coherence that organises
various interpretations of such arrangements into a consistent worldview. Thus, facialisation
relies upon the interpretive work of the subject, who is responsible for the ‘territorialisation’ –
the selection and establishment – of a privileged set of significations from a range of possible
alternatives, and the consolidation of these meanings in accordance with a given mode of
expression. In this sense, the face is a ‘territory’ that is carved out from a broader ‘landscape’ –
the collection of diverse orders of meaning that form any given social, political and discursive
milieu (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 172–3). The face expresses a dominant outlook and mode
of understanding: it encodes a particularly powerful regime of signs. A face is powerful for so
long as its expression remains fixed, that is, for as long as the regime of signs it expresses
repeats regularly and persuasively through time. Its resistance to transformation ensures its
continuation in its given form. Patricia MacCormack comments: the face is a landscape. The
faced landscape is rigid, changeable only in relation to a set of predictable variances. The
landscape is also cultivated by a certain set of people, who own, run and map the land. The land
is recognised in a certain way. (MacCormack 2004: 137) The face is, then, an apparatus of
capture which records and organises events and expressions into meaningful sequences and
structures. It is comprised of ‘a general space of comparison and a mobile centre of
appropriation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 444). The ‘white wall’ of the signifier acts to ‘define
zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions
or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations’ (168). The ‘black hole’ of
subjectivity constitutes a perceptive and interpretive centre, which draws in, assimilates and
transforms alterity, encompassing and internalising various interpretations within an existing
structure of significance and comprehension. Together, the ‘white wall’ of the signifier and
the ‘black hole’ of subjectivity effect the operation of representation. In this process,
difference is compared and measured in terms of its recognised resemblance to a given or
established ‘representative’ form; this privileging of similitude and resemblance reproduces
an expanding principle of identity or sameness in the process of signification. Thus, for
Deleuze and Guattari, faciality privileges the conceptual cluster of identity, resemblance and
analogy that underscores the possibility of representation and the politics of recognition. The
facial system produces an abstract model of identity that is generalised and standardised: the
face enables a ‘computation of normalities’ (178). MacCormack explains that, as a
consequence, ‘when we are facialised, we are made visible only within one dominant system
and in the only manner that the dominant system understands . . . certain bodies are read
and valued according to how they differ from the majoritarian face ’ (2004: 136). Faciality
corresponds with a politics of representative identity, in which the recognition of difference is
achievable only in relation to that identity: ‘the face is a politics’ resting upon technologies of
normalisation and discipline (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 181). Racism, for example, ‘operates
by degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face’ (178).4 Accordingly, ‘the face brings
the body of that which varies from the majoritarian into comprehension for dominant culture
. . . they always exist in comparison with the majoritarian face’ (MacCormack 2004: 136). Or,
as Bogue comments: the face of despotic-passional power identifies, classifies, recognizes. . .
the facialised object is recognized, pinned to the wall, or stuffed in a hole, imprinted with a look
that it returns as a reverberation of the force that shapes it. (Bogue 2003: 104–5) In fact, as was
evidenced by the example of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge development, a facial regime
maintains its majoritarian form by attributing a negative value to any fragments of signifiance
that threaten to elude capture: In a signifying regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of
increasing entropy in the system of signs: it is charged with everything that was ‘bad’ in a given
period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs . . . finally, and especially, it incarnates
the line of flight the signifying regime cannot tolerate . . . the regime must block a line of this
kind or define it in an entirely negative fashion . . . Anything that threatens to put the system to
flight will be killed or put to flight itself. Anything that exceeds the excess of the signifier or
passes beneath it will be marked with a negative value. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 116) The
Ngarrindjeri women, whose claims for cultural recognition ‘threatened’ the Hindmarsh Island
Bridge development, became scapegoats identified negatively in dominant social and legal
discussions concerning the proposed development; they were accused of deception, fabrication
and a recalcitrant resistance to progress. In fact, these women’s revelations about secret or
sacred women’s business issued a serious challenge to the status of dominant (colonial)
structures of knowledge and existing understandings about Indigenous culture and its rightful
place within Australian common law. The women claimed knowledge of a series of alternative
systems of signification, which effectively undermined the conventional authority of colonial
and patriarchal assumptions underlying dominant representations of belonging and land use, as
well as colonial understandings of gendered dimensions within Indigenous authority, traditional
knowledge and cultural power. Repression occurs when plural calls for cultural recognition are
confronted by a ‘white wall’ of signification, which responds only by bouncing back given
structures of meaning and is not capable of recognising creative inventions of sense or
differences that depart from the majoritarian perspective (see Povinelli 2002). Colonisation
constructs an ‘empire of uniformity’ and digs a ‘black hole’ of subjectivation in accordance
with an established or normative model of identity, in which the minoritarian self is
imprisoned or buried. Deleuze and Guattari accordingly ask a question relevant for postcolonial
strategising: ‘How do you get out of the black hole? How do you break through the wall? How
do you dismantle the face?’ (1987: 186).

2] Politics is a zero-sum game since policies must address the racializing assemblages
that perpetuate inequality. Weheliye 14:
Alexander G. Weheliye, [Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern
University.] “Habeas Viscus: Racializaing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories
of the Human” Duke University Press, 2014 (KhMa)
Even more generally, the acknowledgment and granting of full personhood of those excluded
from its precincts requires the overcoming of physical violence, while epistemic and
economic brutalities remain outside the scope of the law. Congruently, much of the politics
constructed around the effects of political violence, especially within the context of
international human rights but also with regard to minority politics in the United States, is
constructed from the shaky foundation of surmounting or desiring to leave behind physical
suffering so as to take on the ghostly semblance of possessing one’s personhood. Then and
only then will previously minoritized subjects be granted their humanity as a legal status.
Hence, the glitch Brown diagnoses in identity politics is less a product of the minority subject’s
desire to desperately cling to his or her pain but a consequence of the state’s dogged insistence
on suffering as the only price of entry to proper personhood, what Samera Esmeir has referred
to as a “juridical humanity” that bestows and rescinds humanity as an individualized legal status
in the vein of property.5 Apportioning personhood in this way maintains the world of Man
and its attendant racializing assemblages, which means in essence that the entry fee for legal
recognition is the acceptance of categories based on white supremacy and colonialism, as
well as normative genders and sexualities. We need only to consult the history of habeas
corpus, the “great” writ of liberty, which is anchored in the U.S. Constitution (Article 1,
Section 9), to see that this type of reasoning leads to reducing inclusion and personhood to
ownership.6 The Latin phrase habeas corpus means “You shall have the body,” and a writ
thereof requires the government to present prisoners before a judge so as to provide a lawful
justification for their continued imprisonment. This writ has been considered a pivotal
safeguard against the misuse of political power in the modern west. Even though the Military
Commissions Act of 2006, which denied habeas corpus to “unlawful enemy combatants”
imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, remains noteworthy and alarming, habeas corpus has been
used both by and frequently against racialized groups throughout U.S. history, as was the case
when habeas corpus was suspended during World War II, allowing for the internment of
Japanese Americans. The writ has also led to gains for minoritized subjects as, for instance, in
the well-known Amistad case (1839), in which abolitionists used a habeas corpus petition to
free the “illegally” captured Africans who had staged a mutiny against their abductors. Likewise,
when Ponca tribal leader Standing Bear was jailed as a result of protesting the forcible removal
of his people to Indian Territory in 1879, the writ of habeas corpus affected his release from
incarceration as well as the judge’s recognition that, as a general rule, Indians were persons
before U.S. law, even though Native Americans were not considered full U.S. citizens until
1924.7 Nevertheless, the benefits accrued through the juridical acknowledgment of racialized
subjects as fully human often exacts a steep entry price, because inclusion hinges on
accepting the codification of personhood as property, which is , in turn, based on the
comparative distinction between groups, as in one of the best-known court cases in U.S.
history: the Dred Scott case. In 1857, the Supreme Court invalidated Dred Scott’s habeas
corpus, since, as an escaped slave, Scott could not be a legal person. According to Chief Justice
Taney: “Dred Scott is not a citizen of the State of Missouri, as alleged in his declaration, because
he is a negro of African descent; his ancestors were of pure African blood, and were brought
into this country and sold as negro slaves.”8 In order to justify withdrawing Dred Scott’s legal
right to ownership of self, Chief Justice Taney’s opinion in the decision contrasts the status of
black subjects with the legal position of Native Americans visà-vis the possibility of U.S.
citizenship and personhood: “The situation of [the negro] population was altogether unlike that
of the Indian race. These Indian Governments were regarded and treated as foreign
Governments. . . . [Indians] may, without doubt, like the subjects of any other foreign
Government, be naturalized . . . and become citizens of a State, and of the United States; and if
an individual should leave his nation or tribe, and take up his abode among the white
population, he would be entitled to all the rights and privileges which would belong to an
emigrant from any other foreign people.”9 While slaves were not accorded the status of being
humans that belonged to a different nation, Indians could theoretically overcome their lawful
foreignness, but only if they renounced previous forms of personhood and citizenship. Hence,
the tabula rasa of whiteness—which all groups but blacks can access—serves as the
prerequisite for the law’s magical transubstantiation of a thing to be possessed into a
property-owning subject.10 The judge’s comparison underscores the dangers of ceding
definitions of personhood to the law and of comparing different forms of political
subjugation, since hypothetical Indian personhood in the law rests on attaining whiteness
and the violent denial of said status to black subjects. Additionally, while the court conceded
limited capabilities of personhood to indigenous subjects if they chose to convert to whiteness,
it did not prevent the U.S. government from instituting various genocidal measures to ensure
that American Indians would become white and therefore no longer exist as Indians. In other
words, the legal conception of personhood comes with a steep price, as in this instance where
being seemingly granted rights laid the groundwork for the U.S. government’s genocidal
policies against Native Americans, since the “racialization of indigenous peoples, especially
through the use of blood quantum classification, in particular follows . . . ‘genocidal logic,’
rather than simply a logic of subordination Law 79 or discrimination,” and as a result
“whiteness constitutes a project of disappearance for Native peoples rather than signifying
privilege.”11 Beginning in the nineteenth century the U.S. government instituted a program in
which Native American children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in
Christian day and boarding schools, and which sought to civilize children by “killing the Indian to
save the man,” representing one of the most significant examples of the violent and legal
enforced assimilation of Native Americans into U.S. whiteness.12 Though there is no clear
causal relationship between Taney’s arguments in the Scott decision and the boarding school
initiative, both establish that legal personhood is available to indigenous subjects only if the
Indian can be killed—either literally or figuratively—in order to save the world of Man (in this
case settler colonialism and white supremacy). Furthermore, the denial of personhood qua
whiteness to African American subjects does not stand in opposition to the genocidal wages of
whiteness bequeathed to indigenous subjects but rather represents different properties of the
same racializing juridical assemblage that differentially produces both black and native subjects
as aberrations from Man and thus not-quite-human. The writ of habeas corpus—and the law
more generally—anoints those individualized subjects who are deemed deserving with
bodies even while this assemblage continually enlists new and/or different groups to exclude,
banish, or exterminate from the world of Man.In the end, the law, whether bound by
national borders or spanning the globe, establishes an international division of humanity,
which grants previously excluded subjects limited access to personhood as property at the
same time as it fortifies the supremacy of Man.13

3] On the surface level, a wealth tax seems beneficial but only reitifies focus on the
taxpayer to differentiate ongoing settlement from established structures legalize
violence, and cements racial inequality. Willmott 24:

Willmott, Kyle. “Taxes, Taxpayers, and Settler Colonialism: Toward a Critical Fiscal Sociology of Tax as
White Property: Law & Society Review.” Cambridge Core, Cambridge University Press & Assessment,
2024, www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-society-review/article/taxes-taxpayers-and-settler-
colonialism-toward-a-critical-fiscal-sociology-of-tax-as-white-property/
A64C397E269523DDA5846F28160AC3FD. Accessed 25 Oct. 2024. (KhMa)
In a sense, the taxpayer is one more tactic in what Eve Reference Tuck and Wayne Yang
Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012) describe as “settler moves to innocence”, which they define as
“strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or
responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege , without having to change much at
all” (p. 10). The moves to innocence that Tuck and Yang discuss mostly describe how settlers
erase their participation in settlement and ongoing colonialism. While most of these
strategies are used in service of innocence, perceived benevolence, non-complicity, or left
politics, the taxpayer might not appear to fit. What I contend is that the taxpayer subjectivity
removes settlement as an element of consideration, from consciousness, and replaces it with
at once, an imagined political and legal status. It ostensibly attempts to remove questions of
politics, sovereignty, and identity from the objects that it investigates—to think about
Indigenous issues as a settler is one thing, but to think about politics and Indigenous issues as a
taxpayer is to stylistically—but not substantively—remove identity, nationhood, and
sovereignty as issues, and to reconstitute them as fiscal concerns. While putatively, the
taxpayer envelops and renders political questions as objective technical fiscal issues, the
strategic move to innocence removes questions of settlement, of treaties, of legal status, and
constitutes the taxpayer not as a subject of settlement, colonization and power, but a subject of
fiscal objectivity. In this sense, the taxpayer, while analytically a subject of settlement and white
entitlement, outwardly positions itself and the will to knowledge that animates it as form of
‘common sense’ color-blindness (Reference Bonilla-Silva Bonilla-Silva, 2002; Reference
RobertsonRobertson, 2015; Walsh 2018). Reference Reardon and TallBear While Reardon and
TallBear (2012) discuss the relationship between whiteness, property, and science, the logic
applies well to tax, as a moral good—as well as a form of ownership of its imagined ‘wards’ or
constituents. They write of science, that “These understandings and performances reflect a
very old order of things in which whiteness figures as a rational civilizing project that creates
symbolic and material value of use to all humanity. As a formation that brings good things to all,
whiteness itself becomes a thing of value that should be developed and defended” (p. 234). To
think as a settler and a taxpayer then is to perform the ‘double move’ described by Reference
Patton, Nicholson and Seidman Cindy Patton (1995). The taxpayer appears free from the
‘contamination’ of ‘bias’ and ‘identity’—making decisions ostensibly based on reason, evidence,
and the ‘common good’—but at the same time the taxpayer refigures the territory on which
politics is contested. The taxpayer is a subjecthood that contains a strategic move away from
the idea that the subject's ideas are animated by racism or settler colonialism. In order to
perform this move of refiguring political space, settler-taxpayers critique Indigenous
governments, peoples, and enroll their critiques as objective and universal taxpayer concerns.
The ‘settler-taxpayer’ then is about strategically harnessing knowledge in order to refigure
the space of critique of Indigenous peoples and governments.

4] The Role of the Ballot is to deconstruct the European Man—it sets up the conditions

for all forms of exclusion. Weheliye 14:

Alexander G. Weheliye, [Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University.]
“Habeas Viscus: Racializaing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human” Duke
University Press, 2014 (KhMa)

For Wynter, the promise of black studies—and the numerous other ruptures precipitated by the 1960s
—lies in its liminality, which contains potential exit strategies from the world of Man. However, we
must first devise new objects of knowledge that facilitate “the calling in question of our present
culture’s purely biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore of what it is like to be, human.”42
We must do so because we cannot fully understand the present incarnation of the human from within
the “biocentric and bourgeois” epistemic order that authorizes the biological selectedness of Man and,
conversely, the creation of “dysgenic humans” (those who are evolutionarily dysselected), “a category
comprised in the US of blacks, Latinos, Indians as well as the transracial group of the poor, the jobless,
the homeless, the incarcerated,” the disabled, and the transgendered.43 Within our current episteme,
these groups are constituted as aberrations from the ethnoclass of Man by being subjected to
racializing assemblages that establish “natural” differences between the selected and dysselected. In
other words, black, Latino, poor, incarcerated, indigenous, and so forth populations become real
objects via the conduit of evolutionarily justified discourses and institutions, which, as a consequence,
authorizes Man to view himself as naturally ordained to inhabit the space of full humanity. Thus, even
though racializing assemblages commonly rely on phenotypical differences, their primary function is
to create and maintain distinctions between different members of the Homo sapiens species that lend
a suprahuman explanatory ground (religious or biological, for example) to these hierarchies. As
Wynter explains, “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation,
ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal
distribution of the earth resources . . . —these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Blackness
29 Man vs. Human struggle.”44 Wynter’s oeuvre facilitates the analysis of the relay between different
forms of subjugation, because in it the human operates as a relational ontological totality. Therefore,
the Man versus Human battle does not dialectically sublate the specificity of the other struggles but
articulates them in this open totality so as to abolish Man and liberate all of humanity rather than
specific groups.

5] This fantasy of legal incorporation ensures a necessary outside of the personhood

as property – their attempt at becoming body through legal incorporation is a cruel
ruse sustaining hierarchies of humanity dividing the human, the not quite, and the
fully nonhuman. Weheliye 14:
Alexander G. Weheliye, [Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University.]
“Habeas Viscus: Racializaing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the
Human” Duke University Press, 2014 (KhMa)
We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception personhood that dominates our
world, and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law
cannot capture, what it cannot magically transform into the of fantastic form of property
ownership. Writing about the connections between transgender politics and other forms of
identitybased activism that respond to structural inequalities, legal scholar Dean Spade shows
how the focus on inclusion, recognition, and equality based on a narrow legal framework
(especially as it pertains to antidiscrimination and hate crime laws) not only hinders the
eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable populations but actually
creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal “distribution of life chances.”22
If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will lead
only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only
one form of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence
of hierarchical differences between full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This can
be gleaned from the “successes” of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay
rights movements, which facilitate the incorporation of a privileged minority into the
ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly criminalized and disposable
populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated, etc.).23 To make
claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical assemblage removes from view that
the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous
genocide, Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, domestic and international warfare, and
so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the
racializing assemblages in the world of Man. Instead of appealing to legal recognition, Julia
Oparah suggests counteracting the “racialized (trans)gender entrapment” within the prison-
industrial complex and beyond with practices of “maroon abolition” (in reference to the long
history of escaped slave contraband settlements in the Americas) to “foreground the ways in
which often overlooked African diasporic cultural and political legacies inform and undergird
antiprison work,” while also providing strategies and life worlds not exclusively centered on
reforming the law.24 Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the
“‘impossible’ worldview of trans political existence,” which redefines “the insistence of
government agencies, social service providers, media, and many nontrans activists and
nonprofiteers that the existence of trans people is impossible.”25 A relational maroon
abolitionism beholden to the practices of black radicalism and that arises from the
incompatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man serves as one example of how
putatively abject modes of being need not be redeployed within hegemonic frameworks but
can be operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated assemblages in
movements to abolish the grounds upon which all forms of subjugation are administered.

6] Balancing rights against each other to decide who gets what is reliant on the
structures of suffering— that perpetuates the validation of some at the expense of
invalidating others, relegating them to the status of nonhuman. Weheliye 14:
Alexander Weheliye, [Associate Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern
University] 2014, “Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist
Theories of the Human,” p. 17 (KhMa)
While thinking through the political and institutional dimensions of how certain forms of
violence and suffering are monumentalized and others are relegated to the margins of history
remains significant, their direct comparison tends to lead to hierarchization and foreclose
further discussion. Comparativity frequently serves as a shibboleth that allows minoritized
groups to gain recognition (and privileges, rights, etc.) from hegemonic powers (through the
law, for instance) who, as a general rule, only grant a certain number of exceptions access to
the spheres of full humanity, sentience, citizenship, and so on. This, in turn, feeds into a
discourse of putative scarcity in which already subjugated groups compete for limited
resources, leading to a strengthening of the very mechanisms that deem certain groups more
disposable or not-quite-human than others. In the resulting oppression Olympics, white
supremacy takes home all winning medals in every competition.28 In other words, as long as
numerous individuals and populations around the globe continue to be rendered disposable by
the pernicious logics of racialization, and thus exposed to different forms of political violence on
a daily basis, it seems futile to tabulate, measure, or calculate their/our suffering in the jargon
of comparison
7] Thus I affirm the United States ought to adopt a Wealth Tax through Habeas Viscus
—an exploration of liminal spaces outside of the law unintelligible to the European
Man. Instead of trying to include people in our sphere of justice, we take the position
of those branded as non-human to create alternate conceptions of humanity outside
of the legal apparatus. Weheliye 14:
Alexander G. Weheliye, [Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern
University.] “Habeas Viscus: Racializaing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories
of the Human” Duke University Press, 2014 *brackets in original* (KhMa)
Because black cultures have frequently not had access to Man’s language, world, future, or
humanity, black studies has developed a set of assemblages through which to perceive and
understand a world in which subjection is but one path to humanity, neither its exception nor
its idealized sole feature. Yet black studies, if it is to remain critical and oppositional, cannot
fall prey to juridical humanity and its concomitant pitfalls, since this only affects change in the
domain of the map but not the territory. In order to do so, the hieroglyphics of the flesh
should not be conceptualized as just exceptional or radically particular, since this habitually
leads to the comparative tabulation of different systems of oppression that then serve as the
basis for defining personhood as possession. As Frantz Fanon states: “All forms of exploitation
are identical, since they apply to the same ‘object’: man.”28 Accordingly, humans are exploited
as part of the Homo sapiens species for the benefit of other humans, which at the same time
yields a surplus version of the human: Man. Man represents the western configuration of the
human as synonymous with the heteromasculine, white, propertied, and liberal subject that
renders all those who do not conform to these characteristics as exploitable nonhumans, literal
legal no-bodies. If we are to affect significant systemic changes, then we must locate at least
some of the struggles for justice in the region of humanity as a relational ontological totality
(an object of knowledge) that cannot be reduced to either the universal or particular.
According to Wynter, this process requires us to recognize the “emancipation from the psychic
dictates of our present . . . genre of being human and therefore from ‘the unbearable
wrongness of being,’ of desetre, which it imposes upon . . . all non-white peoples, as an
imperative function of its enactment as such a mode of being[;] this emancipation had been
effected at the level of the map rather than at the level of the territory.”29 The level of the map
encompasses the nominal inclusion of nonwhite subjects in the false universality of western
humanity in the wake of radical movements of the 1960s, while the territory Wynter invokes in
this context, and in all of her work, is the figure of Man as a racializing assemblage. Wielding
this very particular and historically malleable classification is not an uncritical reiteration of the
humanist episteme or an insistence on the exceptional particularity of black humanity. Rather,
Afro-diasporic cultures provide singular, mutable, and contingent figurations of the human,
and thus do not represent mere bids for inclusion in or critiques of the shortcomings of
western liberal humanism. The problematic of humanity, however, needs to be highlighted as
one of the prime objects of knowledge of black studies, since not doing so will sustain the
structures, discourses, and institutions that detain black life and thought within the strictures
of particularity so as to facilitate the violent conflation of Man and the human. Otherwise,
the general theory of how humanity has been lived, conceptualized, shrieked, hungered into
being, and imagined by those subjects violently barred from this domain and touched by the
hieroglyphics of the flesh will sink back into the deafening ocean of prelinguistic particularity.
This, in turn, will also render apparent that black studies, especially as it is imagined by thinkers
such as Spillers and Wynter, is engaged in engendering forms of the human vital to
understanding not only black cultures but past, present, and future humanities. As a demonic
island, black studies lifts the fog that shrouds the laws of comparison, particularity, and
exception to reveal an aquatic outlook “far away from the continent of man.”30 The poetics
and politics that I have been discussing under the heading of habeas viscus or the flesh are
concerned not with inclusion in reigning precincts of the status quo but, in Cedric Robinson’s
apt phrasing, “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the
historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve
[and I would add also to reimagine] the collective being, the ontological totality.”31 Though
the laws of Man place the flesh outside the ferocious and ravenous perimeters of the legal
body, habeas viscus defies domestication both on the basis of particularized personhood as a
result of suffering, as in human rights discourse, and on the grounds of the universalized
version of western Man. Rather, habeas viscus points to the terrain of humanity as a
relational assemblage exterior to the jurisdiction of law given that the law can bequeath or
rescind ownership of the body so that it becomes the property of proper persons but does
not possess the authority to nullify the politics and poetics of the flesh found in the traditions
of the oppressed. As a way of conceptualizing politics, then, habeas viscus diverges from the
discourses and institutions that yoke the flesh to political violence in the modus of deviance.
Instead, it translates the hieroglyphics of the flesh into a potentiality in any and all things, an
originating leap in the imagining of future anterior freedoms and new genres of humanity. To
envisage habeas viscus as a forceful assemblage of humanity entails leaving behind the world
of Man and some of its attendant humanist pieties. As opposed to depositing the flesh
outside politics, the normal, the human, and so on, we need a better understanding of its
varied workings in order to disrobe the cloak of Man, which gives the human a long-overdue
extreme makeover; or, in the words of Sylvia Wynter, “the struggle of our new millennium will
be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass
(i.e. western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were
the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and
behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves.”32 Claiming and dwelling in the
monstrosity of the flesh present some of the weapons in the guerrilla warfare to “secure the
full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species,” since these liberate from
captivity assemblages of life, thought, and politics from the tradition of the oppressed and, as
a result, disfigure the centrality of Man as the sign for the human. As an assemblage of
humanity, habeas viscus animates the elsewheres of Man and emancipates the true
potentiality that rests in those subjects who live behind the veil of the permanent state of
exception: freedom; assemblages of freedom that sway to the temporality of new
syncopated beginnings for the human beyond the world and continent of Man. German r&b
group Glashaus’s track “Bald (und wir sind frei) [Soon (and We Are Free)]” performs this
overdetermined idea of freedom as disarticulated from Man both graphically and sonically.
Paying tribute to both the nineteenth-century spiritual “We’ll Soon Be Free,” written on the eve
of the American Civil War, and Donny Hathaway’s 1973 recording, “Someday We’ll All Be Free,”
Glashaus’s title “Bald (und wir sind frei)” enacts the disrupted yet intertwined notions of
freedom, temporality, and sociality that I am gesturing to here.33 In contrast to its
predecessors, which are resolutely located in the future via the use of soon/someday and the
future tense, Glashaus’s version renders freedom in the present tense, albeit 138 Chapter Eight
qualified by the imminent future of “bald [soon]” and by the typographical parenthetical
enclosure of “(und wir sind frei) [and we are free].” The flow of the parentheses intimates both
distance and nearness, ragging the homogeneous, empty future of “soon” with a potential
present of a “responsible freedom” (Spillers) and/as sociality. The and and the parentheses are
the conduits for bringing-into-relation freedom’s nowtime and its constitutive potential futurity
without resolving their tension. The lyrics of “Bald (und wir sind frei)” once again exemplify this
complementary strain in that the words in the verses are resolutely future oriented, ending
with the invocation of “bald” just before the chorus, which, held in the potential abyss of the
present, repeats, “und wir sind frei.” Likewise, in the verses, Glashaus’s singer Cassandra Steen,
accompanied only by a grand piano, just about whispers, whereas she opens up to a more
mellifluous style of singing in the chorus; as a result, the verses (bald/future) sound constricted
and restrictive but only when heard in relation to the expansive spatiality of the chorus
(present). What initially looks like a bracketed afterthought on the page punctures the
putatively central point in the sonic realm. It is not a vacant, uniform, or universal future that
sets in motion liberty but rather the future as it is seen, felt, and heard from the enfleshed
parenthetical present of the oppressed, since this group’s now is always already bracketed
(held captive and set aside indefinitely) in, if not antithetical to, the world of Man. The domain
of habeas viscus represents one significant mechanism by which the world of Man constrains
subjects to the parenthetical, while at the same time disavowing this tendency via recourse
to the abnormal and/ or inhuman. Heard, seen, tasted, felt, and lived in the ethereal shadows
of Man’s world, however, a habeas viscus unearths the freedom that exists within the
hieroglyphics of the flesh. For the oppressed the future will have been now , since Man tucks
away this group’s present in brackets. Consequently, the future anterior transmutes the
simple (parenthetical) present of the dysselected into the nowtime of humanity during which
the fleshy hieroglyphics of the oppressed will have actualized the honeyed prophecy of
another kind of freedom (which can be imagined but not [yet] described) in the revolutionary
apocatastasis of human genres.

8] Attempts at inclusion under the law are a ruse. The faciality machine takes the
minoritarian subject and compares it to the majoritarian face. But the hunt for
deviance doesn’t stop recreating the oppression they try to solve. MacCormack 04:
Patricia MacCormack, [Lectures in the Department of Communication and Film , Anglia Polytechnic
University , Cambridge] “The probe-head and the faces of Australia: From Australia post to Pluto”
Journal of Australian Studies, 2004 RE

The facial machine Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's 'Year Zero: Faciality' in A Thousand Plateaus
refutes the common assertion that the humanity of a subject is found in the face. They identify two axes
of making meaning that bring the face into comprehensible being: signification and subjectification.
Signification is the meaning of those facial traits divergent from the dominant 'level zero' face of
humanity: the white, male, heterosexual, upper-class 'majoritarian' face. Majoritarianism implies 'a
state of domination'2 rather than a state of majority; it refers to the general homogeneity of practices
and logic in culture. The 'human' face of the majoritarian is a corporeal articulation of this system, and
other faces are described through the ways in which they differ from this face. Deleuze and Guattari
state that 'Faces are not basically individual: they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field
that neutralises in advance any expressions or connections unnameable to the appropriate
significations'.3 The faces of Australia engage us to tally the frequency of certain face types (white/non-
white or male/female) in order that the 'reality' of Australian culture is epistemically enclosed. Of the
twenty-seven faces depicted in Australia Post's Face of Australia stamp series, nineteen were white
Australian, three Asian, three European (although only one from a European Union country; the other
two were Lebanese and Turkish) and two Indigenous Australian. Australia Post states that its 'aim was to
reflect the Australian community as closely as possible, with respect to age groups, ethnicity, gender
balance, national distribution and so on, while at the same time creating an interesting, balanced
sheetlet'.4 All the faces of Australia must affirm their comparability to the majoritarian face in order that
their difference becomes intelligible. One does not achieve egalitarian subjectivity by having a face;
one becomes subject to one's face. The ability of culture to read the body is brought into being through
the face. When we are facialised, we are made visible only within one dominant system and in the
only manner the dominant system understands. Where the face differs is why the face fails: not
because certain genders or races are destined to fail but because certain bodies are read and valued
according to how they differ from the majoritarian face. Hence the signification of black-or-white skin
and female-or-male face is read so that the face informs on the subject rather than the subject belying
the face. A face's unity is available through binaries: a white gay woman, a black straight man, a sane
healthy male, a sick insane female. Binary choices converge into the 'individual' face. Camilla Griggers
suggests that there is 'but one face with binary aspects ... stabilising a unitary privilege that truncates
multiplicitous proliferation'.5 We may say 'there is a black boy' or 'an "ethnic" woman' but for the
majoritarian we simply claim there is a 'man'. The subjectification of the face reads its signifiers —
black/white, male/female, rich/poor, straight/gay or child/adult — and implements them into the
social strata known as 'subjectivity'. The face brings the body of that which varies from the
majoritarian into comprehension for dominant culture. No pure difference or remarkable subjectivity
exists, only variants on the majoritarian. These variations describe the 'minoritarian': subjects with a
minority of control over signifying and political practices that reflect and create the minority aspect of
dominant facial binary options.6 Facial options fall most often into two categories, but access to their
definition and value remains isomorphic: they always exist in comparison with the majoritarian face. The
majoritarian face is that which constitutes the majority system of comprehension. The majoritarian
and the minoritarian should not be thought of as binary opposites, however. Within different social
situations and structures, the parameters of power and signifying systems shift, and thus the
majoritarian face is a situational rather than a permanent face. The face is a landscape. This faced
landscape is rigid, changeable only in relation to a set of predictable variances. The landscape is also
cultivated by a certain set of people, who own, run and map the land. The land is recognised in a certain
way. Nowhere is this metaphor more clear than in the example of the use of two Indigenous Australian
faces in the stamp series. The landscape of Australia, like its face, was entirely reterritorialised by white
settlement. By giving Indigenous Australians two faces in a stamp series, Australian Post represent
incorporation as equalling justice, operating on the assumption that an Indigenous Australian has a
face in the same way as a white coloniser. What the Indigenous Australian is left with is a colonisation
of the body by the majoritarian order of expression — a face that is emphatically non-dominant.
Stamps may seem a soft version of colonisation, but they are a means of domestic catharsis for white
guilt: 'multicultural' representation is not seen as tokenism but as a landmark in reparation. These
stamps emphasise that variance from a singular does not represent a politics of difference but only a
politics of divergence. Dorothea Olkowski affirms that: a change from a logic of identity to a logic of
difference arises in practice but must be formulated with concepts that differentiate differences and
that undermine the 'representation' of such differences as merely specific differences belonging to a
single genus.7 Like the face of all minoritarians, the faces of the Indigenous Australians in the stamps
reflect an active homogenising system of recognition, where divergence from the majoritarian face
constitutes difference rather than all faces being phyla differentiated from each other. Cyril Watson is
a 'typical Aussie boy'.8 The stamp featuring his face shows an Indigenous Australian child, arms raised
behind his head, his grinning face smeared with mud. Like his Anglo-Australian name, his face has been
brought into sensible comprehension through majoritarian substantive expression. 'Racism never
detects the particles of the other', state Deleuze and Guattari, 'it propagates waves of sameness until
those who resist identification have been wiped out... its cruelty is equalled only by its incompetence
and naïveté'.9 Cyril's smiling face is territorialised by two particular 'waves of sameness'. The first is
found in the mud smeared over his body, which blurs the marker between face and (where we would
ordinarily find) clothes. Cyril's face is 'savage' and his lack of clothing is 'primitive', despite the fact he is
simply playing in mud. He is at once a mischievous boy and a threatening Indigenous Australian
activist/land right claimant/savage. His age is the second wave of sameness. Youth insinuates that Cyril's
future resembles that of every other Australian, based on his volition rather than an assemblage of
opportunity and social circumstance. The current alarming rate of imprisonment and death in custody
for Indigenous Australians haunts the innocuous nature of this stamp.10 Deleuze and Guattari state:
'From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only
people who are not like us and whose crime it is not to be'.11 Cyril's face poses a hope that fictionally
places him in the same space as the majoritarian for his life to unfurl. However, the Australian
attitude of 'giving it a go despite the obstacles' means very different things to Indigenous Australians,
to women and to many other minoritarians than it does to the majoritarian. The Indigenous
Australian face in Australia becomes the potentially sacrificial face of Australian nationality.

9] Habeas Viscus is an embrace of exclusion illegible to the liberal state that de-
centers the European Man allowing for the creation of futures beyond Man. James 14:
Robin James, 11-26-2014, "Notes On Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: or why some posthumanisms are better than others,"
https://www.its-her-factory.com/2014/11/notes-on-weheliyes-habeas-viscus-or-why-some-posthumanisms-are-better-than-
others/ (KhMa)
Queer vibes/frequencies/motion When considered only from the visual plane of Cartesian
modernity or algorithmic biopolitics, the flesh appears only as “an exceptionally disembodied”
(121) ether. If the subject’s body is primarily visible, something to be seen, (Sartre’s “The
Look,” Fanon’s “Look, a Negro!,” Mulvey’s male gaze, hooks’s oppositional gaze), embodied
flesh manifests in other sensory planes (or even queerly visualized planes). Weheilye explains:
“While the Muselmaenner may have appeared withdrawn, passive, and lifeless, nourishment
moved at the center of their being, because ‘the Muselmaenner retained selective receptivity
for all food related stimuli: olfactory, gustatory, and auditory stimuli.’” (120). The flesh is not
immobile; it just moves at frequencies that are invisible to the merely human eye (i.e.,
humanist modernity’s scopic episteme), but easily apparent to senses tuned to other registers,
such as taste and audition. The “relational flesh speaks, conjures, intones, and concocts
sumptuous universes (121), universes in registers inaccessible to Man’s view, but entirely
accessible to different perceptual practices, practices attuned to, say, witch-crafty concoctions
intoned outside modern Man’s myth/enlightenment dialectic. From the perspective of the
human as Man, the flesh radiates with queer vibes, with lively movements that nevertheless
appear as, perhaps we should say, static and undead because they oscillate at frequencies
(e.g., the audible rather than the visual spectrum) that Man can’t recognize as his own. Or, as
Weheliye puts it, “the flesh is not an abject zone of exclusion that culminates in death but an
alternate instantiation of humanity that does not rest on the mirage of western Man as the
mirror image of human life as such” (43). Though the flesh is the death of the human, it is not
the end of existence. Flesh is a practice of not-being-human. Habeas viscus is a concept that
re-tunes humanist philosophical practice, putting it out of phase with Man and in synch with
the “miniscule movements, glimmers of hope, scraps of food, the interrupted dreams of
freedom found in those spaces deemed devoid of full human life” (12). As I understand it,
habeas viscus is what tunes us in to the movements of the flesh, to the vibes it transmits
(e.g., as bodily practices, comportments, ways of not-being in the world of Man). The flesh
does not have the “voice” of a liberal subject, mainly because it does not suffer a ‘wrong’. Its
vibes are not audible as dissensus (in the strict Rancierian sense), as noise. Rather, from the
perspective of liberal humanism, the flesh is inaudible because it vibrates beyond the humanly-
accessible spectrum (thus the need to be more than human, to be something like an
Afrofuturist alien or robot). Liberalism runs on a dialectic of constitutive exclusion/inclusion:
the part-sans-part is tossed out, but then they make noise and this noise disrupts the
mechanisms of exclusion, reformulating them into a different distribution of signal/noise that
excludes somebody else’s voice as unintelligible noise. Neoliberalism accelerates this dialectic
to the point that it appears to have run its course: everyone has a voice that is legitimately
recognized as fully human, except for bare life, which is absolutely and irremediably silenced; it
doesn’t even make noise, so its exclusion can never register as a source of dissensus. Bare life is
the absolutization of exclusion. This is a story the left likes to tell about neoliberalism: it’s
Ranciere’s story in Disagreement, it’s Fisher’s story in Capitalist Realism. It is the story that
exclusion has been absolutized so There Is No Alternative, as they say, and that bare life is what
occupies the space formerly occupied by something like the demos (i.e., by the rabble, those
who grunted but did not speak (yet)). Weheliye thinks this account of neoliberailsm is just flat
wrong. This space of supposedly absolute silence and exclusion is actually a site of
“constitutive potentiality” (13). Exclusion constitutes the agency of Man. Habeas viscus is the
potentiality that constitutes worlds after and beyond Man. These worlds are not alternatives
to Man, “parts” without a proper, legible “part” in his world (i.e., they’re not worlds that can
be compared to Man because they lack a common denominator with humanism). Rather, they
are what is possible when we DTMFA, that is, when we cease to be bound by the gravitational
pull of his universe. To be clear: he still goes on existing, he’s just not our direct or primary
concern. Man and habeas viscus are products of the same process: depending on the angle
from which you view it, either Man or fleshy potentiality appears as the outcome. The humanist
perspective, which is brought into focus by white patriarchal epistemologies of ignorance,
create the world of Man as, to use Charles Mills’s phrasing, a “virtual reality,” a “cognitive
dysfunction that is socially functional” (RC 18). If the Racial Contract is what solidifies this
“virtual reality” in law (habeas) and in heiroglyphics of the flesh (habits of cognitive/social
functionality), habeas viscus is a materially-historically specific reality that functions as the
“virtual” (in the strict Deleuzian sense) to this white supremacist, cis/heterosexist “virtual
reality.” It is in this sense (ie insofar as it is specifically indexed to the racial contract) that
“habeas viscus” is “an extrajuridical law of motion” (124). The hypervisible yet also illegible
hieroglyphics of the flesh” (110): more brilliant than the humanist sun, the radiance of habeas
viscus is both sparked and masked by the frequencies of Man (precisely so that it doesn’t
burn him up).

10] Changing the current educational model for debate and schools is crucial in the
strive to deviate away from and not towards the legal body. Recognizing and
dismantling current racial hierarchies and biases within schools is a critical step
toward the end goal. Dixon-Roman 18.
familydesigncollab.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Racialization-In-and-Across-Learning_FLDC-Research-
Brief_07.24.2018.pdf. Accessed 26 Oct. 2024. (KhMa)

It has become increasingly understood that education is a social process that is

ubiquitous to being human. Learning goes beyond the place of schooling and occurs
through the practices in and across contexts. Further learning is formed and shaped by
racializations - that is, structural relations of “difference” - producing inequities in
pedagogical conditions and inequalities in educational opportunities. Alex Weheliye
defines racialization as the sociopolitical process of differentiating and hierarchizing
bodies, designating their humanity and possibilities. In order to enable educational
justice for everyone social policy has to address the sociopolitical system of
hierarchizing and differentiating relations. This brief will provide a way of
understanding what racializations are, discuss some of the important research
literature on the impact of racialization in education, and highlight the potential of
comprehensive education policy.
Racialization in Schools The forces of racialization also occur in schooling practices
such as discipline and interactions with school teachers and administration. A recent
report found that in the K-12 public school districts in 13 Southern states black
students were disproportionately suspended or expelled at higher rates. They also
found that in 84 school districts in the South, black students made up 100% of those
students suspended. These are unconscionable rates that reflect the school
administrations’ and teachers’ disposition toward black students. Providing several
different examples, Gloria Ladson-Billings has discussed how Black male behaviors in
the classroom are feared and not tolerated whereas their White or Asian American
counterparts’ behaviors are much more tolerated. Others have also found that school
administration are differently responsive to black parents engagement with the school,
regardless of class23. Additionally, parental meetings or conferences with school
teachers have been found to, on average, have a negative effect on achievement
growth for black males.