1AC

We begin with the story of Sugata Mitra, India’s snake oil salesman. His mythos
begins with the technic fantasy. He places a computer in a hole in a Delhi wall.
The impoverished and illiterate walk up to it, using it without questioning,
becoming one with the computer as it becomes one with the infrastructure of
the city via the wall. He develops a theory of the Indian subject. Give a brown
kid a machine and they will solve any problem. Because at their core, they are a
machine. Here are his words.

“Within five years, you will not be able to tell if somebody is consulting the
internet or not. The internet will be inside our heads anywhere and at any time.
What then will be the value of knowing things? We shall have acquired a new
sense.”1

His will for technic mastery is therefore inseparable from his will for self-
mastery. And yet it his elevation the machine to the status of deity that
attempts to close the feedback loop. If we can be one with the machine, and
the machine itself is an all-knowing god, then we too can become gods among
men. Here are his words.

“A few years ago, nobody had a piece of plastic to which they could ask questions
and have it answer back. The Greeks spoke of the oracle of Delphi. We’ve created
it.”2
Of course, these were just musings until his work became the basis for Slumdog
Millionaire3 which came to define global understandings of Indians. Mitra will
die one day but his legacy is a generation of students who can only think
through productivity. Who see the world as an infinite sequence of problems
and solutions. Who can only think through isolation and competition. Look at
any tournament and you may find some roaming the halls. They will grow up to
sacrifice the poor, continue wars, and push us closer to the end of the world.
We’ve gone from having our heads in the clouds to having our heads in the
CLOUD. Unless…

Discourse around border reform has hyper-focused on the exterior. Who can
we let in and who do we keep out? This ignores the interior. Every border is a
mirror producing idealized versions of the self. Citizenship becomes a
performative indicator of commonality, given to acknowledge seeing a piece of
ourselves in others. The operative question is, do we like what we see in the
mirror? WARNING: Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.

Parmar 20 (Dr. Alpa Parmar, Research Associate in Criminology, Faculty of Law. Dr. Parmar studied Social and Political
Sciences as an undergraduate at Cambridge and also completed her doctorate at the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge. Following
completion of her PhD, Alpa held a British Academy Postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Law at King's College London. “Borders
as Mirrors: Racial Hierarchies and Policing Migration”. Critical Criminology (2020) 28:175–192. 16 July 2020.)

Borders and bordering practices have prompted a gamut of critical empirical and conceptual analysis to explore some of the novel
concerns raised by contemporary migration (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015). These analyses have encouraged us to rethink borders,
particularly what and where borders are and the purposes they serve, as well as inspiring questions about temporality and
inviting us to ask: when is a border a border? (Anderson et al. 2009). In this article, I contribute to this

interdisciplinary corpus in border studies, critical criminology and critical race studies by proposing that borders and their

control across Western liberal democracies are like mirrors that represent,
reflect and, at times, defect and obscure the image of Western democracies and liberal
attitudes toward racial others. Conceptualized as mirrors, the transformative function of borders, alongside their
aim to preserve racial and colonial hierarchies across the world, becomes more apparent. Borders have undoubtedly

transformed cities and policing, as well as categories of belonging and the mobility of migrant groups (Back
and Sinha 2018; Weber 2013). The digital age has also brought new technological tools which migrants reclaim to navigate, respond
and resist bordering practices, creating counter-narratives of migration (Milivojevic 2019). Alongside the change and mobility
the productive capacity of the
inherent to bordering and migration1 in contemporary times, we are reminded of

state to make and maintain race through bordering regimes. Despite the inherent mobility
associated with borders, they can engender stasis and inertia, demonstrating the facticity of
racial hierarchies that govern mobility for some and not others (Bosworth et al. 2018).
Perceptions of racial undesirability and processes of exclusion, removal and deportation have gone hand in hand, and continue to do
so now (Gabaccia 1997; Sigona and Trehan 2011). Within this context of the multiple dimensions and functions of borders that other
scholars have identified, I propose that when borders are understood as mirrors as opposed to
boundaries and lines, or barriers and walls, their inherently ambiguous, fluid and protean nature can be
captured meaningfully. The multidimensionality of borders and their simultaneous banality
alongside the exceptionalism they can conjure are comprehensible when we
conceive of borders as mirrors. Borders can defect scrutiny away from racist
attitudes by allowing the media, the public and politicians to convey the idea that
migration control and racism are separate issues and to advance the claim that concerns about migration are
about a strain on public resources or potential criminality as opposed to xenophobia (Garner 2018). In this respect, borders

serve to reflect and magnify anxieties about crime, security and the fear of difference that
are present in the national body, and the focus on borders acts simultaneously as a two-way cause of and
solution to these concerns (Foner and Simon 2015). In the same way that two-way mirrors function—

transparent on one side and reflective on the other—and thereby promote distanced surveillance,
the heuristic device of the mirror creates a number of dimensions that reveals
the performative and productive capacity of borders. Policing migration policies are one example
of this two-way mirror of invisible surveillance that borders engender and that are discussed later in this article. The

reconceptualization of borders as relational processes and as sites of struggle allows borders to be

reimagined beyond their exclusionary function, affording possibilities for the
impermanence of borders or a borderless world to be imagined and their transformative

potential to be calibrated (Segrave and Wonders 2019). This article draws on empirical research on the policing of
migration in the United Kingdom (UK) to demonstrate how borders operate as mirrors at micro- and macro-levels, and the role of
borders in ensuring that experiences of belonging are liminal for racial minorities. The article begins with a discussion about the
metaphors that have been used to describe migration in newspapers and academic analyses, followed by an examination of how
bordering, criminalization and race intersect, both conceptually and practically. Next, I present an analysis of the function of
bordering in terms of holding a mirror to who “we” are or imagine ourselves to be. I then ground the conceptual and theoretical
framework adopted in this article by drawing on Stuart Hall’s (1997) theory of representation, as well as critical race studies.
Following this, I discuss my empirical research on policing migration in the UK to show how border practices operate. As part of this
analysis, I offer evidence of the metaphors and forms of rationalizations applied by police and immigration agents as they perform
their daily work. Here, I draw further on the borders as mirrors concept to show how the multiple dimensions and practices of
bordering can be interpreted in light of the empirical findings. The article concludes by considering how the heuristic device of
understanding borders as mirrors creates a possibility for Western liberal democracies to engage in a process of self-refection (i.e.,
by holding a mirror to ourselves). Borders, Migration and Metaphors Recent scholarship has engendered a reconceptualization of
borders to include a more open reading of border logics, practices and technologies. Such approaches have encouraged us to look
beyond the fixed image of the border as a wall and of bordering practices as solely exclusionary (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015).
Borders are regarded as inherently multidimensional, multifunctional and ontologically ambivalent
(Graziano 2018). The productive capacity of borders has been emphasized, as has the need for borders to be considered from a
dynamic lens and perceived as a means rather than an end. The social and political contexts that surround
border-making processes are key, and borders are recognized for not only restricting access, but also for
ensuring that people can enter and leave freely (Brown 2010). Borders are both performative and

productive; within the framework of conceptualizing borders as performative, migration has been regarded as a social
movement and citizenship has been conceived as a performance (Wonders and Jones 2019). In
another illustration of the performative and productive force of borders, President Donald J. Trump’s election campaign in the
United States (US) in 2016 centered on the promise of “the wall” and since taking office, the president’s rallies have continued to call
for building a wall along the US border with Mexico. Arguably, “the wall” has served a primarily symbolic function to illustrate the
While discussions about barriers
strength of nationalism, rather than the need for national security (Bier 2017).

and fences, walls and wires, are rooted in physical forms of architecture designed to keep some people
out and some people in, non-physical borders are also proving to be restrictive and

controlling in diffuse and remote ways (Broeders and Hampshire 2013). The ubiquity of borders beyond
checkpoints and geographical countries has resulted in what some have called “everyday bordering” (Mezzadra and

Neilson 2013; Yuval-Davis et al. 2018) and bordering responsibilities are increasingly delegated to

the public (Aliverti 2015). For example, in the UK, the Immigration Act 2016 brought in new measures to criminalize the
provision of rental accommodation to individuals without legal status, to prevent illegal migrants from obtaining driving licenses, and
to introduce an information-sharing scheme with the Home Office for migrants seeking medical help from the National Health
Service (Webber 2019). Metaphorically Speaking Metaphors are often deployed to describe migrants and migration in political and
popular discourse and the news media.2 For example, migrants are often described as “flows,” “pests,” “seas” and “waves,” and are
likened to “natural disasters,” such as “foods” or “storms.” Former British Prime Minister David Cameron referred to a “swarm of
people coming across the Mediterranean” (Shariatmadari 2015). Water is often used in association with migrants and refugees and
as modes of communication increasingly employ visual images, water has been employed frequently to depict the process of
migration (Gabrielatos and Baker 2008). Newspaper stories enunciate the power of these metaphors, particularly when they are
written into the headlines. For example, one online tabloid published the headline: “Flood of illegal migrants highlights border
fiasco” (Daily Express 2017), and examples in other outlets include: “Millions of Africans will food Europe unless it acts now, warns
European chief, as Paris evacuates huge migrant camp” (Samuel and Squires 2017); “HMS Bulwark overloaded by migrant tide”
(Beale 2015); and “MIGRANTS SWARM TO BRITAIN: Torrent of stowaway migrants on a typical day in borderless UK” (Chapman
2015). Various forms of media are said to play a constitutive role in framing the migration debate and perceptions of migrants,
thereby influencing public understanding significantly (Lamont 2015). Scholars who have analyzed news stories about migration
argue that minority groups and refugees are depicted by being associated with rising crime levels and danger (Rasinger 2010). An
examination of the Los Angeles Times found that metaphors about immigrant workers operated to dehumanize them and advance
the idea that “immigrants were animals” to be baited, lured and pitted against others (Santa Ana 1999). The media utilize and corral
linguistic tools, metaphors, images and information (as well as the omission of information) to present highly curated perspectives of
the migration debate (Langdon 2018). It is clear that language plays a central role in reference to migration, alongside the power of
metaphors, for their capacity to describe situations, events and contexts, and their propensity to influence people’s thinking (Parker
2015). Not only can metaphors paint a vivid picture in ways that fat descriptive words often fall short, but one metaphor can lead to
another, resulting in a coherent system of metaphorical concepts and expressions (Lakof and Johnson 2003). Metaphors are
effective because they provide shape to abstract processes and can be used politically and strategically to affect public sentiment in
a readily understandable and translatable way (Santa Ana 1999); they are pervasive and a crucial source of influence. In their
analysis of the depiction of Syrian refugees, Abid and colleagues (2017) found that persistent metaphors involving water
represented an unwelcome disaster, which removed the humanity of Syrian refugees, rendering them indistinguishable and
dehumanized entities. Indeed, the use of natural disaster metaphors by the media has resulted in refugees being regarded as a
danger to host countries and a source of panic and terror; such is the power of language (Mayr 2008). Visual representations of
asylum seekers in British newspapers have also been found to fuse together notions of danger, deviance and otherness to produce
panics about male asylum seekers and refugees, framing them as subjects to be feared rather than helped (Banks 2011). Following
the “mobility turn” in the social sciences (Aas 2016; Sheller and Urry 2006), scholars, too, have applied various metaphors to explain
borders and their roles as a mode of analysis. For example, borders have been conceptualized as membranes (Bowling 2013), as
paradox and power (Papadakis 2017), likened to a computer firewall (Rumford 2008), enabling mobility as well as fixicity (Perkins
and Rumford 2013), and as “borderscapes” (Brambillia 2015). Many of the conceptualizations attempt to capture the multiple and
bordering is an active and political process
concurrent potentialities of borders, as well as the idea that
(Van Houtum and Strüver 2002). Others have critiqued representations of migration as a social ill—a poison infecting Europe (De
The duality of borders is also an often-cited theme—one used to highlight their function in
Genova 2010).

connecting as well as dividing. Borders have an inherently regulatory role insofar as walls and checkpoints
serve to manage rather than exclude legal and illegal migrant labor (Brown 2010). Others consider
borders to be central to the definition of the state and a permanent “state of exception” ensuring the exercise of biopolitical power
(Agamben 2005; Salter 2008). Border security practices are gendered and racialized and pre-emptive in coding particular bodies as
dangerous, suspicious and warranting further scrutiny (Basham and Vaughan-Williams 2012). The nature of control in border control
has also been examined, as has the growth in industries and technologies that enable and profit from border security (Andersson
Borders are not just devices for blocking or obstructing global “flows,”
2014; Walters 2006).

but have become essential devices for the articulation of globalization (Mezzadra and
Neilson 2013). The primacy of performance in borders has been highlighted (Wonders and
Jones 2019) and the digital technologies and linked databases that shape border control have also been scrutinized for their
racializing consequences (Parmar 2019). The role of technologies in influencing decision-making and discretion at the border have
also been examined, highlighting the uncertain and visual nature of these practices when they occur. Such studies have also
underscored that border security practices should be explored from the vantage point of actors that are involved in this daily work
(Cote-Boucher et al. 2014; Hall 2017). The use of metaphors in academic circles has also been critiqued for being unable to reconcile
border studies debates which have coalesced around binary pairings of border discourse (e.g., open versus closed, inside versus
outside) (Lalonde 2018; Newman 2006; Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009).

The role of the judge is to look in the mirror. Educational spaces are
predetermined by the same Cartesian models of space that modern geopolitics
remains wedded to. This extends the logic of border practices into the interior,
pushing forward a model of containerization that services neoliberalism with
fresh labor.

Sugarman 20 (David Sugarman teaches courses about American literature and intellectual history since 1945. He is
especially interested in how postwar literature, philosophy, and political theory reflect the changes taking place in American cities
during this period. David received his PhD from New York University’s Department of English in 2019, and is now a professor and
adviser at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. “Man, I’m Nowhere: Collisions in Abstract Space in 20th Century America”.
May 2020.)

But why are we in this particular space to learn this particular lesson ? It is because the
stock exchange, at this moment, has become a space of pedagogy. The students are brought to learn about

how America works, and it becomes clear that, in JR, the students are treated as
yet another space capable of being filled with this or that information or emptied of
this or that value. They embody yet another space. In the extensive spatial reorganizing taking place in this novel,

characters of all kinds—from artists to schoolchildren—come to be seen as an extension of that Cartesian,

geometric plane. As such, people are just one more space that needs to be
managed. In this way, the production (and reorganization) of space is directly linked, in this novel,
to the production and management of bodies. The novel is explicit in its treatment of the body as a geometric
space, even referring to the body as a “container” in an important conversation between Gibbs, Eigen, and Bast. After learning of
Schramm’s suicide, Gibbs and Eigen go to their apartment down the hall where they discover Bast at work on his symphony. The
allusions in this section are significant, as Gibbs mentions his work in progress, Agapé Agape, which was in fact Gaddis’ work in
progress on the player-piano—a piece that would dog Gibbs throughout the novel just as it dogged Gaddis throughout his life, only
to be published posthumously. There is also an illusion, in this section, to Tolstoy’s Redemption. Schramm, Gibbs tells us, “said
Tolstoy told him, something terribly lacking between what he felt and what he could do…” (Gaddis 283). The importance of this
quote, beyond its evocation of the inadequacy of artistic production (a major problem for the artists in JR) is that it also references
Gaddis’ first novel, The Recognitions. Tolstoy’s quote is associated with suicide in that text as well, but the context is crucially
different. In The Recognitions, the line is spoken by Mr. Feddle at a Christmas party in the West Village—a party full of artists flush
with postwar optimism, bombast, and self-importance. In JR, however, Gibbs utters the line to accurately describe the artists at the
center of the novel. These artists find something terribly lacking between their artistic languages and the worlds they’re seeking to
describe. Gibbs then goes on, in response to Bast’s confusion, to explain what “happened” to Schramm: Problem what happened he
always woke up the same person went to bed the night before only way he knew it these God damned words going through his
head, go to bed knew he’d wake up the same God damned person finally couldn’t take it anymore, same God damned words waiting
for him only thing to do get rid of the God damned container for the thing contained, God damned words come around next
morning God damned container smashed on the sidewalk no place for them to… (Gaddis 283). Linking his own artistic practice
(those words that were published, like The Recognitions, as well as those that remained stubbornly incomplete, like Agapé Agape) to
that of the frustrated artists in JR, Gaddis introduces the concept of bodies—of work, of words, of life—as mere containers.
Schramm, in Gibbs’ view, killed himself because the same words always confronted him—the words of his work or the words of his
world. He carried these around with him, whether he wanted to or not; he finally got tired of doing so. Returning once more to the
to see oneself as merely a “container” for ideas and
Heideggeranian terminology outlined above,

language is to extend geometric space into one’s own interior ; it is to see the empty

and immeasurable blank space of the world as continuing inward. Furthermore, when
the language that fills up that internal space is one that cripples the ability to look at the world in a meaningful way—to dwell—
other possibilities remain foreclosed until the “God damned container [is] smashed on
the sidewalk.” That people are containers for discourses —that they’re filled with the words they use

to speak about, grasp, and undo the world—is one of the central concerns of the novel, and can be linked to the
moment, previously discussed, in which JR Vansant learns that a basket company’s stock might hold nothing, while air shaped by the
A description or discourse can shape air into value. It can
right hands might hold a great deal.

also preclude the possibility of finding value in anything save what the market deems worthy. By
means of its treatment of space, JR links the body, the city, and the suburb together, showing how they’ve all become planes
without any value save the ones placed there by certain discursive practices; by elucidating the form and structure of an ascendant
Cartesian, geometric space, this novel does not offer its characters or its
discourse that bolsters a sense of

readers a means of resistance or escape; rather, it seeks to describe the evolving shape of that discourse—its

emergence, spread, and internalization in both the body and the country ,
reinscribing old spaces or constructing new ones according to its logic. In its depiction of this emergent discourse, the novel
documents the structures and structural changes that enable neoliberal discourse to circulate and spread, from
the defunded train to the newly paved roads. The novel describes spaces upended by this discourse, from the private Bast residence
to the public school, from the local sprawl of the suburbs to the far-flung sites of investment like Germany or Africa. JR chronicles
the movement of this chaotic language, grounding it in structural changes and recognizing it as an emergent state form, a form of
governmentality, a set of polices, and a spatial practice—as an emergent discourse and “commonsense. ” The novel chronicles this
to
discourse’s foundations, movements, and effects. 5. Linguistic Recovery Beyond critiquing neoliberal discourse, JR also attempts

produce a linguistic space that (like the train for Stella or the train-wagon for Amy and Gibbs) might retain,
reanimate, or reclaim— however briefly—the spaces flattened by neoliberal discourse.
An example of this can be found—like all the novel’s positive possibilities—on the platform of the Long Island Rail Road. As Stella
stands on the train-platform watching the lights disappear (a scene that signals her fixity against a circulating and spreading
neoliberal discourse) she thinks of the train’s “lights receding as though desperate to lose distinction among lights signifying nothing
but motion” (Gaddis 73-74). This barely buried allusion to Macbeth—“signifying nothing”—signals Stella’s meditative
engagement, via literature and language, with her world and its losses. While reflecting her melancholy, the prose also offers a
is, at this
moment of linguistic recovery, with her literary language reclaiming space by reframing experience. Literary language

moment, a hedge against the language that would otherwise “flatten” space and

experience. JR—an oftentimes overwhelmingly wordy work—sees literary language as another way of staving off

the “flattening,” “containerizing” discourse of neoliberalism. Literary language can contest the
spreading discourses this novel describes and critiques. It can uncover spaces thought foreclosed—the train, for instance—and can
recover other ways of seeing, changing the contents of the “container” of inner experience. Springer points out that
discourses are not impenetrable. He hopes for “the building of transnational solidarity” that
might form as we come to understand neoliberalism, and believes “such an activity h astens the pace at which

neoliberalism may recede into historical obscurity to be replaced with a new discourse, a novel
representation that we can hope produces a more egalitarian social condition” (Springer 142). Gaddis holds out no such hopes,
but against Gibbs’ pessimistic call for self-negation—that the only form of resistance is “breaking the God-damned container”—
Gaddis does offer, as he chronicles and critiques an emergent neoliberal discourse that flattens space and experience, the possibility
of recovering the spaces overlooked by neoliberalism and of filling “the container” with a different discourse. Literary language, this
novel suggests, might reframe social space or social reality, making it legible and livable. This
concept of literary recovery—a literary practice of countering abstraction or illuminating the differences

within what is perceived to be a homogenous space—is one I elaborate in my final chapter,

through a return to Lefebvre and discussion of his theory of rhythmanalysis.

Thus, we endorse awaj as a model of refuge. The 1AC is a system reboot that
pushes us away from machinic models of performance. Modern technical
discourse renders our bodies into simple objects moving on a screen,
performing predictable and preprogrammed tasks. Rather than play with the
task, we choose to play with the screen injecting subjectivity as noise that
renders the screen useless. Only this abdicates the epistemic borders used to
lock people into productivity.
Kunreuther 18 (Laura Kunreuther is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bard College. B.A., University of
Pennsylvania; M.A., Ph.D., University of Michigan. Extensive on-site research in Kathmandu. Awards include Andrew W. Mellon
Fellowship, Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, NMERTA South Asia Fellowships (2). Author of numerous articles and conference
presentations. “Sounds of Democracy: Performance, Protest, and Political Subjectivity”. February 2018. Cultural Anthropology
33(1):1-31)

āwāj resonates with modern, global discourses of voice used to

At a metaphorical level,

describe interior thoughts and desires, political consciousness, agency, and

modes of selfhood central to modern publics and democratic practice (Keane 1999;
Kunreuther 2014; Weidman 2014; Fisher 2016), as in phrases like mahilāko āwāj (women’s voice) or janājātiko āwāj (ethnic
Yet āwāj also includes reference to a wide array of
nationalist voice) or āwāj uthāune (raising voice).

phenomena that are not human or discursive at all: natural and mechanical sounds or noises.3 The
term āwāj, then, quite literally, brings together what Amanda Weidman (2014) and others have identified as two

registers of voice: first, the study of vocal sound, and second, its life as a discursive category

related to discussions of power, subjectivity, representation, and agency . Because

sound affects us in ways that often exceed words, āwāj helps us focus our attention on the connections between the rational and the
affective, the articulate and the inarticulate, rather than their fundamental division, raising questions around how we think about
Āwāj also offers us a way to break open the ubiquitous discourse of
democratic practice.

voice used in global human-rights organizations, humanitarian discourse, and liberal understandings of the
public sphere. In these contexts, we often find a group or a person who is presented as
voiceless but who might be able to “gain a voice” through some effort, often with the help of
another organization, medium, authority, or knowledge producer. While āwāj and āwāj uthāune
 do not believe that there is an equivalent subject—a voiceless
echo these global ideas about voice, I

subject—implied in the concept of āwāj. This may be related to the broader nexus of sounds embraced by the term. In the
present article, I follow the pathways laid out by the concept of āwāj by considering two examples of participatory democracy on the
streets of Kathmandu. Ashmina Ranjit’s performance art piece, A Happening/An Installation: Nepal’s Present Situation, 2004,
intended to dramatize the nation’s suffering in the midst of the Maoist People’s War and, as Ashmina explained to me, to “wake the
people of Kathmandu up.”4 Eight years later, activists staged a political demonstration lasting 107 days in front of the prime
minister’s home, which was called Occupy Baluwatar or Baluwatar Satyagraha, in protest of a young returning migrant being robbed
by an immigration official and then raped by a Nepali policeman. Despite its initial name, Occupy Baluwatar was quite unlike the
Occupy movements around the globe: it did not target global capital, and the activists had a specific aim to further a concrete legal
action (cf. Juris and Rasza 2012). But in using the same name as the movement that popularized the use of the human mic and its
ideals, Occupy Baluwatar created many formal similarities to other global protest movements: its reliance on social media, the use of
silence and noise, as well as the occupation of public space. Both A Happening and the Occupy Baluwatar protests involved a similar
demographic of cosmopolitan young Nepalis, many of whom had traveled or studied abroad, some of whom were journalists who
often wrote in English and spoke a mix of Nepali and English, and some of whom in fact participated in both events (such as
Ashmina). Most of the people involved in these events see themselves as feminists, activists or, in Ashmina’s case, as an “artivist,”
who denounce party politics even when, in the case of the Baluwatar movement, they seek to negotiate directly with the state.5
They practice what Heather Hindman (2014) has called “DIY” democracy, which exhibits a “confluence between anarchic and
libertarian rejections of the state.” Presenting themselves as part of nāgarik samāj (civil society), they distinguish their actions from
the tactics of political society (see Chatterjee 2006), which uses violence or threats of violence to protest against the state. Though
different in intention and to some degree audience, both the performance piece and the Occupy protest moved between the
physical, public space of the street and the mediated public sphere of circulating texts and voices; both used sound strategically.
Drawing on local and global strategies of protest, participants described both events as
examples of āwāj uthāune. As forms of āwāj, they invite us to consider sound, noise, and voice

“as intertwined and diverging trajectories, rather than a unified progression to

an autonomous, speaking subject” (Manoukian 2010, 241). They indicate a range of performances that
cultivate democratic and political subjectivity in Nepal.6 In following āwāj, I am not seeking to indigenize a global concept like voice.
Instead, I argue that āwāj and āwāj uthāune offer another global trajectory of voice—one that might
provincialize Northern discourses of voice. In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) suggests that the

concepts we use to understand political modernity such as citizenship, state, the

individual, the subject, the public sphere, human rights, and so on are both indispensable and inadequate

because their assumptions about universal humanity always take Europe as its
subject. The concept of āwāj does the work of provincializing that Chakrabarty argues for insofar as it offers new
ways of thinking about the political role of sound that comes out of a South Asian
concept but is equally at work in Euro-American contexts. Āwāj is a global
discourse in its own right. Often associated with radical politics, āwāj is also a common name for newspapers, NGOs,
and politically inspired performances throughout South Asia, as well as in Kenya, the United Kingdom, and North America,
where there are large South Asian populations. Derived from the Persian avaaz (sound, voice, or song), in these contexts, the
political and the sonic referents of āwāj often overlap. The online activist network Avaaz (n.d.), started by
a Canadian of South Asian descent, emphasizes the global nature of its campaigns by stating in the “Mission” section of its website:
“Avaaz—meaning ‘voice’ in several European, Middle Eastern, and Asian languages—launched in 2007 with a single democratic
mission: organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want.”
In using the term avaaz rather than voice, the organization signifies its departure from mainstream global media organizations, and
its alignment with the global South. Āwāj uthāune (raising voice) is sound as signal that, like Setrag Manoukian’s (2010, 241) analysis
of crowds in viral videos during protests after recent Iranian elections, “unsettles both the insatiable desire to give closure and the
By considering affective sounds of protest that circulate on the
refusal to engage and reflect critically.”

street and in the media or on the Internet, we move away from an understanding of voice as a

form of transparent political representation of specific demands. W. J. T. Mitchell (2012,

10) describes the Occupy movements, for example, as “a demand for presence, an insistence on being heard, before any specific
political demands are made; a demand that the public be allowed to gather and remain in a public space.” Moreover, he wonders
what “iconic figures” (Mitchell 2012, 13) emerge from such protests. To get at the way in which hearing is a central affective
component of democratic practice, here I ask: What are the sonic motifs of contemporary protests?

We must start here. Debate is an intermediary node, connecting subjects to

matrices of scholarship under the command of a resolution-based model. It
reproduces the coded input-output practice that renders our subjectivity
machinic in nature. If the human and the machine have become one in the
same, how can we glitch the system, rendering an academic practice into a
training ground to begin to understand ourselves as more-than-machine and
more-than-human?
Carassai 09 (Mauro Carassai “From Machinic Intelligence to Digital Narrative Subjectivity: Electronic Literature and
Intermediation as “form of life” Modification”. 2009-12-12.)

As Noah Wardrip-Fruin explains in his introduction to Norbert Wiener’s “Men, Machines and the World About”, before
cybernetics, machines were conceived and analyzed as isolated objects defined in terms of
“mechanics, differences of power and voltage, observable physical changes” [26] but once the study shifted to

the analysis of structures and regulatory systems, the scientific-based scrutiny could equally be
applied to the physical and to the social environment. In other words, cybernetics “created a framework for
studying communication and control systems that spread across multiple entities” [26]. As a result, the new type of study introduced
by cybernetics had a significant role in undermining the stability of humanist ideas on subjectivity causing the “ongoing transition
from the traditional liberal self to the contemporary posthuman subject” ([8], p.2). The process would obviously affect the
posthuman subject’s literary representation in terms of narrative voice to the point that, in commenting on Robert Coover’s decision
to abandon electronic literature practices, Hayles – or better in her persona “Kaye” in Writing Machines – “could see that if voice
was what mattered most to you, second-generation electronic works generally had less of it that first-generation texts and so from
this perspective could be seen as a decline. It came down, she realized, to a question of what constituted literature” ([7], p.45). In
evaluating the retrospective effects of digital-born artifacts on our vision of literature as a whole, Hayles justly argues that,
before the renovated focus on materiality encouraged by digital literary productions, “with significant
exceptions, print literature was widely regarded as not having a body , only a speaking mind” ([7],
p.32). This consideration, however, draws implicit attention also to the complementary perspective according to which, despite
Raymond Kurzweil’s characterization of digital machines as currently on their way to reach the 20-million-billion-calculationsper-
second capacity of the human brain, evolution of computer machinery has rarely been regarded as the growth of more and more
to network
compelling “minds”, but mostly as the updating process of the machine’s chip-based body. As a way

between renovated attention to the body of literature (inscriptional object materiality) and to sensational-
sounding appraisals of computers’ dynamic “cerebral” performance, I believe Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late

philosophical work provides a suitable frame to elaborate a process potentially leading to the envisioning of

a digital textual subjectivity for digital born literary works and, ultimately, to the conceiving of electronic

narratives as literary post-machinic subjects. This is mainly an outcome of two main features of Wittgenstein’s late
philosophical work, one theoretical the other formal. On the one hand, the fact that many a critic has stressed how Wittgenstein
builds up a “community account” of the mind3 makes his remarks particularly suitable tobe put in conversation with the
foundational work on distributed cognition in digital environments provided by Katherine Hayles. On the other hand, the loose
 opens space for intellectual
character of Wittgenstein’s philosophical observations in his late writings leaves

explorations beyond the limits of any rigid philosophical system possibly dealing with the
so-called ontology of the digital. As Søren Overgaard notices, Wittgenstein usually “engages in dialogues with
various imaginary or real interlocutors, and the point of these dialogues is not primarily to promote a set of fixed philosophical
claims … He is not trying to foist a particular view on us as much as he is trying to get us to think carefully about certain philosophical
issues. To be sure, the point is usually that we need to think differently about the issue at hand […].” ([20] p.3) First, according to
Wittgenstein, there is no actual philosophical need to envision a metaphysical locus where meaning and thought must reside as a
necessary pre-condition for language-based interactions aimed at meaning production. Much as electric polarities-based digital
language games does not rely on the hypothesis of a locatable
responses, Wittgenstein’s theory of

“speaking mind” able to perform thought processing in the absence of language

(i.e. before actual behavioural-based language manifestations). Secondly, although he uses the term only a few times in his written
work, crucial developments of the Philosophical Investigations stem from his idea that “ the speaking of a language
is part of an activity, or of a form of life4 [emphasis added]” ([29], §23). Wittgenstein thinks about speaking as ruleguided
activity. In his view, our language games are interwoven with non-linguistic practices in a totality which is at the same time both
contingent and embedded in them. In other words, language has no essence, but is made of various phenomena multifariously
connected in a texture of family resemblances ([29], §67). As he points out, “I shall call the whole, consisting of language and the
actions into which it is woven, a ‘language-game’” ([29], §7) and he explains that “ to imagine a language means
to imagine a form of life” ([29], §19). As responsive literary devices involved in language-based linguistic and extra-
linguistic practices, it is worth asking how digital narratives partake in reconfiguring our rule-guided intersubjective behaviours at the
technotexts “mobilize reflexive loops between its
level of literary negotiation. In other words, since

imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a

physical presence” ([7], p.25), to what extent does any interaction with a dynamic technotext or interactive digital
literary artifact also reconfigure the range of language-use instantiated practices in/on which our form of life is, in Wittgensteinian
terms, embedded and contingent? For the purposes of this paper we can limit our brief analysis to those language practices
already in a family-resemblance relation with our rule-driven language games of “reading” and “writing”. In “Hypertext Fiction
Reading: Haptics and Immersion” Anne Mangen suggests that digital media are changing the common practice of what we call
reading by emphasizing the vital role of our bodies (in particular fingers and hands) in our reading/scanning experience of the
physically ‘untouched’ digital text [15]. To have a clearer idea of the possible reconfigurations of our
language games connected to reading and writing, let us consider the example Wittgenstein provides about the difference
between a human reader and a hypothetical “reading-machine which translated marks into sounds, perhaps as a pianola does”. In
this case “it would be possible to say: ‘The machine read only after suchand such had happened to it – after such-and-such parts had
been connected by wires; the first word that it read was…’. But in the case of the living reading-machine “reading” meant reacting to
written signs in such-and-such ways. This concept was therefore quite independent of that of a mental or other mechanism” ([29]
§157). Wittgenstein shows in the example how what we call ‘reading’ in either case is an instantiation of very different
rule-guided language games because certain sentences happen to be used rather than others (see [29], §§156-181 on the difficulty
Shifting such considerations to the process of writing, it is possible
of establishing reading’s first occurrence in human reading).

to notice how, unlike printed texts, dynamic and time-based digital texts, for example, make the use of language
expressions such as “the work shows the first words after such-and-such has happened” or “it immediately
encourages/allows/prevent the reader to/from” make sense rather than the use of sentences like
“the reader can open the work on such-and-such passage” or “now turn the text upside down”. In other words, in
the dynamic digital environment the propositions we frequently use for oral or realtime subjective storytelling implicitly take the
place of expressions used in object-oriented language games typical of printed texts. To consider such sentences
as working not only as empirical propositions but as ‘grammar proposition’ (sentences that, in Wittgenstein’s terms,
express a rule) is contingent just on whether we use them as standards of correctness,

i.e., as HansJohann Glock puts it, if we use them “normatively to explain, justify and criticize uses of words” ([4],

p.152). In other words, as he goes on to explain, “the logical status of a sentence is due not to its
linguistic form but to the way it is used and can hence change” ([4], p.155). Often times the
narrative itself seems to ‘cry out’ for forms of interactions we usually reserve for subjectivityendowed entities. Hayles’s discursive
treatment of Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue, for example, as a narrative requiring readerly behaviours carried on “with an intention to
savor rather than attack or master it” ([6], p.64) implicitly calls attention precisely to internal relations’ rule-shifting in language
games connected to our common use of textual inscriptions. In philosophical terms, as Wittgenstein highlights, “any empirical
proposition can be transformed into a postulate – and then becomes a norm of description” ([28], §321). If we do not use
(yet)propositions like “it types words for you” for time-based electronic narratives or “it is thinking about the next chunk of
the story” when a narrative pause occurs (but also when the work’s screenshots become, for example,

unresponsive) it is because, in Wittgenstein’s terms, we could regard typing out symbols on a screen as “thinking” only if we
dealt with an entity for which we can envision a larger range of behavioural properties. We
would therefore also need to evaluate to what extent such an “envisioning” process might be carried out for digital narratives.

I want you to leave with more questions than answers.

Inputs without outputs, domains without ranges.
I want to leave gaps in the feedback loop and the function incomplete.
To do so gives the potential for multiple y’s to the same x.
To suspend the game and construct new ones
For imaginary numbers and imaginary worlds to emerge
Let’s play a game
Do not hide and do not seek
Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.
Do not complete the story mode.
Find out where that takes you and instead of telling us
…
Cross Ex