Debate and this year’s resolution affirms an epistemological anchor of the zero point which recreates ego-politics of knowledge under the guise of objectivity –all knowledge is situated –the resolution hides the fact that knowledge in the status quo stems from the western secular thought that marginalizes all other perspectives

Grosfoguel, Professor of Diversity Studies at UC Berkeley, 2011

(Ramon, Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality, TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, pg.5-6 MR)

René Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a¶ new moment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation¶ of knowledge in the Theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages, with¶ (Western) Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the¶ attributes of God are now extrapolated to (Western) Man. Universal Truth beyond¶ time and space privileges access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity to¶ produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man.¶ The Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am“) is the foundation of¶ modern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and¶ between mind and nature, Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, Godeyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago CastroGómez called the “point zero” perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gómez¶ 2003). The “point zero” is the point of view that hides and conceals itself as being¶ beyond a particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents itself as¶ being without a point of view. It is this “god-eye view” that always hides its local and¶ particular perspective under an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges¶ “ego politics of knowledge” over the “geopolitics of knowledge” and the “body-politics¶ of knowledge.” Historically, this has allowed Western man (the gendered term is¶ intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capable of achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as¶ particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality.¶ This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding¶ the location of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial¶ expansion and domination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior¶ knowledge and, thus, of superior and inferior people around the world. We went¶ from the sixteenth century characterization of “people without writing” to the¶ eighteenth and nineteenth-century characterization of “people without history,” to¶ the twentieth-century characterization of “people without development” and more¶ recently, to the early twenty-first-century of “people without democracy”. We went¶ from the sixteenth-century “rights of people” (Sepúlveda versus de las Casas debate¶ in the University of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century), to the eighteenthcentury “rights of man” (Enlightenment philosophers), and to the late twentiethcentury “human rights.” All of these are part of global designs articulated to the simultaneous production and reproduction of an international division of labor of core/periphery that overlaps with the global racial/ethnic hierarchy of¶ Europeans/non-Europeans.¶ However, as Enrique Dussel (1994) has reminded us, the Cartesian “Cogito¶ ergo sum” was preceded by 150 years (since the beginnings of the European colonial¶ expansion in 1492) of the European “ego conquistus” (“I conquer, therefore I am”).¶ The social, economic, political and historical conditions of possibility for a subject to¶ assume the arrogance of becoming God-like and put himself as the foundation of all¶ Truthful knowledge was the Imperial Being, that is, the subjectivity of those who are¶ at the center of the world because they have already conquered it. What are the¶ decolonial implications of this epistemological critique to our knowledge production¶ and to our concept of world-system?

The western thought process and its universality leads to epistemiside

Grosfoguel, Professor of Diversity Studies at UC Berkeley, 2012

(Ramon,"The Dilemmas of Ethnic Studies in the United States: Between Liberal Multiculturalism, Identity Politics, Disciplinary Colonization, and Decolonial Epistemologies," Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 10: Iss. 1, Article 9, pg 83-84 ,MR)

We ﬁnd the same structure of knowledge in Westernized universities everywhere in the world, no matter where they are located. Be they in Dakar, Buenos Aires,¶ New Delhi, Manila, New York, Paris or¶ Cairo, they have fundamentally the same¶ disciplinary divisions and the same racist/¶ sexist canon of thought. Thus, in terms of¶ global capitalism, the Westernized university produces the Westernized political and economic elites all over the world, without which the world-system would be unmanageable. Through this mechanism, the core¶ powers of the world-system are able to¶ form the Westernized Eurocentric fundamentalist elites that will suppress any alternative way of thinking beyond the system and will carry to every corner of the world its epistemic racist/sexist knowledge structures and policies. This monocultural, monoepistemic and monocosmological Eurocentric fundamentalist framework is what deﬁnes who is a valid social agent, who is a terrorist, who is a plausible candidate to win an election, and who is a valid interlocutor in the globe today. Moreover, the Westernized university is a machine of “epistemicide” (Sousa Santos 2010). It inferiorizes and destroys the epistemic potential of non-Western epistemologies.

The absurdity of this epistemic structure has been demonstrated very well in¶ the work of Portuguese social scientist,¶ Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010). He has¶ pointed out many times that if we examine what is called social theory in the social sciences of Westernized universities today, it comes fundamentally from Western male thinkers of only ﬁve countries: Italy, France, Germany, England and the United States. The claim is that the social theory created to account for the social experience and history of these ﬁve countries, which comprise only 12% of the world’s population, should be taken as valid and universal for the rest of the countries of the world, which account for 88% of humanity. This structure throws away the social experience of most of humanity.

Our alternative is epistemic disobedience to challenge the zero point epistemology and delinks from the colonial matrix of power

Mignolo, 2009 (Walter D., “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom”, Theory Culture Society, Vol. 26)

Geo-politics of knowledge goes hand in hand with geo-politics of knowing. Who and when, why and where is knowledge generated (rather than produced, like cars or cell phones)? Asking these questions means to shift the attention from the enunciated to the enunciation. And by so doing, turning Descartes’s dictum inside out: rather than assuming that thinking comes before being, one assumes instead that it is a racially marked body in a geo-historical marked space that feels the urge or get the call to speak, to articulate, in whatever semiotic system, the urge that makes of living organisms ‘human’ beings. By setting the scenario in terms of geo- and body-politics I am starting and departing from already familiar notions of ‘situated knowledges’. Sure, all knowledges are situated and every knowledge is constructed. But that is just the beginning. The question is: who, when, why is constructing knowledges (Mignolo, 1999, 2005 [1995])? Why did eurocentered epistemology conceal its own geo-historical and bio-graphical locations and succeed in creating the idea of universal knowledge as if the knowing subjects were also universal? This illusion is pervasive today in the social sciences, the humanities, the natural sciences and the professional schools. Epistemic disobedience means to delink from the illusion of the zero point epistemology. The shift I am indicating is the anchor (constructed of course, located of course, not just anchored by nature or by God) of the argument that follows. It is the beginning of any epistemic decolonial de-linking with all its historical, political and ethical consequences. Why? Because geo-historical and bio-graphic loci of enunciation have been located by and through the making and transformation of the colonial matrix of power: a racial system of social classiﬁcation that invented Occidentalism (e.g. Indias Occidentales), that created the conditions for Orientalism; distinguished the South of Europe from its center (Hegel) and, on that long history, remapped the world as ﬁrst, second and third during the Cold War. Places of non- thought (of myth, non-western religions, folklore, underdevelopment involv- ing regions and people) today have been waking up from the long process of westernization. The anthropos inhabiting non-European places discovered that s/he had been invented, as anthropos, by a locus of enunciations self-deﬁned as humanitas. …?

Your role as a critic is to vote for the team that best challenges the logic of coloniality.