Foucault K – ScuFI 2012 –
Gannon/Stevenson/Shackelford lab
Read This First
This file combines a couple different arguments related to Michel Foucault:
The mobility link included in the 1NC applies to most affs on the topic with a little
spin, particularly mass transit and high speed rail. You can find extensions and other
transportation/circulation-specific arguments in the mobility section.
The generic section includes links to non-topic-specific things. This is where the
broadest impacts, alts, and framework arguments are.
The territory module includes several 1NC-quality cards about the icebreakers and
STRAHNET affs.
The environment section is best descriptive of the mass transit and gas tax affs.
Generic
Shell
1NC—Mobility Link
Mobility is a disciplinary technique designed to normalize and re-code bodies to
maximize their integration in productive economies. The aff makes bodies docile
within discursive regimes of biopolitics.
Reid ‘8 Julian Reid, “Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault,”
Foucault on Politics, Security and War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New
York, 2008, p. 68-70
The chapter of Discipline and Punish titled ‘Docile Bodies’ carefully records the emergence of these techniques with attention to their
specifically military remit. It was through the technique of enclosure that men came to be assembled under one roof in the form of the
barracks. This technique of enclosure
allowed for new forms of control and security: the prevention of theft and
violence; the dissipation of fears of local populations at the incursions of marauding bands of troops; the
prevention of conflict with civil authorities; the stopping of mass desertion, and the management of expenditure
(1991b: p. 142). Through the technique of partitioning, militarised groups of men were individualised.
Knowing where and how to locate individuals, to control communication between individuals, to
supervise the conduct not only of the mass body but the life of bodies individually, comprised an
essential technique in the development of modern military organisation. The innovation of new systems of rank
represented a further technique by which bodies were not only individualised but cast within a network of relations of exchange, allowing for
their better distribution and circulation. The
organisation of serial spaces providing fixed positions for individuals
but permitting their circulation and interchange allowed for new forms of tactical arrangements in the
composition of military forces. Foucault demonstrates with ample reference to the work of the French military tactician, Comte de
Guibert, how the modern military science of tactics encapsulated this newfound understanding of the potentialities of techniques of ranking
and partitioning in the production of recombinant forms of order. ‘Blinded by the immensity, dazed by the multitude ... the innumerable
combinations that result from the multiplicity of objects’ Guibert mused at the end of the eighteenth century (1991b: p. 148). The
advent
of these new disciplinary techniques in the military sciences was, as Discipline and Punish shows, much
concerned with the re-ordering of relations between bodies and space. Yet they were also as interested
in the disciplining of relations between time and bodily activity, or what Foucault called ‘the temporal elaboration of
the act’ (p. 151). He documents how modern military organisation was predicated upon the creation of meticulously detailed ‘programmes’
according to which the ‘correct use of the body’ would be specified in order to allow for ‘a correct use of time’ (p. 152). For example, between
the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century, ordinances developed to refine the movements across space and time of marching soldiers.
While in the seventeenth century marching was only vaguely regulated to assure conformity, by the eighteenth century ordinances specified
distinctions between four different sorts of marching step; the short step, the ordinary step, the double step and the marching step, each
differentiated according to duration, extension and comportment (p. 151). As
disciplinary power was concerned with the
correct use of time so it was also concerned with what Foucault called ‘the instrumental coding of the
body’ through the creation of a ‘body-machine complex’ (p. 153). Foucault considered that traditional forms of
subjection involved only the extraction of the product of labour, the exploitation of bodies for their surpluses.
Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is about more than that. Its aim is to assure and regulate the correct
procedure by which the body carries out its labour as an end in itself. In this vein, Foucault focused again on
innovations occurring in the domain of military organisation – centrally on the specifications made in the same late eighteenth-century military
ordinances as to how to fire a weapon, which were meticulous in their detailing of how body and weapon interact (p. 153). All of these
new
innovations, reflecting what Foucault identified as a new ‘positive economy’ of time through which modern societies
attempted to intensify their use of time with increased speeds and increased efficiencies, resulted he argued from changes that were
occurring in the domain of war. The mid-eighteenth century successes of Prussia enabled by the military systems of Frederick II were
the harbinger of most of these developments (p. 154). Through the development of these techniques with which to
organise for and conduct war emerged a new object for the organisation of power relations. That new
object was as Foucault described, ‘the natural body, the bearer of forces and the seat of duration; it is the
body susceptible to specified operations, which have their order, their stages, their internal
conditions, their constituent elements’ (p. 155).
1NC—Impact
The dark side of power over life is the ability to put entire populations to death in the
name of ‘the greater good’
Foucault ’78 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley, 1978, p. 136-137
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. "Deduction"
has
tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to
incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on
generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them
submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies
of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as
simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars
were never as bloody as they
have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such
holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death -and this is perhaps what accounts for part of
its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits -now presents itself as the counterpart of a power
that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls
and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended;
they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the
purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as
managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so
many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars
has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and
the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic
situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is
the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics
of battle that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the
existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological
existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent
return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race,
and the large-scale phenomena of population.
1NC—Alternative
The alternative is to vote negative.
This performatively destabilizes the discourses the 1AC subscribes to and opens up
new avenues of discussion which move past status quo limits of knowledge.
Julia H. Chryssostalis, lecturer at the Westminster school of law, “The Critical Instance ‘After’ The
Critique of the Subject,” Law and Critique 16, 2005, pg. 16-21
So far, we have looked at some of the ways in which the question of the question is being re-situated in a philosophical terrain that has been radically _re-marked’
by the critical discourses associated with the deconstruction of subjectivity in French contemporary thought. However, the critical instance involves not only
questioning but also judgment as one of its basic tropes. How? To begin with, judgment is found intimately implicated in the semantic economy of the critical:
critique, criticism, criterion, critic; they all derive from krisis, the Greek word for judgment; yet, in addition, and more importantly, the very operation of the critical
instance seems dominated by judgmental figures, grammars and logics.78 After all, is not the figure of the Tribunal of Reason at the centre of Kant’s critical
project?79 And is not the
role of critique therein precisely _that of defining the conditions under which the
use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known [connaıˆtre], what must be done, and
what may be hoped’?80 Moreover, from the Enlightenment onwards, is not the critical practised _in the search for
formal structures with universal value’81 that would firmly ground our knowledge, action, and
aspirations, and provide the criteria for the evaluation of all claims to authority?82 And does not the critical
instance, in this respect, necessarily turn around a _quaestio juris, the juridical question, [which asks] with
what right one possesses this concept and uses it’?83 Finally, does not the critical moment itself – whether found operating in terms
of fault-finding (epi-krisis),84 of drawing distinctions (dia-krisis),85 or of drawing comparisons (syn-krisis) – seem always to rely on the basic
_logic’ of judgement: namely, the operation through which the particular is subsumed (and thus also
thought and known) under the rule of an already constituted category?86 What is interesting to note about these
judgemental grammars and logics organising the operation of the critical instance,87 is that the subjective forms they deploy involve two well-known _types’ of the
figure of the judge. On the one hand, there is the _judge’ as a sovereign figure whose
capacity to pass judgements on our received
wisdom, draw distinctions in the field of our knowledge, and set the limits of what can be known,
means the capacity to invest the world with a meaning drawn from a more profound knowledge. On the
other hand, there is the _judge’ as a normalising, technocratic figure, a mere functionary of the criteria, which regulate and organise the conceptual gestures of our
thought and knowledge. These two _types’ can be easily seen as antithetical. On the one hand, the figure of the critic in all its dignity, autonomy and sovereignty; on
the other, the figure of the critic in, what Adorno calls, the _thing like form of the object’.88 However, what should not be missed is how much both rely on the
philosophemes that organise the _classical’ configuration of the subject: rationality, mastery, self-presence, identity, consciousness, intentionality, autonomy, the
radical difference between subject and object. For does not critical judgement involve in this instance an operation of thinking, where an already given subject takes
the initiative of applying an already established category to, say, an object, a text, an event? Is not this _initiative’ marked not only by the distance between the
_judge’ and the _judged’, but also by the instrumentality of a masterful, rational and rationalising subject? Moreover, is not the submission of the functionary
compensated by the mastery s/he has over the material under his/her authority? And does not the very form of subsumption, with its reliance on already
established categories, involve a technique, which assimilates and neutralises the singularity of the particular and forecloses the possibility of thinking something
new?89 To return to our initial question,
if the critical instance is ruled by judgemental grammars and logics, which in
turn rely on _classical’ configurations of subjectivity, what happens to the critical when reinscribed
and re-situated in a philosophical terrain which has been _re-marked’ by the critique or
deconstruction of subjectivity, a philosophical terrain without transcendental guarantees? Following what was said earlier in connection with the
question of the question, the critical is also being re-thought and re-worked. Three gestures mark this re-thinking: first, an abandonment of
judgemental grammars and logics; second, a re-casting of the critical in terms of the question of the
limit; and third, the emergence of an ethic of encounter (with the limit). Let us briefly consider what is involved in the last two
gestures. One of the clearest statements of what is at stake in the re-casting of the critical in terms of the question of the limit, the limit as a question, is to be found
in Foucault’s two essays, _What Is Critique?’ 90 and _What is Enlightenment?’91 Without going into the detail of the argument developed there, I want to focus at a
point in the Enlightenment essay, which I think is crucial. This is a point where, to begin with, Foucault affirms that _[ c]riticism
indeed consists of
analyzing and reflecting upon limits’, thus seemingly locating himself within the basic parameters of the Kantian formulation of the critical.
Then, though, he continues: But if the Kantian question was that of knowing [savoir] what limits knowledge [connaissance] must renounce exceeding, it seems
to me that the critical question today must be turned back into a positive one: In what is given to us
as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the
product of arbitrary constraints? The point in brief is to transform the critique conducted in the form
of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible crossing over
[franchissment].92 In other words, Foucault’s re-working of the critical involves a notion of the limit not as
necessary limitation, as in the Kantian critical project, but as a point of _a possible crossing over ’. For
posing the question of the limits of our knowledge, or _showing the limits of the constitution of objectivity’,93 involves also a
dimension of opening up, of transformation and becoming. As such the type of _work done at the limits of ourselves must’,
according to Foucault, _on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry, and on the other, put itself to the test
of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable,
and to determine the precise form this change should take.’94 In other words, the critical instance rethought in terms of the limit
as question does not merely involve a negative moment of transgression. For at the point of this work on the limits (of ourselves),
the ethico-political promise/possibility of transformation opens up – which is also why, at this point,
the critical instance, for Foucault, becomes intimately linked with virtue.95 Let us now turn to the last gesture involved
in the re-thinking of the critical: namely, the displacement of judgemental logics and the emergence of an ethics of encounter – that is to say, an encounter with the
question of the limit. Let us move with caution, though. To begin with ,
it is important to understand that one does not drive to
the limits for a thrill experience, or because limits are dangerous and sexy, or because it brings us into tintillating proximity with
evil. One asks about the limits of knowing because one has already run up against a crisis within the
epistemological field in which one lives. The categories by which social life is ordered produce a
certain incoherence or entire realm of unspeakability. And it is from this condition, the tear in the
fabric of our epistemological field, that the practice of critique emerges, with the awareness that no
discourse is adequate here or that our reigning discourses have produced an impasse.96 Which is to say that the
critical instance, as the exposure of the _limits of the constitution of objectivity’, also involves the experience of the dislocation of our sedimented positivities, in
other words, the experience of crisis. Such a
recognition is important here because it reinscribes crisis, which is actually another
meaning of the Greek word krisis, into the critical, which is thus re-connected with the notion of negativity – negativity in the
ontological sense. This negativity, as Stavrakakis notes, has both a disruptive dimension that _refers to the horizon of impossibility
and unrepresentability, which punctuates the life of linguistic creatures’,97 and at the same time a
productive one: _[b]y inscribing a lack in our dislocated positivities, it fuels the desire for new social
and political constructions.’98 As such, this negativity is _neither an object nor its negation: it is the
condition of possibility/ impossibility of objects’,99 of objectivity more generally, indeed of all
transformative action.100 And it is precisely here that an ethics of the encounter with the limit is located in that such an encounter is a moment, which
ought to be acknowledged rather than covered over by quickly _patching the cracks’ of our universe. It is a moment which should not be foreclosed or assimilated:
For at stake in
this encounter with the limit, _is a matter of showing how the space of the possible is larger
than the one we are assigned – that something else is possible, but not that everything is possible.’101
And it is precisely here, at the moment when the site of the pre-thetic and the pre-judicative is glimpsed, that the thrust and the promise of a _re-marked’ critical
instance is to be found.
Links
Link—Nuclear War
Threats of nuclear war are used to justify militarization
Grondin 2004 ((Re)Writing the “National Security State”: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold
War David Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies Association
Convention, March 17-20, 2004, Montreal)
Much of the Cold War state apparatus and military infrastructure remained in place to meet the
challenges and threats of the post-Cold War era. If the attack on Pearl Harbor was the driving force of the postwar national
security state apparatus (Stuart, 2003: 303), the 9/11 events have been used as a motive for resurrecting the
national security discourse as a justification against a new ‘infamy’, global terrorism. 19 Although in this study
I am calling into question the political practices that legitimized the very idea of a national security state during the Cold War era, I find
even more problematic the reproduction of a similar logic in the post-9/11 era – a rather different
historical and socio-political context. As Simon Dalby highlights, Coupling fears of Soviet ambitions, of a repeat of
Pearl Harbor, and of nuclear war, these institutions formed the heart of a semipermanent military
mobilization to support the policies of containment militarism. If this context is no longer applicable, the case that the
national security state is not an appropriate mode for social organization in the future is in many ways compelling. If security is
premised on violence, as security-dilemma and national-security literatures suggest (albeit often
reluctantly), perhaps the necessity of rethinking global politics requires abandoning the term and the
conceptual strictures that go with it (Dalby, 1997: 21).
Link—Hegemony
US hegemony establishes a global liberal order engaged in constant war—the world is
translated into a universal domestic realm in which continual American intervention is
necessitated
Louiza Odysseos, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex, “Liberalism’s
War, Liberalism’s Order: Rethinking the Global Liberal Order as a ‘Global Civil War’” paper prepared for
Liberal Internationalism, 17 March 2008, San Francisco
This echoes official voices of the ‘new normalcy’ or the ‘new normal’, pronounced by Vice President
Cheney the day before the USA PATRIOT Act passed into law in October 2001: ‘Many of the steps we have now been
forced to take will become permanent in American life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for
decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy’ (Cheney 2001).9 The
new normalcy, encompassing as it does the
‘biopolitical operations’ of the state of exception, and which involves the defence of logistical
societies (Reid 2006), points to a disruption of the relationship posited by Schmitt between the rule and
the exception, allowing Agamben to speak of its becoming the ‘dominant paradigm of government in
contemporary politics’ (Agamben 2005: 2). When the state of exception becomes the (political) rule, we discern it more clearly as ‘a space devoid of
law’, in which the law is replaced by ‘civil war and revolutionary violence, that is human action that has shed [deposto] every relation to law’ (ibid.: 59). 10 Since the
state of exception has ‘today reached its maximum worldwide deployment’, we
are faced with the advent of a global civil war in
which the normative aspect of the law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a
governmental violence that – while ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent
state of exception internally – nevertheless still claims to be applying the law (ibid.: 87) The emphasis placed on the
fictitious (or willed) state of exception and on the analogy to Nazism, alongside the exposition of Benjamin’s call to bring about a real state of exception with which
to fight Fascism (1999: 248), might suggest that we
are faced with a ‘post-modern’ totalitarianism, which normalises the
state of exception and leads us to a ‘global civil war’. Yet this term refers, for Agamben, not so much to actual fighting or a specific
instance of conflict but, importantly, to a form of world ordering, pursued by (or which is) the global liberal order. The global liberal order, then,
maybe be preliminarily ‘formally indicated’ as a ‘war-order’. As he explains in an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
By the rapid reduction of global politics to the antitheses of “state/terrorism”, what once seemed a paradoxical and peripheral term has today become real and
By strategically linking the two paradigms of the state of emergency and the civil war, the new
American world order defines itself as a situation in which the state of emergency [exception] can no
longer be distinguished from the norm, and in which even differentiating between war and peace and between external and civil war - is impossible (Agamben 2003; brackets added).
effective.
US hegemony is distinguished by the way it has embedded and equated itself within
global culture—challenging the US is to challenge all that is good for humanity,
rendering any opposition illegal and exterminable
William Rasch, Associate Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University, "Human Rights as
Geopolitics,” Cultural Critique 54 (2003) 120-147
The only power to emerge from the twentieth-century's first world war fresh and at the top of its game was the United States. [End Page 121]
Although it took another seventy years to subdue fully all its rivals, it was already clear then that this, the twentieth, was to be the American
century, perhaps the first of many such centuries. Not
only was the United States a new power, but there was also
something distinctly new about its power. As Schmitt recognized in 1932 (Schmitt 1988, Positionen und Begriffe, 184-203),
America's legal mode of economic expansion and control of Europe—and, by extension or ambition,
the rest of the globe—was qualitatively different from previous forms of imperialism. Whereas, for example,
Spain in the sixteenth century and Great Britain in the nineteenth justified their imperial conquests by asserting religious and/or cultural
superiority, America simply denied that its— conquests were conquests. By being predominantly economic and using,
as Schmitt says, the creditor/debtor distinction rather than the more traditional Christian/non-Christian or civilized/uncivilized ones (186)—
America's expropriations were deemed to be peaceful and apolitical. Furthermore,
they were legal, or rather they
presented themselves as the promotion and extension of universally binding legality per se. Because
law ruled the United States, the rule of the United States was first and foremost the rule of law. For
Schmitt, this widely accepted self-representation was neither merely "ideological" nor simply propagandistic. It was in truth an intellectual
achievement, deserving respect, precisely because it was so difficult to oppose. As the American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski has more
recently concluded: "The
American emphasis on political democracy and economic development ...
combines to convey a simple ideological message that appeals to many: the quest for individual
success enhances freedom while generating wealth. The resulting blend of idealism and egoism is a potent combination.
Individual self-fulfillment is said to be a God-given right that at the same time can benefit others by setting an example and by generating
wealth." He goes on to say: "As the imitation of American ways gradually pervades the world, it creates a more congenial setting for the
exercise of the indirect and seemingly consensual American hegemony. And as in the case of the domestic American system, that hegemony
involves a complex structure of interlocking institutions and procedures, designed to generate consensus and obscure asymmetries in power
and influence" (Brzezinski 1997, 26-27). To sum up, Brzezinski notes that "the
very multinational and exceptional character
of American [End Page 122] society has made it easier for America to universalize its hegemony without
letting it appear to be a strictly national one" (210). It seems, then, that to oppose American global
hegemony is to oppose the universally good and common interests of all of humanity. This—the equation of
particular economic and political interests with universally binding moral norms—this is the intellectual achievement Schmitt could not help but
admire, even as he continuously embarked on his disastrous attempts at fighting his elusive, because nonlocalizable, enemy, which proved to
be mere shadowboxing in the end.
Link—Realism
Realist discourse keeps the US operating on Cold War logic, securitizes against “the
other” and prevents any alternative forms of thought from achieving legitimacy.
Grondin 2004 ((Re)Writing the “National Security State”: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold
War David Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies Association
Convention, March 17-20, 2004, Montreal)
As American historian of U.S. foreign relations Michael Hogan observes in his study on the rise of the national security state during the Truman
administration, “the
national security ideology framed the Cold War discourse in a system of symbolic
representation that defined America’s national identity by reference to the un-American ‘other,’ usually
the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or some other totalitarian power” The very notion of state security as it is used in this
literature is concerned with the “relationship between state and society where the state provides
insurance against the impact of ‘external’ contingencies” (Mabee, 2003: 143). However, as Bryan Mabee rightfully notes,
this research area “overlaps with the idea of the ‘national security state’, as conceptualized in the literature on the history of US security policy,
with particular reference to the early Cold War years, and the founding of the National Security Act in 1947” (Mabee, 2003: 148, note 15). In
addition, a feminist literature
on national security studies has emphasized how states, and not only the
American state, act as security states. For example, for Iris Marion Young, security states designate Hobbes’ Leviathan; they
are authoritarian governments acting as protector states asking total obedience from their society.
The state grounds its patriarchal role of the masculine protector “in fear of threat and in the apparent
desire for protection such fear generates” (Young, 2003: 2). In light of these different literatures, when using the concept of
national security state, it is necessary to specify the context and the meaning with which it is associated. Such a binary system made
it difficult for any domestic dissent from U.S. policy to emerge – it would have “amounted to an act of
disloyalty” (Hogan, 1998: 18).15 While Hogan distinguishes advocates from critics of the American national security state, his view takes for
granted that there is a given and fixed American political culture that differs from the “new” national security ideology. It posits an “American
way”, produced by its cultural, political, and historical experience. Although he stresses that differences between the two sides of the discourse
are superficial, pertaining solely to the means, rather than the ends of the national security state, Hogan
sees the national security
state as a finished and legitimate state: an American state suited to the Cold War context of
permanent war, while stopping short of a garrison state: Although government would grow larger, taxes would go up,
and budget deficits would become a matter of routine, none of these and other transformations would add up to the crushing regime
symbolized in the metaphor of the garrison state. The outcome instead would be an American national security state that was shaped as much
by the country’s democratic political culture as it was by the perceived military imperatives of the Cold War (Hogan, 1998: 22). I disagree with
this essentialist view of the state identity of the United States. The
United States does not need to be a national security
state. If it was and is still constructed as such by many realist discourses, it is because these discourses
serve some political purpose. Moreover, in keeping with my poststructuralist inclinations, I maintain that identity need not be, and
indeed never is, fixed. In a scheme in which “to say is to do”, that is, from a perspective that accepts the performativity of language, culture
becomes a relational site where identity politics happens rather than being a substantive phenomenon. In this sense, culture is not simply a
social context framing foreign policy decision-making. Culture is “a signifying part of the conditions of possibility for social being, […] the way in
which culturalist arguments themselves secure the identity of subjects in whose name they speak” (Campbell, 1998: 221).
Impacts
Impact—Capitalism
Biopolitics produces a neoliberal economic model that emphasizes corporate rights
over those of the people, collapsing democracy and exacerbating social inequality
Timothy W. Luke, 2001 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as
comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech
University, “Globalization, Popular Resistance and Postmodernity,” Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2001, pg.
323-324)
Neoliberalism also brings a second contradiction tied to its deeply rooted fixation on the market. This
endangers democracy inasmuch as neoliberal doctrines of market expansion, free choice, and
bureaucratic deregulation are counterposed to what were once democratically enacted policies—
affirmed by the people at the ballot box—to constrain markets (wage guarantee laws, workers’ rights legislation,
social welfare provisions) and endorse regulation (occupational safety codes, food inspection procedures, environmental protection legislation).
The information revolution comes after the end of imperialism, and its performativity agendas bring
‘the domination of the global economy by a few hundred TNCs based to an overwhelming extent in
the same ex-imperialist countries. The professional managers who control them have the means to benefit the world or to exploit
it to their own benefit.’24 The opening of American society to global market competition or foreign business
investment appears to be a race, not to ‘the top’ of the world’s economic hierarchies, but instead to
‘the bottom’. For neoliberal advocates, the US should no longer benchmark itself against the welfare states of Western Europe, because
they too will change. Instead, America is urged to emulate Chile, Hong Kong, Mexico, Singapore, or Brazil. While the ‘successful fifth’ of Reich’s
symbolic analysts may benefit from such policies, the ‘unsuccessful four-fifths’ of nonsymbolic toilers suffer even more downward mobility.
The magic of the marketplace should bring clean outcomes, but it now often works many dirty tricks
against most people in contemporary society. Globalization could be resisted, and many in America do
vote to follow anti-globalization paths in the republic’s public policies. Instead, they find experts accelerating the
agendas of globalization, and many see this outcome as selling America out to a nebulous New World Order by turning the US into
NAFTAland.25
Impact—Security
Biopolitics engages in war on behalf of a population whose very identity is contingent
upon the other who must be eradicated
Mark Duffield, Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of
Lancaster, “Carry on Killing: Global Governance, Humanitarianism and Terror,” Danish Institute for
International Studies, 2004,
http://www.diis.dk/graphics/Publications/WP2004/duffield_carry_on_killing.pdf
Bio-politics, however, contains an intrinsic and fateful duality. As well as fostering and promoting life it also has the power to “…disallow it to
the point of death” (Ibid: 138 orig. emph.). In making this bio-political distinction, racism plays a formative role (Foucault 2003; Stoler 1995).
This not only includes its nineteenth and early twentieth century biological forms, it also involves its contemporary cultural, value and
civilisational re-inscriptions (Duffield 1984). Race and its modern codings underpin the division between valid and invalid life and legitimates the
measures deemed necessary to secure the former against the later. In this sense, biopolitics
is intrinsically connected with
the security of populations, including global ones. This duality moreover underlies the paradox of bio-politics: as states
have assumed responsibility for maintaining and developing life, wars have become increasingly more
encompassing, devastating and genocidal for the populations concerned. The awesome power to unleash limitless
death presents itself as a cynical counterpart, …of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and
multiply it, subjecting it to all precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars
are no longer waged in the name of a
sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire
populations are mobilised for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital (Ibid: 136). As the
managers of species-life, since the end of the nineteenth century states have been able to wage total wars that have pitched entire populations
against each other in cataclysmic struggles to the death. What
is at stake in modern war is the existence of society
itself. Genocide consequently emerges as a strategy “…because power is situated and exercised at the
level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population” (Ibid: 137). Although the
ending of the Cold War raised hopes of a ‘peace dividend’, the diagrammatic form of biopower was to be re-inscribed in the ‘new wars’ of the
1990s and confirmed with the declaration of war on terrorism. This re-inscription has taken in its stride the shift in the locus of threat from the
Soviet Union, one of the world’s largest and most centralized war economies, to its very opposite, that is, the new security cartography of failed
states, shadow economies and terrorist networks. However, as the Guardian columnist quoted above has grasped, despite
this radical
re-ordering the bio-political principle of state power has remained the same: in order to carry on living
one has to carry on killing (Ibid). As well as departing from a realist conception of power, the idea of global governance as a design of
bio-power also breaks with the conventional view of what global governance is. That is, as an essentially benign undertaking
involving state and non-state actors in a collective pursuit of global security, an open and inclusive
economic system, effective legal and political institutions, global welfare and development, and a
shared commitment to conflict resolution (Biscop 2004). From this perspective, security threats are usually seen
as emerging independently of global governance and, indeed, despite its best intentions. It becomes an ethicopolitical response to pre-existing or externally motivated threats. Global governance as a design of
bio-power, however, rather than responding ‘out of the blue’ to external threats, directly fabricates its
own security environment. In distinguishing between valid and invalid global life, it creates its own
‘other’ – with all its specific deviancies, singular threats and instances of maldevelopment – to which it then responds and tries
to change. Consequently, it also shapes the terrain over which the bio-political logic of living through
killing must operate. It is in relation to this constitutive function of global governance that the place of sovereignty within it can now be
examined.
Impact—Governmentality
Governmentality adopts any and all means necessary to ensure the health and safety
of the population—this justifies authoritarian control and violent transgression of
order for the sake of its preservation
Louiza Odysseos, “Liberalism’s War, Liberalism’s Order: Rethinking the Global Liberal Order as a
‘Global Civil War’” paper prepared for Liberal Internationalism, 17 March 2008, San Francisco
The sovereign’s task, Foucault argued, was to remain sovereign, that is, in power; there was, in other words,
a circularity to sovereignty, in that its end was ‘internal to itself’ (Foucault 2001: 211). Governmentality, on the
contrary, is characterised by a finality, directed towards the things it manages (ibid.) If the global liberal
order is an order for which the political concern is ‘population’, then its end is to manage that
population ‘in pursuit of the perfection and intensification of the processes it directs’ (ibid.). Yet, one could
argue, some remnant of circularity remains: to preserve the emphasis on life and population management is also an end of a governmental
economy of power. It is this, possibly, that allows Foucault to note that, whereas
sovereign power has historically created
systems of exclusion by differentiating between those who submit to its power (perhaps, in a contractarian
fashion), and those who violate it (such as ‘criminals’), governmental power differentiates between those who
behave in accordance with the welfare of the population and ‘those who conduct themselves in relation
to the management of the population…as if they were not part of the population…as if they put themselves out of it’ (Foucault
2007a: 43-44). ‘Governmental violence’, to use Agamben’s term, might indeed be necessary to ensure that a
distinction is drawn between those ‘who resist the regulation of the population, who try to elude the apparatus by
which the population exists, is preserved, subsists, and subsists at an optimal level’ and the population; as Foucault argues, this
‘opposition is very important’ (ibid.: 44). What range of means or ‘tactics’ might be necessary for this? Any tactic,
including the permanent suspension of the law, which allows this order to identify, criminalise,
control, indeed, to ‘police’ those who stand outside the population and oppose the governmentalisation
of the state. The tactic and operations of governmental power as police activity is pertinent to the
workings of the global liberal order as ‘global civil war’, as discussed below, because it is exercised
internally, i.e. within the population and reinforces the order and its governmental violence (cf. Agamben
2000: 103-7).
Governmentality directs individual freedom towards the goals of a global order which
manages and normalizes populations to guarantee ‘life’
Louiza Odysseos, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex, “Against Ethics?
Iconographies of Enmity and Acts of Obligation in Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan,” paper prepared
for “Practices of Ethics: Relating/Responding to Difference in International Politics” at the annual
convention of the International Studies Association, 22 March 2008, google scholar
Whereas the sovereign’s task, Foucault argued, was to remain sovereign, that is, in power,
governmentality is characterised by a finality, directed towards the things it manages: care for life and
population management are amongst the ends of a governmental economy of power (Foucault 2001a: 211).
A certain kind of subject is produced therein which takes over the work of its own care and, for that
matter, of its own freedom (cf. Lemke 2001). Therefore, one must be free: being made free serves the
biopolitical ends of the global liberal order, which then replicates world-wide a particular
transformation of territorial states into population states, i.e. globalises the governmentalisation of the state (Foucault
2001a). The subject of enforced freedom is possibly the last figure of humanity. But, as Kennedy told us long ago (1998), the invocation
of humanity is predicated upon the calling into being of the ‘human’, which in turn can only be
defined as against its opposite, the inhuman. The subject of enforced freedom is also the subject that
requires the inhuman and its obliteration in the form of absolute enmity, as we shall see below. If the
global liberal order is an order for which the political object is ‘population’, then its end is to manage
that population ‘in pursuit of the perfection and intensification of the processes it directs’ (Foucault
2001a). It is important that the enemies of this order be identified and ‘corrected’. It is this kind of constant
vigilance against the enemy of governmental rationality which also allows Foucault to note that, whereas sovereign power had
historically created systems of exclusion by differentiating between those who submit to its power
and its enemies, which seek to violate it, governmental power differentiates between those who
behave in accordance with the welfare of the population and ‘those who conduct themselves in
relation to the management of the population…as if they were not part of the population…as if they
put themselves out of it’ (Foucault 2007a: 43-44). The order must ensure, then, that it is able to distinguish
between those ‘who resist the regulation of the population, who try to elude the apparatus by which
the population exists, is preserved, subsists, and subsists at an optimal level’ and the population; as
Foucault argues, this ‘opposition is very important’ (ibid.: 44). The production, naming and designation of
the order’s enemy are part of the ethics of enforced freedom. Below we turn to Schmitt’s iconographies of enmity
because it may well be the function of enmity to ‘introduce[s]…a moment of openness and freedom into the immanence of world order’
(Ojakangas 2007: 211; brackets added). Specifically, we discuss, first, the figure of the just and equal enemy which Schmitt identified within the
geo-political structuring of war and politics in the ‘Westphalian order’ (Schmitt uses the term ‘nomos of the earth’ (2003) to designate the order
we mythically call ‘Westphalia’ in IR). Second, we turn to the figure of the absolute enemy and consider Schmitt’s discussion of the dangers of
its emergence. Out of this particular analysis, found primarily in Theory of the Partisan (1963/2004/2007), we can then map
a political
normativity which is not, however, ethical but anti-ethical, so that we can proceed in the concluding
section to articulating a notion of political obligation. This is both an obligation to the other as enemy
but also to the openness of the political.
Alternatives
Alt—Micropolitics
Exposing contradictions within fields of discourse halts their reproduction and lets
counter-hegemonic modes of thinking emerge to contest normalizing practices. This is
both theoretical criticism and the basis for practical revolution.
Jutta Weldes, et al., lecturer in international relations at University of Bristol, Mark Laffey,
independent scholar, Hugh, Gusterson, professor of anthropology at MIT, Raymond Duvall, professor of
political science at University of Minnesota, George Marcus, professor of anthropology at Rice, Cultures
of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, 1999, pg. 16-17
The fact that cultures are composed of multiple discourses or codes of intelligibility, and that the
world therefore can be and is represented in different, and often competing, ways, has significant implications. In particular, it means that any representation can potentially be contested and so must
actively be reproduced. Meanings are not given, static, or final; rather, they are always in process and
always provisional. The production of insecurities thus requires considerable social work—of production, of reproduction, and, possibly,
of transformation. Dominant discourses must constantly reproduce themselves to answer challenges to
their constructions of the world and their identification of those insecurities worthy of a response.
Defining security and insecurity requires considerable ideological labor. Contesting discourses, in turn,
attempt to rearticulate insecurities in ways that challenge the dominant representations (see, for example,
Ballinger, this volume). In addition, discourses are themselves not perfectly coherent but always entail internal
contradictions and lacunae. These contradictions make possible both resistance to a dominant
discourse and the transformation of discourses. It is in this sense, then, that culture can be viewed as a field on which
processes of discursive contestation are set. It should be noted that, in analyzing such constructive processes, we are not examining mere
rhetoric. It is in any case misleading to associate the notions of culture, of discourse, or of codes of intelligibiliry with the “merely linguistic.” As
Laclau and Mouffe have argued (1987: 82—84), discourses are composed of linguistic and nonlinguistic (that is to say, material) practices, both
of which are indispensable to the production of worlds and of insecurity.17 After all, discursive
articulations, including the
always “materialized in concrete practices and rituals and operate through
specific state [and other] apparatuses” (Hall, 1988: 46). Discourses and their codes of intelligibility have
concrete, and significant, material effects. They allocate social capacities and resources and make
practices possible. We use the terms construction and production loosely to maintain the distinction between linguistic and
construction of insecurities, are
nonlinguistic practices. Linguistically, discourses are the vehicle for the construction of categories (of difference, of identity, of threat, etc.).
Through both linguistic and nonlinguistic practices, they are the vehicle for the production of social facts (such as insecurities).
Reframing politics as a mere constellation of power relations reveals its constitutive
violence and allows for alternatives to juridical government to be explored
Andrew W. Neal, “Cutting Off the King’s Head: Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended and the Problem
of Sovereignty,” Alternatives 29 (2004), p. 373-398
The critique of Foucault on sovereignty ultimately turns on Foucault's hypothesis that "politics
is the continuation of war by
other means." Indeed, this hypothesis has been given great prominence; even the inside jacket of the new U.S. English-language edition
exclaims: "Inverting Clausewitz's famous formulation "War is the continuation of politics by other means," Foucault explores the notion that
"politics is war by other means" in its relation to race, class struggle, and, of course, power." This prominence can also be attributed to the fact
that the first two chapters of the lecture series, in which he posits this hypothesis, were available in English long before the translation of the
entire lecture series.^^ Accordingly, then, Foucault provocatively suggests that we need an alternative to the "juridical
model of sovereignty." (He would not make his claim about the need to "cut off the Ring's head" until the following year, but the link is clear.)
As Foucault writes: In
order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, we must abandon the juridical
model of sovereignty. . . . [R]ather than looking for the single point from which all forms of power
derive, either by way of consequence or development, we must begin to let them operate in their multiplicity, their
differences, their specificity, and their reversibility; we must therefore study them as relations of
force that intersect, refer to one another, converge, or, on the contrary, come into conflict and strive to
negate one another. . . . If we have to avoid reducing the analysis of power to the schema proposed by
the juridical constitution of sovereignty, and if we have to think of power in terms of relations of
force, do we therefore have to interpret it in terms of the general form of war? Can war serve as an
analyzer of power relations?16 We can see that the initial hypothesis that Foucault sets out to explore is indeed whether politics
can be alternatively understood as a tangled web of conquests, struggles, and wars; and this does indeed appear to be an inversion of
Clausewitz's famous aphorism.
Small points of resistance are key to analyze the mechanisms of power and escape
from the systems of juridical politics.
Foucault ’78 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley, 1978, p. 94-97 BSH
Continuing this line of discussion, we can advance a certain number of propositions: -Power
is not something that is acquired,
seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points,
in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. -Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority
with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter;
they are
the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter,
and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in
superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role,
wherever they come into play. -Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition
between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix -no such duality extending from
the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body. One must suppose rather that the manifold
relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited
groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a
whole. These then form a general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links them together; to be sure, they also bring about
redistributions, realignments, homogenizations, serial arrangements, and convergences of the force relations. Major dominations are
the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these confrontations. -Power relations are both intentional and
nonsubjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are the effect of another instance that "explains" them, but rather
because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without
a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject; let us not
look for the headquarters that presides over its rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus,
nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a society (and makes it
function); the
rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted
level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which, becoming connected to one another, attracting
and propagating one another, but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere, end by forming comprehensive
systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few
who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which coordinate the
loquacious tactics whose "inventors" or decisionmakers are often without hypocrisy. -Where
there is power, there is
resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to
power. Should it be said that one is always "inside" power, there is no "escaping" it, there is no absolute outside
where it is concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case? Or that, history being the ruse of reason, power is the ruse of
history, always emerging the winner? This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational character of power relationships. Their existence
depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations. These
points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network . Hence there is no single locus of
great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary . Instead there is a
plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage,
solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in
the strategic field of power relations. But this does not mean that they are only a reaction or rebound, forming with respect to the basic
Resistances do not derive from a few
heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in
relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite. Hence they too are distributed in irregular fashion: the
domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat.
points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a
definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. Are there no great radical ruptures,
massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more
often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of
resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting
regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in
their bodies and minds. Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions,
without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And it
is
doubtless the
strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat
is in this sphere of force
relations that we must try to analyze the mechanisms of power. In this way we will escape from the
system of Law-and-Sovereign which has captivated political thought for such a long time. And if it is true
similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships. It
that Machiavelli was among the few-and this no doubt was the scandal of his "cynicism"-who conceived the power of the Prince in terms of
force relationships, perhaps
we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and decipher power
mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships.
The alt seizes the debate as a site for resisting power by destabilizing dominant
discourses and opening political spaces outside of state bureaucracy—this enables
change both within and beyond the state
David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing Security,
1998, pg. 204-205
Even more important, his understanding of power emphasizes the ontology of freedom presupposed by the existence of disciplinary and
normalizing practices. Put simply, there
cannot be relations of power unless subjects are in the first instance free: the
need to institute negative and constraining power practices comes about only because without them
freedom would abound. Were there no possibility of freedom, subjects would not act in ways that
required containment so as to effect order.37 Freedom, though, is not the absence of power. On the contrary,
because it is only through power that subjects exercise their agency, freedom and power cannot be
separated. As Foucault maintains: At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it,
are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an
essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an “agonism” — of a relationship which is at the
same time reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a face-to--face confrontation which paralyzes both sides
than a permanent provocation.38 The political possibilities enabled by this permanent provocation of power and freedom can be
specified in more detail by thinking in terms of the predominance of the “bio-power” discussed above. In this sense, because the
governmental practices of biopolitics in Western nations have been increasingly directed toward modes of being and forms
of life — such that sexual conduct has become an object of concern, individual health has been figured as a domain of discipline, and the
family has been transformed into an instrument of government — the ongoing agonism between those practices and the
freedom they seek to contain means that individuals have articulated a series of counterdemands
drawn from those new fields of concern. For example, as the state continues to prosecute people according to sexual
orientation, human rights activists have proclaimed the right of gays to enter into formal marriages, adopt children, and receive the same
health and insurance benefits granted to their straight counterparts. These claims are
a consequence of the permanent
provocation of power and freedom in biopolitics, and stand as testament to the “strategic reversibility” of
power relations: if the terms of govern mental practices can be made into focal points for resistances,
then the “history of government as the ‘conduct of conduct’ is interwoven with the history of
dissenting ‘counterconducts.”’39 Indeed, the emergence of the state as the major articulation of “the
political” has involved an unceasing agonism between those in office and those they rule. State
intervention in everyday life has long incited popular collective action, the result of which has been both resistance to the state and new claims
upon the state. In particular, “the core of what we now call ‘citizenship’ . . . consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in
the course of their struggles over the means of state action, especially the making of war.”40 In more recent times, constituencies
associated with women’s, youth, ecological, and peace movements (among others) have also issued
claims on society.41 These resistances are evidence that the break with the discursive/nondiscursive
dichotomy central to the logic of interpretation undergirding this analysis is (to put it in conventional terms) not
only theoretically licensed; it is empirically warranted. Indeed, expanding the interpretive imagination
so as to enlarge the categories through which we understand the constitution of “the political” has
been a necessary precondition for making sense of Foreign Policy’s concern for the ethical borders of
identity in America. Accordingly, there are manifest political implications that flow from theorizing
identity. As Judith Butler concluded: “The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics;
rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated.”42
Alt—Resistance
Questioning the legitimacy of the 1AC discourse is an act of resistance which questions
the very coordinates of power that have previously been assumed. Demonstrating
the possibility that things might be different is a radical political act.
Dan W. Butin, Assistant Professor of Education at Gettysburg College, June 2001, Educational Studies,
Vol. 32, No. 2
Foucault believed that resistance could make a positive and concrete difference in people's lives. It
may, of course, make the situation worse. But to not have the opportunity to attempt to change is the
most dangerous of all positions. It is against this that Foucault railed. His "hyper- and pessimistic activism" was thus both an
enactment of his belief in how relations of power can be struggled against, and an experiment in gauging the potential for
transformation. In this light I would therefore like to offer three methodological correctives for the "Foucauldian fallacies" I outlined previously.
First, it must be acknowledged that individuals are
neither simply passive nor radically autonomous agents.
is an inherent aspect of relations of power and thus predicated on
the ability to act. Without such a theoretical acknowledgment, Foucault's insights concerning power
and domination collapse within a totalizing and static perspective. In a sense, this is a simple acknowledgment based
Foucault forcefully argued that resistance
on over one hundred years of pragmatist research grounded in William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. And in fact, some have
argued for a more sympathetic relationship between Foucault and pragmatism (Maslan 1988). Second, and predicated on the first point,
"subjugated
knowledges" should be heard. "Subjugated knowledges" are, for Foucault, "a whole set of
knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated" and
include the voices "of the psychiatric patient, of the ill person, of the nurse" (Foucault 1980, 82). For all of the
theoretical sophistication of the four articles analyzed previously, none cites the individuals affected by the practices described. Gang members,
British academics who "spontaneously" consent, and administrators caught within disciplinary practices are left unheard. Their voices
are
assumed and spoken for. I am not suggesting that their voices are the final truth. Neither does Foucault. Rather, they must simply
be acknowledged. Michael Apple makes a similar point when he urges analyses of how subjects make meaning of the technologies of
differentiation: "we should not assume that teachers or students are totally unaware of what is happening. How do they understand these
things? How do they possibly find the holes in these discourses and mechanisms in creative ways so as to allow for spaces of resistance?"
(Apple 1998, 424). Qualitative and ethnographic research, or the citation of it, is not a strong point of poststructuralist researchers. It might
behoove a closer look at Foucault's constant and consistent political engagement (Felski 1998). Third, educational researchers must
be
willing to experiment with new truths. One must always bear in mind and grapple with the fact that new "regimes of
truth" may replace old authoritarian principles; yet it should be realized that some forms of domination
are more dangerous than others. To capitulate to a radical relativism denies any potential to resist
and thus precludes any means by which to modify or reverse relations of power. Moreover, the
questioning of the criteria of the experimental truth must be seen for what it is: a tactical struggle to
maintain a particular truth-claim. This is not to say such a truth-claim is invalid or unhelpful or nonliberating. Rather, it is simply to
realize that the truth-claims of the status quo attempt to ward off resistance in the same manner that
new experimental truths attempt to overturn them: by struggling to delegitimize their grounding to
truth.
Resistance is always possible—the alt reveals the insecurity of modern power by
questioning its pretensions to certainty and truth
Hasana Sharp, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Spring 2002, Intertexts, Vol. 6,
No. 1
Fraser's invocation of empirical validity could be misleading in that Foucault does not advocate imagining power in sovereign terms in any
historical period, but, at the same time, claims that the
move away from organizations of rule according to a model
of state sovereignty nonetheless constitutes a transformation in techniques of government. I would like to
contend that, even in an absolutist regime, power operates productively and is connected to everyday life
and subjectivity, albeit in quite different forms. Understandings of sociality according to sovereignty
never adequately grasp the complexity of the social forces at play. What is interesting and troubling about
disciplinary and normalizing societies is that the pervasive quality of power makes it all the more necessary for it to
conceal itself through naturalizing discourses: "power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a
substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms" (HS1 86).
Panopticism tends to be read as the most somber note in Discipline and Punish, but the book ends with an invocation of battle and struggle, a
reminder that the norms produced by discipline are contested and always subject to the vicissitudes of war. Foucault writes, "And what
ultimately resides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary functioning of an apparatus or an institution, but the
necessity of combat and the rules of strategy ... we must hear the distant roar of battle" (308). While the
"panopticon," itself a dream of power, appears unitary to its subjects, its mode of appearing represents only the necessary
myth of power's functioning. Power must appear necessary where it is contingent. The logic of sovereignty is coextensive
with the logic of necessity, of the seamless functioning of power. Such a logic betrays itself as a symptom of power's
insecurity. Beneath such desperate measures, we must apprehend what power seeks to conceal: the
power of the multitude, the antagonistic forces of the people, the omnipresence of struggle. (5)
Alt—Care of the Self
Resisting power entails evaluating one’s actions and beliefs with regard to their
regulatory functions, endeavoring to be creative in life.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, “ ‘Being and Power’ Revisited,” Foucault
and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, 2003, p. 49-50
Like Heidegger abandoning talking of being, as Foucault works out his final ideas on how to resist bio-power, he becomes more interested in
saving the self from becoming a subject and less interested in power per se. Thus, in a typical retrospective reinterpretation, he begins his essay
"The Subject and Power" by saying: "I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not
been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a
history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.1151 The moral seems to be that, when
one is
looking for marginal practices that could support resistance to a dominant epoch of the understanding
of being or a dominant regime of power; rather than thinking of resistance as the preparation of a
new total epoch or regime that is dawning, as both Heidegger and Foucault once did, one should think of the
marginal as what resists any unified style of being or power. One will seek to preserve not new forms
of being or power, but local things and individual selves. Thus in the last works of Heidegger and Foucault the
discussions of epochal understandings of being and regimes of power appropriately disappear.
Foucault, then, bases resistance on the self. He finds in antiquity a practice in terms of which to
question the direction our current practices are taking, and to resist this trend. He explains: [In antiquity]
it was a matter of knowing how to govern one's own life in order to give it the most beautiful form
possible (in the eyes of others, of oneself, and of the future generations for whom one could serve as an example).59 He proposes
"opposing to categories of the 'law' and of 'prohibition' those of the 'art of living,' 'techniques of self,'
and 'stylization of existence."'60 Foucault grounds resistance in these "practices of creativity.1161 In the
end, he thus embraces a kind of Nietzschean constant overcoming for its own sake. He offers "a critical philosophy that seeks
the conditions and the indefinite possibilities of ... transforming ourselves.1162 This is the sense in which,
although the structure of Foucault's thought is thoroughly Heideggerian, Nietzsche won out in the end.
Alt—Refuse Distinctions
We should refuse the distinctions that sovereign power creates, as it leads to a
relationship of violence.
Jenny Edkins, Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and
Véronique Pin-Fat, Lecturer in International Relations in the Centre for International Politics at the
University of Manchester, 2005, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1, p. 11-14
Against Connolly’s reading, we suggest that Agamben’s contribution provides an insight into ways in which sovereign power can be challenged
and indeed its ‘logic’ or grammar refused. As we have pointed out, the
possibility of resistance is in general not one which
relies on an ‘escape’ or ‘emancipation’ from power relations. Indeed, we have argued that such an escape
leads us into the camps, which are marked by such an absence of power relations. What we will call a
challenge to or contestation of sovereign power, on the contrary, entails a displacement of sovereign
power and a return to properly political power relations: a life of power. A challenge to sovereign power’s creation
of zones of indistinction (the concentration camp being the paradigmatic example) cannot consist of a call for a reinstatement of classical
politics, a reinstatement of the distinction between zoe and bios. Firstly, this is not a possibility because the
very distinction itself,
and the lines that it draws, is ‘the fundamental activity of sovereign power’.51 Secondly, the classical distinction
requires that bare life can only be included through an exclusion in the form of an exception. There cannot be a return to a
politics that maintains the distinction between zoe- and bios, or, in Agamben’s words: There is no
return from the camps to classical politics. In the camps, city and house became indistinguishable, and
the possibility of differentiating between our biological body and our political body – between what is
incommunicable and mute and what is communicable and sayable – was taken from us forever.52 Either
way, whether through an emancipatory ideal or through a reinstatement of classical politics, we would all remain homines sacri or bare life.
However, challenge may be possible not through emancipation or nostalgic return, but, as we will argue, through either of two other strategies:
first, through a refusal to draw lines and second, through the assumption of bare life. We have argued that Agamben’s
work
demonstrates that sovereign power is no longer a form of power relation in Foucauldian terms but a
relationship of violence (as his discussion of the camp shows). Since this is the case, however paradoxical it may seem,
challenges to sovereign power take place when there is a demand for a return to properly political
power relations, and take the form of such a demand. Agamben’s injunction is that we must find ‘a completely new
politics – that is, a politics no longer founded on the exception of bare life’.53 If the zone of indistinction has extended beyond the camp to
embrace much of the rest of the world, then what we have is an extension of bare life, and its lack of relationalities of power: in other words,
an impossibility of politics. The
absence of a power relation is not desirable because there is then no
possibility of resistance. We have nothing but a form of servitude or slavery. So, rephrasing it in
Foucauldian terms, Agamben’s argument is that we have moved from a relation of power to a
relationship of violence. Let us remind ourselves how Foucault describes such a relationship and its contrast with a power relation: A
relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks, it destroys, or it
closes off all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be passivity, and if it comes up against any
resistance it has no other option but to try to break it down. A power relationship, on the other hand, can only
be articulated on the basis of two elements that are indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship:
that the ‘other’ (the one over whom power is exercised) is recognised and maintained to the very end as a subject
who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results,
and possible inventions may open up.54 In this context it then makes sense when Agamben argues that the question we should
be addressing is not Is there any escape from power relations? but, on the contrary, Is today a life of power available? Such a life of power
would be a life of potentialities and possibilities, a life in the field of power relations, resistance, and freedom: in other words, a political life. It
is important to make it clear that what we are talking about is not a challenge to a particular
sovereign order, but to sovereignty, or sovereign power, in general, as a form of order that entails
specific forms of life. We do not see sovereignty as ‘an ontological condition of the possibility of order as such’, as Sergei Prozorov
argues.55 In our view it is not inconceivable that there might be forms of social and political organisation
which would not entail a life under the sway of sovereign power and would still represent a form of
order, though a very different one. They may well seem ‘wholly unintelligible’, ‘entirely meaningless,’ ‘outright inconceivable’ or
even ‘quaintly paradoxical’ when viewed from the framework of sovereign power.56 We are indeed issuing a call ‘to dispense with the very
principle of order’57 when it concerns an order founded on the sovereign ban. We do not deny that the sovereign exception is constitutive of
such an order;58 we do deny that sovereign power constitutes the only possible form of political life, and indeed that it constitutes a political
life at all. Since
sovereign power relies on two things – first, the drawing of lines between forms of life,
and, second, the production thereby of a generalised bare life – there are two ways the demand for a
return to politics can be articulated: the refusal of sovereign distinctions and the assumption of bare
life. We elaborate what we mean by this in the remainder of this article.
The only way to contest sovereign power is to completely eliminate lines of distinction
drawn between people. We cannot simply change where the lines are drawn.
Jenny Edkins, Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and
Véronique Pin-Fat, Lecturer in International Relations in the Centre for International Politics at the
University of Manchester, 2005, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1, p. 11-14
One potential form of challenge to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between
zoe and bios, inside and outside.59 As we have shown, sovereign power does not involve a power relation in
Foucauldian terms. It is more appropriately considered to have become a form of governance or
technique of administration through relationships of violence that reduce political subjects to mere
bare or naked life. In asking for a refusal to draw lines as a possibility of challenge, then, we are not asking for the
elimination of power relations and consequently, we are not asking for the erasure of the possibility
of a mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks: quite the
opposite. Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw any lines at all
between forms of life (and indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power as a form of violence
can be contested and a properly political power relation (a life of power as potenza) reinstated. We
could call this challenging the logic of sovereign power through refusal. Our argument is that we can evade sovereign power and reinstate a
form of power relation by contesting sovereign power’s assumption of the right to draw lines, that is, by contesting the sovereign ban. Any
other challenge always inevitably remains within this relationship of violence. To move outside it (and return to a power relation) we need not
only to contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also to resist the call to draw any lines of the sort sovereign power demands. The
grammar of sovereign power cannot be resisted by challenging or fighting over where the lines are
drawn. Whilst, of course, this is a strategy that can be deployed, it is not a challenge to sovereign power per se as it
still tacitly or even explicitly accepts that lines must be drawn somewhere (and preferably more inclusively).
Although such strategies contest the violence of sovereign power’s drawing of a particular line, they
risk replicating such violence in demanding the line be drawn differently. This is because such forms of
challenge fail to refuse sovereign power’s line-drawing ‘ethos’, an ethos which, as Agamben points
out, renders us all now homines sacri or bare life.
Answers To
AT: Perm—Power
The 1AC cannot be severed from its entrenchment in an outdated model of power
relations which mistakenly centralizes power in the federal government. Only the alt
engages new modes of disciplinary power present throughout society.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, “‘Being and Power’ Revisited,” Foucault and
Heidegger: Critical Encounters, 2003, p. 44-45
This seeming problem is cleared up, I think, if we remember Heidegger's account of onto-theology. Like the understanding of being, power
always, in fact, "comes from everywhere," in that it is embodied in the style of everyday practices. But what
these background
practices have made possible up until recently is monarchical and state juridical power , i.e., power
administered from above. As Foucault Puts it: At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation
of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have
not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem
of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty. (8889) But now, Foucault tells us, things have changed. just as for Heidegger technicity, by treating everything as resources, levels being
to pure ordering and so gets rid of onto-theology-the idea that some entity is the ground of everything-so bio-power reveals the
irrelevance of questions of the legitimacy of the state as the source of power. Foucault says: To conceive of
power [in these terms] is to conceive of it in terms of a historical form that is characteristic of our
societies: the juridical monarchy. Characteristic yet transitory. For while many of its forms have
persisted to the present, it has gradually been penetrated by quite new mechanisms of power that are
probably irreducible to the representation of law. (89) That is, Just as for Heidegger total mobilization cannot be
understood by positing subjects and objects, so normalization bypasses the state and works directly through new
sorts of invisible, precise, continuous practices of control Foucault calls micro-practices. The everyday personto-person power relations whose coordination produces the style of any regime of power are, indeed,
everywhere. But in earlier regimes of power there were no micro-Practices. Only disciplinary power
works meticulously by ordering every detail. So, while for Foucault all forms of power are bottom-up and the understanding
of power as emanating from the sovereign or the state misses this important fact, nonetheless bio-power is bottom-up in a new
and dangerously totalizing way, so that understanding power on the model of the power of the king
or the state (the equivalent of ontotheology) now covers up an important change in how our practices are
working.
AT: Perm—Framework
Effective policy is impossible without prior investigation of the discursive
underpinnings of the 1AC—mere combination fails to displace security’s central role in
governmentality
David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing Security,
1998, pg. 202
Furthermore, Foucault argues that from the eighteenth century onward, security
becomes the central dynamic in
governmental rationality, so that (as discussed in chapter 6) we live today, not in a narrowly defined and overtly repressive
disciplinary society, but in a “society of security,” in which practices of national security and practices of social security
structure intensive and extensive power relations, and constitute the ethical boundaries and territorial
borders of inside/outside, normal/pathological, civilized/barbaric, and so on23 The theory of police and the shift
from a sovereign’s war to a population’s war thus not only changed the nature of “man” and war, it
constituted the identity of “man” in the idea of the population, and articulated the dangers that might
pose a threat to security. The major implication of this argument is that the state is understood as having no essence, no ontological
status that exists prior to and is served by either police or war. Instead, “the state” is “the mobile effect of a multiple
regime of governmentality,” of which the practices of police, war, and foreign policy/Foreign Policy
are all a part.34 Rethinking security and government in these terms is one of the preconditions
necessary to suggest some of the political implications of this study. Specifically, it has been the purpose of this book to
argue that we can interpret the cold war as an important moment in the production and reproduction of American identity in ways consonant
with the logic of a “society of security” To
this end, the analysis of the texts of Foreign Policy in chapter 1, the
consideration of Eisenhower’s security policies in chapter 6, and the examination of the interpretation of danger
surrounding “the war on drugs” in chapter 7, demonstrated that even when these issues are represented in terms of national security and
even when these issues are written in the depoliticizing mode of policy discourse,
they all constitute “the ensemble of the population” in terms of social security and ethical borders.
territorial boundaries, and
Likewise, Foucault’s argument underpins the fact that these developments are not peculiar to the post—World War II period.
AT: Perm—Security
1AC securitization overwhelms alt solvency because the nature of security politics
footnotes all other concerns as secondary to the survival and health of the homeland
Jeff Huysmans, Lecturer in politics at the department of government at Open University, Alternatives
“Defining Social Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative Dilemma of Writing Security” Feb
2002 p. 45-47
For understanding the meaning of security, the discursive formation is crucial because it defines the specificity of security
practices. The rules of the security formation link different themes, theories, and practices together as security themes, security theories, security practices.
The formation is not a security utterance itself, but it makes it possible for these themes, theories, and practices to appear. Here the full implications
of this understanding of language becomes visible. The formation is not a transparent instrument that is manipulated to represent
security questions that already exist “out there somewhere.” It works on another register: the constitutive or generic register where security questions are brought
into existence. Wawer has briefly defined some major aspects of the dominant Western security formation. He defines the rules, or logic, constituting the meaning
of security through the logic of war, which he reads through the lens of national security. National security is “the name of an ongoing debate, a tradition, an
established set of practices and, as such, the concept has a rather formalized referent.”17 Looked at through this lens, a
security problem is
something that challenges the survival of the political order. As a result, it alters the premises for all
other questions. They are subjugated to the security question because if the political unit does not succeed in successfully
dealing with the security problem it will cease to exist as a self-determined political unit. The other
questions will have become irrelevant at that stage since the unit does not exist anymore as a political unit. Security concentrates everything at
this one point where the political units confront a test of will “in which the ability to fend off a challenge is the criterion for
forcing the others to acknowledge its sovereignty and identity as a state.”18 This logic of security can be replayed
metaphorically and extended to other sectors. If this happens, the other sectors are structured according to a security logic.19 The normative dilemma receives its
full weight from the combination of the performative logic and a generic understanding of language. Security
language becomes normative
by definition. Here it differs from the normative dimensions of security policies that classical realists sometimes discussed. For example, Arnold Wolfers’s
classic analysis of national security argues that security is a value among other social values such as wealth.29 This implies that a security policy
implicitly or explicitly defines how important security is compared with other values. (To put the question
crudely: How much do we spend on nuclear weapons that we cannot then spend on health care?) The policy also has to decide the level of security that is aspired
to; for example: will it be minimum security or maximum security? But this normative “awareness” does not capture the fundamental normativity of security
enunciations that social constructivists face. Social-constructivist authors face not only the two questions formulated by Wolfers, they also have to answer a
question that in a sense precedes Wolfers’s remarks. They have to decide whether they want to “write” security in a particular area. In other words, security
enunciations not only implicitly or explicitly assume the level of priority they give to security and the level of security they aspire to; they first determine if one
should approach an issue from a security perspective at all. Normative questions are thus inescapably present in the very heart of security analysis.
AT: Action/Reform Good
Theory is action. Our critique of power is the first step in its reversal and in the
initiation of new struggles for more equitable and free social circumstances. Reform
merely increases asymmetrical distributions of power.
Deleuze and Foucault ’72 Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice: selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard,
recorded March 4, 1972, http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michelfoucault-and-gilles-deleuze
DELEUZE: Precisely. A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses
it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate. We don't revise a
theory, but construct new ones; we have no choice but to make others. It is strange that it was Proust, an author thought to be a pure intellectual, who said it so
clearly: treat my book as a pair of glasses directed to the outside; if they don't suit you, find another pair; I leave it to you to find your own instrument, which is
necessarily an investment for combat. A theory does not totalise; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself. It is in the nature of power to
theory is by nature opposed to power. As soon as a theory is
enmeshed in a particular point, we realise that it will never possess the slightest practical importance
unless it can erupt in a totally different area. This is why the notion of reform is so stupid and
hypocritical. Either reforms are designed by people who claim to be representative, who make a profession of
speaking for others, and they lead to a division of power, to a distribution of this new power which is consequently
increased by a double repression; or they arise from the complaints and demands of those concerned. This latter
totalise and it is your position, and one I fully agree with, that
instance is no longer a reform but revolutionary action that questions (expressing the full force of its partiality) the totality of power and the hierarchy that
maintains it. This is surely evident in prisons: the smallest and most insignificant of the prisoners' demands can puncture Pleven's pseudoreform (5). If
the
protests of children were heard in kindergarten, if their questions were attended to, it would be enough to explode
the entire educational system. There is no denying that our social system is totally without tolerance; this accounts for its extreme fragility in all
its aspects and also its need for a global form of repression. In my opinion, you were the first-in your books and in the practical sphere-to teach us something
absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others. We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this
"theoretical" conversion-to appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf. DELEUZE: Yes, and
the reverse is equally true. Not only are prisoners treated like children, but children are treated like prisoners. Children are submitted to an infantilisation which is
alien to them. On this basis, it is undeniable that schools resemble prisons and that factories are its closest approximation. Look at the entrance to a Renault plant,
or anywhere else for that matter: three tickets to get into the washroom during the day. You found an eighteenth-century text by Jeremy Bentham proposing
prison reforms; in the name of this exalted reform, he establishes
a circular system where the renovated prison serves as a
model and where the individual passes imperceptibly from school to the factory, from the factory to
prison and vice versa. This is the essence of the reforming impulse, of reformed representation. On the
contrary, when people begin to speak and act on their own behalf, they do not oppose their
representation (even as its reversal) to another; they do not oppose a new representativity to the false
representativity of power. For example, I remember your saying that there is no popular justice against justice; the reckoning takes place at another
level. FOUCAULT: I think that it is not simply the idea of better and more equitable forms of justice that underlies the people's hatred of the judicial system, of
judges, courts, and prisons, but-aside from this and before anything else-the singular perception that power is always exercised at the expense of the people. The
anti-judicial struggle is a struggle against power and I don't think that it is a struggle against injustice, against the injustice of the judicial system, or a struggle for
improving the efficiency of its institutions. It is particularly striking that in outbreaks of rioting and revolt or in seditious movements the judicial system has been as
compelling a target as the financial structure, the army, and other forms of power. My hypothesis -but it is merely an hypothesis- is that popular courts, such as
those found in the Revolution, were a means for the lower middle class, who were allied with the masses, to salvage and recapture the initiative in the struggle
against the judicial system. To achieve this, they proposed a court system based on the possibility of equitable justice, where a judge might render a just verdict. The
identifiable form of the court of law belongs to the bourgeois ideology of justice. DELEUZE: On
the basis of our actual situation, power
emphatically develops a total or global vision. That is, all the current forms of repression (the racist repression of
immigrant workers, repression in the factories, in the educational system, and the general repression of youth) are easily totalised from the
point of view of power. We should not only seek the unity of these forms in the reaction to May '68, but more appropriately, in the concerted
preparation and organisation of the near future, French capitalism now relies on a "margin" of unemployment and has abandoned the liberal and paternal mask
that promised full employment. In this perspective, we begin to see the unity of the forms of repression: restrictions on immigration, once it is acknowledged that
the most difficult and thankless jobs go to immigrant workers-repression in the factories, because the French must reacquire the "taste" for increasingly harder
work; the struggle against youth and the repression of the educational system, because police repression is more active when there is less need for young people in
the work force. A wide range of professionals (teachers, psychiatrists, educators of all kinds, etc.) will be called upon to exercise functions that have traditionally
belonged to the police. This is something you predicted long ago, and it was thought impossible at the time: the reinforcement of all the structures of confinement.
Against this global policy of power, we initiate localised counter-responses, skirmishes, active and
occasionally preventive defences. We have no need to totalise that which is invariably totalised on the
side of power; if we were to move in this direction, it would mean restoring the representative forms
of centralism and a hierarchical structure. We must set up lateral affiliations and an entire system of
net- works and popular bases; and this is especially difficult. In any case, we no longer define reality as a continuation
of politics in the traditional sense of competition and the distribution of power, through the so-called representative agencies of the Communist
Party or the General Workers Union(6). Reality is what actually happens in factories, in schools, in barracks, in
prisons, in police stations. And this action carries a type of information which is altogether different from that found in newspapers (this explains the
kind of information carried by the Agence de Press Liberation (7).' FOUCAULT: Isn't this difficulty of finding adequate forms of
struggle a result of the fact that we continue to ignore the problem of power? After all, we had to wait until the
nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power. It may be that
Marx and Freud cannot satisfy our desire for understanding this enigmatic thing which we call power, which is at once visible and invisible, present and hidden,
ubiquitous. Theories of government and the traditional analyses of their mechanisms certainly don't exhaust the field where power is exercised and where it
functions. The question of power re- mains a total enigma. Who exercises power? And in what sphere? We now know with reasonable certainty who exploits
others, who receives the profits, which people are involved, and we know how these funds are reinvested. But as for power . . . We know that it is not in the hands
of those who govern. But, of course, the idea of the "ruling class" has never received an adequate formulation, and neither have other terms, such as "to dominate
... .. to rule ... .. to govern," etc. These notions are far too fluid and require analysis. We should also investigate the limits imposed on the exercise of power-the
relays through which it operates and the extent of its influence on the often insignificant aspects of the hierarchy and the forms of control, surveillance, prohibition,
and constraint. Everywhere
that power exists, it is being exercised. No one, strictly speaking, has an official
right to power; and yet it is always excited in a particular direction, with some people on one side and
some on the other. It is often difficult to say who holds power in a precise sense, but it is easy to see
who lacks power. If the reading of your books (from Nietzsche to what I anticipate in Capitalism and Schisophrenia (8) has been essential for me, it is
because they seem to go very far in exploring this problem: under the ancient theme of meaning, of the signifier and the signified, etc., you have developed the
question of power, of the inequality of powers and their struggles. Each struggle develops around a particular source of power (any of the countless, tiny sources- a
small-time boss, the manager of "H.L.M.,"' a prison warden, a judge, a union representative, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper). And if pointing out these sourcesdenouncing and speaking out-is to be a part of the struggle, it is not because they were previously unknown. Rather, it is because to speak on this subject, to force
the institutionalised networks of information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusation, to find targets, is the first step in the reversal of power
and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power. If the discourse of inmates or prison doctors constitutes a form of struggle, it is because they
confiscate, at least temporarily, the power to speak on prison conditions-at present, the exclusive property of prison administrators and their cronies in reform
groups. The discourse of struggle is not opposed to the unconscious, but to the secretive. It may not seem like much; but what if it turned out to be more than we
expected? A whole series of misunderstandings relates to things that are "bidden," "repressed," and "unsaid"; and they permit the cheap "psychoanalysis" of the
proper objects of struggle. It is perhaps more difficult to unearth a secret than the unconscious. The two themes frequently encountered in the recent past, that
"writing gives rise to repressed elements" and that "writing is necessarily a subversive activity," seem to betray a number of operations that deserve to be severely
denounced. DELEUZE: With respect to the problem you posed: it is clear who exploits, who profits, and who governs, but power nevertheless remains something
more diffuse. I would venture the following hypothesis: the thrust of Marxism was to define the problem essentially in terms of interests (power is held by a ruling
class defined by its interests). The question immediately arises :
how is it that people whose interests are not being served can
strictly support the existing power structure by demanding a piece of the action? Perhaps, this is because in terms
of investments, whether economic or unconscious, interest is not the final answer; there are investments of desire that function in a more profound and diffuse
manner than our interests dictate. But of course, we never desire against our interests, because interest always follows and finds itself where desire has placed it.
We cannot shut out the scream of Reich: the
masses were not deceived; at a particular time, they actually wanted a
fascist regime! There are investments of desire that mould and distribute power, that make it the
property of the policeman as much as of the prime minister; in this context, there is no qualitative
difference between the power wielded by the policeman and the prime minister. The nature of these
investments of desire in a social group explains why political parties or unions, which might have or
should have revolutionary investments in the name of class interests, are so often reform oriented or absolutely
reactionary on the level of desire.
AT: Realism/Security Inevitable
International relations is constituted through exchanges of power, of which we are all
agents—investigating power as such best interrogates its particular deployments and
allows us to resist violence
Mark Duffield, Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of
Lancaster, “Carry on Killing: Global Governance, Humanitarianism and Terror,” Danish Institute for
International Studies, 2004,
http://www.diis.dk/graphics/Publications/WP2004/duffield_carry_on_killing.pdf
Global governance is a design of bio-power. These two terms – design and bio-power – need some elaboration. Understanding power
as a design sets it apart from a realist or conventional, state-centric approach to power. For realism,
power is something almost tangible. It is an exclusive quality or resource that can be captured, amassed or deployed
by the powerful; usually elites of some kind – political, economic, military, criminal, and so on. In this context, power is frequently
presented as somehow ‘bad’, or at least, having negative connotations; it is what the ‘powerful’ use against the ‘powerless’. Power as a design,
however, is more egalitarian, diffuse and inclusive. We are
all agents of power, including actors and non-state
organisations that realism would regard as merely the external auxiliaries, servants or sub-contractors
of the powerful. Power is the ability to change the behaviour and attitudes of others and, in the
process, of ourselves as well (Dean 1999). As such, even life’s bit-players have the ability to stage independent, innovative and often
surprising effects. Power relations are everywhere – in the classroom, the doctor’s surgery, the family, the NGO project, and so on. Such
relations are productive and shape the comportment of their authoring agents as well as those subject to them.1 Without
relations of
power, society and the world would grind to a halt. From this inclusive and pervasive perspective, power itself is
ambivalent and can be either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Deciding between them, and checking the latter in favour of the former, is a matter for a practical
ethics and politics. It would be a mistake to regard the
realist conception of power (as an exclusive quality amassed by the
powerful) as wrong or misconceived. For many actors and non-state agencies this viewpoint is a convenient construction. It enabled, for
example, concentration camp functionaries to frame their defence in terms of ‘just following orders’ of
an external power. It also enables humanitarian agencies, in the interests of neutrality, to either remain silent
in relation to power so conceived, or else, through recourse to international law, codes of conduct or
technical standards, to erect legalistic barriers and professional boundaries to distance themselves
from an external power (Leader 1999). An exclusive and amassed view of power also shapes what humanitarian agencies understand
by ‘politics’. That is, those various strategies and techniques relating to the augmentation or deployment of external power (Weiss 1999).
Realism is not necessary—it is a political construct used to confirm national identity
Grondin 2004 ((Re)Writing the “National Security State”: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold
War David Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies Association
Convention, March 17-20, 2004, Montreal)
Given that political language is not a neutral medium that gives expression to ideas formed
independently of structures of signification that sustain political action and thought, American realist
discourses belonging to the neorealist or neoclassical realist traditions cannot be taken as mere
descriptions of reality. We are trapped in the production of discourses in which national leaders and security speech
acts emanating from realist discourses develop and reinforce a notion of national identity as
synonymous with national security. U.S. national security conduct should thus be understood through the prism of the
theoretical discourses of American political leaders and realist scholars that co-constitute it. Realist discourses depict American
political leaders acting in defense of national security, and political leaders act in the name of national
security. In the end, what distinguishes realist discourses is that they depict the United States as
having behaved like a national security state since World War II, while legitimating the idea that the
United States should continue to do so. Political scientists and historians “are engaged in making (poesis), not merely recording
or reporting” (Medhurst, 2000: 17). Precisely in this sense,
it constitutes it.
rhetoric is not the description of national security conduct;
AT: Threats Real
Threats don’t exist, they’re defined by state leaders
Grondin 2004 ((Re)Writing the “National Security State”: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold
War David Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies Association
Convention, March 17-20, 2004, Montreal)
Adopting a more critical stance, David Campbell points out that “[d]anger is not an objective condition.
It (sic) is not a thing which exists independently of those to whom it may become a threat. […] Nothing
is a risk in itself; [...] it all depends on how one analyses the danger, considers the event” (Campbell,
1998: 1-2). In the same vein, national security discourse does not evaluate objective threats; rather, it
is itself a product of historical processes and structures in the state and society that produces it.
Whoever has the power to define security is then the one who has the authority to write legitimate
security discourses and conduct the policies that legitimize them. The realist analysts and state leaders
who invoke national security and act in its name are the same individuals who hold the power to
securitize threats by inserting them in a discourse that frames national identity and freezes it.9
Framework
Framework—Discourse
Power comes from everywhere and permeates all relations—institutions and social
groups are all constellated through convergences and conflicts of power. Locating
analysis at this level reveals linkages between power and knowledge and produces the
best strategies for change.
Foucault ’78 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley, 1978, p. 92-93
Hence the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowledge regarding sex, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of power. But
the
word power is apt to lead to a number of misunderstandings-misunderstandings with respect to its nature, its form,
and its unity. By power, I do not mean "Power" as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the
subservience of the citizens of a given state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in
contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by
one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body. The analysis, made in
terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the
outset; rather, these
are only the terminal forms power takes. It seems to me that power must be understood in
the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate
and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations,
transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a
chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in
which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in
the various social hegemonies. Power's
condition of possibility, or in any case the viewpoint which permits one to understand its
exercise, even in its more "peripheral" effects, and which also makes it possible to use its mechanisms as a grid of
intelligibility of the social order, must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a
unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force
relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and
unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but
because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.
Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere .
And "Power," insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges
from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement. One needs to be
nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with;
it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society . Should we
turn the expression around, then, and say that politics is war pursued by other means? If we still wish to
maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we should postulate rather that this multiplicity of
force relations can be coded-in part but never totally-either in the form of "war," or in the form of "politics"; this
would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous,
unstable, and tense force relations.
Governmentality is dispersed through policy discussions that accept dominant terms
of debate without critically interrogating them. Discursive analysis demonstrates the
contingent and arbitrary nature of the 1AC assumptions.
Larner and Walter ‘4 Wendy Larner, School of Geographical Sciences, Unviersity of Bristol, and
William Walters, Department of Political Science, Carleton University, “Globalization as
Governmentality,” Alternatives 29 (2004), 495-514
Jessop is right to observe that the idea of a zero-sum opposition between globalization and the state is not helpful. He argues that "states help
to constitute the economy as an object of regulation and the extent to which even economic globalization continues to depend on politics. "^^
But it is not states that do this. To frame it in this way is to imply they would never destroy themselves. Rather, attention
should be
paid to the discourses and techniques through which disparate and qualitatively different
assemblages are made into commensurable entities such as the "economy." Most immediately then,
the technical is political.^'^ Policy debates within international organizations and the redeployment of techniques
and measurements are part of the means by which global objects and subjects are being constituted.
So, too, are the flows of knowledge embodied in the activities of management consultants and
others.58 These claims underline the point that globalization is governmental. Globalization assumes particular
"macrosubjects" (industries, states, regions, firms, networks) with particular attributes and capacities. These
entities are exhorted to enter into the pursuit for international competitiveness through notions such
as export orientation, self-management, good governance, and policy dialogue. They are encouraged
to work on themselves to recreate themselves in very specific forms with particular capacities.
Significantly, and in strong contrast to earlier formulations, embeddedness in the global order is not imposed from
above but is to be sought voluntarily. Both people and places are encouraged to apply financial disciplines, demonstrate
entrepreneurial capacities, and seek out new opportunities. Moreover, the response to global uncertainty is not to withdraw but rather to
engage more deeply, to adapt, and become more compatible with the new global terrain. In this regard, we can see how globalization is both a
description and a normative account. Governmentality encourages us to ask questions such as: Through
what techniques are such
global entities known? How are the relationships between them understood? Once attention is paid
to such questions, it becomes possible to better distinguish between concepts like civilization,
modernization, and globalization. How does each of these formulations imagine places and
populations? How do they divide and rule? And what of other series? Religions, nation-states, networks? Finally,
we could think about how the governmentalities of globalization are articulated with other forms of rule
(for example, authoritarianism) .59
Critique is a prior question—the ‘real’ world is mere discursive construct—only
discursive criticism allows us to alter and correct rigid lenses of analysis
Grondin 2004 ((Re)Writing the “National Security State”: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold
War David Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies Association
Convention, March 17-20, 2004, Montreal)
Given my poststructuralist inclinations, I do not subscribe to the positivistic social scientific enterprise
which aspires to test hypotheses against the “real world”. I therefore reject epistemological
empiricism. Since epistemology is closely intertwined with methodology, especially with positivism, I eschew
naturalism as a methodology. I study discourses and discursive practices that take shape in texts. This
does not mean that there is no material world as such, only that it must be understood as mediated
by language, which in the end means that it is always interpreted once framed by discourse (through the
spoken word or in written form).2 “A discourse, then, is not a way of learning ‘about’ something out there in the ‘real world’; it is rather a
way of producing that something as real, as identifiable, classifiable, knowable, and therefore,
meaningful. Discourse creates the conditions of knowing” (Klein quoted in George, 1994: 30). We consider “real”
what we consider significant: a discourse is always an interpretation, a narrative of multiple realities inscribed in a specific social or
symbolic order. Discursive representation is therefore not neutral; individuals in power are those who are “authorized” to
produce “reality”, and therefore, knowledge. In this context, power is knowledge and the ability to produce that which is
considered “true”. A realist discourse will produce the sociolinguistic conditions that will allow it to
correspond, in theory as in practice, to “reality”. Evidently, this “reality” will be nothing but the “realist
discourse” that one has constituted oneself. This is why, from a poststructuralist perspective, discourse may be
considered as ontology3.
AT: Policymaking Good
Institutions are constituted through discourse—our theoretical critique is
simultaneously radical practice which creates space within policymaking for
intellectual responsibility
Deleuze and Foucault ’72 Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice: selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard,
recorded March 4, 1972, http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michelfoucault-and-gilles-deleuze
GILLES DELEUZE: Possibly we're in the process of experiencing a new relationship between theory and
practice. At one time, practice was considered an application of theory, a consequence; at other times, it had an opposite sense and it was
thought to inspire theory, to be indispensable for the creation of future theoretical forms. In any event, their relationship was
understood in terms of a process of totalisation. For us, however, the question is seen in a different light.
The relationships between theory and practice are far more partial and fragmentary . On one side, a theory
is always local and related to a limited field, and it is applied in another sphere, more or less distant from it. The relationship
which holds in the application of a theory is never one of resemblance. Moreover, from the moment a theory moves into its
proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles, walls, and blockages which require its relay by
another type of discourse (it is through this other discourse that it eventually passes to a different domain). Practice is a set
of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can
develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall. For example, your work
began in the theoretical analysis of the context of confinement, specifically with respect to the psychiatric asylum within a capitalist society in
the nineteenth century. Then you became aware of the necessity for confined individuals to speak for themselves, to create a relay (it's
possible, on the contrary, that your function was already that of a relay in relation to them); and this group is found in prisons -- these
individuals are imprisoned. It was on this basis that you organised the information group for prisons (G.I.P.)(1), the object being to create
conditions that permit the prisoners themselves to speak.
It would be absolutely false to say, as the Maoist implied, that in
moving to this practice you were applying your theories. This was not an application; nor was it a project for initiating
reforms or an enquiry in the traditional sense. The emphasis was altogether different: a system of relays within a
larger sphere, within a multiplicity of parts that are both theoretical and practical. A theorising intellectual, for
us, is no longer a subject, a representing or representative consciousness. Those who act and struggle are no longer represented, either by a
group or a union that appropriates the right to stand as their conscience. Who
speaks and acts? It is always a multiplicity,
even within the person who speaks and acts. All of us are "groupuscules."(2) Representation no longer exists; there's only actiontheoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks. FOUCAULT: It seems to me that the political
involvement of the intellectual was traditionally the product of two different aspects of his activity: his
position as an intellectual in bourgeois society, in the system of capitalist production and within the ideology it produces or
imposes (his exploitation, poverty, rejection, persecution, the accusations of subversive activity, immorality, etc); and his proper
discourse to the extent that it revealed a particular truth, that it disclosed political relationships where they were
unsuspected. These two forms of politicisation did not exclude each other, but, being of a different order, neither did
they coincide. Some were classed as "outcasts" and others as "socialists." During moments of violent reaction on the part of the
authorities, these two positions were readily fused: after 1848, after the Commune, after 1940. The intellectual was rejected and
persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say
that the emperor had no clothes. The intellectual spoke the truth to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who were
forbidden to speak the truth: he was conscience, consciousness, and eloquence. In the most recent upheaval (3) the intellectual discovered that
the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are
certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there
exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and
invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that
profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power-the idea of their
responsibility for "consciousness" and discourse forms part of the system. The
intellectual's role is no longer to place
himself "somewhat ahead and to the side" in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity ; rather,
it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of "knowledge," "truth,"
"consciousness," and "discourse. "(4) In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But
it is local
and regional, as you said, and not totalising. This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at
revealing and undermining powe r where it is most invisible and insidious . It is not to "awaken consciousness"
that we struggle (the masses have been aware for some time that consciousness is a form of knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of
subjectivity is a prerogative of the bourgeoisie),
but to sap power , to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside
those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance. A "theory" is the regional system of this struggle.
Mobility Module
Links
Link—Circulation
Mobility infrastructure paradoxically imposes freedom of movement on the populace
to support security apparatuses
Didier Bigo, Professor of International Relations at Sciences-Po, Paris, “Security: A Field Left Fallow,”
trans. J.E. Dillon, Foucault on Politics, Security and War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal,
Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2008, p. 107-108
As we have seen, a major argument for Foucault is that a dispositif of security cannot exist without a regime of
liberties, and in particular without freedom of circulation. Security pre-supposes that one analyses
mobilities, networks and margins instead of the frontier and the isolation that goes with demarcation.
Security is thus a dispositif of circulation within a life environment and not a dispositif of disciplining
bodies. A security dispositif does not isolate, it is built as a network. It does not close off the social area but
interweaves its aspects. It does not operate so as to watch and maintain surveillance, it lets things happen (as a form of laissez-faire).
Specialists on European institutions have to question themselves about this dimension where freedom of circulation produces a normality, a
security which destabilises disciplinary closures and sovereign logics, and thus creates unease about the lack of certainty (Apap, 2001; Gangster
et al., 1997; Huysmans, 2004a; Kelstrup and Williams, 2000). They are often unaware of the Foucaultian approach and its idea of centrifugal
dynamic, and see the phenomenon through the lenses of a spillover, but much research concerning the frontiers of Europe can profit from
Foucault’s lectures. What is often not accepted is the effect this line of thought has on freedom. The
proposition overturns the
conventional schema of the balance between two different principles: security and freedom (Bigo et al., 2006a).
Security is not the opposite of liberty. It is not an equivalent principle. It is not even the delineation of the limits of liberty or a
form of necessity. It is the result of liberties. Security works in a given area and favours the double
movement of extending the area and freeing circulation. In fact, within the interplay of opposing forces, security is
extended by displacing frontiers, pushing back controls on others, externalising discipline so as to maintain securitisation only in the name of
the liberty of the majority (Bigo and Guild, 2005; Valluy, 2005).
Production of greater and more efficient population movement justified through the
backdrop of images of terror is a strategy of population management
Diken and Laustsen ‘3 Bülent Diken, lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, and Carsten Bagge
Laustsen, Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen, “Zones of indistinction : security, terror and
bare life,” Territories, Islands, camps and other states of utopia, 2003, p. 42-51,
http://www.languageandcapitalism.info/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/wot.pdf
Modern sovereignty does not only work according to the disciplinary logic of exclusion. Disciplinary
confinement, and thus exclusion and normalization constitute only one of the three spatial principles embodied in the camp. The camp is
also a space of control organized according to a science of flows, manifesting a biopolitical paradigm à
la Foucault. Control does not demand the delimitation of movement but rather abstraction and speed.
Significantly, the Nazi regime used the human instinct for survival to make the Jews carry out their own
destruction. The Nazi sought to destroy the Jews step by step, making them opt for the “least evil”
option each time, which paved the way for the greatest evil. In the camp, there was no space for rest,
reflection and comfort: work, finding something to eat and survival were parts of a daily battle, which
meant that the prisoners were in permanent movement. What interrupted their controlled flow was
terror. In contrast to discipline and control, which operate, respectively, in terms of enclosure and flow, terror functions against
the background of fear related to uncertainty, insecurity and unsafety. The prisoner could be hit, at
any time, by the guards’ anger, the greatest terror being the “showers”. Terror immobilizes through
fear. It is thus disciplinary without the spatial confinement of discipline and the functional regularity
of flows. Let us now investigate these three paradigms – discipline, control, and terror – focusing on how the attempts at escaping from one
form of power sediment other, more advanced forms of power.
Mobile subjectivity requires discipline and regulation from the state in the form of
increasingly effective transportation infrastructure to ensure that speed does not
exceed mechanisms of social control
Jeremy Packer, Assistant Professor of Communications at Penn State-University Park, Foucault, Cultural
Studies, and Governmentality, 2003, p. 139-140
Paul Virilio’s thesis in Speed and Politics (1986) is that the power of the State is primarily that of the police: the management of the public ways.
He follows this with a combative assertion on thinking about knowledge. Virilio states in his study, “the related logic of knowing-power, or
power-knowledge, is eliminated to the benefit of moving-power—in other words the study of tendencies, of flows” (p. 47). An examination of
this statement will make it apparent that although Virilio does provide impetus to think about the importance of mobility and its control, his
dismissal of the relationship between power and knowledge not only weakens his claims but forces his hand regarding notions of power and
freedom. Foucault, according to Virilio, is the thinker of confinement and disciplinarity. Power/knowledge according to Foucault describes the
co-constitutive capacities of knowledge and power to produce apparatusses of control, regulation, and production. The important insight that
power/knowledge provides is that discourses
such as science, medicine, or psychology, through their monopoly
on truth claims, exert the power to determine the relative face of “reality.” For instance, Foucault in Madness and
Civilization (1965) explains how, through the creation of the descriptive category of madness, a whole series of material effects were carried
out upon those deemed mad by medicine and psychology Knowledge
then is not simply descriptive, but productive. It
produces, among other things, normative categories, prescriptions for proper conduct, and relations of
power: for instance the relationship of doctor-patient or highway patrolman-driver. Virilio, by dismissing the power/knowledge thesis,
demonstrates that his understanding of power is in line with traditional Marxism in which power is wielded by the State and is exerted upon an
unsuspecting proletariat, with negative effects.3 His discussion of freedom begins to reveal his notion of the negative effects that the power of
speed has, namely the loss of freedom. Freedom for Virilio is something innate to individuals rather than the product and necessity of certain
forms of government. Furthermore, speed is a correlate of freedom within conceptions of mobility: more speed is said to equal greater
freedom. In Foucault and Political Reason (1996), Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose critique this understanding of freedom and
its relation to a top-down conception of power. The following quote sums this up: Freedom is neither an ideological fiction of modern
societies nor an existential feature of existence within them; it must be understood also and necessarily as a formula of rule.
Foucault’s concern here might be characterized as an attempt to link the analysis of the constitution of freedom with that of the exercise of
rule; that is, with the extent to which freedom
has become, in our so-called “free societies,” a resource for, and not merely a
need not simply look for instances in which
something, in this instance speed, leads to a loss of freedom, but instead reveal the types of freedom produced by speed,
the types of regulations placed on speed and its purposes, and the necessity of freedom as a
constitutive element of the very notion of speed. Speed after all is always relative; it is measured against
what is considered the normative rate. Freedom and mobility, one of its material corollaries, must be
understood then in their specificity and in their necessity to current forms of governing, State and otherwise. This
demands a recognition that as the potential for mobility is increased, the subject of governing must change in
accordance. A “more free” or at least “more mobile” citizen becomes necessary to partake actively in a
differently striated space. Thus the goal of governing is not to simply guard against too much freedom, but to produce
the type of freedom that accords with the expansive demands of culture and economy . Governing at a
hindrance to, government. (p. 8) If we are to take Foucault’s notion seriously we
distance across striated space takes the place of direct control. A proper deployment of power requires enabling and activating “men and
things” (Foucault 1991, p. 93) in a manner that allows them to and in fact demands that they move outside of confined and continuously
surveyed arenas. It also means striating space in such a fashion that rule can still be exercised. Depending upon what perspective drives one’s
analysis, one could view the directly surveyed subject as far less dangerous to the State than the mobile subject, and thus more free, in that
once it is surveyed, its perceived ability to do harm to the state is minimal and thus not taken as seriously. Mobile
subjects, on the other
hand, must be highly disciplined, because they are not under continual surveillance, are not always
within the immediate scope of state interaction, and are depended upon to execute the goals of State
and non-State institutions when the State per se is not present to do so. Thus, to be mobile is to be free
to govern oneself, across a vast territory, but it is always in accordance with governing in so far as it coincides with “convenient ends” (p.
93).
Link—Transportation Infrastructure
Transportation infrastructure is designed to maximize the extraction of labor from the
populace and identify and quarantine social deviants and unproductive workers
Elden ‘8 Stuart Elden, “Strategies for Waging Peace: Foucault as Collaborateur,” Foucault on Politics,
Security and War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2008, p. 28-30
In sum, over a million francs was projected for this work, worth about 773,000 euros today, 13 enough to support a fairly large team for a few years. 14 Various
outputs came from this work, culminating in the book Les équipements du pouvoir which was originally published as a special issue of the journal Recherches in
1973, and then reissued in 1976. 15 Recherches was the house journal of CERFI, and although all the projects clearly influenced the work, this is very much based on
Fourquet’s research project. 16 The
equipments of power analysed in this book are the three items in the subtitle: towns,
territories and ‘collective equipments’ – équipements collectifs. By these Fourquet and Murard mean something akin to public
amenities or the infrastructure of society. These are tools or utensils that are utilised collectively – roads, transportation and
communication networks, and the more static apparatus of towns. Circulation necessarily plays a crucial role, with the flux
and flow of people, goods and capital as money (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 35). For Fourquet and Murard, these
elements of infrastructure are means of production, or perhaps more accurately the means by which
production can be achieved (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 32). The town is in their terms a ‘collective equipment’,
‘and the network [réseau] of towns distribute capital across the whole of the national territory’ (Fourquet and
Murard, 1976: p. 35). Foucault himself takes place in two dialogues in the book, after the outlining of various ideas by Fourquet and Murard. 17 In the English
translation of the dialogues the order is reversed, and the accompanying material left aside. This makes for a peculiarly decontextualised discussion. Fourquet and
Murard note that the three key terms that they are interested in thinking through are power, territory and production, particularly in their interrelation (Fourquet
and Murard, 1976: p. 7). The stress on power and territory within a broadly Marxist analysis allows for a ‘displacement’ rather than a revision or critique (Fourquet
and Murard, 1976: p. 8). This context is supplemented by an interest in Deleuze and Guattari’s work Anti-Oedipus, and earlier texts which the authors received
while working on this, and an interest in Foucault’s work on madness and the clinic (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 10). The original title of the work, Généalogie
des équipements collectives (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 9) perhaps betrays this Foucaultian influence – a Foucault then engaging with Nietzsche’s ideas in
detail. Indeed in the extended introduction, Fourquet and Murard acknowledge Deleuze and Foucault’s readings of Nietzsche, as well as the pioneering work of
Bataille and Klossowski (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 17). All sorts of Foucaultian themes are found in this work – the use of the panopticon, relations of power
and knowledge, surveillance, control of population and normalisation of individuals and so on. The dating of the material to the early 1970s shows that this relation
was not solely a one-way influence. Murard and Fourquet utilise Foucault’s research on madness, medicine and other issues, but the bulk of the material predates
Discipline and Punish, although there is some editing between the 1973 journal article and the 1976 book. Some of Foucault’s ideas about the division of space in
schools and the control of children’s bodies and medical plans for towns are discussed in this work (see Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 197–8, 210). A range of
other contemporary thinkers are utilised, including those of a more obviously Marxist perspective such as Lefebvre (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 55–6) and
Castells. The ideas of normalisation are explicitly related to Canguilhem, just as Foucault does in his Les Anormaux lectures (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 155, see
7). But the other key role is played by Fernand Braudel, who is mentioned in a number of places (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 7, 10). The book is organised on
the following plan: • La ville-ordinateur – the town-machine • La ville-métaphore – the town-metaphor • Les territoires – territories • Formation des équipements
collectives – formation of collective equipments or facilities • Le discours du plan – the discourse of the plan • Économie politique sans famille – political economy
without the family. In the second dialogue Foucault
takes the example of a road, and suggests that it plays three
strategic functions: to produce production, to produce demand, and to normalise. While the first two are
unsurprising from a Marxist perspective, the third is perhaps most interesting. Production requires transport, the movement of
goods and labour, and the levies or tithes of state power and tax collector. The bandit is an ‘antithetical person’ in
these relations. Demand requires ‘the market, merchandise, buyers and sellers’, it creates a whole system of
coded places of business, regulates prices and goods sold. The inspector, controller or customs agent face-to-face with the
smuggler of contraband, the peddler (Foucault, 1996: p. 106; Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 215–16). Both production and demand are the
subject of the procedure of normalisation, in the adjusting and regulation of these two domains. Foucault talks about the aménagement du
territoire, the control and planning of the land or territory of the state that the road allows. The role of engineers is important both as a product of normalising
power – their education and authentic knowledge – and as its privileged agent. In
opposition to them are those who do not fit the
allowed circuits – the vagabond or the sedentary: ‘in both cases, abnormal’ (Foucault, 1996: p. 216; Fourquet and
Murard, 1976: p. 107). Foucault stresses that this is merely one example of the kind of collective equipment that Fourquet and Murard are analysing. He suggests
that the chronology of the industrial and the disciplinary state – we should note that it is of the state, not society, that he is speaking – do not match up, although
they are correlatives. ‘Education produces producers, it produces those who demand and at the same time, it normalises, classes, divides, imposes rules and
indicates the limit of the pathological’ (Foucault, 1996: p. 107; Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 217–18). Deleuze
responds to this, suggesting
that the three aspects are rather investment, treating someone as a producer in potential or actuality;
control, treating someone as a consumer; the public service aspect, the citizen as a user. Utilising concepts that
he and Guattari would develop in their collaborative work, Deleuze suggests that ‘the highway today is channelled nomadism, a
partitioning into a grid, while public service implies a general nomadism’ (Foucault, 1996: p. 107; Fourquet and Murard,
1976: pp. 217–18). Foucault’s point in response is that the state is tasked with the balancing of production of
production (i.e. supply) with the production of demand. The state’s role in other areas, such as the normalisation undertaken by the
police, hospitals, treatment of the insane, is ambiguous: on the one hand the state’s role expands, but on the other private corporations are part of a process of destatisation. Foucault’s telling point is that the difference between socialist and capitalist utopias is that the latter worked. But now,
instead of private
ventures of this kind, there are ‘housing projects’ that the state must control, that ‘depend on the State apparatus. The
deck has been reshuffled’ (Foucault, 1996: p. 108; Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 218–20). Murard and Fourquet give their own examples, of
hospitals that act as means of production in terms of producing the healthy workforce required by capital.
Transportation networks facilitate biopolitical relations of power
Campbell ‘5 ,David ‘ The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle’ American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3, Legal
Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (Sep., 2005), pp. 943- JSTOR BSH
This theoretical concern
with biopolitical relations of power in the context of networked societies is consistent with
an analytical shift to the problematic of subjectivity as central to understanding the relationship between foreign
policy and identity. That is because both are concerned with "a shift from a preoccupation with physical and isolated entities, whose
relations are described largely in terms of interactive exchange, to beings-in-relation, whose structures [are] decisively influenced by patterns
of connectivity."23A t the same time, while conceptual approaches are moving away from understandings premised on the existence of
physical and isolated entities, the social and political structures that are produced by network patterns of connectivity often appear to be
physical and isolated. As Lieven de Cauter argues, we
don't live in networks; we live in capsules. Capsules are
enclaves and envelopes that function as nodes, hubs, and termini in the various networks and contain a multitude of spaces
and scales. These enclaves can include states, gated communities, or vehicles - with the latter two manifesting the
"SUV model of citizenship" Mitchell has provocativelyd escribed. Nonetheless, though capsules like these appear physical and isolated, there
is "no network without capsules. The more networking, the more capsules. Ergo: the degree of
capsularisation is directly proportional to the growth of networks."The result is that biopolitical
relations of power produce new borderlands that transgress conventional understandings of
inside/outside and isolated/ connected.
Link—Public Transportation
Efficient public transportation fulfills the biopolitical necessity of increasing
population movement and labor extraction while regulating movement and social
interactions
Jeremy Packer, Assistant Professor of Communications at Penn State-University Park, Foucault, Cultural
Studies, and Governmentality, 2003, p. 145-46
The first technique of docility dealt with by Foucault is “the
art of distributions,” mentioned earlier in the discussion of the naval hospital. It
entails the distribution of individuals in space provided through the enclosure of populations, the
partitioning of individuals within that space, the creation of specialized spaces in which only singular
activities took place, and the rank of arrangements through which individuals move. This last point is particularly
important in that individuals are never given a fixed location, but rather their purposefulness is dependent
upon the relative location that they occupy at any given moment. This allows for mobility, yet only in a
very predetermined fashion. For instance, there are very particular places in which one can operate motor vehicles: primarily the road system, with
some ever-decreasing number of off-road areas. The roads themselves only connect certain places, and the quickest routes
generally only connect places of political and economic importance. Furthermore, only certain types of vehicles and modes
of transportation are allowable in these spaces. The second technique is “the control of activity,” which primarily depends upon the allocation of time and the
efficient connection of actor and tools, through the use of time-tables, the standardization of time allowed for actions, the partitioning of actions, and exhaustive
use of time. The control of activities on the road can in a simple way be understood as the rules of the road: one-way streets, stop signs, turn signal use, speed
limits, and so forth. In
the name of efficiency an entire traffic engineering apparatus has been set up to
minimize time spent on roads in order to command the most efficient use of resources. As drivers we
merely serve as transporters of our own resources: time, money, and labor. This creates the third
technique of docility, capitalization of time. It entails the repetitive but gradual acceleration of
proficiency. Thus the Highway Commission is constantly under pressure to produce more proficient drivers through the use of traffic engineering. Whether
automobiles or other forms of public transportation are involved, the often divergent goals of personal mobility and population mobilization frequently derail any
plans to satisfy both desires with one system as Bruno Latour (1996) notes. The last technique described by Foucault is “the
composition of forces.” It
entails the response to a new demand for social efficiency, which is to “construct a machine whose
effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is
composed” (Foucault, 1979, p. 164). Thus the techniques listed above are said to elevate the effectiveness of simple actions into a comprehensive activity~ In
this instance it is paramount that the mobility produced must service other sectors of the social order , most notably the
economy and government. Put simply, these techniques of docility must enable individuals to get to work,
transport goods, go on vacation, get to shopping malls, and go to school in an efficient manner.
Furthermore, the road system needs to operate to keep particular, often less docile, populations off the
streets, away from middle-class suburbs, and without access to quick group mobilization.6
Link—Traffic Safety
Purging transportation of its attendant dangers is a tool to solidify social control
through the ordering of mobility
Jeremy Packer, Assistant Professor of Communications at Penn State-University Park, Foucault, Cultural
Studies, and Governmentality, 2003, p. 135-136
In his “Governmentality” lecture, Michel Foucault (1991) pinpoints Guillaume de La Perrier’s statement in Mirror Politique, one of the first antiMachiavellian treatises on government, “government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end” (Foucault,
1991, p. 93), as the demarcator of the shift from sovereignty to governmentality. According to de La Perrier, and Foucault by extension, ruling
was no longer consumed by the task of simply retaining sovereignty. Rather, it
became the responsibility of rulers to employ
tactics that would benefit the population as well as the State. In place of the goal simply to maintain territory and
loyalty, men and territory were seen as a means to an ends, assuming they were properly disposed. According to Foucault,
the metaphor often used to illustrate this point, in the governing manuals of the eighteenth century, was the governance of a ship (p. 93). This
metaphor speaks to a concern with not only the men on the ship and the potential gain produced by successful shipping, but, importantly, the
avoidance of catastrophes that could befall such an enterprise. It is the choice of this metaphor that I want to elucidate in this essay. It bears
further elaboration because it points out the importance of mobility in the formation of thought concerning governing. In
an increasingly
mobile world, governing mobility consumes greater and greater amounts of mental and physical
resources. A vast literature explains the structural organization, political and economic advantages, and general importance of
transportation and communication systems that crisscross the globe. But more specifically, the disposition of these resources takes place not
personal mobility is primarily achieved through the brute
trucks, buses, trains, motorcycles, and airplanes. This form of mobility plays a vital role in
how individuals organize, rationalize, and inhabit their world. It is at this intersection of governance
and governed (increasingly self-governed) in the realm of the microphysics of power, that the following
analysis of the politics of mobility is located. Quite literally, “individuals are the vehicles of power” (Foucault
1980, p. 98). Personal mobility must therefore be seen as an act of power. An examination of the “net like-organisation” (p.
only on a global or national scale. In contemporary America,
materiality of cars,
98) that binds individual aims and governmental aims can illuminate the important ways that our individual mobile conduct is implicated in,
guided by, and resistant to seemingly detached political, economic, and cultural trends. The relative importance ascribed to Foucault’s work is
often based on his analysis of large-scale processes such as power, discourse, or, more recently, government. The critical orientation that such
generalities provide for current and friture intellectual enterprises is certainly important. However, it needs to remain clear that the specificity
of Foucault’s research was often the microphysics of power and close discursive investigation of key texts that oriented thought at critical
moments. Furthermore, thinking about mobility, like thinking about incarceration or madness, demands detours into discursive territory that is
not necessarily obvious at first. In the case of this essay the
notion of safety has oriented my road map for investigating how
personal mobility is linked to governing. As the ship metaphor makes explicit, an important part of governing in
general and mobility specifically is the avoidance of catastrophe. It is this avoidance—being safe—that
comes to construct thought and ultimately self-reflection about mobility. As Foucault explains, in order for
something to be governed, or imagined as governable, it needs to be problematized (1990b). This is to say that an activity to be
governed needs to be thought of in terms of a problem to be overcome. In this regard, mobility, like
communication (Mattelart, 1996, p. xvi), has historically been seen as an economic, cultural, and political good, but it has been
problematized according to the dangers that it posed.’ The idea of safety serves then as the solution
and provides a normative orientation for mobility. Once this orientation solidifies, as I will argue it has, it
disperses into a vast array of normative contexts, thereby legitimating forms of governance and selfgovernance that have little relation to any specific problematization.
Link—Highways
Highway expansion fortifies class divisions within populations by stratifying social
privileges through the criteria of automobility
Campbell ‘5 ,David ‘ The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle’ American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3, Legal
Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (Sep., 2005), pp. 943- JSTOR BSH
Although constructed as a means to achieve the unification of social life, the
web of traffic routes that permeate urban space have
in practice furthered the fragmentation of the urban and its peri-urban and suburban spaces, creat-ing in
the process new borderlands (which in turn require new capsules of security).The distanciation of life
elements (home from work, family from friends, haves from have nots) that are part of this urban fissure in turn promotes
further reliance on automobility as people seek to overcome, traverse, or bypass these divisions. Importantly, this partitioning
of the urban world has been codified in and encouraged by planning legislation. Embodying a functionalist
view of the city as an organized machine, American urban plan-ners from the 1 920s on relied on a system
of zoning controls that separated uses and imposed homogenous criteria on specified areas. Hostile to mixed usage or
hybrid formations, these uniform zoning codes (known as Euclidean zoning after a 1 926 Supreme Court decision in favor of the village of
Euclid) have produced urban sprawl and the elongation of travel routes.95 In the absence of public transport systems,
these urban forms have further increased reliance on the car. For residents of the border zones known as "edge cities," there is
little choice but to rely on private transport for mobility. Contemporary urban life is both sustained by oil in the form of
the car and requires increasing oil consumption through the use of the car urban life promotes. Citizens are thus coerced into a
limited flexibility, creating a situation that is "a wonderful testament
Impacts
Impact—Normalization
Biopolitical regulation undertaken in the name of human productivity exposes the
entire population to death and totalitarian control
Reid ‘8 Julian Reid, “Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault,”
Foucault on Politics, Security and War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New
York, 2008, p. 89-90
It is in turn in response to this reconceptualisation of war, a war in defence of the state rather than against the state, that we see the
emergence of the discourse of population and the development of the range of biopolitical techniques that guarantee the existence and
proliferation of what George Ensor described classically in 1818 as ‘populousness’ (Ensor, 1967: p. 12). If
state security is, according to
Foucault, the object of war by the end of the eighteenth century, it is also more importantly the strategic object of
war to secure the life of populations themselves. The species life of populations becomes the
battlefield on which these new forms of biopolitical war are to be waged. A war conducted through
the development of security mechanisms that act ‘to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average,
establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general population ... so as
to optimise a state of life’ (Foucault, 2003b: p. 246). The commitment to state security is always by necessity
a commitment to the security of society which is also always a commitment to the security of a
particular form of life. The development of the range of normalising techniques, the constitution of
populations around various discourses of the normal is in turn, Foucault insists, a kind of continual race war.
‘What in fact is racism?’ he asks. It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under
power’s control, the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the
biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that
certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a
way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the
groups that exist within a population. (Foucault, 2003b: pp. 254–5) The constitution of species life itself as the
referent object of the security practices of state power allows for the specification of any and every form of life that
can be held to install degenerative effects within the field of population as the enemy upon which war must be
waged. Not necessarily a war of the military type, but a war of quiet extermination, carried out with the continual
deployment of regulatory and normalising techniques. A war that rages at the heart of modern
societies. A war of the ‘biological type’ (Foucault, 2003b: p. 255). At the same time, then, that we see wars of the military type addressed as
a moral scandal and the major political problematic of modernity, so we see the legitimisation of new forms of warmaking
as the right to kill becomes aligned in proximity to the new necessity to ‘make live’ (Foucault, 2003b: p. 256).
In turn we see the emergence of new practices of colonisation justified on racial grounds. Subsequently
we witness the emergence of fascist states and societies in which the power over life and death,
adjudicated on explicitly racial criteria, is disseminated widely, to the point where everyone has the
power of life and death over his or her neighbours, if only because of the practice of informing, which
effectively means doing away with the people next door, or having them done away with. (Foucault,
2003b: p. 259) Likewise the emergence of socialisms based on the pursuit of the elimination of class enemies within capitalist society emit, for
Foucault, an essential form of racism (Foucault, 2003b: pp. 261–2). These strategies of states, as well as counter-state, counter-hegemonic
struggles, are all fundamentally tied up with this problem of the relations between war, life and security. Once politics is construed as the
continuation of war, once
war becomes conceived as a condition of possibility for life, for the pursuit of its
security and the increase of its being, however that conception may be grounded, the conditions are created whereby life itself
becomes the object for variable forms of destruction, annihilation and quiet exterminations.
Attempting to normalize subjectivity leads to repression, assimilation, and eradication
Connolly ’2 William Connolly, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins
University, Identity/Difference, revised edition, 2002, pp. 88-90
To say that late-modern societies are, among many other things, normalizing societies is not simply to say that
they bestow institutional privilege on a restrictive set of identities and apply intensive institutional
pressures to secure those identities as norms against which a variety of modes of otherness are
defined and excluded. It is also to say that those who endorse these norms tout them as natural or
intrinsically true standards. They claim that the self, the group, the nation, and/or the world would
endorse these standards once they acquired the experience of their intrinsic truth. To translate such a
naturalization of norms into the critical language of normalization is not to gesture toward an order in which no norms exist. For the ethic I
endorse, as we have already seen, accepts the importance of disciplines applied to the self and the group. Such disciplines, though, encourage
the self and the culture to come to terms more affirmatively with contingent, relational elements in established cultural identities and to
cultivate a more generous ethics of engagement between contending constituencies. A
normalizing society treats the small set
of identities it endorses as if they were intrinsically true; this puts it under tremendous pressure to
treat everything that differs from those intrinsic truths to be fundamental threats, deviations, or
failures in need of correction, reform, punishment, silencing, or liquidation. To challenge such a perspective is to
presume that every social identity is a constructed, relational formation that engenders human differences, resistances, remainders, and
surpluses through the very politics of its consolidation. It is, therefore, to resist the drive to translate all of those remainders into modes of
otherness in the futile pursuit of final redemption or completion. Contemporary
social life requires identity (at various
levels) to be, but the dogmatization and universalization of dominant identities translates some of the
very intrasubjective and intersubjective differences through which they are organized and regulated
into modes of otherness to be assimilated, punished, or liquidated. Such a critical perspective does not deny the
necessity of limitations and exclusions. Those who resist the pressures of a normalizing society, indeed, must explore what can be done to
restrict dogmatic constituencies who strive to repress the very differences upon which they depend for their organization. This poses difficult
and dicey issues. But even as those issues are being addressed, it is necessary to find political means by which to expose the dependence of
dogmatic identities upon the differences they vilify. For a
dogmatic identity translates the differences upon which it
depends into modes of otherness to be opposed and condemned, doing so to a degree far surpassing
the requirements of living together when the presumptions of intrinsic identity are reciprocally
resisted by the parties involved. Such a politicization of dogmatic identities forms an essential prelude to the effort to devise
creative ways through which a wider variety of identities can negotiate less violent terms of coexistence. Everyone does not become
the same in a normalizing society. The opposite is more likely to occur. Nor is a normalizing society automatically mobilized
against "the individual." It might, for instance, embody a general conception of the normal individual against
which every difference is appraised. A normalizing society resists the proliferation of affirmative
individualities and positive associational styles. It does so not by making everyone the same, but by
translating the cultural diversity that exists and struggles to exist into perversified diversities. It
identifies multiple deviations from the norms it endorses and then translates them into an impressive
variety of intrinsic perversities. There is thus plenty of variety in a normalizing society. The numerous groups and
individuals who deviate are shuffled into multifarious categories of abnormality, perversity,
incapacity, irrationality, sickness, irresponsibility, personal defect, and so on. These abnormalities
vary across domains (e.g., medical practice and sexual customs), severity (e.g., eccentricity, a sick sense of humor, madness), and
perceived degree of threat to the identity of an entire civilization (e.g., welfare freeloaders, sexual deviants, atheists,
nihilists). A normalizing society, then, proliferates abnormalities, treating the broad array of types that
threaten its claim to correspond to the natural or divine order of things to be in themselves in need of
help, love, self-correction, improvement, or punishment. Its consummate irony is that it fosters the
world of antagonism, violence, and fragmentation to which it purports to be the corrective.
Impact—Freedom
Biopolitics deprives the subject of freedom by enfolding them within a proliferating
web of technicism and expertism
Timothy W. Luke, 2001 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as
comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech
University, “Globalization, Popular Resistance and Postmodernity,” Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2001, pg.
322-323)
Moreover, these professional–technical experts derive power, prestige, and privilege in the collective
quest for greater performative results from ‘their possession of specialized knowledge, based on education,
competitive merit, and experience on the job—in a word, on their human capital’.19 As Lasch argues, they also constitute an
essentially postmodern class that incarnates neoliberalism in everything they do. Living without metanarratives, they are
symbolic analysts, technical experts, and managerial specialists. They also are deterritorialized souls,
‘who live in a world of abstract concepts and symbols, ranging from stock market quotations to the visual images
produced by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and who specialize in the interpretation and deployment of symbolic information’.20 As
postmodern times become those focused on the work of nations, as Reich asserts, the silent
majorities of ‘routine producers’ and ‘inperson servers’ are now becoming very restive over losing
both their metanarrative meanings and most social control over their future to such abstract mobile
minorities of systems-thinking ‘symbolic analysts’.21 Increasingly, the expert exponents of more global
neoliberalism completely miss how much their project contradicts and confounds democracy in the
US. Liberal management by the state or firm may appear to guarantee ‘individual values’, but these
precepts might only be the values of neoliberal experts who believe they are empowered to keep ‘the
people’ equal by impelling them to pursue individuality in an open society, to secure various abstract
enactments of individual rights, and to assist the needier elements of society. Such agendas of enlightened
managerialism from above and without frequently will conflict with those of more selfreliant people struggling to rule themselves as fullyfunctioning democrats in fulfillment of goals chosen by/for/of ‘the people’, and not by liberal statists.22 Many local and regional movements
ask a troubling question: who actually sets the rules of governance, and for whom? Such
elitist statism arguably is
contemporary neoliberalism’s first contradiction. A proliferating panoply of experts, once meant to
assist the life of individuals in states, has come to constrain real democratic choice, reducing
communal self-governance to the individual ratification of expert decisions taken elsewhere. State
and corporate managerialists transmogrify popular democracy into an elitist technocracy legitimated
by formal bureaucratic practices intent upon protecting only their moralizing abstractions , like equal rights
and full entitlements. While real people in many actual communities might choose through open and free democratic means to not accept
affirmative action, to not endorse abortion rights, to not pay for anti-poverty program entitlements, or to not impose restrictive gun control
laws for many locally important reasons,
liberal statists continue to intervene contra-democratically in their lives
to force such statist policies down their throats as ‘the right freedoms’ that they must accept. As Beck
observes, governments now try to reduce risk—to themselves and their constituents—by reprocessing the dangers of democratic governance
into the more predictable certainties of expert rulings.23 Politics becomes
‘sub-politics’, insulating real political
choices from the democratic hurly-burly of popular elections or partisan wrangling, while empowering
small networks of experts to make decisions on the basis of their professional–technical disciplinary
codes in polyarchies of professionalized interest articulation/aggregation where more networks of
other experts make/enforce and interpret the rules. Hence, the main political conflict zones today are no longer
necessarily those between labor and capital, left and right, persons of color and WASPs, or women and men, but rather they are cut along new
contours of control between those who know and those who do not, those who can and do participate in elitist managerial decisiontaking and
those who cannot, or those who intervene in the personal spheres of others and those who cannot.
Territory Module
Links
Link—Security/War
Invocations of a dangerous other threatening the stability of the West place discursive
control in the hands of a national security complex fixated on continual war
Grondin 2004 ((Re)Writing the “National Security State”: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold
War David Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies Association
Convention, March 17-20, 2004, Montreal)
The Cold War national security culture represented in realist discourses was constitutive of the
American national security state. There was certainly a conflation of theory and policy in the Cold War military-intellectual
complex, which “were observers of, and active participants in, defining the meaning of the Cold War. They contributed to portray
the enemy that both reflected and fueled predominant ideological strains within the American body
politic. As scholarly partners in the national security state, they were instrumental in defining and disseminating a Cold War culture” (Rubin,
2001: 15). This national security culture was “a complex space where various representations and
representatives of the national security state compete to draw the boundaries and dominate the
murkier margins of international relations” (Der Derian, 1992: 41). The same Cold War security culture has
been maintained by political practice (on the part of realist analysts and political leaders) through
realist discourses in the post-9/11 era and once again reproduces the idea of a national security state.
This (implicit) state identification is neither accidental nor inconsequential. From a poststructuralist vantage point, the identification
process of the state and the nation is always a negative process for it is achieved by exclusion,
violence, and marginalization. Thus, a deconstruction of practices that constitute and consolidate state identity is necessary: the
writing of the state must be revealed through the analysis of the discourses that constitute it. The state and the discourses that
(re)constitute it thus frame its very identity and impose a fictitious “national unity” on society; it is
from this fictive and arbitrary creation of the modernist dichotomous discourses of inside/outside
that the discourses (re)constructing the state emerge. It is in the creation of a Self and an Other in
which the state uses it monopolistic power of legitimate violence – a power socially constructed,
following Max Weber’s work on the ethic of responsibility – to construct a threatening Other
differentiated from the “unified” Self, the national society (the nation).16 It is through this very practice of normative
statecraft,17 which produces threatening Others, that the international sphere comes into being. David Campbell adds that it is by constantly
articulating danger through foreign policy that the state’s very conditions of existence are generated18.
Link—Terrain
Identifying zones of land as sites for sovereign struggle and competition converts land
into militaristic terrain—this supports and extends the violence essential to modern
statecraft
Stuart Elden, Durham University, “Land, terrain, territory,” Progress in Human Geography 34 (6), 2010,
p. 799-817
The conflict over land indicated by Anderson is significant. Property is important as an indicator, but conflict over land is twofold: both over its possession and
conducted on its terrain. Land is both the site and stake of struggle. In this it differs from conflict over other resources. Strategic-military
reasons thus become significant. As well as seeking to maximize the possession of land as a scarce resource, feudal lords and nascent states were also concerned
with security, management and administration. Defensible
borders, homogeneity and the promotion of territorial
cohesion offer a range of examples – examples that straddle the strategic issues and link closely to the
development of a range of techniques of state practice. France, for example, following the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, began a
process of mapping and surveying its land, employing technical specialists both to map and to reinforce its so-called ‘natural frontiers’. A related term to
that of land is therefore ‘terrain’. This is land that has a strategic, political, military sense. The English ‘territory’,
the French territoire and related terms in other languages derive from quite a specific sense of the Latin territorium. Territorium is an extremely rare term in
classical Latin that becomes common in the Middle Ages. The standard definition is the land belonging to a town or another entity such as a religious order. It is
used, for instance, by Cicero (1858: volume IV, 522) for the agricultural lands of a colony, and in phrases such as that describing the birthplace of the Venerable
Bede in his Ecclesiastical history. Bede (Colgrave and Mynors, 1969: v, 24) is described as being born ‘in territorio eiusdem monasterii’, ‘in lands belonging to the
monastery’. This monastery was Jarrow in northeast England. In Alfred the Great’s Anglo-Saxon translation, Bede was born ‘on sundorlonde of the monastery’,
outlying lands, lands sundered from the estate itself, but under its possession, and thus it has been claimed that this is the basis for the name of the town
Sunderland, although it is not clear that it was this sundorlonde (Brown, 1855: 277, 280; Colgrave, 1969: xix). As a number of writers have discussed, the etymology
of territorium is disputed, with the meaning of the place around a town supplemented by that of a place from which people are warned or frightened (see, for
example, Connolly, 1995; Neocleous, 2003; Hindess, 2006). The Latin terrere is to frighten, deriving from the Greek trein meaning to flee from fear, to be afraid, and
the Sanskrit, trasati, meaning he trembles, is afraid. This means that the term territory has an association with fear and violence, an association that is more
compelling in history than etymology. As argued elsewhere, ‘creating
a bounded space is already a violent act of exclusion
and inclusion; maintaining it as such requires constant vigilance and the mobilization of threat; and
challenging it necessarily entails a transgression’ (Elden, 2009: xxx). Terrain is of course a term used by physical geographers and
geologists. Yet all too often the term terrain is used in a very vague sense. Evans (1998: 119), for instance, notes that ‘to some of us, ‘‘terrain analysis’’ means,
especially, quantitative analysis of terrain’, thus seeing a greater need to qualify the mode, rather than object, of analysis. Terrain is seen as land form, rather than
process (Lane et al., 1998; see also Lawrence et al., 1993; Wilson and Gallant, 2000). It is also a term used by military strategists. Yet there is a relation as well as a
separation, with knowledge of battlefield terrain essential to military success. There are a number of important studies of different military campaigns and the
question of terrain, but little conceptual precision (see, for example, Parry, 1984; Winters, 1998; Rose and Nathanail, 2000; Doyle and Bennett, 2002a).10 For Doyle
and Bennett (2002b: 1), terrain ‘encompasses both the physical aspects of earth’s surface, as well as the human interaction with them’. At times terrain seems to be
landscape devoid of life, as it is when targeting of cities is discussed without reference to those living within it, or it is reduced from a concrete materiality to a level
of virtuality. Max Weber’s analysis of the historical development of the state, and Michael Mann’s study of the changing dynamics of power (Mann, 1986; 1993),
where they do discuss territory, could be seen to be operating in a way that sees territory as terrain, a political-strategic relation. In his interview with the
geographers of the H´ erodote journal, Foucault deflects their inquiry about his use of spatial categories, suggesting that they are not primarily geographical, but
instead shot through with power. As he declares, ‘territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it’s first of all a juridico-political one: the area controlled by a
certain kind of power’ (Foucault, 2007: 176). As his interviewers respond, ‘certain spatial metaphors are equally geographical and strategic, which is only natural
since geography grew up in the shadow of the military’ (p. 177). They make the explicit linkage between the region of geographers and the commanded region,
fromregere; the conquered territory of a province, from vincere; and the field as battlefield. Foucault then notes how ‘the
politico-strategic term is
an indication of how the military and administration actually come to inscribe themselves both on a
material soil and within forms of discourse’ (p. 177). Lefebvre offers further concrete and compelling discussion of this relation (see also
Lefebvre, 1974: 133; 1991: 122; 2009; Brenner and Elden, 2009): Sovereignty implies ‘space’, and what is more it implies a space against
which violence, whether latent or overt, is directed – a space established and constituted by violence . . . Every
state is born of violence, and state power endures only by virtue of violence directed towards a space .
. . At the same time, too, violence enthroned a specific rationality, that of accumulation, that of the bureaucracy and the army – a
unitary, logistical, operational and quantifying rationality which would make economic growth possible and draw strength from that growth for its own expansion to
a point where it would take possession of the entire planet. A founding violence, and continuous creation by violence (by fire
and blood, in Bismarck’s phrase) – such are the hallmarks of the state. (Lefebvre, 1974: 322–33; 1991: 280) What is central in Lefebvre’s reading is the relation
between accumulation, violence and the ‘unitary, logistical, operational and quantifying rationality’. For Lefebvre this highlights the limitations of a politicaleconomic reading of territory as land: ‘Neither Marx and Engels nor Hegel clearly perceived the violence at the core of the accumulation process . . . and thus its role
in the production of a politico-economic space. This space was of course the birthplace and cradle of the modern state (Lefebvre, 1974: 322; 1991: 279; see also pp.
413/358).
Link—Arctic Territory
The primary issue underlying Arctic concerns is a question of territory and borders.
What is at stake is a method of delineating an inside and outside to feed a desire for
security
Klaus Dodds, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, “Flag planting and
finger pointing: The Law of the Sea, the Arctic and the political geographies of the outer continental
shelf,” Political Geography, Vol. 29, Issue 2, February 2010, p. 63-73, Elsevier
The ongoing claims to OCS and maritime resources, alongside with debates about the trans-continental
accessibility of the Arctic, has attracted considerable popular and formal geopolitical speculation.
According to some commentators, the Arctic is on the threshold of a political and environmental state-change (e.g. Berkman & Young, 2009).
Sea ice thinning in particular is held to be primarily responsible for stimulating renewed interest in the
Arctic as a resource rich space awaiting further development and exploitation. Moreover, as a
consequence of these potential shifts, it is claimed that we are witnessing the prospect of further schisms
emerging over maritime claims to the Arctic Ocean. As Berkman and Young (2009: 339) warn, “The Arctic could slide into a
new era featuring jurisdictional conflicts, increasingly severe clashes over the extraction of natural resources, and the emergence of a new
‘great game’ among the global powers”. Claims
to OCS are only one element, therefore, in a wider discursive
reconfiguration of the Arctic. Repeated warnings concerning the thinning of Arctic sea ice have
contributed to increasingly strategic debate concerning the region's accessibility not only in the form
of shipping lanes (e.g. the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route) but also as an energy/resource frontier. What
is at stake here, I believe, is a competing sense of territorial legibility, most notably over the maritime Arctic. The
ongoing attempt of the coastal states to map and survey their continental shelves is one powerful
manifestation of that desire, in the words of the US led Extended Continental Shelf Project, for ‘certainty’ and
‘recognition’. Informing, and indeed enhancing, that desire for those aforementioned qualities is a
whole series of ‘bordering practices’ ranging from demarcating the outer continental shelf to
speculating about new fears of illegal trans-shipment and illicit flows through an ice-free Arctic. What,
however, is clear is that those Arctic coastal states seeking ‘certainty’ and ‘recognition’ will have to do so in a world much changed form the
Cold War era when extra-territorial actors and indigenous communities were either marginal or marginalised, respectively (cf. Osherenko &
Young, 1989).
Peaceful expeditions into the Arctic cannot be divorced from their demarcating
functions. The plan is an apparatus of control designed to efficiently map and
demarcate territory for effective governance.
Klaus Dodds, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, “Flag planting and
finger pointing: The Law of the Sea, the Arctic and the political geographies of the outer continental
shelf,” Political Geography, Vol. 29, Issue 2, February 2010, p. 63-73, Elsevier
In his highly suggestive book, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James Scott poses the
question of what kinds of conditions need to exist for the state to intervene in an attempt to engineer particular outcomes for its population
(Scott, 1999). As Scott (1999: 2) expatiates, “How
did the state gradually get a handle on its population and their
environments?” While he is excoriating subsequent attempts of states to engage in social engineering, attention is drawn to a
series of modernist conceits such as confidence in the progress of science and mastery over nature,
which have animated many state-sponsored interventions such as Soviet collectivization (Scott, 1999: 89). Whether examining Soviet Russia or
post-colonial Tanzania, his
analytical framework is informed by a concern for how populations and territories
were made ‘legible’ via cadastral surveys, statistics and mapping. The capacities a state possesses to make its
population and territory legible are thus shown to be inevitably double-edged – there is usually a high
price to be paid for grand plans designed at a distance and implemented with little appreciation for
local communities and environments. Scott's arguments seem highly pertinent for a region such as the seabed beneath the
central Arctic Ocean, which after all few will ever actually see let alone experience. During the Cold War, however, the crews contained within
American and Soviet submarines came as close to anyone to the subterranean world of the Arctic Basin. Rapidly appreciating that the Arctic
barely separated the two superpowers, both the United States and the Soviet Union invested billions of dollars and roubles in an attempt to
understand better the surface and sub-surface properties of the Arctic Ocean. The challenges posed by ice depth and spread, changeable water
temperature and inclement weather were sizeable. In the post-war period, for example, civilian and military based institutions such as the
Office of Naval Research funded Arctic Research Laboratory (ARL) occupied the vanguard of scientific research ( [Doel et al., 2005] and [Farish,
2006]). The ARL's Committee on Oceanography, alongside the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the US Navy Hydrographic Office were
eager to map and survey the seabed north of Port Barrow in Alaska all the way to the North Pole (Leary & LeSchack, 1996: 44). Making
the
seabed of the Arctic Ocean legible was critical to US maritime strategy throughout the Cold War. Military
planners, as with their Soviet counterparts, wanted to know more about this particular theatre for two fundamental reasons. First, the US
Navy wanted to be able to track and monitor the movements of their Soviet counterparts, especially if
ice cover made aerial surveillance problematic. Second, armed with superior oceanographic and
bathymetric knowledge of the Arctic, it was hoped that the US would have a decisive military
advantage in the event of war breaking out between the two superpowers and their allies. The collection
of such information was aided and abetted by a series of drifting ice stations, which used echo-sounding techniques to collect under ice
acoustic data. Soviet and US drifting ice stations, operating during the International Geophysical Year of 1957–1958, contributed further to this
task even if data collected was not shared in the same manner as was experienced in the Antarctic. Both
states were determined
to make the Arctic Ocean legible for geopolitical reasons. A major turning point was the voyage of the nuclear powered
US submarine Nautilus in 1958 and its sub-surface voyage to the North Pole followed in March 1959 by the surfacing of the Skate at the same
geographical point. These voyages gave fresh impetus to the Office of Naval Research and both voyages demonstrated that nuclear submarines
could operate in all seasons, and with greater understanding of the Arctic Ocean Basin, it became increasingly feasible to detect and avoid
icebergs and judge when and how to break surface ice. This
expanding corpus of geographical knowledge about the
Arctic and North Atlantic coincided with civilian mapping projects, funded by the Defense Research Development
Board, designed to enhance understanding of the seabed floor and temperature profile of the oceans. As Hamblin (2005) has noted,
“Reliable
data would allow the US Navy to colonize this environment i.e. control or master it in order
to best navigate it in the next war”. While the Cold War had subsided, this desire to make Arctic territory legible
has taken a different kind of turn in the last decade informed as much by changing sea ice patterns,
seaborne mobility, and resource speculation as they are by military-strategic rationales ( [Lopez, 1988] and
[Bravo and Rees, 2006]). What emerges is a sense of the Arctic as a palimpsest – quite literally ‘again scraped’. As
colonial, Cold War and now War on Terror era rationales and representations intermingle with one
another. Adriana Craciun is right in part to remind us that, “They have come by airship, plane, balloon, nuclear submarine, and most
recently by Russian mini-sub… Scientists predict an ice-free Arctic Ocean in a few decades, at which point one might think that the ‘Northwest
Passage’ will cease to mean anything”. Where I disagree is the notion that meaning somehow disappears rather than enriching multiple
legibilities of the Arctic. Geographers such as Matthew [Hannah, 2000] and [Hannah, 2009] have turned to Michel Foucault's suggestive writings
on governmentality and calculable territory to re-configure what made the modern governance of populations possible. Drawing on Scott's
arguments pertaining to legibility, Hannah (2009: 68) shows clearly how there
are a series of important moments including
inscribing territory with “basic systems of geographical reference that allow knowledge about
populations, resources and activities to be indexed to specific locations, and hence make territory
readable”. The 2007 Russian expedition to the bottom of the central Arctic Ocean was preoccupied with the collection of bathymetric and
oceanographic data (see Fig. 3). The mapping and subsequent public display of that knowledge of the Arctic
seabed is an essential element of what we will subsequently be considering – extending sovereign
rights over outer continental shelf regions.
Exploring and opening the Arctic is intimately linked with the governmental practice
of bordering and identifying domestic spaces which must be protected from foreign
threats, as well as a colonial mythology of economic expansion
Klaus Dodds, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, “Flag planting and
finger pointing: The Law of the Sea, the Arctic and the political geographies of the outer continental
shelf,” Political Geography, Vol. 29, Issue 2, February 2010, p. 63-73, Elsevier
The inscription of Arctic territory including remote areas of the seabed by coastal states and international bodies such as the CLCS
makes it both more legible and accessible – although in this case accessibility is unusual in the sense that it is likely to only
apply to scientists and their logistical sponsors including civilian and military agencies such as the US Coast Guard. Access to these
territories will, because of their remoteness, inevitably be conditioned by variable sea ice/weather. The
CLCS requested that the Russian authorities conduct further oceanographic research in the central Arctic Ocean following their 2001 submission
to this UN body. What has changed in the intervening period, however, was this
attempt to calculate subterranean territory
was further heightened by a growing awareness of an Arctic being changed by ice melting and debates
over accessibility involving a range of parties including coastal and non-coastal states. The establishment of
calculable territory depends on underwater interventions and the travails of mini-submarines and survey vessels are helping
to create the conditions for further sovereign interventions. The map and the survey are one element
of this intervention but so are other kinds of activities and practices. In a speech to an audience in the Canadian
Arctic, the Canadian Prime Minister noted that: But you can't defend Arctic sovereignty with words
alone…It takes a Canadian presence on the ground, in the air and on the sea and a Government that is
internationally recognized for delivering on its commitments. And I am here today to make it absolutely clear there is
no question about Canada's Arctic border…All along the border, our jurisdiction extends outward 200 miles into the surrounding sea, just as it
does along our Atlantic and Pacific coastlines…Some in the opposition dismiss our focus on northern sovereignty as expensive and
unnecessary…Some have actually come to the North and suggested our plans here are a waste of money. To that I say, government's
first obligation is to defend the territorial integrity of its borders…This is Nunavut – “Our Land” – just as Yukon and
the Northwest Territories and the entire Arctic Archipelago are “Our Land” (Harper, 2006). Notwithstanding the Prime Minister's extraordinary
appropriation of the Inuit term ‘Nunavut’, it does give an indication of the apparent stakes. Making
territory legible, especially in
the absence of the protective covering of ice, raises the spectre of intrusion and transgression even in
areas where citizens will never see let alone walk over. And as one commentator has recently noted, the legibility
of the Arctic carries with not just contemporary anxieties but longer colonial trajectories, “…the
Northwest Passage has long been regarded not as a distinct place, but as a threshold to a desired
place elsewhere, be it the commercial riches of China, natural resources in the High Arctic, or the
paradise imagined to exist at the ice-free North Pole…” (Craciun, 2009: 14). The spectre of an ice-free North
Pole is unquestionably one of the most powerful incentives to make those subterranean territories
legible. It also helps to explain and legitimate a special kind of icy geopolitics (Dodds, 2008). Mobilising
terms such as ‘borders’, ‘our land’ and ‘presence’, Prime Minister Harper helped to conjure up the
exceptional – the Arctic as an exceptional space, which demands extraordinary measures to make
sure that Canadians care as much as the Arctic as they might about the Bay of Fundy. In Canada's case, new
investment in icebreakers, military bases, scientific mapping and enhanced homeland security
measures were initiated ( [Heubert, 2009] and [Byers, 2009]). As we shall see, however, those attempts to intervene and to enhance
legibility are rarely straightforward in a remote environment strongly shaped by ocean currents, sea ice formation and extreme weather. The
Arctic, notwithstanding the desires and demands of coastal states and their political representatives,
is a lively space.
Link—Arctic War
Framing the Arctic as an anarchic site for security competition reinforces a militaryindustrial trajectory which builds and preys upon political anxiety to justify violence
Klaus Dodds, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, “Flag planting and
finger pointing: The Law of the Sea, the Arctic and the political geographies of the outer continental
shelf,” Political Geography, Vol. 29, Issue 2, February 2010, p. 63-73, Elsevier
This episode formed the backdrop to this paper, which was originally a wide-ranging lecture on the Polar Regions presented to the 2009 Nordic
Geographers Meeting, held in Finland. My concern here is to use this moment in 2007 as an exemplar of Arctic territorialities, which is then
informed by recent discussions on calculable territory, sovereignty and territorial legibility (for example, Agnew, 2005; [Blomley, 1994] and
[Blomley, 2003]; [Clark et al., 2008] and [Crampton, 2006]; [Elden, 2007] and [Elden, 2009]; Hannah, 2009). This flagging incident seemed to me
to present an opportunity to reflect on how Arctic territories are being made legible and re-legible for the purpose of intervention and/or
management. Legibility, as such, allows for all sorts of textual and visual interventions (see Fig. 1). As a widely cited Foreign Affairs journal
article noted in the aftermath of the 2007 Russian flagging, “The situation is especially dangerous because there are currently no overarching
political and legal structures that can provide for the orderly development of the region or mediate political disagreements over Arctic
resources or sea-lanes” (Borgerson, 2008: 71). Accordingly, a
nightmarish neo-realist vision of international politics
with the central Arctic Ocean as an anarchic space, at the apparent mercy of the competing
geopolitical imperatives of coastal states and other interested parties, is brought to the fore (see also
Baev, 2007). As a consequence of such a scenario, the management of the Arctic emerges as a latter day
Sisyphean challenge ( [Heininen, 2005] and [Heininen and Nicol, 2007]; Dodds, 2008; [Dalby, 2009] and [Rothwell, 2009]). Given the
enduring legacies of Arctic militarization alongside the tangled contours of the military–industrial–
academic complex (Barnes, 2008), this framing of the Arctic, as a poorly regulated space invested with
considerable resource potential, is not inconsequential (for other analyses, [Chaturvedi, 1996], [Chaturvedi, 2000] and
[Lackenbauer and Farish, 2007]). Growing evidence of material changes such as sea ice thinning (and with
consequences for seaborne accessibility via the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route) and new
resource assessments by state agencies such as the US Geological Survey (Bird et al., 2008) have added gist to the
neo-realist mill. Maps of biophysical changes, polar sea-lanes, actual and possible maritime claims and
resource potential have also enriched a particular sense of the Arctic as a site of intensifying
geopolitical competition, and what Didier Bigo has termed, the ‘circulation of security unease’ (Bigo, 2002). As the
Canadian scholar, Michael Byers informed his readers, “An ice-free Northwest Passage could also serve as an entry point for drugs, guns and
illegal immigrants”. In Canada and elsewhere including the United States, there
is evidence of a kind of domopolitics, which as
Walters (2004: 241) has noted involves, “[a] rationalization of series of security measures in the name of a
particular conception of home” against a backdrop of anxiety about heightened mobility.
Link—Arctic Treaties
The abstract and deterritorialized nature of legal regimes encourages global
incorporation of Arctic resources—the profit motive and demand for energy empties
the arctic of any immanent territoriality in favor of the interests of global capital
Klaus Dodds, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, “Flag planting and
finger pointing: The Law of the Sea, the Arctic and the political geographies of the outer continental
shelf,” Political Geography, Vol. 29, Issue 2, February 2010, p. 63-73, Elsevier
The directive was a significant intervention in terms of US Arctic policy, which has rarely merited a strategic overview in the post Cold War era, with the partial
exception of the
1994 Arctic review under the Clinton Administration. Significantly, the paper opens with the declaration that
‘The United States is an Arctic nation’ and that this realization is not limited to simply acknowledging the presence of the state of Alaska.
Echoing the strategic discourse of the post 9/11 security environment, terms such as ‘homeland
security’ are invoked in order to convey the significance of the Arctic in terms of resource potential,
accessibility and threat potential. Significantly, the Directive urges “The Senate should act favorably on US accession to the UN Convention on
the Law of the Sea promptly, to protect and advance US interests, including with respect to the Arctic” (United States, 2009). This is noteworthy
following a raft of public commentary regarding the Russian flag planting in the Arctic Ocean, which
warned that the US was ‘losing out’ in the process. As The New York Times noted in October 2007, “…the steady retreat of the
sea ice in the Arctic Ocean…has touched off a scramble among nations to determine who owns what
on the ocean floor. Unless the United States ratifies the treaty, it will not have a seat at the table
when it comes time to sort out competing claims” (New York Times, 2007). As a non-signatory to UNCLOS, this
editorial and others warned that the US was going to be excluded from OCS delimitation and potential
resource exploitation. In contradistinction to the Bush administration's suspicion of international agencies and legal regimes, UNCLOS was routinely
presented as an opportunity for the US to expand its territorial domain with international approval rather than disparaged as acting imperially. Despite its nonsignatory status, the Bush administration approved investment to the so-called Extended Continental Shelf Project (ECSP). The strategic rationale for the ECSP has
been noted as being: The United States has an inherent national interest in knowing, and declaring to others with specificity, the extent of our sovereign rights with
regard to the US extended continental shelf. Certainty and international recognition are important in establishing the necessary stability for development,
conservation and protection of these areas, likely rich in resources (ECSP, 2009). Supported by a number of US agencies and fronted by the University of New
Hampshire, the ECSP has since 2001 been involved in collecting material relating to the OCS. One of the primary objectives of the ECSP was to establish where
geographical knowledge of the OCS off US territories was incomplete. Since 2002, the Gulf of Alaska, Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea have witnessed bathymetric data
collection, which is held by the US Nation Geophysical Data Center and Joint Hydrographic Center. The ECSP is redolent, albeit for different reasons, of earlier Cold
War era investment in the mapping of the seabed – with ‘certainty’ being an important source of continuity with the recent past. However, until the US becomes
party to UNCLOS then it will not be able to seek a CLCS recommendation and possible wider international recognition. If the Senate approved US accession to
UNCLOS, the US would have ten years to submit materials to the CLCS. As former Under-Secretary John Negroponte noted in 2007, “Setting aside its recent flag
planting…Russia's continuing data collection in the Arctic reflects its commitment to maximizing its sovereign rights under the Convention over energy resources in
that region. Currently, as a non-party, the United States is not in a position to maximize its sovereign rights in the Arctic or elsewhere. We do not have access to the
[U.N.] Commission [on the Limits of the Continental Shelf]'s procedures for according international recognition and legal certainty to our extended shelf”
(Negroponte, 2007). One key reason why accession to UNCLOS would prove attractive to both the US government and commercial sectors is that it provides a more
stable international legal environment based on a widespread recognition of the authority of the CLCS to issue recommendations on OCS. Given the interest in
hydrocarbon potential this is highly significant in terms of commercial investor confidence, as interest has been expressed in the offshore potential of the Chukchi
and Beaufort Seas off the state of Alaska. In February 2008, for example, major corporations such as Shell and Conoco Philips bid for exploration leases in the
Chukchi Sea. Other areas such as the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) have attracted attraction, while at the same provoking fierce debates about the
sustainability let alone desirability of further hydrocarbon development (on the visual politics of the ANWR see Dunaway, 2006). Underlying
this
debate about UNCLOS and US Arctic strategy (as witnessed in the 2009 National Security Presidential Directive) is uncertainty
about how to define the Arctic within the spatial imagination of the country. For proponents of UNCLOS,
OCS delimitation represents a frontier of possibility, which the US can only realise when it accedes to
the provisions of the 1982 Convention. For critics such as the right wing Heritage Foundation, however, “The United States
should continue to behave in the international arena as a sovereign and independent nation and not
as a country that looks to the United Nations or the “international community” to determine its own
rights”. In other words, according to at least one analyst, there was no need to accede to UNCLOS because of the existence of the 1945 Truman Proclamation
(Groves, 2007). A-5: coastal states, Law of the Sea and the Arctic As the coastal states of the Arctic seek to clarify their own OCS limits, they have also acted
collectively with regard to establishing a regional legal and political order. In May 2008, the Arctic Five (A-5, my term) of Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the
United States issued the so-called Ilulissat Declaration, which noted that: The Law of the Sea provides for important rights and obligations concerning the
delimitation of the outer limits of the continental shelf, the protection of the marine environment, including ice-covered seas, freedom of navigation, marine
scientific research and other uses of the sea (Ilulissat Declaration, 2008). The five signatories also noted that they were committed to UNCLOS as a mechanism for
resolving any ‘overlapping claims’. As such the Declaration also announced that: This framework provides a solid foundation for responsible management by the five
coastal States and other users of this Ocean through national implementation and application of relevant provisions. We therefore see no need to develop a new
comprehensive international legal regime to govern the Arctic Ocean. We will keep abreast of the developments in the Arctic Ocean and continue to implement
appropriate measures (Ilulissat Declaration, 2008). What
was noteworthy was the decision of the five coastal states to
issue such a declaration and the words to accompany this expression of geo-power. To echo the sentiments of
Thrift (2000) and his short intervention on ‘it's the little things’, the use of words such as ‘we’ is highly significant in expressing
a form of geo-power. In so doing, this Declaration signed by the five coastal states explicitly excluded
other members of the Arctic Council, a regional body established in the 1990s. The excluded three of
Finland, Iceland and Sweden were reportedly unhappy with this development, which in turn raises questions as to
whether there will be an A-5 for issues pertaining to maritime sovereignty in the Arctic Ocean and an A-8 for other affairs pertaining to the business of the Arctic
Council. Moreover, the statement's claim that the ‘Arctic Ocean stands at the threshold of significant changes’ is significant because the spectre of further
environmental degradation was deployed to justify their assertion that the A-5 are best placed to secure the current and future condition of the Arctic. In their
statement at the Inuit Leaders' Summit on Arctic Sovereignty in November 2008, however, Inuit representatives from North America and Greenland took issue with
the Declaration: We took note of various declarations and statements made by governments and industry regarding overlapping claims and assertions of Arctic
sovereignty without full regard to Inuit concerns and rights…We further asserted that any claim of sovereignty that nation states may make is derived through the
use and occupancy by Inuit of lands and seas in the Arctic…Concern was expressed among us leaders gathered in Kuujjuaq that governments were entering into
Arctic sovereignty discussions without the meaningful involvement of Inuit, such as the May, 2008 meeting of five Arctic ministers in Ilulissat, Greenland. The
Kuujjuaq summit noted while the Ilulissat Declaration asserts that is the coastal nation states that have sovereignty and jurisdiction over the Arctic Ocean, it
completely ignores the rights Inuit have gained through international law, land claims and self government processes (Inuit Leaders, 2008). While the Ilulissat
Declaration acknowledges the presence of ‘local inhabitants and indigenous communities’, Inuit communities have frequently warned that the Arctic coastal states
have been eager to assert national sovereignty at the expense of recognising the Arctic as a populated space with aspirations and demands regarding selfhood and
cultural security. This was followed by a declaration of sovereignty by the Inuit Circumpolar Conference in April 2009, which noted: As states increasingly focus on
the Arctic and its resources, and as climate change continues to create easier access to the Arctic, Inuit inclusion as active partners is central to all national and
international deliberations on Arctic sovereignty and related questions, such as who owns the Arctic, who has the right to traverse the Arctic, who has the right to
develop the Arctic, and who will be responsible for the social and environmental impacts increasingly facing the Arctic. We have unique knowledge and experience
to bring to these deliberations. The inclusion of Inuit as active partners in all future deliberations on Arctic sovereignty will benefit both the Inuit community and the
international community (Inuit Circumpolar Conference, 2009). The Declaration also reaffirmed their unhappiness that the 2008 Ilulissat Declaration on the five
Arctic coastal states gave insufficient recognition to Inuit rights ( [Bravo, 2008] and [Nuttall, 2008]). Regionalizing the Arctic: Europe and a ‘special region’ While the
five coastal states sought to reinforce their ‘special relationship’ with the Arctic on the basis of geographical proximity, the European Parliament and European
Commission in October and November 2008, respectively, reasserted a distinctly European interest in the Arctic. In a press release, via Commissioner Joe Borg, the
European Commission (EC) calls into question the ability of the five Arctic coastal states to manage and regulate the region: Quite obviously, the challenges faced by
the Arctic cannot be met by the coastal countries in the region alone. Many international players have to take their responsibility, and in particular the European
Union. Arctic challenges and opportunities will have significant repercussions on the life of European citizens and the rest of the world for generations to come…No
country or group of countries have sovereignty over the North Pole or the Arctic Ocean around it. As there is no specific treaty regime for the Arctic, the European
Commission favours a co-operative Arctic governance system based on the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea…beyond those international conventions, it is
important to strengthen dialogue between states and stakeholders on Arctic matters (Borg, 2008). While acknowledging the role of UNCLOS and the Arctic coastal
states, the EC also notes the role of other ‘stakeholders’. Indeed the ‘North Pole’ and central Arctic Ocean are important geographical markers, helping to
consolidate this sense that the Arctic is not the exclusive province of the A-5. Rather than seeking to discover the North Pole, this point on the earth's surface
becomes a zone of opportunity to press counter-claims to the managerial authority of geographically proximate states. In a follow up statement on EU policy
towards the Arctic, Commissioner Borg noted in January 2009 that: The European Union has close historical and geographical links to the Arctic…the changing face
of the Arctic impacts upon European security, trade and supply of resources…The main legal framework and tool for managing the Arctic Ocean and its resources is
the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, which establishes the notion of a ‘common heritage of mankind’. The Arctic Ocean therefore
concerns not only its coastal states. Its sound management and the preservation of its resources is an obligation for all countries and signatories to UNCLOS…All of
us in a position to make and influence policy must recognise the need to contribute to the decisive international action we need for the Arctic in order to preserve
our common heritage (European Union, 2009). The reference to ‘common heritage’ is, therefore, highly noteworthy and highlights how the provisions
of
UNCLOS provide opportunities for more geographically distant actors to take an active interest in a
particular maritime space. As the CLCS issues recommendations on OCS claims so it will become clearer as to the extent, if at all, of common
heritage spaces within the Arctic Ocean. It is important to bear in mind that, even after OCS claims have been asserted, marine living resource management and
surface navigation will remain live issues for other users.
Link—Outer Continental Shelf
The outer continental shelf is an object constituted through scientific discourse to
expand states’ territorial claims. This incorporation of science and land into legal
norms creates hierarchies of control centered around those with the resources most
capable of Arctic exploration.
Klaus Dodds, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, “Flag planting and
finger pointing: The Law of the Sea, the Arctic and the political geographies of the outer continental
shelf,” Political Geography, Vol. 29, Issue 2, February 2010, p. 63-73, Elsevier
Under Article 76(1) of UNCLOS, coastal states are entitled to assert rights over a 200 nautical mile
continental shelf provided that there are no overlapping claims via neighbouring states. As the Article
states: Information on the limits of the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles from the baselines from which the breadth of the territorial
sea is measured shall be submitted by the coastal State to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf set up under Annex II on the
basis of equitable geographical representation. The Commission shall make recommendations to coastal States on matters related to the
establishment of the outer limits of their continental shelf. The limits of the shelf established by a coastal State on the basis of these
recommendations shall be final and binding (UNCLOS, 1982). Moreover, a
coastal state might be able to assert rights over
that part of the continental shelf that extends beyond the 200 NM limit provided that it forms part of
the natural prolongation. Article 76 provides two formulae according to which coastal states can use to establish the basis of the
continental shelf beyond the 200 NM limit. They also help to establish the so-called cut off points as well. Both of formulae are based on
the assumption that any extension is measured from the base of the continental slope. The so-called
Gardiner Line proposes that a claim to OCS can be established with reference to the depth/thickness
of sedimentary rocks overlying the continental crust. Whereas the Hedberg Line uses a distance
formula, starting from the foot of the continental shelf. The coastal state making a submission to the CLCS is entitled to
use whichever formula is most advantageous. Article 76 also establishes certain outer limits to any OCS submission. The first involves 350 NM
from the baseline from which the territorial sea is measured. In other words, any claim to the OCS cannot extend beyond 150 NM of the EEZ.
The second restraint is that the OCS cannot extend beyond 2500 m in terms of water depth. Preparing
a submission regarding
OCS delimitation is costly and time consuming and requires detailed geo-scientific information on the
area in question ranging from geological data to depth and shape of seabed in question. Moreover, the
establishment of distance measurements from a coastal state's baselines is also critical in terms of
preparing maps of OCS. Applying sediment thickness (seismic analysis), locating the 2500 m isobath line (bathymetric analysis) and the
location of the foot of the continental slope (geological analysis) are difficult and problematic issues not least because it is fundamentally an
interpretative process. In the light of these potential ambiguities, it
is perhaps not surprising that the CLCS has
encouraged, where possible, collective and co-ordinated submissions from coastal states especially in
regions that are shared and possibly contentious. One area of contention, which has direct relevance
to the central Arctic Ocean, is the question of ridges. Distinguishing between submarine ridges and
elevations is not merely a semantic question, with regard to submarine ridges the 350 NM limit applies whereas elevations
are judged to be natural components of the continental margin. As Benitah (2007) has noted with reference to the Russian submission, “This
leaves the possibility that Russia claims that parts of the ridges are in fact ‘submarine elevations that
are natural components of the continental margin’. This position would remove the 350 outer line
constraint for its claimed ridge points as long as these points satisfy the 2500 m isobath + 100 miles
formula”. As my CLCS interviewee noted, “Mid oceanic ridges are relatively easy to recognise…other types of
ridges…Lomonosov…they might be atypical…and thus harder to identify” (CLCS, 2009). But as the submission
process and its aftermath have made clear, distinguishing between geopolitics, law and science is far
from unproblematic. Since the Russian submission to the CLCS in 2001, the five coastal states of the Arctic region have participated in a
discursive and material engagement, which has been described as a kind of ‘state-change’ (Young, 2009). The Russian submission was the first
ever to the CLCS and contained details on the Barents Sea, the Bering Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk and the Central Arctic Ocean. In response, the
CLCS in 2002 suggested that in the case of the Central Arctic that Russia make a revised submission based on the CLCS' findings contained
within the recommendation. With regard to the Barents and Bering Seas, the Russians were encouraged to the limits of OCS once the maritime
boundaries between it and Norway and the United States entered into force. In doing so, the CLCS' recommendations were significant in so far
as they recognized not only the presence of other interested coastal states but also suggested a revised submission. In the case of the Central
Arctic Ocean, Russia was presented with opportunity to re-submit in the aftermath of additional fieldwork. This has solidified a view that the
CLCS is willing to have an ongoing engagement with individual coastal states regarding their submission on OCS delimitation. Under Annex II
Article 8 of the LOSC provision exists for a coastal state to make a revised submission ‘within a reasonable time’ and in the case of Russia will be
later than the ten-year deadline of May 2009. While the actual content of a CLCS recommendation remains confidential, a ‘reasonable time’
might be considerable in practice especially if a coastal state is asked to provide further data on the continental shelf, as is suspected with
regard to the Russian submission. The
Russian submission is an important element in what Powell (2008: 1) has
a “clash of scientific knowledges, legal regimes and offshore technologies”. As we have
seen claims to OCS, whatever the geographical area concerned, depend upon a detailed submission,
which is both costly and time consuming to prepare. The actual delimitation depends on a whole raft
of interpretations over distances, seabed morphology and ocean depth. In the case of the central Arctic Ocean,
appropriately called
OCS claims will be shaped in part by how the CLCS defines ridges such as Lomonosov and Mendeleyev. What the Russian submission, however,
provoked was two distinct reactions amongst the coastal states. On the one hand, it acted as a stimulus for further investment in Arctic based
activity, especially in the aftermath of the reporting of the Russian expedition of 2007. On the other hand, it has led the five Arctic coastal states
to act more strategically with regard to their collective interests in the region. However, recent events involving the five Arctic coastal states
(individually and collectively) have also provoked two additional understandings of the Arctic – a distinctly regional response from the European
Commission and renewed interest in the central Arctic Ocean as an international space.
Link—Terrorism
Claiming terrorist threats marks a homeland to be defended against the outside. This
simultaneously constructs foreign lands as dangerous and unpredictable, justifying
interventions through the War on Terror.
Mark Duffield, Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster, “Carry on Killing: Global
Governance, Humanitarianism and Terror,” Danish Institute for International Studies, 2004,
http://www.diis.dk/graphics/Publications/WP2004/duffield_carry_on_killing.pdf
For Georgio Agamben (1998),3 rather
than emerging from a social contract, sovereignty is argued to reside in
the power to decide the exception. That is, to fix in language the boundary between who or what is
included or excluded as valid life: sovereign power is that which constitutes the ‘other’. In populating the space of the exception,
sovereignty calls forth a particular form of subjectivity to bear the consequences of exclusion. Agamben has given this subjectivity a generic
name calling it ‘bare’ or ‘natural’ life. That is, an abandoned life that effectively exists beyond the rights, conventions and moral restraints of
secular and religious law. Deciding
the exception constitutes a juridico-political space where anything
becomes possible; it is even “…permitted to kill without committing homicide…” (Ibid: 83 as orig.).4 Such
life, however, is more than an abandoned subjectivity destined to bear sovereignty’s ordering; it is
constitutive of political order itself. Bare life is an exclusion that is also an inclusion (Ibid: 18). While
sovereignty decides the exception, it simultaneously elects to protect society from the threat that it has itself identified. The war on
terrorism is an example of this recurrent sovereign design. During the 1990s, the leading ‘homeland’ states,
as it were, remapped the zone of exception in terms of a global ‘borderland’ of failed states, shadow
networks, rogue states, and so on. Today, this new cartography of risk encapsulates the terrorist threat
(National Security Strategy 2002). At the same time, through emergency powers, the derogation of international law
and pre-emptive attack, homeland states seek to protect society and its values from the menace their
intelligence systems have identified. The global borderlands have once again become zones where
anything becomes possible; an open-range where you can kill without committing murder.
Enunciations of shadowy unidentifiable terrorist threats require necessary
reterritorialization of these threats in specific foreign nations to be invaded and
controlled
Stuart Elden, International Boundaries Research Unit, Department of Geography, Durham University,
“Terror and Territory,” Antipode, Vol. 39, Issue 5, p. 821-845, November 2007,
http://instituty.fsv.cuni.cz/~kozak/elden-terror-territory.pdf
It did not take long after the events of September 11, 2001 for the US to work out who was going to pay.
According to Antony Seldon, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s biographer, when told that “force could not be used purely for retribution”,
Bush said “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we’re going to kick some ass” (Seldon 2005:490). Other commentators joined the
chorus. Right-wing harridan Ann Coulter (2001) was particularly animated: We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones
cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious
about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.
Bush too agreed that this action had to be more than “pounding sand” (Seldon 2005:490). This was a reference to the Tomahawk Cruise Missile
attacks of Clinton, particularly those launched at Sudan and Afghanistan on 21 August 1998 in the wake of the US embassy bombings in Nairobi,
Kenya, and Dar as-Salaam, Tanzania. Despite the destruction of a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, and camps in Afghanistan this was not
nearly effective enough for Bush, who declared that “when I take action, I’m not going to fire a two million dollar missile at a ten dollar empty
tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive” (cited in Roy 2001:140). As the novelist Arundhati Roy suggests: President Bush should
know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will give his missiles their money’s worth. Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should
develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world (2001:140). A
number of
moves were thus made. On 12 September Bush said that “the deliberate and deadly attacks which
were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war”
(2001b). The sovereignty of the US was profoundly challenged, and a sovereign response , a decision,
was needed . It was therefore important that this branding of the acts, and the response, was as a
war: either the “war on terrorism” or the “war on terror” (see Ross 2004:137–138). This was not the
only option, but one that marked the political events that followed, and has regularly characterised US
projections of its power (see Badiou 2004:26–27). Indeed, in the fumbling speech on the day of the attacks, Bush declared that he had
“directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice”,
suggesting a rather different response. But the very next words demonstrated how this was likely to proceed: “we will
make no
distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them” (2001a). As
Bush’s speechwriter David Frum suggested, “with those words, Bush upgraded the ‘war on terror’ from metaphor
to fact” (2003:142). What this enabled was the move to target states . As Cheney expressed it, “in some ways the
states were easier targets than the shadowy terrorists” (reported in Woodward 2003:48). A putatively
deterritorialised threat—the network of networks of al-Qaeda (Burke 2004), or global Islamism (Roy 2004)3 —
was reterritorialised in the sands of Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. For Benjamin Barber, among others, this was tortured
logic: Like the drunk looking on the wrong side of the street for the keys he dropped on the other side because “the light is better over here”
the United States prefers the states it can locate and vanquish to the terrorists it cannot even find (Barber 2004:126, see 124–125). It was
then a short step to position al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, although There was an immediate struggle in the Bush
administration as to whether this indeed should be the first target, or whether this provided the opportunity for outstanding scores to be
settled with Iraq (see Clarke 2004; Woodward 2003, 2004). In the short term, Afghanistan as target was to win out, with an immediate demand
that the Taliban shut down the terrorist training camps. Not working with this demand left the Taliban vulnerable as harbourers. For Gregory,
“this
entailed two peculiar cartographic performances. The first was a performance of sovereignty
through which the ruptured space of Afghanistan could be simulated as a coherent state . . . The
second was a performance of territory through which the fluid networks of al-Qaeda could be fixed in
a bounded space”. As Gregory continues, this required the reterritorialisation of the supposedly “nonterritorial” network. Similarly it required a rigid territorialisation of the US as “a national space—
closing its airspace, sealing its borders, and contracting itself to ‘the homeland’” (Gregory 2004a:49–50).
Link—Quebec Secession
Secession represents a challenge to territorial sovereignty at the heart of international
norms of ordering—the Lamont evidence is trying to hold onto a barren and violent
system of statehood
Stuart Elden, International Boundaries Research Unit, Department of Geography, Durham University,
“Terror and Territory,” Antipode, Vol. 39, Issue 5, p. 821-845, November 2007,
http://instituty.fsv.cuni.cz/~kozak/elden-terror-territory.pdf
The relation between sovereignty and territory has been so strong in the past 60 years that the
international political system has
been structured around three central tenets: the notion of equal sovereignty of states; internal
competence for domestic jurisdiction; and territorial preservation of existing boundaries. Various clauses of
the UN Charter, along with Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, have continually stressed these central founding principles,
summed up in the prohibition on the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state” (UN Charter
Article 2.4). This provides the foundation of the linkage between the three tenets, as the
notion of territorial integrity means
both territorial preservation and territorial sovereignty, and political independence requires both
exclusive internal and equal external sovereignty. As well as territorial aggression, secessionist movements
have been perceived as a danger locally and regionally, and the norms of the United Nations have been established
on the basis that preservation of the territorial status quo and the strong link between sovereignty
and territory is important to global stability. Even decolonisation happened along the boundaries that marked the lines of
colonial division.
Alternatives
Alt—Critique
Questioning spatial assumptions of the 1AC generates an epistemic confusion which
provides the impetus for a discovery of new values and relations to others
Dalby ‘5 Simon Dalby, Carleton University, Ottowa, “Political Space: Autonomy, Liberalism, and
Empire,” Alternatives 30 (2005), 415-441, ebsco
Starting from the assumptions of stability and the fixity of political spaces in a world where they are
so novel suggests great conceptual confusion, or at least considerable ethnocentrism and
"presentism," in the so-called social sciences. It forces reflection on the social role of such discourses as
statements of political aspiration quite as much as analysis of how things actually are. Legitimation
practices premised on an unreflective cartography of at least relatively autonomous spaces offer an extension of
the geopolitics of liberalism, of local autonomy as the mode of administration of a political economy that exceeds those spaces
repeatedly. Then again, might we social scientists not simply understand ourselves as Wilsonian liberals dedicated to the triumph of modern
affluence administered within autonomous territorial, albeit it not obviously "national" spaces? Ironically the events of the last few years, and
in particular the actions of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001, make all this much easier to see. In
a world of
supposedly sovereign states with formal political equality, the conditions of the global covenant, at least
the US state under the Bush administration has no problem arrogating to itself the right to intervene when and
where it sees fit to preempt any threats to its preeminence. The nonintervention clauses of the UN Charter are notably
fraying, but still the return of the Bush administration to the United Nations, in the months after its invasion in March 2003, to ask for help in
pacifying Iraq suggests that even the prerogatives of empire do not allow that state to evade its political obligations to claim legitimacy on the
basis of more than brute force. In this sense, there remains a global "political space," albeit one that seems to have an impossible Newtonian
cartography. The converse of this argument is that political
struggles that oppose the cavalier use of military force to
ensure the flows of resources from the periphery to fuel, literally in this case, the economies of the metropole, are
also implicated in a politics that transcends claims to sovereignty. Precisely the invocation of the rights to
nonintervention on the part of activists in many places rely on a nonterritorial strategies of publicity, internet "sites," and coordinated protests
in many places, to invoke the "rights" to territorial nonintervention. This
is not to disparage the undoubted uses of territorial strategies in
insist on the utility of raising explicitly
the questions of who precisely writes cosmopolitan texts with many of the assumptions of the "right"
of mobility, travel, and transit anywhere on the planet.^^ In addition, the argument that the current occupation of Iraq is
defence of many things; but it is to make clear that this is what is going on. It is also to
about a war for the US way of life, and gas-guzzling SUVs in particular, makes it clear that this violence is a form of "shadow globalization" cast
over the peripheries of the world economy.^^ Progressive
politics cannot now be about the extension of these fossilfueled urban liberties. It can be about solidarities, which do not have an implicit spatiality to them,
although these sometimes also use spatial metaphors to express "horizontal" linkages. Above all else, this engagement with the
political-space debate reinforces the argument that the cartographies of modern administrative
spaces are no longer an adequate basis on which to build either social sciences or some form of progressive
politics. To think differently is to try to think about politics as connection, as link, as network. As Walker
has repeatedly pointed out, this is immensely difficult to do given the constraints of the spatial languages that we have inherited from modern
thinkers.^^ Obligations
across boundaries and the possibilities of politics not constrained to geographical
invocations of a we that does politics are the questions for the moment. These questions are not well served by
unreflective languages of political "space" or geographical "scale" with assumptions of autonomy as their ontological starting point. Politics is a
lot more complicated. The inclusion of so much of the world directly into the circuits of the global economy has made the necessity of thinking
much more carefully about the spatial metaphors of politics unavoidable.
Framework
FW—Territory
Territory is constituted through practices of knowledge production bound within
exercises of state power. Accounts of territorial politics that do not address its
conceptual genealogy are ahistoric and bound within myopic epistemologies
Stuart Elden, Durham University, “Land, terrain, territory,” Progress in Human Geography 34 (6), 2010,
p. 799-817
While there are some excellent and important investigations of particular territorial configurations, disputes or issues (see, for example, Sahlins, 1989; Winichakul,
1994; Paasi, 1996; J¨onsson et al., 2000), and some valuable textbooks on the topic (Storey, 2001; Delaney, 2005), there is little that investigates the term ‘territory’
conceptually or historically.3 This is, in part, because territory
is often assumed to be self-evident in meaning, allowing the
study of its particular manifestations – territorial disputes, the territory of specific countries, etc –
without theoretical reflection on ‘territory’ itself. Where it is defined, territory is either assumed to be a relation that can be
understood as an outcome of territoriality, or simply as a bounded space, in the way that Giddens (1981: 5–6, 11) described the state as a ‘bordered power
container’ (see also Giddens, 1987).4 In the first, the
historical dimension is neglected, since it appears that territory
exists in all times and places; in the second the conditions of possibility of such a configuration are assumed
rather than examined. Both take the thing that needs explaining as the explanation: the explanandum as the
explanans. Rather, territory requires the same kind of historical, philosophical analysis that has been undertaken by Edward Casey (1997) for another key
geographical concept, that of place.5 Linda Bishai (2004: 59) suggests that territory
‘may be examined in a similar fashion as
sovereignty – through conceptual history’. Yet conceptual history, Begriffsgeschichte, has, with partial exceptions, not been turned
towards the question of territory explicitly. There is, for instance, no explicit discussion of territory in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the Handbuch politischsozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, or the HistorischesW¨ orterbuch der Philosophie, which are the most comprehensive works of the Begriffsgeschichte approach
pioneered by Reinhart Koselleck (see Ritter et al., 1971–2007; Bruner et al., 1972–97; Reichardt and Schmitt, 1985–; Koselleck, 2002; 2006). The work of the
Cambridge School of contextualist approaches to the history of political thought, of which Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock are perhaps the most significant
figures, offers substantive help in its methodological principles, but only tangentially in terms of its focus (Skinner, 1978; 2002; Pocock, 2009). Important though
such methods are, the approach employed here is closer to a genealogical account, of the type Foucault developed from Nietzsche and Heidegger’s work (see Elden,
2001; 2003b). Genealogy,
understood as a historical interrogation of the conditions of possibility of things
being as they are, is helpful for a number of reasons. It makes use of the kinds of textual and
contextual accounts offered by Begriffsgeschichte or the Cambridge school; but is critical of notions that the production of
meaning is reliant on authorial intent. It makes use of the full range of techniques – including
etymology, semantics, philology and hermeneutics – that should inform the history of ideas, but pairs
them with an analysis of practices and the workings of power. And it is avowedly political,
undertaking this work as part of a wider project that aspires to be a ‘history of the present’.6 The best
general study of territory remains Jean Gottmann’s The significance of territory (Gottmann, 1973; see also Muscara`, 2005). It trades on his earlier book La politique
des E´tats et leur g´ eographie, where he claims that ‘one cannot conceive a State, a political institution, without its spatial definition, its territory’ (Gottmann, 1951:
71). Nonetheless, in both works he tends to use the term in an undifferentiated historical sense, as a concept used throughout history (see, for example, Gottmann,
1951: 72–73). Thus, while he makes a detailed and valuable analysis, he is still perhaps too willing to see territory existing at a variety of spatial scales and in a
variety of historical periods. This tends to create an ahistorical and, potentially, ageographical analysis. One of the very
few attempts that begins to offer a more properly historical account of territory is found in the work of the legal theorist Paul Alli`es in his book L’invention du
territoire, which was originally a thesis supervised by Nicos Poulantzas in 1977. Alli`es (1980: 9) suggests that ‘territory always seems linked to possible definitions of
the state; it gives it a physical basis which seems to render it inevitable and eternal’. It is precisely in order to disrupt that inevitability and eternal nature that an
interrogation of the state of territory is necessary.
Territory is a prior question to the plan because it shapes how we encounter and
interact with the political—we cannot work within the state without understanding its
spatial dimensions
Stuart Elden, Durham University, “Land, terrain, territory,” Progress in Human Geography 34 (6), 2010,
p. 799-817
It would be unusual or reductive to see the political-economic, political-strategic, political-legal or political-technical in strict isolation. Political-economic accounts often indicate a strategic
relation; strategic work recognizes the importance of law and the dependence on measure and calculation. Yet it is only in seeing these elements together, and in privileging the legal and the
To concentrate on the political-economic risks reducing
territory to land; to emphasize the political-strategic blurs it with a sense of terrain. Recognizing both,
and seeing the development made possible by emergent political techniques allows us to understand
territory as a distinctive mode of social/spatial organization, one which is historically and
technical, that an understanding of the complexities of territory can be attained.
geographically limited and dependent, rather than a biological drive or social need. Indeed, recognizing
and interrogating this does not just allow us to see that the modern division and ordering of the world is peculiar and clearly not the only possible way, but it also
allows us to begin to escape what Agnew described as ‘the territorial trap’. As Agnew (1995: 379) himself notes, social science has
often been too geographical and insufficiently historical. It is through a historical conceptual
examination that moving beyond ‘the territorial trap’ rather than simply avoiding it might be possible
(Brenner and Elden, 2009; for a related inquiry, see Murphy, 1996). The overall suggestion here is thus that territory is not best understood through
territoriality, but through an examination of the relation of the state to the emergence of a category
of ‘space’. Edward Casey (2002: xvii) describes his book The fate of place as an inquiry which ‘traces out the idea of place vis-a`-vis space’. What understanding of
space was necessary for the idea of territory to be possible? If territory is seen as a ‘bounded space’ or
as Giddens’s ‘bounded power container’, the questions that remain are what is this space and how are
these boundaries possible? As Paul Alli`es (1980: 32) suggests: ‘to define territory, we are told, one delimits borders [fronti ` eres]. Or to think the
border, must we not already have an idea of homogeneous territory?’ To put this more forcefully, boundaries only
become possible in their modern sense through a notion of space, rather than the other way round.
Focusing on the determination of space that makes boundaries possible, and in particular the role of
calculation, opens up the idea of seeing boundaries not as a primary distinction that separates
territory from other ways of understanding political control of land, but as a second-order problem
founded upon a particular sense of calculation and concomitant grasp of space. How does that concept of space become a
political-legal category and what kinds of techniques are at work? Two qualifications to this analysis are necessary. The first is that this is an approach derived from, and directed toward,
western political thought. The problematic term ‘west’ is of course open to question, but it is intended here to be read in relation to a chronology of thought that can be traced from Ancient
Greece, to Roman appropriations and late medieval Latin rediscoveries, providing the conceptual frame within which the emergence of the modern state and its territory occurred.15 Other
traditions would have very different histories, geographies and conceptual lineages. The specificity of the analysis begun here militates against generalization and pretensions to universalism.
Nonetheless, it is hoped that this historical conceptual approach would be useful in other such analyses, even if it would need to be supplemented, developed and critiqued. The second
qualification is that while this work seeks to utilize an expanded understanding of territory that goes beyond narrowly economic or strategic accounts, but which is also attentive to the
specificity of the notion, its approach is necessarily partial. As Val´erie November (2002: 17) notes, ‘the notion of territory is at the same time juridical, political, economic, social and cultural,
and even affective’. Here, the social, cultural, and affective elements have been underplayed in order to emphasize the political in a broad sense. This is not to suggest that those other
elements are unimportant, but rather that they have been discussed elsewhere in some detail. The literature on the nation, on attachment to homeland, and identity politics, for instance, can
profitably be read from a territorial perspective (see Winichakul, 1994; Paasi, 1996; Yiftachel, 2006). Folding the insights of those analyses into the outline offered here would be a necessary
step for any account which aimed to be comprehensive. Three interlinked propositions thus provide an agenda for future work; a project which seeks to grasp the history of the state of
territory: (1) Territory must be approached as a topic in itself; rather than through territoriality. Indeed, it may well be the case that the notion of ‘territoriality’ with regard to humans can only
be appropriately understood through a notion of territory. In other words, while particular strategies or practices produce territory, there is a need to understand territory to grasp what
territoriality, as a condition of territory, is concerned with. (2) Territory can be understood as a ‘bounded space’ only if ‘boundaries’ and ‘space’ are taken as terms worthy of investigation in
their own right as a preliminary step. These terms require conceptual and historical work themselves, rather than being sufficient for an explanation. (3) ‘Land’ and ‘terrain’ – as political-
Territory can be understood as a political
technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain. Measure and control –
the technical and the legal – need to be thought alongside land and terrain. Understanding territory as
a political technology is not to define territory once and for all; rather it is to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it
was understood in different historical and geographical contexts. Territory is a historical question:
produced, mutable and fluid. It is geographical, not simply because it is one of the ways of ordering
the world, but also because it is profoundly uneven in its development. It is a word, a concept and a
practice, where the relation between these can only be grasped genealogically. It is a political
question, but in a broad sense: economic, strategic, legal and technical. Territory must be approached politically in its
historical, geographical and conceptual specificity.
economic and political-strategic relations – are necessary but insufficient to grasp ‘territory’.
FW—Territory—Arctic spec.
Arctic politics are bound within constructions of self and other—security discourse is
deployed to produce and reinforce identifications of the ever-expanding homeland
against foreign dangers.
Mathieu Landriault, School of Political Studies, University of Ottowa, “Securitizing the north in Canada:
Observations on Continuity and Transformation: A Reply to Nicol and Heininen’s ‘Networking the
North’,” Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011), google scholar
There is no doubt than the international agenda has been modified near the end of and after the Cold War. I am not questioning this factual
point presented by Nicol and Heininen, but rather the authors’ argument that “it is clear that this international North, stemming from an
environmental and “scientific” understanding of regionalism, resulted in a new way of structuring policies within the North.”5 On the contrary, I
would argue that, by taking discursive practices seriously and by attributing to them a performative nature in which discourses can frame and
represent in a specific way, we come to see the stability, constancy, and permanency of Canadian foreign policy (CFP) in the Arctic instead of
postulating that a rupture in CFP occurred at the end of the Cold War. By doing so, foreign
policy can exist as a site for the
construction of significations and differences between the inside of the state (a Self) and an external
world (Others). In turn, the Self will be defined in contrast with the external world and thus establish the
differences that are considered meaningful.6 This process of differentiation can be positive or
negative, but it stands on the projection of identity which, in the case of foreign policy, will favour one
component (the Self, Canada) over the Other(s). This discursive practice shapes the elaboration and
implementation of the policies by bringing forth a system of acceptable norms, conventions, and
signs. This context will contribute afterwards to the stability and permanency of the established
practices and discourses. Foreign policy discourses actively construct “how the “foreign” world
beyond the border might look to insiders”, especially after the Cold war given that it sparked an
interest for initiating new reactions to novel issues and that these initiatives had to be explained to
multiple audiences.7 To better illustrate my point, I shall comment on “The Northern Dimension of Canada’s
Foreign Policy” document, and how the threats affecting Northern populations are conceptualized
within it, as this represents a key component of the document itself. This exercise of defining the
threats is centred on external phenomenon, particularly globalisation, climate change and
transboundary pollution issues.8 The performative function of the foreign policy discourse is evident
here as the threats to the integrity and the security of the communities all come from the exterior (the
Others). This situation has the advantage of concealing the fact that many past, present and future threats
are direct consequences of the activities emanating from the Southern populations in Canada and that
Canada has been idle on many issues (climate change being the most notable example of this inactivity). A passage of this
document is particularly important in order to grasp the identity-building nature of foreign policy: “A clearly defined Northern Dimension of
Canada’s Foreign Policy will establish a framework to promote the extension of Canadian interests and values” (P.2). The Canadian
government policy toward the North is thus taking the very common path of the diffusion and
exportation of “Canadian values” to construct communities to its image. A relevant example of this type of practice in
the circumpolar world would be the investment coming from the Canadian government for governance and democratic reform projects in
Northern Russia. These initiatives helped Canada and Russia’s Nordic communities connect, but if “a new way of structuring policies in the
North” can be identified, I think we must pay attention to the transfer of responsibilities from governmental agencies to organizations of the
third sector, the oft-cited concept of civil society. However, we must understand though that this
new neo-liberal way of
conducting business results in an overstretch for these organizations because these new tasks of
providing services and implementing the practical implications of policies on a daily basis come with a
price, which is a reduction in the advocacy capability of these organizations9. Furthermore, as many critical
voices in Canadian foreign policy had outlined (see Sandra Whitworth or Mark Neufeld), the democratisation of CFP has not created a structural
change in the formulation and application of CFP. As a former Foreign Affairs minister reminded us, governments still control international
processes even though NGOs can influence and stimulate cooperation. On another note, the inclusion of Canadian NGOs in international forum
in the 1990s have been made by the Canadian government with the underlying assumption that these NGOs would largely support official
Canadian positions and interests.10 On a related front, the divide is clearly delineated and the differentiation is established, positive or negative
depending on your normative standpoint (it is not the purpose of this article to postulate one) with this key fragment of the Northern
dimension of Canada’s Foreign Policy, since foreign policy has the goal first and foremost “to enhance the security and prosperity of Canadians”
(P.10). This necessity appears in the majority of official foreign policy documents linked to Canadian foreign policy. We do not want to judge the
intentions or the instrumentality of such a discursive practice but rather underline the existence of its basic function performed by foreign
policy, which is to reify the insideoutside demarcation point.
FW—Spatiality—Terrorism spec.
Space is crucial to understanding the war on terrorism. Governmental manipulation
of spatial imaginaries which paint Al-Qaeda as ‘spaceless’ enables comparably global
violence
Stuart Elden, International Boundaries Research Unit, Department of Geography, Durham University,
“Terror and Territory,” Antipode, Vol. 39, Issue 5, p. 821-845, November 2007,
http://instituty.fsv.cuni.cz/~kozak/elden-terror-territory.pdf
The events of September 11, 2001 in New York City, Washington DC, and the field in Pennsylvania are a political, spatial and temporal marker.
The lazy shorthand of September 11 or, worse, 9/11, masks the spatial context of the events in favour of a temporal indication (see Gregory
2004a:19), one that is reduced to a number in calendar time, and seeks a privileging of the date for American grief, occluding other events on
that day in this and other years.1 As some have been quick to remind us, more than twice as many children died of diarrhoea on this same day
than died in the more publicised events (United Nations Development Report figures from http://www.undp.org; see Pilger 2002:1). President
George W Bush himself has now put a figure to part of the consequences, suggesting that at least 30,000 people have died in Iraq since the
invasion (2005), while others have put the figures much higher. And yet, such mere enumerations risk losing sight—and losing site—of the
problem in their numerical accounts; accountancy in place of grief. Unlike
the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, which
is conveniently signed by a place alone, the lack of a single geographical site has turned the “new
Pearl Harbor” into a simple date. Yet the implications of these events have been widespread in space and
time, spreading across spatial scales from the local to the national and the regional to the global (see
Smith 2001, 2002). As Gregory suggests, contra Booth and Dunne (2002:1), these were not “out-of-geography”, but rather
“their origins have surged inwards and their consequences rippled outwards in complex, overlapping
ways” (2004a:19). In a number of ways then Bush’s “war on terror” has demonstrated the importance of Lefebvre’s
suggestion that space is the ultimate locus and medium of struggle, and is therefore a crucial political
issue. For Lefebvre, space is not just the place of conflict, but an object of struggle itself. It is for this reason that
he claims that “there is a politics of space because space is political ” ([1972] 2000:59; see Elden 2004). Considering
the interrelation of the spatial dimension of politics and the political dimensions of space provides an
important frame for understanding the “war on terror”. Yet while geographers have concentrated on the spatial aspects
generally, there has arguably been less emphasis on the explicitly territorial aspects (Cairo 2004). Al-Qaeda has often been portrayed as a
deterritorialised network, and while the challenges to international law have been widely discussed, few have looked at the implications for the
legal basis of the relationship between sovereignty and territory.
Environment Module
Links
Link—Environmental Managerialism
Identifying an environment separate from nature reduces it to an object to be
managed and manipulated for the good of human populations as interpreted through
technicist discourse
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The separation
of organisms from their environments is the primary epistemological divide cutting
through reality in the rhetorics of ecology. This discursive turn goes back to Haeckel's initial 1866 identification of ecology as
the science that investigates all of the relations of an organism to its organic and inorganic environments. Nonetheless, there are
differences among ecologists over what these "environments" might be. Because the expanse of the organic and
inorganic environment is so broad, it often is defined in terms delimiting what it is by looking at what it is not. In other words, it is the
organism, or biotic community, or local ecosystem that ecologists place at the center of their systems of
study, while the environment is reduced to everything outside of the subject of analysis . With these
maneuvers ,
environments are often transformed rhetorically into silences, backgrounds, or settings . In
this manner, they also are studied and understood not directly as such, but more indirectly in terms of the objective
relations and effects they register upon the subjects of study they surround. Even so, this inversion of
one thing, like an organism or society, into everything, or the environment, might disclose the nature of the environment
only in relation to this one thing. After all, environmental analysis must reduce "everything" to measures
of "anything" available for measurement (like temperature levels, gas concentrations, molecular dispersions,
resource variations, or growth rates) to track variations in "something" (like an organism's, a biome's, or a river's
responses to these factors). But is it "the environment" that is being understood here, or is its identity being evaded in reducing it to a subset of
practicable measurements? Does
this vision of "environment" really capture the actual quality or true
quantity of all human beings' interrelations with all of the terrains, waters, climates, soils,
architectures, technologies, societies, economies, cultures, or states surrounding them? In its most
expansive applications, then, the environment becomes a strong but sloppy force: it is anything out there, everything around
us, something affecting us, nothing within us, but also a thing upon which we act. Despite its formal definitions, however, the
environment is not, in fact, everything. Many environmental discourses look instead at particular sites or at peculiar forces. The discursive
variations and conceptual
confrontations of the "environment" really begin to explode when different
voices accentuate this or that set of things in forming their environmental analysis. On the one side, they may
privilege forces in the ecosphere, or, on the other side, they might stress concerns from the technosphere. But in either case, each
rhetoric which operates as an agency protecting "the environment" struggles to site "the
environmental" as a somewhere affected by or coming from everything. Perhaps the early origins of "the
environment" as a conceptits historical emergence and original applications-might prove more helpful. In its original sense, which is
borrowed by English from Old French, an environment is an action resulting from, or the state of being produced by a
verb: "to environ." And environing as a verb is, in fact, a type of strategic action. To environ is to encircle, encompass,
envelop, or enclose. It is the physical activity of surrounding, circumscribing, or ringing around something. Its uses even
suggest stationing guards around, thronging with hostile intent, or standing watch over some person or place. To environ a site or a subject is to
beset, beleaguer, or besiege that place or person. An
environment, as either the means of such activity or the product of these actions,
now might be read in a more suggestive manner. It is the encirclement, circumscription, or beleaguerment of places and
persons in a strategic disciplinary policing of space. An environmental act, in turn, is already a disciplining move, aimed
at constructing some expanse of space-a locale, a biome, a planet as biospherical space, or, on the other hand, some
city, any region, the global economy in technospherical territory-in a discursive envelope. Within these enclosures,
environmental expertise can arm environmentalists who stand watch over these surroundings,
guarding the rings that include or exclude forces, agents, and ideas. If one thinks about it, this original use of
"the environment" is an accurate account of what is, in fact, happening in many environmental practices
today. Environmentalized places become sites of supervision, where environmentalists see from above and from
without through the enveloping designs of administratively delimited systems. Encircled by enclosures of alarm , environments can be
disassembled, recombined, and subjected to the disciplinary designs of expert management.
Enveloped
in these interpretive frames, environments can be redirected to fulfill the ends of other economic scripts, managerial directives, and
administrative writs. Environing, then,
engenders "environmentality," which embeds instrumental
rationalities in the policing of ecological spaces.
Teaching students in educational contexts like debate that nature is something
external to be used by humanity produces subjects concerned more with efficiency
and instrumentality than ecological health
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and
Sustainability: what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE
Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA,
also he blew up the death star)
One vital site for generating, accumulating and then circulating such discursive knowledge about nature is the educational system of schools,
colleges and universities. As the primary institutions for credentialing individual learners and legitimating collective teachings, schools and
universities do much to construct our understanding of the natural world. Over
the past generation, graduate programmes
in environmental science on many American university campuses have become a major source of
collective representations of `the environment’ as well as the home base for those scienti® c
disciplines used to study nature’ s meanings. At the same time, their research ® ndings and graduates ® lter into the lower
levels of education in the teaching of environmental awareness. As a result, school leavers at all levels routinely now have a
very speci® c set of knowledge (as it has been scienti® cally validated) and a quite focused notion of power (as it is institutionally
constructed) to understand `the environmental crisis’ as citizens or consumers armed with sound
scientific and technical teachings. This study, however, questions how such specialised discourses about nature, or `the
environment’ , are constructed in many school programmes by professional± technical experts. This articulation of environmental
knowledge often sets nature apart in special distant locales and isolates nature’ s wild places from
modern economies and societies. This move articulates a complex epistemic code for
environmentalists that externalises, authorises and centres, on one level, the forces of nature by
operationally internalising, mystifying and decentring complex economic and social forces, on another
level, in the practices of environmental education and management.2 How Epistemics Affects Applied Practices
The first efforts to articulate such epistemic schemata in environmental education began in the United
States with the Second Industrial Revolution as the conservation movement and progressively-minded managers founded schools
of forestry, management, agriculture, mining and engineering on many college and university campuses. Their ecological vision put
nature outside society, and humans then went out into nature to master and transform its resources
into `goods’ and `services’ 3 for society. Industrialising society saw nature’ s environments as external,
other and centred, because the progress of all in society over nature was allegedly the internal,
manifest and decentred goal of all. These two spheres for human thought and action thus were
divorced, and this split has created major conceptual and operational problems for environmental
education and policy ever since. In the ecological upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, some schools of the environment and colleges
of natural resources went beyond this conservationist project by beginning to train specialised experts in environmental science. This ill-de®
ned discipline, ranging in scope from ecotoxiology to national park administration, was Education, Environment and Sustainability 189 needed
to de® ne, develop and deploy new varieties of knowledge for society about nature in many practical dimensions of everyday work and play.4
The entire planet, then, can be reduced by such environmental science at research universities to a
complex system of interrelated systems, whose constituent ecological processes are essentially
humanised. In turn, two different spatial systemsÐ nature and societyÐ are left in such environmental
education for humanity to operateÐ efficiently or inefficiently as vast terrestrial infrastructures. Yet, one
is zoned as `green’ space where wild nature survives and the other becomes `brown’ space where society’s industrialisation, pollution and
contamination occur. The
rational imperatives for inserting natural and artificial bodies into the machinery
of global production pushes environmental education to assume that the green spaces are what
environmental professionals’ work must be about and the brown zones are largely ignored except as
the realm from which global threats to pristine green places originate.
Environmental discourse enfolds populaces into apparatuses of biopolitical control
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These reflections on "the environment" reframe its meanings in terms of the practices of power, allowing us to turn to Michel Foucault for
additional insight. The bio-power formation described by Foucault was not historically closely focused upon the role of Nature in the equations
of biopolitics (Foucault, History of Sexuality I 138-42). For Foucault, the
whole point of the controlled tactics of inserting human
bodies into the machineries of industrial and agricultural production as part and parcel of strategically
adjusting the growth of human populations to the development of industrial capitalism was to bring
"life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations," making the disciplines of knowledge and
discourses of power into many agencies as part of the "transformation of human life" (143). Once this
threshold of biopower was crossed, human economics, politics, and technologies continually placed
all human beings' existence into question. Foucault notes that these industrial transformations implicitly raised ecological
issues as they disrupted and redistributed the understandings provided by the classical episteme of defining human interactions with Nature.
Living became "environmentalized," as humans related to their history and biological life in new ways
from within growing artificial cities and mechanical modes of production, which positioned this new form of
human being "at the same time outside history, in its biological environment, and inside human historicity, penetrated by the latter's
techniques of knowledge and power" (143). Here we
can begin to locate the emergence of "the environment" as a
nexus for knowledge formation and as a cluster of power tactics. As human beings began to consciously wager their life as a species
on the outcomes of these biopolitical strategies and technological systems, it became clear that they also were wagering the lives of other (or
all) species as well. While Foucault regards this shift as one of many lacunae in his analysis, it is clear there is much more going on here than he
realizes. Once
human power/knowledge formations become the foundation of industrial society's
economic development, they also become the basis for the physical survival of all terrestrial life
forms. Here, ecological analysis emerges as a productive power formation that reinvests human bodiestheir means of health, modes of subsistence, and styles of habitation integrating the whole space of existence with bio-historical
significance by framing them within their various bio-physical environments filled with various animal
and plant bodies.
Link—Resource Managerialism
Resource managerialism submits nature to the power of bureaucratic control and
economic manipulation, converting natural objects into usable goods
Luke 95 ‘On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary
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The script of environmentality embedded in new notions like "the environment" is
rarely made articulate in scientific
and technical discourses. Yet, there are politics in these scripts. The advocates of deep ecology and social ecology
dimly perceive this in their frustrations with "reform environmentalism," which weaves its log-ics of
geo-power in and out of the resource managerialism that has defined the mainstream of
contemporary environmental protection thinking and traditional natural resource conservationism
(Luke, "Green Consumerism"). Resource managerialism can be read as the eco-knowledge of modern governmentality. While voices in favor of
conservation can be found in Europe early in the nineteenth century, the real establishment of this stance comes in the United States with the
Second Industrial Revolution from the 1880s through the 1920s and the closing of the Western Frontier in the 1890s (Noble). Whether one
looks at John Muir's preservationist programs or Gifford Pinchot's conservationist codes, an awareness of modern industry's power to deplete
natural resources, and hence the need for systems of conservation, is well established by the early 1900s (Nash, Wilderness). President
Theodore Roosevelt, for example, organized the Governor's Conference in 1907 to address this concern, inviting the participants to recognize
that the natural endowments upon which "the welfare of this nation rests are becoming depleted, and in not a few cases, are already
exhausted" (Jarrett 51). Over the past nine decades, the
fundamental premises of resource managerialism have not
changed significantly. In fact, this code of eco-knowledge has only become more formalized in bureaucratic
applications and legal interpretations. Paralleling the managerial logic of the Second Industrial Revolution, which empowered technical experts
on the shop floor and professional managers in the main office, resource
managerialism imposes corporate
administrative frameworks upon Nature in order to supply the economy and provision society
through centralized state guidance. These frameworks assume that the national economy, like the interacting capitalist
firm and household, must avoid both overproduction (excessive resource use coupled with inadequate demand) and
underproduction (inefficient resource use in the face of excessive demand) on the supply side as well as overconsumption (excessive
resource exploitation with excessive demand) and underconsumption (inefficient resource exploitation coupled with inadequate
demand) on the demand side. To even construct the managerial problem in this fashion, Nature must be reduced-through the
encirclement of space and matter by national as well as global economies-to a cybernetic system of
biophysical systems that can be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled anew to produce "resources"
efficiently and in adequate amounts when and where needed in the modern market-place. In turn,
Nature's energies, materials, and sites are redefined by the eco-knowledges of resource managerialism as the source
of "goods" for sizable numbers of some people, even though greater material and immaterial "bads" also might be
inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people who do not reside in or benefit from the advanced
national economies that basically monopo-lize the use of world resources at a comparative handful of highly developed regional and
municipal sites. Many of these eco-knowledge assumptions and geo-power commitments can be seen at work in the discourses of the
Worldwatch Institute as it develops its own unique vision of environmentality for a global resource managerialism.
Link—Environmental Crises
Environmental crisis frames policy solutions in terms of expert discourses and leads to
individual passivity
Frederick Buell, professor of English at Cornell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, 2003, p. 184-185
Elaborating crisis is thus not only hard to do but can also perhaps never really be done. Worse, even an actual occurrence of crisis, not just an
elaboration of its imminence, is no guarantee that people will fall in line with the analyses and prescriptions of environmentalists.
Environmental crisis, as Ulrich Beck has argued, is uniquely susceptible to social construction, and
while an actual crisis, like Samuel Johnson's hanging, can indeed concentrate the mind wonderfully, it
can concentrate it on the wrong target. Revenge against an outgroup can easily substitute for remedy to ecological crisisespecially given the political machinery devoted to obscuring problems and displacing blame described in Chapter 1. Looked at critically
then, crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of liabilities. First, it seems to have become a
political liability almost as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective opposition with its
predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to refutation by events. It also
exposes environmentalists to being called grim doomsters and antilife Puritan extremists. Further, concern with crisis has all too
often tempted people to try to find a "total solution" to the problems involved – a phrase that, as an
astute, analyst of the limitations of crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too reminiscent of the Third Reich's infamous
"final solution." A total crisis of society – environmental crisis at its gravest – threatens to translate despair into inhumanist authoritarianism;
more often, however, it helps keep merely dysfunctional authority in place. It
thus leads, Barry suggests, to the belief that only
elite-and expert-led solutions are possible. At the same time it depoliticizes people, inducing them to
accept their impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many people today feel,
ironically and/or passively, that since it makes no difference at all what any individual does on his or
her own, one might as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of environmental crisis is,
though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply ironic. A problem with deep cultural and psychological as well as
social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple proposition: the worse one feels environmental
crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn one's back on the environment. This means, preeminently,
turning one's back on "nature" – on traditions of nature feeling, traditions of knowledge about nature
(ones that range from organic farming techniques to the different departments of ecological science), and traditions of naturebased activism. If nature is thoroughly wrecked these days, people need to delink from nature and live in postnature – a conclusion that,
as the next chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the millennium. Explorations of how
deeply "nature" has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and dependent on human
actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further indifference to nature-based environmental issues, not
greater concern with them.
Regulatory sciences on ecological issues are characterized on what the public can and
can’t see, and are an extension of biopolitical grip on society
Paul Rutherford, professor of environmental politics in the Department of Government and Public
Administration at the University of Sydney, Australia, 1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 55-56
The sorts of extensive, transnational research programmes on ecological
issues mentioned above came increasingly to
characterize scientific and political discourse on the environment throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
From the end of the 1960s, through the establishment of a wide range of environmental legislation and
enforcement agencies, the advanced industrialized countries experienced a rapid growth in state
intervention directed at environmental regulation and planning. Ecological and environmental research in the 1970s
thus laid the foundation for public policies of significant economic and political impact, particularly in terms of the regulatory intervention in
the activities of industry. In financial terms alone these are important — for example, the direct cost of complying with US pollution control
regulations is estimated to be in excess of US$100 billion per year (Jasanoff 1992: 195). However,
of more general importance,
the period since the early 1970s has seen the significant institutionalization of new forms of ecological
governmentality. Two important aspects of this have been the growth of regulatory science and the international spread of procedures
for environmental impact assessment (EIA). The notion of regulatory science refers to the widespread reliance by
the state on extensive systems of scientific advisory structures which have become an integral feature
of environmental (and health) policy making in industrialized societies (Beck 1992a; Jasanoff 1990). These
expert advisory groups serve not only a role of political legitimation, but more importantly a role of
epistemic policing, both by framing the definition of ecological risks and by certifying what is to count
as scientifically acceptable knowledge of the natural world. The complexities thrown up by attempts to define
environmental-societal interrelationships in terms of a global systems ecology produces a high level of ‘technical’ uncertainty and potential
social conflict. The
rapid expansion of social regulation associated with the growth of the discourse on
ecological problems from the 1970s produced a whole new domain for the biopolitical administration
of life. The population became the target for a new form of ecological security and welfare, in which
environmental agencies and the professional disciplines required by them set about the task of
protecting the public against hazardous and environmentally damaging technologies, demanding ‘ever more
complex predictive analyses of the risks and benefits of regulation’ (Jasanoff 1990: 3). As Brian Wynne has noted, the regulatory ‘turn
to science’, as an attempt to provide greater stability and legitimacy in environmental policy, ‘also in
important respects. . . defined society, by tacitly defining the scope and nature of social intervention in public
policy risk decisions’ (Wynne 1992: 746—8). The increasing importance of regulatory ecological science is
therefore a particularly significant articulation of the biopolitical character of modern governmental
rationality. It is clearly linked to the growth of big science. Indeed, a notable feature of regulatory science is the role of the state and
industrial interests (especially transnational corporations) in the manufacture, negotiation and certification of knowledge: that is, the central
role these institutions play in the normative constitution of ecological knowledge (ibid. 754). Regulatory
ecological science does
not so much describe the environment as both actively constitute it as an object of knowledge and,
through various modes of positive intervention, manage and police it.
Link—Environmental Globalism/THE STATE
Displacing environmental activism in global terms co-opts movements and ensures
policies are crafted to serve the interests of multinational corporations
Vandana Shiva, 98(a philosopher, environmental activist, author and eco feminist, “The Geopolitics
Reader,” Volume 1 pg. 231-232)
The “global” in the dominant discourse is the political space in which a particular dominant local seeks
global control, and frees itself of local, national and international restraints. The global does not
represent the universal human interest; it represents a particular local and parochial interest which
has been globalized through the scope of its reach. The seven most powerful countries, the G-7, dictate global affairs, but
the interests that guide them remain narrow, local and parochial. The World Bank is not really a Bank that serves the interests of all the world’s
communities. It is a Bank where decisions are based on the voting power weighted by the economic and political power of donors, and in this
decision-making it is the communities who pay the real price and the real donors (such as the tribal of Narmada Valley whose lives are being
destroyed by a Bank financed mega-dam)but have no say. The “global” of today reflects modern version of the global reach of a handful of
British merchant adventurers who, as the East India Company, later the British Empire, raided and looted large areas of the world. Over
the
past 500 years of colonialism, whenever this global reach has been threatened by resistance, the
language of opposition has been co-opted, redefined and used to legitimize future control. The
independence movement against colonialism had revealed the poverty and deprivation caused by the
economic drain from the colonies to the centers of economic power. The post-war world order which saw the
emergence of independent political states in the South, also saw the emergence of the Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank and
IMF which took over the language of underdevelopment and poverty, removed these independent political states’ history, and made them the
reason for a new bondage based on development financing and debt burdens. The
environment movement revealed the
environmental and social costs generated by maldevelopment, conceived of and financed by such
institutions as the World Bank. Now, however, the language of the environment is itself being taken
over and made the reason for strengthening such “global” institutions and increasing their global
reach. In addition to the legitimacy derived from coopting the language of dissent is the legitimization that derives from a false notion that
the globalized “local” is some form of hierarchy that reflects geographical and democratic spread, and
to which lower order hierarchies should somehow be subservient. Operationalizing undemocratic development
projects was based on a similar false notion of “national interest”, and every local interest felt morally compelled to make sacrifices for what
seemed the larger interest. It was this moral compulsion that led each community to make way for the construction of mega-dams in postindependence India. Only during the 1980s, when the different “local” interests met nationwide, did they realize that what was projected as the
“national interest “was, in fact, the electoral interests of a handful of politicians financed by a handful of contractors, such as J.P. and
Associates who benefit from the construction of all dams, such as Tehri and the Narmada Valley
projects. Against the narrow and selfish interest that had been elevated to the status of “national”
interest, the collective effort of communities engaged in resistance against large dams began to
emerge as the real though subjugated national interest. In a similar way the World Bank’s Tropical Forest Action Plan
(TFAP) was projected as responding to a global concern about the destruction of tropical forests. When rainforest movements formed a
worldwide coalition under the World Rainforest Movement, however, it became clear that TFAP reflected the narrow commercial interests of
the World Bank and multinational forestry interests such as Shell, Jaako Poyry and others, and that the
global community best
equipped to save tropical forests were forest dwellers themselves and farming communities
dependent on forests.
Link—Sustainability
Attempts at sustainability serve to reinforce power relations and capitalistic
development.
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Sustainability, however, cuts both ways. On the one hand, it can articulate a rationale for preserving Nature's biotic diversity in
order to maintain the sustainability of the biosphere. But, on the other hand, it also can represent an effort to reinforce the
prevailing order of capitalistic development by transforming sustainability into an economic project. To
the degree that modern subjectivity is a two-sided power/knowledge relation, scientific-professional declarations about
sustainability essentially describe a new mode of environmentalized subjectivity. In becoming enmeshed in a
worldwatched environ, the individual subject of a sustainable society could become simultaneously "subject
to someone else by con-trol and dependence," where environmentalizing global and local state agencies enforce their codes
of sustainability, and police a self-directed ecological subject "tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge" (Foucault,
"Afterword" 12). In both manifestations,
the truth regime of ecological sustainability draws up criteria for what
sort of "selfness" will be privileged with political identity and social self-knowledge. Sustainability, like
sexuality, becomes a discourse about exerting power over life. How power might "invest life through and through"
(Foucault, History of Sexuality I 139) becomes a new challenge, once biopolitical relations are established as environmeltalized systems.
Moreover, sustainability more or less presumes
that some level of material and cultural existence has been attained
that is indeed worth sustaining. This formation, then, constitutes "a new distribution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and
powers; it has to be seen as the self-affirmation of one class rather than the enslavement of another: a defense, a protection, a strengthening, and an exaltation ... as a means of social control and political subjugation" (123).
Link—Technology
Technological evolution operates in accordance with market forces, ultimately
justifying environmental degredation
Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
“Reconstructing Nature: How the New Informatics are Rewrighting the Environment and Society as
Bitspace,” Capitalism Nature Society 12 (3), September 2001
At this juncture in the postmodern condition, then, new dangers emerge, and some of most fascinating,
and virulently dangerous, are those which embrace these self-reflexive observations about how
science and technology actually work in impure, subjective, and mediated ways to degrade, displace,
or destroy Nature as such. Since Second Creation allows many to presume there is no pure, objective, unmediated Nature, then
why not coevolve with a “Nature” whose impure subjective mediations always are driven by market
forces? After making this admission, they move directly into self-interested efforts to reconstruct Nature
informatically such that the moments of degradation, displacement, and destruction caused by a
quest for power and profit will benefit their producers. Such new departures are not easy to imagine, but their
proponents ultimately seek nothing less than the rewriting of place, power, and property by
rewrighting the material registers in which place is fixed, power defined, and property accumulated.
One of the crassest efforts to reposition all of these relations by reimaging Nature’s environments are those of digital materialism which asserts
what we are “becoming digital” after “being atomic.”
Link—Transportation Investment
Investments in transportation infrastructure feed the interests of major corporations
in the form of building contracts, which leaves uncontested the systems of exchange
and social relations that produce environmental degredation
Timothy W. Luke, 5 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative
politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech University,
“THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM OR THE ADVENT OF PUBLIC ECOLOGY?” Organization & Environment,
Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2005 489-490)
established environmental movements rarely question
“the most basic assumptions” about what does and does not get counted as “environmental,” because
these groups inherently define environmental problems “so narrowly” that almost all proposed
solutions turn out to “be technical” (pp. 8-9). Yet, even as they pillory environmentalism for embracing technified tactics and/or accepting statist regulation, Shellenberger and Nordhaus
take a major misstep. That is, they claim the only real escape from global warming, for example, as a severe “ecological
surprise” (King, 1995) is to follow now the organizational lead blazed by “the successes” of right-wing
political activists since the 1970s. This recommendation, in turn, entails riding a new “third wave of
environmentalism” that “will be framed around investment” in new public-private partnerships “like
those America made in the railroads, the highways, the electronic industry, and the Internet” (Shellenberger &
Nordhaus, 2004, p. 28). Even though one can sympathize with their disappointments over the conventional ecomanagerialism favored by the National Environmental Protection Acts since the 1970s, any
clearheaded environmentalist must question solutions for global warming based on the putative
models of America’s railroads, interstate highway system, or electronics industry, using so-called
public-private investments. On one level, these big technological systems are the embedded infrastructures that
spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, so they hardly provide ideal models for curbing global
climate change. On another level, Shellenberger and Nordhaus do not have a clear sense of how deeply private interests burrow into larger public
projects in the economy and environment (Fischer, 1990) to pursue special agendas that derail the common
good to seize personal benefits. Admittedly, the railroads, the interstates, and electronic life both on and off the Net did change America. Nonetheless, it is unclear that such changes were
positive, because these ambiguous transformations often served other narrower interests, like those of railroad
tycoons, General Motors, Microsoft, or General Electric. This miscomprehension can be connected to
the stark distortions built into the “ecosubpolitical” realms of contemporary capital and its collective
infrastructures (Luke, 2005, pp. 202-206). It is in this realm that private interests and/or technical accreditation are
pitted against truly collective public concerns.
Here, Shellenberger and Nordhaus (2004) perhaps start out on the right track. They observe that
Link—Gas Tax
Market-centered approaches to environmental crises replicates irresponsible practices
of consumption which reproduce disaster. Eco-progress can’t come from systems
premised on greed and selfishness.
Timothy W. Luke, 5 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as
comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at
Virginia Tech University, “THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM OR THE ADVENT OF PUBLIC ECOLOGY?”
Organization & Environment, Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2005 489-490)
The challenge today is not how “to get back on the offensive” (Shellenberger& Nordhaus, 2004, pp. 29-31) by only doing private conservative activists
one better. Rather, it is how to develop a truly public ecology with new organizations, institutions, and ideas
whose material articulation can balance the insights of scientific experts, the concerns of private
property holders, the worries about social inequity, and the need for ecological sustainability to
support human and nonhuman life in the 21st century. A public ecology merely accepts the truth of
John Law’s (1991) observations about contemporary life: All human ecologies on Earth are a
hybridized “sociotechnical order.” Dismissing technical realities, and then turning to private
investments, as Shellenberger and Nordhaus ask, will not change this increasingly artificial world, which, as Law
suggests, pulls together systems of humans and machines, animals and plants, economies and
ecologies as “our environment.” Even global warming reaffirms this rough reality, namely, “what appears to be 490 ORGANIZATION &
ENVIRONMENT / December 2005 social is partly technical. What we usually call technical is partly social. In practice nothing is purely technical. Neither is anything
Markets alone, especially with new antistatist “coping and consenting” style of
collaborative environmental governance, either will fail completely or flail around ineffectively in
churning new green investment schemes. As Light and Shippen (2003, p. 234) claim, “the specific importance of
environmental public goods” makes it imperative to lay deeper materialist foundations for protecting
the community goods, collective needs, and public services required for stable, healthy, industrial
and natural metabolisms to sustain all human and nonhuman life. Only a more public conception of ecology can harness
purely social” (Law, 1991, p. 10).
together a new mixed ecological regime (of state, market, and civil society) to rethink and restructure today’s destructive urban industrial ecologies (Luke, 2003).
Link—Economy
Economic growth is an extension of the rich exploiting the political environment in
order to get ahead in society. This leads towards inequality and class distinctions.
Timothy W. Luke, 2001 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well
as comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at
Virginia Tech University, “Globalization, Popular Resistance and Postmodernity,” Democracy & Nature,
Vol. 7, No. 2, 2001, pg. 317-318)
Everything that exists now around the world could be otherwise. This realization is what fuels the
increasingly restive resistance against what global modernity has become from Seattle to London to
Washington. Much of what persists at this moment, whether one looks at advanced economic
structures or modern political practices, expresses enduring inequalities in wealth, power, and
knowledge that benefit a few to the detriment of the many. These oligarchical concentrations of
authority and income, in turn, are undercutting the democratic promise of a more universal popular
empowerment and enrichment, which if it was realized would create more prosperity, greater
harmony, and better governance. Those benefits, however, are not being realized. And, most efforts to advance toward them are
being thwarted by entrenched elites intent upon preserving their position and privilege in latest expressions of modernity as ‘the postmodern
turn’.1 Nonetheless, other
more democratic, equitable, and popular expressions of modernity are
possible; and, this possibility is what many new local, regional, and national resistances against
globalized inequality and disempowerment hope to attain. The modes of organization realized during the Industrial
Revolution entailed a complex social contract between labor and capital, the rulers and the ruled, the lay people and technical experts. In
exchange for passive acceptance of expert decisions, enlightened rule, and enduring
growth at its finest levels of
performance, this social contract—as a rhetorical construct—mostly consigned active agency to
capital, the rulers, and experts, leaving labor, the ruled, and lay people to enjoy a good standard of
living, a state concerned with their welfare, and better living through science. Of course, it rarely worked to
everyone’s satisfaction, many were left out, and some suffered continual persecution. Nevertheless, this mode of organization
in the economy, society, and government, whether one labels it industrial democracy, Fordism, social
democracy, advanced capitalism, liberal democratic society, etc., satisfied some publics with many continuous
emendations until the 1980s.
Link—Economy—Innovation
Capitalism incorporates their new and fancy technology within its demand for
increasing efficiency and flexible accumulation
Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
“Reconstructing Nature: How the New Informatics are Rewrighting the Environment and Society as
Bitspace,” Capitalism Nature Society 12 (3), September 2001
This ceaseless search for performance and profit is the essence of today’s postmodern condition. And, as
Lyotard claims, such capitalist restructuring “continues to take place without leading to the realization of any
of these dreams of emancipation.”18 With waning trust in narratives of truth, enlightenment or progress, Lyotard argues the supporters
of science and technology working behind big business fall under the sway of “another language
game, in which the goal is no longer truth, but performativity — that is, the best possible input/output
equation.”19 On another level, which Jameson struggles to outline, these mediations of performativity begin generating “a
new social system beyond classical capitalism.” 20 This system is inchoate, but it basically boils down to whatever
is proliferating throughout “the world space of multinational capital.”21 More specifically, as David Harvey argues, this
new multinational corporate regime began dismantling the old Fordist regime of industrial
production, capital accumulation, and state intervention patched together on a national basis during the 1930s through the 1970s
by welfare states. In its place, new arrangements for flexible accumulation, productive specialization, and public deregulation have surfaced since the 1970s along
with the ideologies of neoliber-alism. Working within these many loosely coupled transnational alliances, Harvey observes, “ flexible
accumulation
typically exploits a wide range of seemingly contingent geographical circumstances, and reconstitutes
them as structured internal elements of its own encompassing logic....the result has been the
production of fragmentation, insecurity, and ephemeral uneven development within a highly unified
global space economy of capital flows.”22
Link—Information about nature/Biotech/GMOs
The gathering and collection of information of nature feeds flows of innovation for
capital—developing ‘new’ and ‘different’ tech solutions is motivated by desire for
profit
Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
“Reconstructing Nature: How the New Informatics are Rewrighting the Environment and Society as
Bitspace,” Capitalism Nature Society 12 (3), September 2001
Ultimately, then, these transformations are a function of restructuring the world economy. If Nature is gone for good, then
Second Creation can be digitally remastered as a postnature at the genetic, organic, and systemic
level. Specializing in primary agricultural or forestry products is no longer necessarily a path to economic
growth, or even stability for those already occupying those niches. Consequently, new means of exploiting, or creating,
comparative advantage in the global economy need to be discovered, and informatics are often one
sure-fire method for making such discoveries. Whether it is bioengineering new transgenic animals,
genetically modifying plant stocks, nanoengineering new industrial materials or reimagining
agroindustrial inputs on new logistical timelines and spatial flows with GIS (geographic information systems)
spatial data, informatics are now seen as an essential means for this rerationalization of transnational
commerce at a national, regional, and local level. Here is how being digital burrows into the molecular registers of organic
and inorganic materiality. Informatics enables agricultural and industrial activity to fracture along three degrees of resolution — the biogenetic,
biorganismic, and biosystemic — in bitspace. The inherently difficult qualities of primary product production, whether the industry is farming,
forestry or fisheries, have been difficult to surmount, because Nature itself has imposed so many constraints on production. Of course,
industrialized fishing, scientific forestry, and high-tech agriculture all have made some inroads toward controlling more material qualities of
agricultural and industrial production, but “Nature” continues
to be seen in these economic pursuits as a
recalcitrant barrier against greater production. Of course, Nature also is already an enablement for
production, but this characteristic is usually ignored in the quest for greater technological proficiency.
Whether it is variations in land topography, random differences in soil chemistry, water quality or
weather, larger ecological pressures, land use pressures, basic fishery overuse, general forest stress,
or unpredictable atmospheric changes, Nature has not been a readily surveyed or easily controlled
object of analysis. A reconstructed Nature with the digital materialists’ Second Creation, however,
offers prospects for making considerable progress in that direction. Enveloping the Earth in different
layers of bitspace for informatics surveillance, and then material manipulation, promises to
revolutionize the many practices of agricultural and industrial production.
Link—Digitalization/Singularity
The Social Network is wrong—we cannot ‘live on the internet’—we are necessarily
limited by nature. Seeking disconnection or transcendence just leads to disregard and
destruction.
Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
“Reconstructing Nature: How the New Informatics are Rewrighting the Environment and Society as
Bitspace,” Capitalism Nature Society 12 (3), September 2001
Most celebrants of bits, despite their protests to the contrary, revitalize old materialist philosophies by grafting
digitalization over the defunct dialectical fields of old progressive teleologies. Like orthodox communists, the
advocates of digitalization presume already to know how history ends: in the classless state of full connectivity,
ubiquitous computing, and 24x7 access made possible by bits. One finds many of them rhetorically twisting every new
optical cable, each new microchip design, and all new operating systems into another irrefutable sign
of historical progress. Digital materialists boot up the mode of information, and then find the relations of informatics and means
are configuring society with more efficient cooperation — both online and offline — to attain finally
full virtualization. In most respects, informatics could be regarded as only the latest wrinkle in “modernity.” Once again, one finds a
fresh set of cultural transformations, resting upon destructively productive new technics with its own unformed social mores, posing as both
the source and goal of yet another universalizing moral order, uniform vision of nature, and univocalized economic model. Bits, like most
modern things defined by commodified commercial operations, are privileged objects, which can
go from anywhere to anywhere
at anytime for anybody.10 Yet, this potential omnipresence, first, mostly glosses over how much
“anywhere” in digital environments actually will remain — in worldsystems terms — a set of very
limited venues, or truly a privileged set of “manywheres,” albeit often widely distributed
geographically. Second, it also ignores how most digital packets go from somebody at one privileged
site to somebody, or actually “manybodies,” at another special place. And, third, it discounts how
speeds in anytime are arrayed in “manytimes” as a function of willingness to pay, salience of
authority, or quality of connectivity. While Negroponte does not admit it, his digital materialist “thinking,” as Deleuze and
Guattari claim, always must take “place in the relationship of territory and the earth,” and “the earth constantly carries out a
movement of deterritorialization on the spot, by which it goes beyond any territory: it is
deterritorializing and deterritorialized” in a fashion that continuously “brings together all of the
elements within a single embrace while using one or another of them to deterritorialize territory.”11
Consequently, the characteristics of bits on networks always are already environmental forces, and
they never should be considered apart from atoms of the earth.
The shift to a more “advanced” world makes culture and society into a commodity to
assist in the digitalization of the world.
Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
“Reconstructing Nature: How the New Informatics are Rewrighting the Environment and Society as
Bitspace,” Capitalism Nature Society 12 (3), September 2001
Negroponte’s digital being of bits now promises infinite diagrammatic movements in still-to-bedetermined relationships with atoms in a metanational transgenic space. Brimming with unknown works-inprogress, lines-of-flight, and bodies-without-organs, bits reach out and command atoms. As an absolute plane of immanence,
the qualities of bits are those of a constantly “movable and moving ground,”14 and they endlessly
cycle the decisive moments of founding/ building/inhabiting through informatic thought and action.
What is more, bits are being rapidly transversalized by capitalist exchange, and digitalization mostly works now through informatics to advance
the universalization of markets. The
axiomatics of commodification are very congruent with those of
digitalization, so metanational environments emerge through informatics in decoded flows of bits,
money, ideas, and products. These streams can erode the overcoded substance of resistant cultures,
governments, and societies.15 Because of bits, governments and markets now seem hell-bent upon “going
with the flow” of digital change simply to survive, because they are “no longer paradigms of
overcoding but constitute the ‘models of realization’ of this immanent axiomatic” for rapid
commodification and global digitalization.1
Impacts
Impact—Environmental Destruction
The environment always exceeds human meddling—more intervention only worsens
the cycle of crisis, guaranteeing ecological extinction
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and
Sustainability: what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE
Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA,
also he blew up the death star)
Commoner also presents these two worlds as being `at war’ . As humans in the technosphere disrupt the ecosphere, the
ecosphere responds with equally or more disruptive secondary effects in the technosphere. In some sense,
the environment is `nature’ for Commoner, but it is also `society’ , or, perhaps more accurately, a new composite of `nature-as-transformed-bysociety’ . Commoner stresses this interpretation in The Closing Circle when he claims `the environment is, so to speak, the house created on the
earth by living things, for living things’ (Commoner, 1971, p. 32). This representation of the environment as life’ s house, however, does little
more than reduce it to a biophysical housing of all living thingsÐ or, again, the setting that surrounds organisms.Pesticides often
are
used to typify how environmental destruction happens in this conceptual register. A chemical agent is
applied by humans in the technosphere on something in the biosphere, like weeds or animal pests.
While this application was intended to eradicate only those plants or animals that destroyed crops,
carried disease and infested dwellings, its impact was much broader. Soon pesticides jumped the
dualist chasm and spread through everything in the ecosphereÐ both human technosphere and nonhuman biosphereÐ returning from `out there’ in natural environments back into plant, animal and
human bodies situated `in here’ , affecting those arti® cial environments with unintended,
unanticipated and unwanted negative effects. This recognition begins with Carson (1962). Many environmental educators
accept this ontological momentum in ordinary Education 195 language use and allow the reductionist and dualist vision of the environment to
in® ltrate their visions of human concern for the Earth’ s ecologies. Up to a point, this view works, but the limited advantage it provides
culminate in resource, risk and recreationist managerialism. When
the world is divisible into environment and society,
nature and community, ecology and economics, environmental education’ s charge is to enlighten
everyone about how to mitigate the damage caused by the latter on the former. Hence, various
environmental protection agencies, built `in here’ by society to safeguard what is `out there’ in
nature, can mobilise agents and activities to reduce resource use, mitigate risks, and contain
recreational degradation in the environment. These approaches `work’ , but their workability is shortterm and limited. They overlook how resources are misused, risks are avoidable and recreations are
mutable.
Environmental destruction is a result of human managerial control that contributes to
the diminishment of planetary resources. Managerialism is the root cause of
environmental crises.
Paul Trenell, graduate student in international politics at the University of Wales, "The (Im)possibility
of 'Environmental Security," dissertation submitted September 2006, accessed 11/30/09
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/410/2/trenellpaulipm0060.pdf
Before tracing the response to the emergence of environmental hazards it is necessary to say a word
about the causes of environmental degradation. By this I refer not to the scientific explanations of the process, but the
deeply rooted societal and philosophical developments that have allowed the process to continue. As Simon Dalby has detailed,
environmental threats “are the result of the kind of society that the current global political economy
produces. Industrial activity, agricultural monocultures, and rampant individual consumption of
“disposable items” (all of which are efforts to enhance some forms of human welfare through domination and control of facets of
nature) produce other forms of insecurity” (1992a: 113). A large hand in the development of contemporary environmental
problems must be attributed to the enlightenment faith in human ability to know and conquer all. In
the quest for superiority and security, an erroneous division between humanity and nature emerged
whereby the natural world came to be seen as something to be tamed and conquered rather than
something to be respected (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1973). Over time, this false dichotomy has become accepted as given, and as a
result humankind has lost sight of its own dependence on nature. It is this separation which allows the continued abuse
of planetary resources with such disregard for the long-term implications. What is at stake in how we respond to
environmental insecurity is the healing of this rift and, in turn, the preservation of human life into the future. Any suggested solutions
to environmental vulnerability must account for these concerns and provide a sound basis for
redressing the imbalance in the humanity-nature relationship.
Alternatives
Alt
Reconsidering our relationship to the environment allows us to change the way we
view nature
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and
Sustainability: what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE
Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA,
also he blew up the death star)
By reconsidering how educators and schools discursively construct `the environment’ , one can see, as Foucault
suggests, the way in which individuals or groups represent words to themselves, utilise their forms and
meanings, compose real discourse, reveal and conceal in it what they are thinking or saying, perhaps
unknown to themselves, more or less than they wish, but in any case leave a mass of verbal traces of
those thoughts, which must be deciphered and restored as far as possible to their representative
vivacity.(Foucault, 1994, p. 353) There are many different alternatives to what prevails, and changing ways of thought can revolutionise the
practices of policy. In environmental education, the professional± technical articulations of teaching largely
focus on resource/risk/recreation managerialism to establish and enforce `the right disposition of
things’ between humans and their environment through administering resource use, risk, de® nition,
and recreation loads. When approached through these categories, the planet Earth does become, if
only in terms of environmental policy’ s operational assumptions, an immense planetary
infrastructure. As the human race’s `ecological life-support system’, it has `with only occasional localised failures’ provided `services upon
which human society depends consistently and without charge’ (Cairns, 1995). As the foundational infrastructure of brown
spaces in society, the Earth generates `ecosystem services’ , or those derivative products and
functions of natural systems that human societies perceive as valuable (Westmen, 1978). Human life will
continue only if such survival-sustaining services continue, so this complex system of systems is what
must survive. These outputs include: the generation of soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients, capture of solar energy, conversion of
solar energy into biomass, accumulation/puri® cation/ distribution of water, control of pests, provision of a genetic library, maintenance of
breathable air, control of micro and macro climates, pollination of plants, diversi ® cation of animal species, development of buffering
mechanisms in catastrophes and aesthetic enrichment (Cairns, 1995). Because it is the terrestrial infrastructure of transnational enterprise, the
planet’ s ecology requires very skilled and informed leadership to guide its sustainable use. In turn, environmental experts will monitor,
massage and manage those systems that produce these robust services. Just as the sustained use of any technology `requires that it be
maintained, updated and changed periodically’ , so too does the `sustainable use of the planet require that we not destroy our ecological
capital, such as old-growth forests, streams and rivers (with their associated biota), and other natural amenities’ (Cairns, 1995, p. 6).
Systemic survival of nature’ s green zones, then, becomes the central concern of these environmental
education initiatives, while the artificial ecologies of society’ s brown zones often are ignored.
The alt is a reconceptualization of humanity and the environment as intimately bound
within common economic forces—this establishes responsibility for the environment
that doesn’t devolve into managerialism
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and
Sustainability: what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE
Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA,
also he blew up the death star)
What must be done now to re-orient educators and students about the environment is to re-imagine
environments in more holistic dialectical terms as integral parts of economies, societies and
communities. Organisms are circumscribed by environments and environments co-evolve with organisms. Most importantly, the people
and things, which markets now mix and match magically with invisible hands, in tightly wrapped black boxes labelled as `the environment’ and
`the economy’ must be recombined conceptually so that they can interoperate in more ecologically sensible and economically equitable ways.
Education must grab the hidden hands, make them more visible and let these closed and darkened
boxes be opened and brightened. Once these black boxes are unpacked and lightened by education,
the other systems of power/knowledge that always (con)fuse human beings with non-human beings
and things, both natural and arti® cial, might be rebuilt in a manner that is more economically just and
environmentally sound. The ecological upheavals being caused by global trade, professional science and corporate capital force us to
rethink what environmental education must do, because these forces are elaborating their productive powers on a transnational scale. This
work, in turn, is destroying much of what was the realm of `nature’ and the domain of `society’ in the process. In developing informational
modes of production, which are designed, built and managed by a new global bloc of professional± technical experts, local and global capital
now are trying to reconstruct their roles under new conditions of economic and political reproduction as the ultimate guarantors of humanity’ s
`sustainable development’ and `environmental security’ .10 As the `battle in Seattle’ over the World Trade Organization (WTO) during
December 1999 indicates, workers and consumers are fearful of their personhood being displaced by new installations of robotic apparatus,
divided up into competing national and regional labour reserves within a transnational capital market, or diluted into indistinct types of
increasingly underskilled work. Yet, transnational businesses are using new collaborative associations, like the WTO, to expand, amplify and
elaborate these outcomes in their markets as the world’s most important revolutionary economic and political force. For the ® rst time in the
development of markets, global modes of production can commodify almost everything on a planned, rational, mass scale.
Not only can
the raw resources of the Earth, the manufactured things of factory production and the social services
of human interaction be submitted to a business logic of exchange, but also words, codes, memories,
sounds, images and symbols can be designed as value-adding, fungible products for rapid transit
through mass markets as instruments of production, accumulation, reproduction and circulation. Even
life itself, whether in the form of designer genes, engineered tomatoes, bionic joints, synthetic skin, or
patented mice, is being turned into a commodity. Most environmental education misses these
developments by consigning them to another place, or the messy brown zones of society, as it fends
for the still pristine green zones of nature. Such ecological teachings unfortunately dehistoricise social
change and decontextualise cultural shifts, abstracting economics and technics out of everyday lived
experience in society. Once removed from the ecological picture, these powers return as autonomous external forces which allegedly
compel people to reshape their values, institutions and beliefs about nature to ® t bigger imperatives in the market. Managerial
environmentalism can then intervene to regulate how natural resources are consumed and at what rate by whom, in the contingent exchange
relations of capital, states and technics. Consequently, it is in the planet’ s environment that environmental educators must ask a key question:
who, whom? Whose benefits come from nature for whom, whose organisation of society by whom?
Environmental policies play
out as a struggle for control, pro® t and organisational authority and the winners are promoting the
domination of human beings in society and non-human beings in nature. There are many other ways to reimagine environments as community, economy, or society and environmental education should free everyone to consider all of them. To begin
this task, environmental education could return to Marx’ s criticism of the commodity form. When Marx asserts in `The Preface’ to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, `it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their
social being that determines their consciousness’ , he also is trying to open the black boxes of `the environment’ and `the economy’ (Marx,
1978). Marx’ s
examination of the commodity form under capitalism looks at how human labour is
associated, or disassociated, with non-human things to create profit by studying who dominates
whom in such exchange relations. In fact, commodification leads to the endless `co-modification’ of
human and non-human beings in both nature and society, and environmental education can draw an
awareness from Marx of more equitable or emancipatory paths to modernity kept in stasis as an
unrealised potential within the frozen maze-ways of existing capitalist modernity. Not necessary, but
possible, not foreordained, but feasible, not inevitable, but practical; these other conditions of
remediation or the possibilities for rebuilding the associations of people and things could be
actualised with more socially astute ways of acting politically and thinking ethically . Marx recognised the
commodity form was becoming the universal basis of all social relations and his entire political project is based upon overcoming its destructive
effects. When caught in the webs of monetised exchange, the origin and existence of all socially produced artefacts become mysti® ed. The
Earth becomes what one buys in `The Nature Store’, and society is what is taped, broadcast and watched on `The History Channel’ , but the real
show goes on the market watch of CNNfn. In global markets, human interactions with the environment increasingly have `absolutely no
connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom’ (Marx, 1967). Instead, one finds there it is a definite
social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore to find an analogy,
we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the
productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into
relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the
products of men’ s hands. (Marx, 1967) Thus, humans wright things, products and machines. They
then are rewrought by the machines, products and things they wright. Yet, these tendencies are
exactly what environmental education does not address in their entirety. Environmental education
should peer directly into the disorder congealed together in capitalist commerce. At its root, this mode of
production thrives upon a purposive cultivation of chaos, whose qualities Marx and Engels captured in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:
198 T. W. Luke Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All ® xed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Marx, 1978, p. 476)
Commodification volatilises, liquidates, ¯ uidises matter and spirit. By mixing and matching holy and profane, solids and atmospheres,
immediacy and antiquation, the normalising associations and disassociations of people and things appear sensible when they are, in fact,
Markets now are in many ways the ultimate environment for both human and non-human
beings and environmental education must show how humans and things are fused in the market’ s
chaotic swirls.
assuredly not.
Interrogating the way contemporary environmental policy is bound within market
relations best enables more sustainable ethics
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and
Sustainability: what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE
Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA,
also he blew up the death star)
To create a truly more sustainable society, environmental education must unravel the complicated
cycles of production and consumption, which are interwoven through most technological and
economic practices in contemporary transnational commerce and this unravelling must show how
these cycles are verging upon almost complete chaos. Highly planned programmes for economic
growth are creating many unintended and unplanned outcomes of environmental destruction,
boosting society’ s already high ecological risks to even higher levels. Most steps taken to mitigate these risks will
not be executed with much certainty of successfully gaining their intended ends. Doing anything could make everything
worse, doing nothing might make something better. At this juncture, environmental education must
redefine some shared values for an ecological society. Unfortunately, most academic disciplines, from ecology to
economics, are shackled by a set of disciplinary practices that constrain the imagination to ® t the approved scope and correct method of
normal disciplinary inquiry. When Eugene Odum, for example, asserts that ecology is a `major interdisciplinary science that links together the
biological, physical, and social sciences’ (Odum, 1975), very few biological, physical, or social scientists accept this broad interdisciplinary
charge. Any ecology worth of its name would concede immediately that the economy and society are the Earth’ s main environments. This
reality is acknowledged by Moscovici in his re¯ ections about the question of nature in the contemporary world system. That is, science and
technology have reconstituted humanity as a new material force, working on planetary basis. `In 200 T. W. Luke short’ , he asserts, `the
state of nature is not now just an economy of things; it has become at the same time the work of
human beings. The fact is that we are dealing with a new nature’ (Moscovici, 1990). This fact and how the
work of human beings continuously remediates this new nature are what environmental education
must address to attain sustainability. Without sinking into a green foundationalist stance,
environmental education must weave an analysis of power, politics and the state into an ecology’ s
sense of sustainability, survival and the environment. This kind of interdisciplinary effort could
develop a deeply contextual understanding of nature and society as holistic cluster of interdependent
relations. This view should integrate a clear sense of how ecological constraints must reshape
social/political/economic/cultural practices to move past the technological and environmental failings
of the present global economy. In turn, this critical account of humanity’ s ecological failings, once it came common in
environmental education classes, should open broader dialogues about how individuals, as both citizens and consumers, can intervene as
defenders of their local habitats in many corners of today’ s global economy
Rejecting the values of managerialism allows for the creation of a new society that
refuses to be rooted in expert control and capitalism.
Timothy W. Luke, 2001 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as
comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech
University, “Globalization, Popular Resistance and Postmodernity,” Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2001, pg.
324-325)
It is the unanticipated costs incurred by society at large in serving such performative corporate goals that populists resist as antithetical to the
larger agendas of living well. By
opposing these destructive tendencies with new alternative values,
democratic populists push to renew non-hierarchical social relations, technical simplicity, small-scale
economies, political decentralization, reasonable science, and cultural vitality within the free spaces
of present-day national society. Unlike most expert programs for greater corporate managerialism, many democratic
populists and critical social theorists favor mobilizing the immediate producers and consumers to
reconsider how crucial decisions about their relations to Nature can change rather than surrendering
this prerogative to state and corporate technocrats. This contestation of expert managerialism puts
ecology at the center of a new critical sensibility to revitalize political debates over the key issues of
who decides, who pays, and who benefits in the complex economic and technological l relations of
people with Nature.26 A sense of Nature, as ecologically constituted free sites for self-created being,
promises to reorder the relations of the individual l to the collective, of personality to society, and of
these dual social relations to Nature.27 This ecological sensibility, then, also must reinvest individuals with the decision-making
power to construct their material relations to the environment in smaller-scale, non-hierarchical, ecologically sound technical relations
between independent producers in local and regional commonwealths. They know states and businesses will not act responsibly in every
instance. Therefore, democratic populism must reaffirm the responsibility of all individuals for preserving their ecological inheritance and
passing it on to future generations. To
confirm the virtues of self and social discipline in living within the
renewable cycles of natural reproduction, this ecological sensibility should point to the most
promising paths out of the global consumerism of transnational capitalism. 28 Rather than encouraging passivity,
dependence and purposelessness, which corporate technocracy fosters and perpetuates, the theory and praxis of democratic populism should
presume greater social activity, personal autonomy, and reasonable balance to preserve Nature. With these goals, the labor of competent,
conscious communities could be guided to reconstitute ecologically their social, economic and political mediations with each other by
interacting reasonably with Nature.29 Furthermore, the
successful establishment of new social relations
organized along these ecological lines will alter radically the social constructions of Nature in relation
to society, making it again into a subject not an object, an agency not an instrumentality, and a more
than equal partner not a dominated subaltern force. Rather than viewing environmental disasters as isolated incidents of
untidy waste disposal or inefficient management of natural processes, making Nature an equal partner with people would recast such events as
tragedies of unreasoning abuse. The
living and inorganic constituents of Nature could be entitled to rights and
privileges as worthy of defense as any human rights and social privileges.30 Guarantees of ecological
security should ramify, in turn, into greater freedom, dignity and reasonability for the human beings
whose own autonomy suffers in Nature’s abusive indenturement to corporate enterprises’
instrumental rationality.31
Alt—Public Ecology
A public ecology attuned to the social realities of today is most capable of responding
to the problems of commodification and nature. This entails critical redeployment of
scientific and social discourses through a prior framework which refuses any reductive
or self-interested approaches to the environment.
Timothy W. Luke, 5 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative
politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech University,
“THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM OR THE ADVENT OF PUBLIC ECOLOGY?” Organization & Environment,
Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2005 492-493)
Oddly, Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s (2004) endorsement of a “new Apollo Project” could make moves toward a public ecology because it
could aim at undercutting today’s allegedly “special interest environmentalism” by using big, new investments for national energy
independence centered on “building a
coalition of environmental, labor, business, and community allied who
share a common vision for a future and a common set of values” (p. 26). Even though this would be a laudable goal,
Shellenberger and Nordhaus ironically get caught here in almost laughable performative contradictions inasmuch as they try to legitimize their
“new strategy” by noting “the Apollo vision was endorsed by 17 of the country’s leading labor unions and environmental groups ranging from
the NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council] to the Rainforest Action Network,” as if this lineup actually is “a sincere attempt to undermine
the assumptions of special interest environmentalism” (p. 26). This strategic miscalculation fails their own test of intellectual viability, namely,
“that the strength of any given political proposal turns more on its visions for the future and the values its carries within it than on its technical
policy specifications” (p. 27). Lining up new coalitions of different special interests from old environmental and labor groups neither expresses a
new vision for the future nor a fresh set of values. It is Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s blindness to
proclaim that
“environmentalism is dead.” In truth, they should instead see the advent of a public ecology amid
today’s ecological crises as a vital space to gather new progressive movements for equity from the
economy and ecology of the Earth. Public ecology is one opportunity to overcome such blindness by
cutting new spatial optics to detect the disruptive snarls in the worldwide webs of natural and social
exchanges (see Dodds, 2000). Public ecology, then, knits together what once were quite discrete natural and social elements into a
compound prefiguration of planet wide community, which Lefebvre (2003) labeled as “the urban” in 1970. What once seemed only like “a
horizon, an illuminating virtuality” (p. 17) a
generation ago is now fully recognizable in today’s deruralizing and
over urbanized ways of life. Although the urban is perhaps somewhat abstract, its fields of force still
remain the main public focus of human ecological action—in cities and country sides alike. Consequently, the
material impulse of capitalist globalism to remake the world in commodified forms through markets
must be countered by dense webs of social movements and systemic materialities embedded in public
ecology to reimagine the urban revolution’s inequitable and inefficient reconstitution of the world’s
environments and their inhabitants. By pushing beyond exhausted conceptual divisions in naturalized “environmental sciences”
into the more social science–focused “environmental studies,” public ecology also could fuse insights from life science,
physical science, social science, applied humanities, and public policy into a cohesive conceptual
complex that anticipates and avoids “ecological surprises” (King, 1995). Today, the Earth is a res publica, and it must be
cared for with caution, through collective deliberation, and quite openly (Luke, 1999). Public ecology could preserve but also look far beyond
conventional regimes for “environmental problem” detection/monitoring/ regulation such as those in the United States’s federal bureaucracy.
Public ecology must show how private ecologies have turned the world’s built and un -built
environments into a formation that exploits those mental divides as it degrades the overall civic life of
society. Although privileged millions still benefit from the international misery of billions, Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s anti global warming
politics cannot help us find a post environmental world by simply endorsing other more preferred networks for privativistic special interest
politics. Indeed, their frantic faith in just doing what right-wing activists have done for decades, only now with a different progressive spin and
broader coalition, could only resurrect the non-environmentalism all suffered through during the Gilded Age prior to rise of the first
conservation movements in the United States.
Public ecology seeks a more responsible division between public and private that
maintains awareness of social ills while balancing these against universal interests in
ecological well-being
Timothy W. Luke, 5 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as
comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at
Virginia Tech University, “THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM OR THE ADVENT OF PUBLIC ECOLOGY?”
Organization & Environment, Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2005 491-492)
Appealing to the public today for any sort of collective action, however, is quite difficult. The meandering meditations found in
Habermas’s (1991, p. 1) work on “the public sphere,” for example, cue anyone interested in publics or a
public sphere that history “betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings” in their use. Habermas notes, for
example, how most public events can be open to all, but many public buildings are only open to the few. Over time, the multiplicity of meanings
entangled by public-private
distinctions must be traced back through a public ecology to define the
boundaries between what is thrown open and what is closed, what belongs to “the people” and what can be possessed
by a private person, what is embedded within collective needs and what is tied to individual desires. Here,
the “sociotechnical order” of the environment is apparent, because these divisions cut deep divides
between gender, class, race, power, citizenship, and status (see Clark & Foster, 2003, pp. 459-469). Although both
public and private have a history, today the public realm is regarded most negatively—as Shellenberger and Nordhaus repeatedly illustrate by
favoring corporate marketing, private investment, and commercial values to generate their third wave of environmentalism. Nonetheless, the
post-1979 history of Thatcherite public-bashing and/or Reaganite private-boosting rhetoric can be evaded. Public
ecology’s open
acceptance of humanity’s growing sociotechnical order and disorder at all of its many urban and
natural sites only points out the material roots of ecology in definite places, things, and practices.
Shared by humans and nonhumans together in the short run, and perhaps even belonging to all in the long run, the Earth’s ecological
spaces, systems, and sites make public ecology an enduring notion well worth using to reclaim the
Earth’s vast bounty for humans and nonhumans alike. Otherwise, environmentalism will stay snared
in the hidden and limited shifting agendas of neoclassical economics, which during the past two
decades, all over the world, elevated the private in a variety of economic and policy matters (Light &
Shippen, 2003). To paraphrase Arendt (1998), while noting that her sense of “the human condition” is tied to “the conditional humanized,” it is
public ecologies are material formations in which the mutual dependence of the Earth for
the sake of life and nothing else must assume a new public significance. Public ecologies are efforts to ecologically
evident that
rebalance the sociotechnical order in which the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to, and yet also pushed forth, to appear
before the public at large, as bigger public issues, and from the public in action via new institutions of public ecological cooperation (see p. 46).
Defining public ecology, then, depends upon recognizing how thoroughly the materialization of global
warming, for example, marks a structural transformation of the biosphere. Defending this public
ecology—as it is extruded bioculturally and sociotechnically in the transformed structures of a fossil
fuel– polluted biosphere/technosphere—requires a new sense of how the cultural, economic, and
social forces infiltrate built environments. Plainly, a planet undergoing rapid anthropogenic global warming now fuses historical
and natural forces in a sociotechnical order (Luke, 1997). These links are mostly now occluded in complex private
chains of personal property and professional expertise, but their recognition, articulation, and
reoperationalization are imperative, first, to reimagine, and second, to protect the biosphere as a
continuously transformed public sphere (see Luke, 1999).
Answers To
AT: Perm
The perm is like the national park system—it sets aside a particular instance of
environmental ‘protection’ so that systemic abuses of nature go uninvestigated
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and
Sustainability: what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE
Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA,
also he blew up the death star)
To serve this end, schools are invited to prepare their students to master the `ins-and-outs’ of resource
managerialism, risk assessment and/or recreationist management in the environment . In fact, resources,
risks and recreationists become `the three Rs’ of higher environmental education. This gives students and faculty some very
specific new foci for their studies and grants a specialised managerial power to experts in either the
government or big business to control. Because acting on the behalf of nature has shifted from the
avocational register of belle-letteristic naturalist writings into the professional technical knowledge
codes of environmental science, larger public discourses about ecological degradation, resource waste
or environmental remediation also have changed significantly. On the one hand, many see this shift as progressive:
scienti® c personnel with positivistic technical knowledge allegedly now can identify ecological problems objectively as well as design ef® cient
solutions for the most pressing ones. On the other hand, this change is regarded by others with suspicion: a spirit of `shallowness’ occludes the
enchantments of nature in the dark shadows of anthropocentrism, capitalism and statism, leaving
`the environment’ to be
treated as little more than terrestrial infrastructure for global capital (see Nash, 1989; Devall & Sessions, 1985; Fox,
1990). Parts of it must be maintained in pristine condition as parks, but other larger pieces must be
turned over either to mines, agriculture and ranches or sacrificed to dumps, sewers and wasteland.
Environmental costs cannot just be regulated and postponed, they must be solved
utterly and completely
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
“Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered,” Organization & Environment, Vol. 15 No. 2, June 2002, p.
178-186, Sage
Reform environmentalism and radical ecology both focus on the unintended social costs of economic
growth, complexity, scale, and productivity (Luke, 1997). Yet reform environmentalists treat them as
minor problems that can be dealt with by the public and not-for-profit sector with essentially minor
technocratic modifications by government regulation or market-driven incentives for the private sector
(Devall, 1979, pp. 129-155). Many radical ecologists, on the other hand, see the modern state’s
approach to these “unintended costs” as forgotten costs that business, society, and government have
always known about but purposely suppressed (Best, 1998). Such costs never can be eradicated
entirely because an industrial economy presumes their recurring charges as externalities. Regulating
them only postpones the final reckoningby hiding some costs elsewhere. A foundational change in
thinking is needed to attack the most basic problems—untrammeled economic growth, instrumental
rationality, and the reification of nature—implicit in capitalist industrialism (Luke, 1999; Salleh, 1993).
Hence, deep ecologists turn to repressed, ignored, or forgotten visions of ecological living, which
persist beneath, behind, or beyond the existing structures of industrial society.
AT: Managerialism Good
Resource managerialism fails to prevent ecological damages; empirically causes harm
to the environment
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and
Sustainability: what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE
Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA,
also he blew up the death star)
The fundamental premise of resource managerialism in environmental education has not changed
significantly over the past nine decades. At best, it only has become more formalised in its
bureaucratic applications and legal interpretations. Keying off of the managerial logic of the Second Industrial Revolution,
which empowered technical experts, or engineers and scientists, on the shop ¯ oor and professional managers, or corporate executives and
finnancial officers, in the main office, resource managerialism
imposes corporate frameworks upon nature in
order to supply the economy and provision society through centralised expert guidance (Noble, 1977).
These frameworks assume that the national economy, like the interacting capitalist firm and
household, must avoid both overproduction (excessive resource use coupled with inadequate
demand) and underproduction (inefficient resource use coming with excessive demand) on the
supply-side as well as over-consumption (excessive resource exploitation coming with excessive
demand) and under-consumption (inefficient resource exploitation coupled with inadequate demand)
on the demand side. To imagine the managerial problem in this manner, nature is reduced through
the encirclement of space and matter by national as well as global economiesÐ to an elaborate
system that can be dismantled, redesigned and assembled anew on demand to produce `resources’
efficiently and when and where needed in the modern marketplace. As a cybernetic system of biophysical systems,
nature’ s energies, materials and sites are rede® ned by the eco-knowledge of resource managerialism as manageable resources. With them,
environmental education teaches that human beings can realise great material `goods’ for sizeable numbers of some people, even though
greater material and immaterial `bads’ also might be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people, who do not reside in or bene® t from
the advanced national economies that essentially monopolise the use of world resources at a comparative handful of highly developed regional
and municipal sites. As Beck suggests, risk managerialism is now an integral part of the self-critical production and reproduction of globally
thinking, but locally acting, capitalism.7 Environmental
educators train students to conceptually contain,
actuarially assess and cautiously calculate various dimensions of ecological risk in their eco-toxicology,
environmental assessment, or eco-remediation courses. Risk management presumes its calculations
are based on a (spatially, temporally and socially circumscribed) accident definition’ or that its analyses truly do
`estimate 192 T. W. Luke and legitimate the potential for catastrophe of modern large-scale technologies
and industries’ .8 Superfund site after supertanker spill after superstack bubble, however, suggest that this degree of
managerial knowledge is precisely what the risk management sciences at schools of environmental
studies fail to produce, `and so they are falsifications, and can be criticised and reformed in
accordance with their own claims to rationality’ (Beck, 1996). Nonetheless, this trend toward developing fully selfconscious risk managerialism grounded in economistic trade-offs is taking over many curricula for higher environmental
education, because such risk assessment methods can produce models of most social and political
factors that bureaucratic experience believes to be true to effective resource management.
Resource managerialism gives only the cheapest and most minimal concessions to
environmental progressivism by isolating irrelevant ‘safe spaces’ to justify wider
destruction
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and
Sustainability: what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE
Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA,
also he blew up the death star)
Environmental education also prepares students for more tertiary uses of nature as recreational
resources. As the USDA says about its managed public lands, the natural environment is `a land of many uses’ , and mass tourism,
commercial recreation, or park administration all require special knowledge and powers to be conducted successfully. Instead of appraising
nature’ s resources as industrial production resource reserves, recreationist managerialism frames them as resource preserves for recurring
consumption as positional goods, scenic assets, or leisure sites. The
idea behind national parks or protected areas is to
park a number of unique sites or undeveloped domains outside of the continuous turnover of
industrial exploitation for primary products or agricultural produce, and then the recreational pursuits
of getting to, using and appreciating such ecological assets can be mass produced there through highly
organised sets of practices. These goals for the green zones of nature are crucial. The pressures of living in the brown
zones of society are such that many of® cial studies suggest tourism will be the world’ s largest
industry by 2000. Hence, environmental education must pitch managerial knowledge at those sectors
of the tourism industry that depend upon valuable natural resources whether they are `park and
recreation concessionaires, adventure and tour guide companies, private campgrounds and hunting/®
shing preserves, destination resorts, ecotourism establishments, and tourism development boards
and advertising companies’ (Department of Natural Resource, Recreation and Tourism, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, 1996,
p. 1) to prepare students for these private sector pursuits. As these guideposts for contemporary environmental education indicate, its
discursive practices frequently have a shallow/instrumental/managerialist understanding of `the environment’ . Yet, from these curricula and
their professional degree granting capabilities, the
discourse of resource managerialism/risk
assessment/recreationist administration become, as Foucault argues, `embodied in technical processes, in
institutions, in patterns for general behavior, in forms of transmission and diffusion, and in
pedagogical forms which, at once, impose and maintain them’ (Foucault, 1977).
AT: Securitization  Activism
Environmental securitization doesn’t spur activism—it distracts political subjects and
reframes the problem solely in terms of state action
Barnett, Fellow in the School of Social and Environmental Enquiry at University of Melbourne, 2001
(Jon, and a New Zealand Sci and Tech Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Canterbury and serves on
the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, May 4, The Meaning of Environmental Security:
Ecological Politics and Policy in the New Security Era, pg. 88 p4 – pg. 89 p1)
Another failing of the threat discourse is that it focuses attention on issues 'only when crises are
imminent, by which time it is often too late for effective interventions and corrective measures'
(Dabelko and Simmons 1997: 142). This is another example of what Prins calls the environmental Catch-22: by the
time environmental problems are unambiguously overt it is too late to rectify them; on the other
hand, unless the problems at immediately pressing there is insufficient motivation to result in action
by mainstream political institutions (Prins 1990). Thus the particular state- and military-centred interpretation of environmental
security by the US policy community ignores a telling implication of environmental problems for politics: that long-term and
fundamental reforms are required to address the underlying structural causes of environmental
degradation.This presentation of environmental problems as threats rests on a recurrent conflation of
threat with risk. Environmental security in this sense represents the state's particular highly politicised
assessment of risk rather than any scientific account of the actual risks. There is little correlation
between the two; most often the way states respond to environmental problems is conditioned by
political factors more than informed risk assessments. Certainly the US government's assessment of risks is fat less a
matter of credible scientific assessment and far more a Matter of the', politics of identity and Otherness. The
challenge, according to Hay, is to continue to provide informed risk assessments, and 'to expose the distortions imposed by the state's own
consequence-risk calculus' (Hay 1994: 226). This chapter has sought to expose such distortions in US policy.
Even if securitization spurs activism, it collapses quickly
Broda-Bahm 99 (Kenneth T, Assistant Professor in the Mass Communication and Communication
Studies Department at Towson University, “Finding Protection in Definitions: The Quest for
Environmental Security” Argumentation & Advocacy, 10511431, Spring99, Vol. 35, Issue 4)
Another motive for speaking of environmental degradation as a threat to national security is rhetorical: to make people respond to
environmental threats with a sense of urgency. But before harnessing the old horse of national security to pull the heavy new environmental
wagon, one must examine its temperament... If the
emotional appeals of national security can somehow be
connected to environmental issues, then it is also possible that other, less benign associations may be
transferred. Yet the national security mentality engenders an enviable sense of urgency, and a corresponding willingness to accept great
personal sacrifice. Unfortunately, these emotions may be difficult to sustain. Crises call for resolution, and the
patience of a mobilized populace is rarely long. A cycle of arousal and somnolence is unlikely to
establish permanent patterns of environmentally sound behavior, and `crash' solutions are often bad
ones. (pp. 24-25)
AT: Pragmatism
Even if the state should do things, the discursive constructs deployed in this debate
round spill over to unnecessary and countereffective environmental policy
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and
Sustainability: what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE
Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA,
also he blew up the death star)
Environmental education is one place that shows how power and knowledge work in unison out in the open as the expertise sets needed by
ruling, owing, knowing, or controlling elites. At the same time, the power agendas required to define, implement or reproduce such knowledge
and their truth systems quickly get adopted through environmental educators’ programmes of study and research.9 Such discursive
frames and conceptual definitions for a common theoretical concern, like `the environment’ ,
`environmental studies’ , or `environmental sciences’ , have not entirely failed to safeguard nature.
Nonetheless, they also cannot fully succeed by simply zoning nature off into the green spaces of `the
environment’ , while most environmental education systematically ignores the economics, politics
and technics of social ecologies in the brown zones that threaten nature from without. Whether one
looks at K-12 classrooms or colleges of natural resources, the dualistic misconstruction of nature and
society as green and brown zones, separate and apart, is a major intellectual distortion in most
environmental education.
AT: Deep Eco
DEEP ECO ALTS ARE STUPID AND WOULDN’T WORK, ABOLISHING DIFFERENCES
BETWEEN ENVIRONMENT AND SOCIETY IS THE ONLY WAY TO SOLVE RESOURCE
MANAGERIALISM
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and
Sustainability: what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE
Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA,
also he blew up the death star)
Black-boxing `the environment’ and `society’ , letting them collide together destructively and then
seeking managerial means to repair damages that are believed to be inescapable is the fool’s errand
of mainstream environmentalism. Radical ecologists have pointed this out for years. Nonetheless, their ecocentric deep
alternatives would have society forsake environmental protection by choosing various fantastic forms
of social implosionÐ a return to Neolithic hunting and gathering, zero population growth, voluntary
and/or coercive simplicity, reagrarianisation and deurbanisation. Such alternatives, are unpopular,
unlikely and unworkable with the Earth’s current level of human population (Luke, 1994). The ecocentrists
would downsize the black box of `society’ , upgrade the `nature’ black box, and then freeze them both in place to prevent any more damage.
This outcome is both unlikely and undesirable.
A more holistic and dialectical approach to environmental education
must abolish the artificial divisions between the environment and economy/society/community by
accepting fully Haeckel’ s claims about ecology: the totality of the organic and inorganic environments
must be acknowledged to accept humanity’ s organic and inorganic presence in both. What surrounds
all organisms now is the environment, economy, society and community of humanity. Seeing
economies, societies and communities as environments should force environmentalists, ecologists
and naturalists to come `in here’ from `out there’ to explore how everything works in unified
dialectical terms of operation. Green zones `out there’ are being degraded by brown zones `in here’ .
Accepting the boundaries of those green and brown zones as inalterable is the root of gradual
environmental decline.
Deep ecology is impossible, the current world does not allow, nor could ever allow, for
a complete protection of nature
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
“Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered,” Organization & Environment, Vol. 15 No. 2, June 2002, p.
178-186, Sage
Dressing out the human-centered appropriation of nature in new rituals or myths might make it more
spiritually rewarding, but how is biocentric equality anything more than soft anthropocentrism? It seems
doubtful that even a primal hunting and gathering society consistently will fulfil all the strictures of a hard biocentrism, much less today’s
globalized postindustrial economy and society. The
goal may well be worthy, but it is basically impossible to
operationalize. Given these numerous contradictions in the deep ecological program, how can Deep Ecology be situated politically within
the existing system of power? In the last analysis, Naess, Devall, and Sessions responded to the environmental crisis with “an examination of
the dominant world view in our society, which has led directly to the continuing crisis of culture,” and their practical political answers
essentially present “an ecological, philosophical, spiritual approach for dealing with the crisis” (Devall & Sessions, 1985, p. ix). As Earth First!’s
Dave Foreman asserted, “Deep
ecology has been developed by outdoorspersons—mountain climbers,
backpackers, field biologists—with experience in observing natural phenomena and comes from the
conservation/preservation movement” and “seeks to develop a new paradigm, questions the essence
of human civilization, fundamentally condemns human overpopulation and industrialism, is antimodern and future primitive, bioregional, reinhabitory, and resacralization” (Blea, 1986, pp. 13-14). Not
surprisingly, deep ecology turns to these different groups of people and their social practices for the discipline and discourse of ecological
consciousness. Takingcare of a place, bringing an attitude of watchful attention to the environment, Focusing on self in nature, finding maturity
and joy in natural being, and simply doing outdoors activities all are basic values shared by many outdoors persons. If they are done “with the
proper attitude,” many personal leisure pursuits, “like fishing, hunting, surfing, sun bathing, kayaking, canoeing, sailing, mountain climbing,
hang gliding, skiing, running, bicycling and bird watching” (Devall & Sessions, 1985, p. 188), are endorsed as a path to attain clear ecological
awareness. Ultimately, this sports personism (Luke, 1997) is dangerous. Because of its qualities, deep
ecology tends to ring up
politically as a form of utopian ecologism. As a utopia, the imagination articulated in Deep Ecology
presents some alluring moral prospects for what might be. At the same time, they fail to outline
practicable means for realizing these moral visions. Deep ecologists are trapped by endorsingne w images for new
“ecotopias,” but they do not have a very practical program for anything their visions of future primitive reinhabitation or bioregional
community building. Political action is pushed off into the realm of ethical ideals, making it every individual’s moral duty to change himself or
herself in advancing cultural change. Without real opportunities to change collective activity—in the economy, ideology, technology, or polity—
this individual moral regeneration might be, at best, a green quietism, suitable only for finding a personal path in an evil society. Naess (1984,
pp. 201-204), for example, suggested his vision of deep ecology is virtually idiosyncratic; others are strongly enjoined to concoct their own
ecological omelettes. Devall and Sessions (1985) concluded that deep
ecology must stand for these ultimate values:
inward and outward direction, two aspects of the same process. We are not alone. We are part and
parcel of the larger community, the land community. Each life in its own sense is heroic and
connected. In the words of Bodhisativa, “No one is saved until we are all saved.” This perspective encompasses all notions
of saving anything, whether it be an endangered species, the community, or your own self. Each life is a heroic quest. It is a
journey of the spirit during which we discover our purpose. We have only to embark, to set out in our
own hearts, on this journey we began so long ago, to start on the “real work” of becoming real and of
doing what is real. Nothing is labored, nothing forced. (p. 205) Deep ecologists will claim these spiritual values for their final goals (Fox,
1990; Naess, 1985; Sessions, 1995). However, those principles have been shown to have little practical utility for
staging an effective ecological transformation over the past 30 years (Best, 1998; Negri, 1997). Some
consciousness may be changing, but the earth is still being polluted and abused.
Framework
FW—Discourse
Be skeptical of their truth claims—they are determined by a statist discourse of the
environment which evaluates truth and creates meaning through techniques of
control
Luke 95 ‘On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary
Environmentalism’ Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II p.57-81
(Autumn,1995), JSTOR Accessed: 13/07/2012 12:05 BSH
Foucault invites social theorists not to reduce all ensembles of modernizing development to the "statalization" of society wherein "the
state" becomes an expansive set of managerial functions, dis-charging its effects in the development of productive
forces, the reproduction of relations of production, or the organization of ideological superstructures. Instead he argues in favor of investigating
the "governmentalization" of the economy and society whereby individuals and groups are enmeshed within the tactics and strategies of a
complex form of power whose institutions, procedures, analyses, and techniques loosely manage mass popula-tions and their surroundings in a
highly politicized symbolic and material economy (103). Because governmental
techniques are the central focus of
political struggle and contestation, the interactions of populations with their natural surroundings in
highly politi-cized economies compel states constantly to redefine what is within their competence
throughout the modernizing process. To survive after the 1960s in a world marked by decolonization, global industrialization,
and nuclear military confrontation, it is not enough for states merely to maintain legal jurisdiction over their
allegedly sovereign territories. As ecological limits to growth are either dis-covered or defined, states are forced to
guarantee their populations' fecundity and productivity in the total setting of the glo-bal political
economy by becoming "environmental protection agencies." Governmental discourses methodically mobilize
particular assumptions, codes, and procedures in enforcing specific under-standings about the economy and society. As a result, they
generate "truths" or "knowledges" that also constitute forms of power with significant reserves of
legitimacy and effectiveness. Inasmuch as they classify, organize, and vet larger understandings of reality, such discourses can
authorize or invalidate the possibilities for con-structing particular institutions, practices, or concepts in society at
large. They simultaneously frame the emergence of collective subjectivities (nations as dynamic populations) and collections of subjects
(individuals) as units in such nations. Individual subjects as well as collective subjects can be reevaluated as "the element
in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of
knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge,
and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power" (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 29). Therefore, an
environmentalizing regime must advance ecoknowledges to activate its com-mand over geo-power as
well as to re-operationalize many of its notions of governmentality as environmentality. Like governmen-tality, the disciplinary
articulations of environmentality must cen-ter upon establishing and enforcing "the right disposition
of things."
Affirmative
General K Answers
Predictions Good
Predictions good, accepting uncertainty doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and predict
the future .
Kurasawa ‘4 Fuyuki Kurasawa, Associate Professor of Sociology at York University, “Cautionary Tales,”
Constellations Volume 11, No. 4, 2004,
http://www.yorku.ca/kurasawa/Kurasawa%20Articles/Constellations%20Article.pdf
When engaging in the labor of preventive foresight, the first obstacle that one is likely to encounter from
some intellectual circles is a deep-seated skepticism about the very value of the exercise. A radically
postmodern line of thinking, for instance, would lead us to believe that it is pointless, perhaps even
harmful, to strive for farsightedness in light of the aforementioned crisis of conventional paradigms of historical analysis. If,
contra teleological models, history has no intrinsic meaning, direction, or endpoint to be discovered through human reason, and if, contra
scientistic futurism, prospective trends cannot be predicted without error, then the abyss of chronological inscrutability supposedly opens up at
our feet. The future appears to be unknowable, an outcome of chance. Therefore,
rather than embarking upon grandiose
speculation about what may occur, we should adopt a pragmatism that abandons itself to the twists
and turns of history; let us be content to formulate ad hoc responses to emergencies as they arise.
While this argument has the merit of underscoring the fallibilistic nature of all predictive schemes, it conflates the necessary recognition of the
contingency of history with unwarranted assertions about the latter’s total opacity and indeterminacy.
Acknowledging the fact that
the future cannot be known with absolute certainty does not imply abandoning the task of trying to
understand what is brewing on the horizon and to prepare for crises already coming into their own. In
fact, the incorporation of the principle of fallibility into the work of prevention means that we must be ever more vigilant for warning signs of
disaster and for responses that provoke unintended or unexpected consequences (a point to which I will return in the final section of this
paper). In addition, from a normative point of view, the acceptance of historical contingency and of the self-limiting character of farsightedness
places the duty of preventing catastrophe squarely on the shoulders of present generations. The
future no longer appears to be
a metaphysical creature of destiny or of the cunning of reason, nor can it be sloughed off to pure
randomness. It becomes, instead, a result of human action shaped by decisions in the present –
including, of course, trying to anticipate and prepare for possible and avoidable sources of harm to
our successors.
Predictions good, without them, leaders resort to their personal beliefs.
Michael Fitzsimmons, defense analyst, The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic Planning, Survival
48.4, Winter 2006/2007
It should follow, then, that in
planning under conditions of risk, variability in strategic calculation should be
carefully tailored to available analytic and decision processes. Why is this important? What harm can an imbalance
between complexity and cognitive or analytic capacity in strategic planning bring? Stated simply, where analysis is silent or
inadequate, the personal beliefs of decision-makers fill the void. As political scientist Richard Betts found in a study of
strategic surprise, in ‘an environment that lacks clarity, abounds with conflicting data, and allows no time
for rigorous assessment of sources and validity, ambiguity allows intuition or wishfulness to drive
interpretation ... The greater the ambiguity, the greater the impact of preconceptions.’16 The decisionmaking environment that Betts describes here is one of political-military crisis, not long-term strategic planning. But a strategist who
sees uncertainty as the central fact of his environment brings upon himself some of the pathologies of
crisis decision-making. He invites ambiguity, takes conflicting data for granted and substitutes a priori
scepticism about the validity of prediction for time pressure as a rationale for discounting the
importance of analytic rigour. It is important not to exaggerate the extent to which data and ‘rigorous assessment’ can illuminate
strategic choices. Ambiguity is a fact of life, and scepticism of analysis is necessary. Accordingly, the
intuition and judgement of decision-makers will always be vital to strategy, and attempting to
subordinate those factors to some formulaic, deterministic decision-making model would be both
undesirable and unrealistic. All the same, there is danger in the opposite extreme as well. Without careful analysis of what is
relatively likely and what is relatively unlikely, what will be the possible bases for strategic choices? A
decision-maker with no faith
in prediction is left with little more than a set of worst-case scenarios and his existing beliefs about
the world to confront the choices before him. Those beliefs may be more or less well founded, but if they are not made
explicit and subject to analysis and debate regarding their application to particular strategic contexts, they remain only beliefs and
premises, rather than rational judgements. Even at their best, such decisions are likely to be poorly
understood by the organisations charged with their implementation. At their worst, such decisions
may be poorly understood by the decision-makers themselves.
Generic Perm
Operating through political spheres is the only way to produce change
Lawrence Grossburg, University of Illinois, We Gotta Get Outta This Place, 1992, p. 391-393
The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance, understanding that
such institutions are the mediating structures by which power is actively realized. It is often by directing
opposition against specific institutions that power can be challenged. The Left has assumed from some time now that,
since it has so little access to the apparatuses of agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in
the media through tactical protests. The Left does in fact need more visibility, but it also needs greater access to
the entire range of apparatuses of decision making and power. Otherwise, the Left has nothing but its
own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have produced starvation and the other social disgraces of our world, although it is
individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they must act within organizations, and
within the system of organizations which in fact have the capacity (as well as the moral responsibility)
to fight them. Without such organizations, the only models of political commitment are self-interest and charity. Charity suggests that we
act on behalf of others who cannot act on their own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the circuits of global capitalism, and everyone’s position is increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will not take much to change the position of any individual in the United States, as the
experience of many of the homeless, the elderly and the “fallen” middle class demonstrates. Nor are there any guarantees about the future of
any single nation. We
can imagine ourselves involved in a politics where acting for another is always acting
for oneself as well, a politics in which everyone struggles with the resources they have to make their
lives (and the world) better, since the two are so intimately tied together! For example, we need to
think of affirmation action as in everyone’s best interests, because of the possibilities it opens. We need
to think with what Axelos has described as a “planetary thought” which “would be a coherent thought—but not a rationalizing and ‘rationalist’
inflection; it would be a fragmentary thought of the open totality—for what we can grasp are fragments unveiled on the horizon of the totality.
Such a politics will not begin by distinguishing between the local and the global (and certainly not by valorizing one over the other) for the ways
in which the former are incorporated into the latter preclude the luxury of such choices.
Resistance is always a local struggle,
even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to connect into its global structures of
articulation: Think globally, act locally. Opposition is predicated precisely on locating the points of articulation between them,
the points at which the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto the global. Since the meaning of these terms has to be understood in
the context of any particular struggle, one is always acting both globally and locally: Think globally, act appropriately!
Fight locally
because that is the scene of action, but aim for the global because that is the scene of agency. “Local
struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the precise point of their insertion into the field of immanence. This requires the
imagination and construction of forms of unity, commonality and social agency which do not deny differences. Without such commonality,
politics is too easily reduced to a question of individual rights (i.e., in the terms of classical utility theory); difference ends up “trumping”
politics, bringing it to an end. The struggle against the disciplined mobilization of everyday life can only be built on affective commonalities, a
shared “responsible yearning: a yearning out towards something more and something better than this and this place now.” The
Left, after
all, is defined by its common commitment to principles of justice, equality and democracy (although these
might conflict) in economic, political and cultural life. It is based on the hope, perhaps even the illusion, that such
things are possible. The construction of an affective commonality attempts to mobilize people in a
common struggle, despite the fact that they have no common identity or character, recognizing that
they are the only force capable of providing a new historical and oppositional agency. It strives to organize
minorities into a new majority.
Reform Good
Slow but steady revolutions allows us to bring about change.
Bradley 9 Robert Bradley, PhD in Political Economy, M.A. in Economics, “Capitalism at Work: Business,
Government and Energy,” pg. 103
There are good revolutions and bad ones. There must be continual improvement, or incrementalism,
between sea changes. Often, if not quite always, revolution comes by steps, not bounds. Business thinker
Jim Collins enriched the Schumpeter-Drucker-Hamel view by noting how good-to-great companies were disciplined change makers whose
entrepreneurship was less about revolutionary moments than revolutionary process. In his words: Good-to-great
transformations
never happened in one fell swoop. There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one
killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution. Good to great comes about by a
cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the
flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results. Success was “an organic evolutionary process . . . a
pattern of buildup leading to breakthrough.” The “doom loop,” noted Collins from his case studies, was “big programs, radical
change efforts, dramatic revolutions, chronic restructuring— always looking for a miracle moment or
new savior.” Collins saw greatness in disciplined thought and action; failure, in “fads and . . . management hoopla.” There was no
silver bullet, no magic, that could substitute for sustained, well- directed effort.
Alt Doesn’t Solve
Alt fails, only operating through political spheres actually changes anything.
Anna M. Agathangelou, Dir. Global Change Inst. And Women’s Studies Prof @ Oberlin, and L.H.M.
Ling, Inst. For Social Studies @ Hague, Fall 1997, Studies in Political Economy, v. 54, p 7-8
Yet, ironically if not tragically,
dissident IR also paralyzes itself into non-action. While it challenges the status
quo, dissident IR fails to transform it. Indeed, dissident IR claims that a “coherent” paradigm or research
program — even an alternative one — reproduces the stifling parochialism and hidden powermongering of sovereign scholarship. “Any agenda of global politics informed by critical social theory perspectives,” writes Jim
George “must forgo the simple, albeit self-gratifying, options inherent in ready-made alternative Realisms and confront the dangers, closures,
paradoxes, and complicities associated with them. Even
references to a “real world, dissidents argue, repudiate the
very meaning of dissidence given their sovereign presumption of a universalizable, testable Reality.
What dissident scholarship opts for, instead, is a sense of disciplinary crisis that “resonates with the effects of marginal and dissident
movements in all sorts of other localities.” Despite its emancipatory intentions, this approach effectively leaves the prevailing prison of
sovereignty intact. It doubly incarcerates when dissident IR highlights the layers of power that oppress without offering a heuristic, not to
mention a program, for emancipatory action. Merely
politicizing the supposedly non-political neither guides
emancipatory action nor guards it against demagoguery. At best, dissident IR sanctions a detached
criticality rooted (ironically) in Western modernity. Michael Shapiro, for instance, advises the dissident theorist to take “a
critical distance” or “position offshore’ from which to “see the possibility of change.” But what becomes of those who know
they are burning in the hells of exploitation, racism, sexism, starvation, civil war, and the like while
the esoteric dissident observes “critically” from offshore ? What hope do they have of overthrowing these shackles of
sovereignty? In not answering these questions, dissident IR ends up reproducing despite avowals to the
contrary, the sovereign outcome of discourse divorced from practice, analysis from policy,
deconstruction from reconstruction, particulars from universals, and critical theory from problemsolving.
Alt can’t gain political momentum because no one understands it.
O’Callaghan ‘2 Terry O'Callaghan, lecturer in the school of International Relations at the University of
South Australia, International Relations and the third debate, ed: Jarvis, 2002, p. 80
There are also a host of technological and logistical questions that plague George's scheme and make problematic his recommendations. For
example, through what medium are those on the fringes of the international system going to speak to the world? Although it may be true that
the third world has now been integrated into the global polity via the advent of technological innovations in communications, allowing for
remote access to information sources and the Internet, it also remains true that the
majority of those on the fringes continue
to be disenfranchised from such mediums, whether as a result of a lack of economic resources, the
prevalence of illiteracy, or social, cultural and political circumstances that systemically exclude,
women (among others) from economic resources and certain political and social freedoms. Need we
remind George that social, political, and individual autonomy is at a minimum in these parts of the
world, and an intellectual approach as controversial as postmodernism is not likely to achieve the
sorts of goals that George optimistically foreshadows. Indeed, on practical questions such as these, matters otherwise
central to the success of postmodern visions, George prefers to be vague, suggesting instead that the intricacies of
such details will somehow work themselves out in a manner satisfactory to all. Such a position reveals George's
latent idealism and underscores how George's schema is an intellectual one: a theory of international politics written for other theorists of
international politics. George's
audience is thus a very limited and elite audience and begs the question of
whether a senior, middle-class scholar in the intellectual heartland of Australia can do anything of real
substance to aid the truly marginalized and oppressed. How is it possible to put oneself in the shoes of
the "other," to advocate on his or her behalf, when such is done from a position of affluence,
unrelated to and far removed from the experiences of those whom George otherwise champions? Ideals
are all good and well, but it
is hard to imagine that the computer keyboard is mightier than the sword, and
hard to see how a small, elite, affluent assortment of intellectuals is going to generate the type of
political momentum necessary to allow those on the fringes to speak and be heard! 1 .
Alt fails, no one cares about the oppressed
O’Callaghan ‘2 Terry O'Callaghan, lecturer in the school of International Relations at the University of
South Australia, International Relations and the third debate, ed: Jarvis, 2002, p. 80-81
Moreover, why should we assume that states and individuals want to listen and will listen to what the
marginalized and the oppressed have to say? There is precious little evidence to suggest that
"listening" is something the advanced capitalist countries do very well at all. Indeed, one of the allegations so
forcefully alleged by Muslim fundamentalists as justification for the terrorist attacks of September I I is precisely that the West, and America in
particular, are deaf to the disenfranchised and impoverished in the world. Certainly, there
are agencies and individuals who
are sensitive to the needs of the "marginalized" and who champion institutional forums where
indigenous voices can be heard. But on even the most optimistic reckoning, such forums and
institutions represent the exception, not the rule, and remain in the minority if not dwarfed by those
institutions that represent Western, first world interests. To be sure, this is a realist power-political image
of the current configuration of the global polity, but one apparently, and ironically, endorsed by
George if only because it speaks to the realities of the marginalized, the imposed silences, and the
multitude of oppressions on which George founds his call for a postmodern ethic. Recognizing such realities,
however, does not explain George's penchant for ignoring them entirely, especially in terms of the structural rigidities they pose for meaningful
reform. Indeed, George's
desire to move to a new "space beyond International Relations" smacks of
wishful idealism, ignoring the current configuration of global political relations and power
distribution; of the incessant ideological power of hyperindividualism, consumerism, advertising,
Hollywood images, and fashion icons; and of the innate power bestowed on the (institutional) barons
of global finance, trade, and transnational production. George seems to have little appreciation of the structural
impediments such institutions pose for radical change of the type he so fiercely advocates. Revolutionary change of the kind desired by
George ignores that fact that many individuals are not disposed to concerns beyond their family, friends,
and daily work lives. And institutional, structural transformation requires organized effort, mass
popular support, and dogged single-mindedness if societal norms are to be challenged, institutional
reform enacted, consumer tastes altered, and political sensibilities reformed. Convincing Nike that there is
something intrinsically wrong with paying Indonesian workers a few dollars a week to manufacture shoes for the global market requires
considerably more effort than postmodern platitudes and/or moral indignation. The cycle of wealth creation and distribution that sees Michael
Jordan receive multimillion dollar contracts to inspire demand for Nike products, while the foot soldiers in the factory eke out a meager
existence producing these same products is not easily, or realistically, challenged by pronouncements of moving beyond International Relations
to a new, nicer, gentler nirvana.
Alt fails, apathy doesn’t translate to action, no real plan for enacting the alternative
means nothing gets done.
O’Callaghan ‘2 Terry O'Callaghan, lecturer in the school of International Relations at the University of
South Australia, International Relations and the third debate, ed: Jarvis, 2002, p. 81-82
More generally, of course, what George fails to consider is the problem of apathy and of how we get people to
care about the plight of others. What do we with the CEOs of multinational corporations, stockbrokers, accountants, factory
workers, and the unemployed, who, by and large, fail to consider the homeless and destitute in their own countries, let alone in places they
have never isited and are never likely to visit? Moral
indignation rarely translates into action, and apathy about the
plight of others is a structural impediment as strong any idea, theory, or writing. What George's treatise thus
fails to consider is how we overcome this, and how we get others to listen. He needs to explain how the social, political,
psychological, and moral structures that define the parameters of existence for the many millions of
ordinary citizens in the first world, and that deflects attention from the marginalized and the
oppressed can be broken down. Unfortunately, there is little to indicate that George has thought much about this, suggesting that
his commitment to postmodern theory is not likely to make much difference. In fact, in the academy the postmodern light is
already beginning to dim in certain quarters, having registered scarcely a glimmer in the broader
polity, where, if change was to ensue, it needed to burn brightly. Even among those versed in the nomenclature of
scholarly debate, theorists of international politics remain skeptical of the value of postmodern discourse, by and large rejecting it. This does
not portend well for postmodern visionaries and the future of postmodern discourse. But can George really be surprised by this? After all, his
discourse indicts the "backward discipline" for complicity in crimes against humanity, calling for a
repudiation of realism and with it a repudiation of the lifelong beliefs and writings of eminent
theorists like Kenneth Waltz, Robert Gilpin, and Stephen Krasner who have otherwise defined the parameters of the
discipline, its projects, and research agendas. Can George really expect discipline-wide capitulation to an intellectual diaspora
that would see theorists repudiate their beliefs and works in order to take up the creed of postmodernism, as vague, open-ended, and
indeterminate as it is? Without
a clear and credible plan of how to get from "incarceration and closure" to
intellectual freedom, creativity, and openness, George's postmodern musings have understandably
attracted few disciples.
Cede the Political DA
Focus on postmodern discussions cedes control of political spheres to right-wing
fascists.
Richard Rorty, professor emeritus of comparative literature and philosophy at Stanford University,
“Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, 1998, pp. 89-94
Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are
heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn
constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point
of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will
sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to
prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers-them- selves
desperately afraid of being downsized-are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point,
something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start
looking around for a strongman to vote for-someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected,
the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no
longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once
such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about
what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is
that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will
be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words "nigger" and "kike" will once again be heard in the
workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment
which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. But such a renewal
of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the
international superrich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke
military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People
will wonder
why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why
was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why could not the Left channel the
mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?
It is often said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth century,
no longer have a Left. Since nobody denies the existence of what I have called the cultural Left, this
amounts to an admission that that Left is unable to engage in national politics. It is not the sort of Left which
can be asked to deal with the consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the
present cultural Left would have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old
reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions. It would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less
about stigma. I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. The first is that the Left should put a moratorium
on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the Left should try to mobilize
what remains of our pride in being Americans. It should ask the public to consider how the country of Lincoln and Whitman
might be achieved. In support of my first suggestion, let me cite a passage from Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy in which he expresses
his exasperation with the sort of sterile debate now going on under the rubric of "individualism versus communitarianism." Dewey thought that
all discussions which took this dichotomy seriously suffer from a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general notions under
which specific situations are to be brought. What we want is light upon this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this
or that special institution or social arrangement. For such a logic of inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationships with one another. Dewey was right to be exasperated by sociopolitical theory conducted at
this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this level is typically a rightist maneuver, one which supplies
"the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the established order. "9 For such ascents are now more common on the Left than on the Right.
The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more
subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual
apparatus, the more radical your critique. When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been "inadequately
theorized," you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neoMarxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or
political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan's impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is
accomplished by "problematizing familiar concepts." Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a
few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of
these purportedly "subversive" books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down
from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even
though what these authors "theorize" is often something very concrete and near at hand-a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent
scandal-they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable. These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political
relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its
country. Disengagement
from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual
environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted
by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called "power." This is the name of what Edmundson calls
Foucault's "haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook."10
Violence UQ
Global violence at its lowest point in history now, impacts of the kritik are
exaggerated
Pinker ’11 Steven Pinker, experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science
author, and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard, “Violence
Vanquished,” Wall Street Journal, 9/24/2011,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180.html?mod=WSJ_hp
_LEFTTopStories
Believe it or not, the world of the past was much worse. Violence has been in decline for thousands of
years, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species. The decline,
to be sure, has not been smooth. It has not brought violence down to zero, and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is a persistent historical
development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children. This claim, I know, invites
skepticism, incredulity, and sometimes anger. We
tend to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with
which we can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes
and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. There will always be enough violent deaths
to fill the evening news, so people's impressions of violence will be disconnected from its actual likelihood. Evidence of our bloody
history is not hard to find. Consider the genocides in the Old Testament and the crucifixions in the New, the gory mutilations in
Shakespeare's tragedies and Grimm's fairy tales, the British monarchs who beheaded their relatives and the American founders who dueled
with their rivals. Today the decline in these brutal practices can be quantified. A
look at the numbers shows that over the
course of our history, humankind has been blessed with six major declines of violence. The first was a
process of pacification: the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering and horticultural
societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations, with cities and governments,
starting about 5,000 years ago. For centuries, social theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau speculated from their armchairs about
what life was like in a "state of nature." Nowadays we can do better. Forensic archeology—a kind of "CSI: Paleolithic"—can
estimate rates of violence from the proportion of skeletons in ancient sites with bashed-in skulls,
decapitations or arrowheads embedded in bones. And ethnographers can tally the causes of death in
tribal peoples that have recently lived outside of state control. These investigations show that, on average,
about 15% of people in prestate eras died violently, compared to about 3% of the citizens of the
earliest states. Tribal violence commonly subsides when a state or empire imposes control over a territory, leading to the various "paxes"
(Romana, Islamica, Brittanica and so on) that are familiar to readers of history. It's not that the first kings had a benevolent interest in the
welfare of their citizens. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his livestock from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles
of raiding and feuding. From his point of view, such squabbling is a dead loss—forgone opportunities to extract taxes, tributes, soldiers and
slaves. The
second decline of violence was a civilizing process that is best documented in Europe. Historical
records show that between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a 10to 50-fold decline in their rates of homicide. The numbers are consistent with narrative histories of
the brutality of life in the Middle Ages, when highwaymen made travel a risk to life and limb and dinners were commonly
enlivened by dagger attacks. So many people had their noses cut off that medieval medical textbooks speculated about techniques for growing
them back. Historians attribute this decline to the consolidation of a patchwork of feudal territories into large kingdoms with centralized
authority and an infrastructure of commerce. Criminal
justice was nationalized, and zero-sum plunder gave way to
positive-sum trade. People increasingly controlled their impulses and sought to cooperate with their
neighbors. The third transition, sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, took off with the
Enlightenment. Governments and churches had long maintained order by punishing nonconformists with mutilation, torture and
gruesome forms of execution, such as burning, breaking, disembowelment, impalement and sawing in half. The 18th century saw the
widespread abolition of judicial torture, including the famous prohibition of "cruel and unusual
punishment" in the eighth amendment of the U.S. Constitution. At the same time, many nations began to whittle
down their list of capital crimes from the hundreds (including poaching, sodomy, witchcraft and counterfeiting) to just murder and treason. And
a growing wave of countries abolished blood sports, dueling, witchhunts, religious persecution, absolute despotism and slavery. The
fourth
major transition is the respite from major interstate war that we have seen since the end of World
War II. Historians sometimes refer to it as the Long Peace. Today we take it for granted that Italy and Austria will not
come to blows, nor will Britain and Russia. But centuries ago, the great powers were almost always at war, and until
quite recently, Western European countries tended to initiate two or three new wars every year . The
cliché that the 20th century was "the most violent in history" ignores the second half of the century (and may not even be true of the first half,
if one calculates violent deaths as a proportion of the world's population). Though it's tempting to attribute the Long Peace to nuclear
deterrence, non-nuclear developed states have stopped fighting each other as well. Political scientists point instead to the growth of
democracy, trade and international organizations—all of which, the statistical evidence shows, reduce the likelihood of conflict. They also credit
the rising valuation of human life over national grandeur—a hard-won lesson of two world wars. The
fifth trend, which I call the
New Peace, involves war in the world as a whole, including developing nations. Since 1946, several
organizations have tracked the number of armed conflicts and their human toll world-wide. The bad news
is that for several decades, the decline of interstate wars was accompanied by a bulge of civil wars, as newly independent countries were led by
inept governments, challenged by insurgencies and armed by the cold war superpowers. The less bad news is that civil
wars tend to kill
far fewer people than wars between states. And the best news is that, since the peak of the cold war
in the 1970s and '80s, organized conflicts of all kinds—civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic
governments, terrorist attacks—have declined throughout the world, and their death tolls have
declined even more precipitously. The rate of documented direct deaths from political violence (war, terrorism, genocide and
warlord militias) in the past decade is an unprecedented few hundredths of a percentage point. Even if we multiplied that rate to account for
unrecorded deaths and the victims of war-caused disease and famine, it would not exceed 1%. The most immediate cause of this New Peace
was the demise of communism, which ended the proxy wars in the developing world stoked by the superpowers and also discredited genocidal
ideologies that had justified the sacrifice of vast numbers of eggs to make a utopian omelet. Another contributor was the expansion of
international peacekeeping forces, which really do keep the peace—not always, but far more often than when adversaries are left to fight to
the bitter end. Finally, the
postwar era has seen a cascade of "rights revolutions"—a growing revulsion
against aggression on smaller scales. In the developed world, the civil rights movement obliterated
lynchings and lethal pogroms, and the women's-rights movement has helped to shrink the incidence
of rape and the beating and killing of wives and girlfriends. In recent decades, the movement for children's rights has
significantly reduced rates of spanking, bullying, paddling in schools, and physical and sexual abuse. And the campaign for gay rights has forced
governments in the developed world to repeal laws criminalizing homosexuality and has had some success in reducing hate crimes against gay
people.
No Impact
Democracy checks the impact to the kritik
Rosemary O’Kane, professor of comparative political theory at the University of Keele, “Modernity, the
Holocaust and politics,” Economy and Society 26:1, 1997, pp. 58-59
Modern bureaucracy is not 'intrinsically capable of genocidal action' (Bauman 1989: 106). Centralized state
coercion has no natural move to terror. In the explanation of modern genocides it is chosen policies which play the greatest
part, whether in effecting bureaucratic secrecy, organizing forced labour, implementing a system of terror, harnessing science and technology
or introducing extermination policies, as means and as ends. As Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR have shown, furthermore, those chosen
policies of genocidal government turned away from and not towards modernity. The choosing of policies, however, is not independent of
circumstances. An analysis of the history of each case plays an important part in explaining where and how genocidal governments come to
power and analysis of political institutions and structures also helps towards an understanding of the factors which act as obstacles to modern
genocide. But it is not just political factors which stand in the way of another Holocaust in modern society. Modern
societies have
not only pluralist democratic political systems but also economic pluralism where workers are free to
change jobs and bargain wages and where independent firms, each with their own independent
bureaucracies, exist in competition with state-controlled enterprises. In modern societies this economic
pluralism both promotes and is served by the open scientific method. By ignoring competition and the
capacity for people to move between organizations whether economic, political, scientific or social,
Bauman overlooks crucial but also very 'ordinary and common' attributes of truly modern societies. It
is these very ordinary and common attributes of modernity which stand in the way of modern
genocides.
AT: Structural Violence
Structural violence doesn’t cause war, wars cause structural violence.
Joshua S. Goldstein, professor of International Relations at American University, War and Gender:
How Gender shapes the War System and Vice Versa, 2001, pp. 411-412
First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the approach, “if you want
peace, work for justice.” Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war one can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps among others) in order to pursue
peace. This
approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but rests on the assumption that
injustices cause war. The evidence in this book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the
other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other
single cause, although all of these influence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in part
fueled and sustained these and other injustices.9 So,”if you want peace, work for peace.” Indeed, if you want justice (gender and
others), work for peace. Causality does not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs
downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military may be the most important way to “reverse women’s oppression.” The
dilemma is that peace
work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral
grounding, yet, in light of this book’s evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war
seems to be empirically inadequate.
AT: Root Cause
There’s no root cause for war. Monocausal explanations ignore the human thinking
process
Vivienne Jabri, lecturer in international relations at the University of Kent, "Introduction: Conflict
Analysis Reconsidered,” Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered, 1996, p. 3
The study of war has produced a number of often conflicting answers to Quincy Wright’s question, “Why is war thought? Why is war fought?”1
The history of human political violence has shown that we cannot produce monocausal explanations
of war. Studies which concentrate on assumed innate human characteristics fail to account for the
societal factors which are implicated in what is essentially an interactive and dynamic process . Similarly,
investigations which link attributes of the international system, such as balances of power, not only
produce contradictory findings, but seem to negate human decision-making and psychological
processes in the onset of war in specific conditions. Studies of violent conflict aspire to uncover, through empirical
investigation, patterns of behaviour which lead to war. As indicated by Holsti, studies of war may be divided into those
which emphasise structural or “ecological” variables, such as the distribution of power capabilities
within the system, and those which emphasise “decision-making, values, and perceptions of policymakers” in attempts to isolate common features leading up to the decision for war.2
No root cause of war, root cause claims offer no solutions to preventing war.
Kalevi Jaakko Holsti, professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, "On The Study
Of War," Peace And War: Armed Conflicts And International Order, 1648-1989, 1991, p. 3
Investigators of conflict, crises, and war reached a consensus years ago that monocausal explanations
are theoretically and empirically deficient. Kenneth Waltz’ (1957) classic typology of war explanations convincingly
demonstrated various problems arising from diagnoses that locate war causation exclusively at the individual, state attribute, or systemic
levels. He also illustrated how prescriptions
based on faulty diagnoses offer no solution to the problem. Even
Rousseau’s powerful exploration of the consequences of anarchy, updated by Waltz (1979), remains full of insights, but it only
specifies why wars recur (there is nothing to prevent them) and offers few clues that help to predict
when, where, and over what issues. Blainey (1973), in another telling attack on monocausal theories, continues where Waltz left
off. He offers, on the basis of rich historical illustrations, both logical and anecdotal rebuttals of facile explanations of war that dot academic
and philosophical thought on the subject. But rebuttals of the obvious are not sufficient. We
presently have myriads of theories
of war, emphasizing all sorts of factors that can help explain its etiology. As Carroll and Fink (1975) note, there
are if anything too many theories, and even too many typologies of theories. Quoting Timascheff
approvingly, they point out that anything might lead to war, but nothing will certainly lead to war.
Competing ideologies have different ideas of root cause claims, no one true root cause
of violence.
Dr. John Monahan, psychologist and professor of law at University of Virginia-Charlottesville, "The
Causes of Violence," FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 1 January 1994
I have been asked to summarize everything that we really know about the biological, sociological, and psychological causes of violence–in 20
minutes or less. Unfortunately, I think I can do it. But, I warn you in advance what
I cannot do-what no one can honestly do–
and that is to offer a neat, simple story that explains why so many Americans are afraid to walk home
alone at night. Only people on the extremes of the political spectrum have that luxury and that conceit. The political right believes that the
root cause of violent crime is bad genes or bad morals. Not so, says the left. The root cause of violent crime is bad housing or dead-end jobs.
And, I tell you that while
doing something about the causes of violence surely requires a political ideology,
the only way we can determine what those causes are in the first place is to check our ideologies at
the door and to try to keep our minds open as wide, and for as long, as we can bear. I realize that this is not
easily done. But, if you give it a try, which I urge you to do, I think that you will find that violence does not have one root cause. Rather,
violence has many tangled roots. Some grow toward the left and some grow toward the right. We
have to find the largest ones, whichever way they grow, and only then can we debate how to cut
them off.
Framework Answers
AT: Discourse FW
Discourse is overrated; focusing on it prevents discussion on other aspects of political
decisions.
Gearoid O Tuathail, Department of Geography at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
“The patterned mess of history and the writing of critical geopolitics: a reply to Dalby,” Political
Geography Vol 15 No 6/7, 1996, CIAO
While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse and concerns of foreign-policy decision- makers
are quite different, so different that they constitute a distinctive problem- solving, theory-averse, policy-making subculture. There
is a
danger that academics assume that the discourses they engage are more significant in the practice of
foreign policy and the exercise of power than they really are. This is not, however, to minimize the
obvious importance of academia as a general institutional structure among many that sustain certain
epistemic communities in particular states. In general, I do not disagree with Dalby’s fourth point about politics and discourse
except to note that his statement-‘Precisely because reality could be represented in particular ways political
decisions could be taken, troops and material moved and war fought’-evades the important question
of agency that I noted in my review essay. The assumption that it is representations that make action possible
is inadequate by itself. Political, military and economic structures, institutions, discursive networks
and leadership are all crucial in explaining social action and should be theorized together with
representational practices. Both here and earlier, Dalby’s reasoning inclines towards a form of idealism. In response to Dalby’s fifth
point (with its three subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book is about the CPD, not the Reagan administration. He analyzes certain CPD
discourses, root the geographical reasoning practices of the Reagan administration nor its public-policy reasoning on national security. Dalby’s
book is narrowly textual; the general contextuality of the Reagan administration is not dealt with. Second, let me simply note that I find that
the distinction between critical theorists and post- structuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn by Dalby and others. Third, Dalby’s
interpretation of the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced by dissident peace researchers in Europe is
highly idealist, an interpretation that ignores the structural and ideological crises facing the Soviet elite at that time. Gorbachev’s reforms and
his new security discourse were also strongly self- interested, an ultimately futile attempt to save the Communist Party and a discredited
regime of power from disintegration. The issues raised by Simon Dalby in his comment are important ones for all those interested in the
practice of critical geopolitics. While I agree with Dalby that questions of discourse are extremely important ones for political geographers to
engage, there
is a danger of fetishizing this concern with discourse so that we neglect the institutional
and the sociological, the materialist and the cultural, the political and the geographical contexts
within which particular discursive strategies become significant. Critical geopolitics, in other words,
should not be a prisoner of the sweeping ahistorical cant that sometimes accompanies
‘poststructuralism nor convenient reading strategies like the identity politics narrative; it needs to
always be open to the patterned mess that is human history.
Discourse framing widens gaps between people based on languages spoken, prevents
social change.
McNally ’97 David McNally, professor of political science at York University, In Defense of History:
Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, 1997, p. 26-27
We are witnessing today a new idealism, infecting large sections of the intellectual left, which has turned language not merely into an
independent realm, but into an all pervasive realm, a sphere so omnipresent, so dominant, as virtually to extinguish human agency. Everything
is discourse, you see; and discourse is everything. Because human begins are linguistic creatures, because the world in which we act is a world
we know and describe through language, it allegedly follows that there is nothing outside language. Our
language, or “discourse,”
or “text” – the jargon varies but not the message – defines and limits what we know, what we can
imagine, what we can do. There is a political theory here too. Oppression is said to be rooted
ultimately in the way in which we and others are defined linguistically, the way in which we are
positioned by words in relation to other words, or by codes which are said to be “structured like a
language.” Our very being, our identities and “subjectivities,” are constituted through language. As one trendy literary theorist puts it in
David Lodge’s novel Nice Work, it is not merely that you are what you speak; no, according to the new idealism, “you are what speaks you.”
Language is thus the final “prison-house.” Our confinement there is beyond resistance; it is impossible
to escape from that which makes us what we are. This new idealism corresponds to a profound collapse of political
horizons. It is the pseudoradicalism of a period of retreat for the left, a verbal radicalism of the word without deed, or, rather, of the word as
deed. In response to actual structures and practices of oppression and exploitation, it offers the rhetorical gesture, the ironic turn of phrase. It
comes as little surprise, then, when one of the chief philosophers of the new idealism, Jacques Derrida, tells us that he “would hesitate to use
such terms as ‘liberation’” 1 Imprisoned within language, we may play with words; but we can never hope to liberate ourselves from immutable
structures of oppression rooted in language, itself. The
new idealism and the politics it entails are not simply
harmless curiosities; they are an abdication of political responsibility, especially at a time of ferocious
capitalist restructuring, of widening gaps between rich and poor, of ruling class offensives against
social programs. They are also an obstacle to the rebuilding of mass movements of protest and
resistance.
AT: Epistemology FW
Epistemological kritiks require a large lack of information, doesn’t preclude doing
things like the plan.
Tyler Cowen, Department of Economics at George Mason University, "The Epistemic Problem Does Not
Refute Consequentialism," 2 November 2004, http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/Epistemic2.pdf, p. 14-15)
The epistemic critique relies heavily on a complete lack of information about initial circumstances. This
is not a plausible general assumption, although it may sometimes be true. The critique may give the impression of relying
more heavily on a more plausible assumption, namely a high variance for the probability distribution
of our estimates concerning the future. But simply increasing the level of variance or uncertainty does
not add much force to the epistemic argument. To see this more clearly, consider another case of a high upfront benefit.
Assume that the United States has been hit with a bioterror attack and one million children have
contracted smallpox. We also have two new experimental remedies, both of which offer some chance
of curing smallpox and restoring the children to perfect health. If we know for sure which remedy
works, obviously we should apply that remedy. But imagine now that we are uncertain as to which
remedy works. The uncertainty is so extreme that each remedy may cure somewhere between three hundred thousand and six hundred
thousand children. Nonetheless we have a slight idea that one remedy is better than the other. That is, one remedy is
slightly more likely to cure more children, with no other apparent offsetting negative effects or considerations. Despite the greater uncertainty,
we still have the intuition that we should try to save as many children as possible. We
should apply the remedy that is more
likely to cure more children. We do not say: “We are now so uncertain about what will happen. We
should pursue some goal other than trying to cure as many children as possible.” Nor would we cite greater
uncertainty about longer-run events as an argument against curing the children. We have a definite good in the present (more cured children),
balanced against a radical remixing of the future on both sides of the equation. The
definite upfront good still stands firm.
Alternatively, let us assume that our broader future suddenly became less predictable (perhaps genetic
engineering is invented, which creates new and difficult-to-forecast possibilities). That still would not diminish the force of our reason for saving
more children. The variance of forecast becomes larger on both sides of the equation – whether we save the children or not – and the value of
the upfront lives remains. A higher variance of forecast might increase the required size of the upfront benefit (to overcome the Principle of
Roughness), but it would not refute the relevance of consequences more generally. We
could increase the uncertainty more,
but consequentialism still will not appear counterintuitive. The remedies, rather than curing somewhere in the range of
three to six hundred thousand children, might cure in the broader range of zero to all one million of the children. By all classical statistical
standards, this new cure scenario involves more uncertainty than the previous case, such as by having a higher variance of possible outcomes.
Yet this higher uncertainty lends little support for the view that curing the children becomes less important. We still have an imperative to
apply the remedy that appears best, and is expected the cure the greater number of children. This example may appear excessively simple, but
it points our attention to the non-generality of the epistemic critique.
The critique appears strongest only when we have
absolutely no idea about the future; this is a special rather than a general case. Simply boosting the
degree of background generic uncertainty should not stop us from pursuing large upfront benefits of
obvious importance.
Our knowledge doesn’t have to be perfect—the aff still matters
Rudra Sil, assistant professor of Political Science at University of Pennsylvania. “Against Epistemological
Absolutism: Toward a “Pragmatic” Center,” in Beyond Boundries ed Sil and Eileen M. Doherty 2000
p160-161
An even stronger case is made by Paul Feyerabend who attacks the very idea that a paradigm might provide some conceptual coherence to a
body of theoretical literature; rather, the problem of incommensurable meanings in each and every theory, in each and every case, makes it
impossible to generate shared paradigms. Thus, Feyerabend’s relativistic
epistemology provides no criteria whatsoever
for the acceptance or refutation of theories, leaving social scientists with a growing body of
inconsistent and incommensurable theories.~~ Feyerabend’s position is implicitly accepted by many interpretive theorists as
well as postmodernists. For relativists, it is not simply the “methodological immaturity” of the social sciences that produces debates over the
relative merits of theories; the very nature of social inquiry makes it impossible to achieve a uniform set of methods or criteria for the
evaluation of theory.56 Posrmodernists even make a virtue out of this criterionless social science where “anything goes.” Some
of the
less skeptical posrmodernists proceed to emphasize intuition and empathy as substitutes for positivist
method, but the most extreme relativists can do no more than “deconstruct” texts to reveal hidden
biases and challenge hidden assumptions. In both cases, there is no basis for determining when an
insightful narrative or an act of deconstruction yields anything of significance to anyone other than
author. Is there a position between Feyera bend’s relativism, on the one hand, and Popperian conventionalism or Lakatos’s sophisticated
falsificationism on the other? To most social scientists in their everyday work, the latter seems unfeasible and the former unthinkable.
Instead, some have responded to the challenge of absolute relativism by calling for the use of
compelling arguments and empirical findings not to test or falsify theories but to modestly engage in
the “rational persuasion” of a given audience; thus, they posit a bounded notion of “rationality,”
stripped of its absolute universalism and consistent with socially constructed intersubjective
realities.57 Others suggest that theories may initially be incommensurable, but that they can be “translated” so as to enable at least a
tentative comparison and evaluation on the basis of the same kind of empirical tests.s8 In these approaches, the result will not be definitive
and theories will never become laws, but instead of crirerionless narratives,
scholars can at least make an effort to
persuade audiences by appealing to their own common-sense version of “reason” by relating theories
to compelling empirical observations. In the end, there may be no alternative to relying on the
judgment of other human beings, and this judgment is difficult to form in the absence of empirical
findings. However, instead of clinging to the elusive idea of a uniform standard for the empirical
validation of theories, it is possible to simply present a set of observational statements—whether we
call it “data” or “narrative”—for the modest purpose of rendering an explanation or interpretation
more plausible than the audience would allow at the outset. In practice, this is precisely what the most committed
positivists and interprerivists have been doing anyway; the presentation of “logically consistent” hypotheses “supported by data” and the
ordering of facts in a “thick” narrative are both ultimately designed to convince scholars that a particular proposition should be taken more
seriously than others. Social
analysis is not about final truths or objective realities, but nor does it have to be
a meaningless world of incommensurable theories where anything goes. Instead, it can be an ongoing
collective endeavor to develop, evaluate, and refine general inferences—be they in the form of
models, partial explanations, descriptive inferences, or interpretations—in order to render them more
“sensible” or “plausible” to a particular audience. In the absence of a consensus on the possibility and
desirability of a full-blown explanatory science of international and social life, it is important to keep
as many doors open as possible. This does not require us to accept each and every claim without some sort of validation, but
perhaps the community of scholars can be more tolerant about the kinds of empirical referents and
logical propositions that are employed in validating propositions by scholars embracing all but the
most extreme epistemological positions.
Universal truths exist without subscribing to a particular epistemology.
Mark Bauerlein, English professor at Emory, Social Constructivism, Partisan Review 68.2, 2001,
accessed 7/16/10 http://www.bu.edu/partisanreview/archive/2001/2/bauerlein.html
The weakness of social constructionism as an epistemology lies in the fact that one can agree with the
bare premise that knowledge is a construct, but disagree with the conclusion that objectivity is
impossible and that the contents of knowledge are dependent upon the social conditions of the
knower. Of course, knowledge is constructed. It must be expressed in language, composed
methodically, conceived through mental views, all of which are historically derived. Constructionists extend
the fact that knowledge materializes in cognitive and linguistic structures which have social determinants into the belief that knowledge has no
claim to transcend them.
That knowledge cannot transcend the conditions of its origination stems from the
notion that cognition is never innocent, that cognition has designs and desires shaping its knowledgebuilding process, that knowing always has an instrumental purpose. This human dimension is local
and situational, constructionists argue, a historical context for knowledge outside of which the
knowledge has no general warrant. Even the most ahistorical kinds of knowledge, the principles of logic, mathematics, and
science, have a social basis, one obscured by thinkers who have abstracted that knowledge from its rightful setting and used it for purposes of
their own. Thus Martin Heidegger claims in a well-known illustration, "Before Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not ‘true’. . . .Through
Newton the laws became true" (Being and Time). We only think the laws preceded Newton’s conception because, Heidegger explains, that is
how entities "show themselves." But even though Newton’s laws arose at a particular historical moment, in one man’s mind, why assume that
the laws are inextricable from that moment? There is abundant evidence for believing that the truth of Newton’s laws is independent of
Newton’s mind, language, class, education, etc.
The simple fact that persons of different languages and cultures
implement those laws effectively implies their transhistorical and cross-cultural capacity. Engineers
and physicists confirm the laws daily without any knowledge of Newton’s circumstances . Three hundred
years of experimentation and theory have altered Newton’s laws only by restricting their physical purview. In short, Newton’s laws have been
justified in vastly different times and places. Yes, scientists and engineers have de-historicized Newtonian knowledge, pared it down to a few
set principles (nobody actually reads the Principia). But though abstract and expedient, the laws of Newtonian physics still have a truth-value,
and that value is related not to Newton’s world, but to how well the laws predict outcomes, how reliably they stand up to testing, how useful
they are in physical domains.
To think otherwise is to deny the distinction between the contents of knowledge
and the context of their emergence. This is an old logical mistake, namely, the genetic fallacy: the
confusion of a theory’s discovery with its justification. Social constructionists overlook this distinction
between discovery (the circumstances of a theory’s origin) and justification (the establishment of its
truth).
AT: Ontology FW
Ontological questions aren’t a reason to exclude certain arguments
Wendt ‘2 Alexander Wendt, professor of international security at political science at Ohio State, with
James Fearon, Handbook of International Relations, ed Carlsnaes, 2002, p. 53
It is important to understand these ontological issues, since failure to do so can lead to analytical tools or frameworks becoming tacit ontologies
(Ruggie, 1983: 285), foreclosing potentially interesting lines of argument without justification. However,
we do not believe this
framing of the rationalist constructivist debate is the most useful, for three reasons. First, the issues
are by definition philosophical, and as such not likely to be settled soon, if ever, and almost certainly
not by IR scholars. Second, although some rationalists and constructivists may in fact have strong
ontological commitments, others may not, since there is no inherent need to commit to an ontology
to work in these traditions. Just as quantum physicists can do their work without any idea how to interpret its ontological
implications, social scientists too can proceed pragmatically, remaining agnostic about what society is 'really' made of. Finally, it seems
doubtful that as a discipline we know so much about international life that we should rule out certain
arguments a priori on purely philosophical grounds. Thus, while recognizing the role that ontological
issues play in structuring the rationalist-constructivist debate, in this chapter we will largely avoid
them, adopting a stance of ontological pluralism instead.
Reality and human experiences come before questions of ontology
Davidson ’89 Arnold Davidson, co-editor of Critical Inquiry, Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Member of the Committees on General Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of
Science at the University of Chicago, Critical Inquiry, Winter, 1989
I understand Levinas’ work to suggest another path to the recovery of the human, one that leads through or toward other human beings: The
dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face….Hence metaphysics is enacted where the
social relation is enacted—in our relations with men….The Other is not the incarnation of God, but
precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed. It is our
relations with men…that give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of. Levinas places ethics before ontology
by beginning with our experience of the human face: and, in a clear reference to Heidegger’s idolatry
of the village life of peasants, he associates himself with Socrates, who preferred the city where he encountered men to the
country with its trees. In his discussions of skepticism and the problem of others, Cavell also aligns himself with this path of thought, with the
recovery of the finite human self through the acknowledgment of others: As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldn’t the other suffer
the fate of God?…I wish to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe. This requires
understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God. [CR, p. 470] The
suppression of the
other, the human, in Heidegger’s thought accounts, I believe, for the absence, in his writing after the war, of the experience of horror.
Horror is always disconnected toward the human: every object of horror bears the imprint of the
human will. So Levinas can see in Heidegger’s silence about the gas chambers and death camps “a kind of consent to the horror.” And
Cavell can characterize Nazis as “those who have lost the capacity for being horrified by what they do.” Where was Heidegger’s horror? How
could he have failed to know what he had consented to? Hannah Arendt associates Heidegger with Paul Valery’s aphorism, “’Les evenements
ne sont que l’ecume des choses’ (‘Events
are but the foam of things’).” I think one understands the source of
her intuition. The mass extermination of human beings, however, does not produce foam, but dust
and ashes; and it is here that questioning must stop.
AT: Value to Life
Value to life inevitable – existence key to maximize it
David Pizer 2001“Argument that life has inherent value”, July 8, http://www.cryonet.org/cgibin/dsp.cgi?msg=16930
Argument that life has inherent value 1. The concept of value comes from what living beings will pay for something. How much one being is
willing to give in order to get something he wants is a way to think of the value of that thing. What a being is willing to pay for something
depends on how much he desires that thing. So indirectly, desire is what actually sets the value of something. 2. In
order to desire
something, the thing doing the desiring must be alive - it must be a living being. So value, the end of
desire, is dependent on life. Only living things (living beings) can give value to something else. 3. In order
for any first thing to give something to a second thing, the first thing must first have it to give. So if only living things can give value, then living
things must have value. 4. Desire can
only come from, (and so must be in), living beings. So when living things desire
If desire in living things is what gives value to other things,
and that desire is inherent in the living thing, then living things, or life, has inherent value in it. Or to say
something, that desire must be inherent in the living things.
it another way: If an object gives something value, that object must have value in it as a quality to give. Example: For me to love my dog, I must
first have love in me. For me to value my dog, I must first have value in me. 5. Put another way, if
a living being has some quality,
that quality is a part of what makes that being what it is. 6.If life gives value to life, than one of the
parts of life is value. Put another way, value cannot exist without life, so value is life and life is value. 7. If
value is only relative, then saying life being valuable relative to life is the same as saying life has worth relative to life. Anything that is
relative to itself is an unconditional part of itself and therefore has "inherentness". 8.THEREFORE, anyway
you look at it, life is value and value is life - and life has inherent value.
Territory/Mobility Answers
Biopower Good
Democratic biopower is designed to protect the rights of its citizens.
Dickinson 4 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, “Biopolitics,
Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity,” Central European History,
vol. 37, no. 1, 1–48)
In the Weimar model, then, the rights of the individual, guaranteed formally by the constitution and substantively by the welfare system, were
the central element of the dominant program for the management of social problems. Almost no one in this period advocated expanding social
provision out of the goodness of their hearts. This was a strategy of social management, of social engineering. The
mainstream of
social reform in Germany believed that guaranteeing basic social rights— the substantive or positive
freedom of all citizens — was the best way to turn people into power, prosperity, and profit. In that
sense, the democratic welfare state was— and is — democratic not despite of its pursuit of biopower,
but because of it. The contrast with the Nazi state is clear. National Socialism aimed to construct a system of
social and population policy founded on the concept of individual duties, on the ubiquitous and total
power of the state, and on the systematic absorption of every citizen by organizations that could
implant that power at every level of their lives — in political and associational life, in the family, in the workplace, and in
leisure activities. In the welfarist vision of Weimar progressives, the task of the state was to create an
institutional framework that would give individuals the wherewithal to integrate themselves
successfully into the national society, economy, and polity. The Nazis aimed, instead, to give the state the wherewithal
to do with every citizen what it willed. And where Weimar welfare advocates understood themselves to be constructing a system of knowledge
and institutions that would manage social problems, the
Nazis fundamentally sought to abolish just that system by
eradicating — by finding a “final solution” to — social problems. Again, as Peukert pointed out, many advocates of a
rights-based welfare structure were open to the idea that “stubborn” cases might be legitimate targets for sterilization; the right to health
could easily be redefined as primarily a duty to be healthy, for example. But the
difference between a strategy of social
management built on the rights of the citizen and a system of racial policy built on the total power of
the state is not merely a semantic one; such differences had very profound political implications, and
established quite different constraints. The rights-based strategy was actually not very compatible with exclusionary and
coercive policies; it relied too heavily on the cooperation of its targets and of armies of volunteers, it was too embedded in a democratic
institutional structure and civil society, it lacked powerful legal and institutional instruments of coercion, and its rhetorical structure was too
heavily slanted toward inclusion and tolerance.
Biopolitical ends have created constraints on totalitarian power.
Dickinson 4 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, “Biopolitics,
Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity,” Central European History,
vol. 37, no. 1, 1–48)
In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the
welfare state in our own time are unmistakable. Both are instances of the “disciplinary society” and of biopolitical,
regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state,
but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become
superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes.
Clearly the
democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from
totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that
characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from
economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to
generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce “health,” such a system can —and
historically does— create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a
structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and
incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this
pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to
have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a “logic” or
imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I
think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in
Germany.90 Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such
regimes are
characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient
numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic
configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of “liberty,” just as
much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least,
totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end
point of the logic of social engineering.
Modern Biopower does not stifle ideas, but opens up a forum for many different ideas
to be expressed
Dickinson 4 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, “Biopolitics,
Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity,” Central European History,
vol. 37, no. 1, 1–48)
This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of
power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not “opposites,” in
the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The
concept “power” should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and
entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively “the same.”
Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy
and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, “tactically polyvalent.” Discursive elements (like the various elements
of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state);
they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The
varying possible constellations of power in
modern societies create “multiple modernities,” modern societies with quite radically differing
potentials.91
Democratic biopower has greatly increased the rights and resources of citizens under
interventionist regimes.
Dickinson 4 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, “Biopolitics,
Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity,” Central European History,
vol. 37, no. 1, 1–48)
At its simplest, this view of the politics of expertise and professionalization is certainly plausible. Historically speaking, however, the further
conjecture that this
“micropolitical” dynamic creates authoritarian, totalitarian, or homicidal potentials at
the level of the state does not seem very tenable. Historically, it appears that the greatest advocates
of political democracy —in Germany left liberals and Social Democrats —have been also the greatest
advocates of every kind of biopolitical social engineering, from public health and welfare programs
through social insurance to city planning and, yes, even eugenics.102 The state they built has intervened in social
relations to an (until recently) ever-growing degree; professionalization has run ever more rampant in Western societies; the production of
scientistic and technocratic expert knowledge has proceeded at an ever more frenetic pace. And yet, from
the perspective of the
first years of the millennium, the second half of the twentieth century appears to be the great age of
democracy in precisely those societies where these processes have been most in evidence. What is more,
the interventionist state has steadily expanded both the rights and the resources of virtually every
citizen — including those who were stigmatized and persecuted as biologically defective under National Socialism. Perhaps these processes
have created an ever more restrictive “iron cage” of rationality in European societies. But if so, it seems clear that there is no
necessary correlation between rationalization and authoritarian politics; the opposite seems in fact to
be at least equally true.
Threats Are Real
Threats exist, we should pay attention to them.
Olav Knudsen, Professor of Political Science at Sodertorn, "Post-Copenhagen Security Studies,"
Security Dialogue 32:3, 2001
Moreover, I have a problem with the underlying implication that it is unimportant whether states 'really' face dangers from other states or
groups. In the Copenhagen school,
threats are seen as coming mainly from the actors' own fears, or from what
happens when the fears of individuals turn into paranoid political action. In my view, this emphasis on
the subjective is a misleading conception of threat, in that it discounts an independent existence for
what- ever is perceived as a threat. Granted, political life is often marked by misperceptions, mistakes, pure imaginations, ghosts,
or mirages, but such phenomena do not occur simultaneously to large numbers of politicians, and hardly most of the time. During the
Cold War, threats - in the sense of plausible possibilities of danger - referred to 'real' phenomena, and
they refer to 'real' phenomena now. The objects referred to are often not the same, but that is a different matter. Threats have
to be dealt with both ín terms of perceptions and in terms of the phenomena which are perceived to be threatening. The point of Waever’s
concept of security is not the potential existence of danger somewhere but the use of the word itself
by political elites. In his 1997 PhD dissertation, he writes, ’One can View “security” as that which is in language theory called a speech
act: it is not interesting as a sign referring to something more real - it is the utterance itself that is the act.’24 The deliberate disregard of
objective factors is even more explicitly stated in Buzan & WaeVer’s joint article of the same year.” As a consequence, the phenomenon of
threat is reduced to a matter of pure domestic politics.”
It seems to me that the security dilemma, as a central notion
in security studies, then loses its foundation. Yet I see that Waever himself has no compunction about referring to the
security dilemma in a recent article." This discounting of the objective aspect of threats shifts security studies to
insignificant concerns. What has long made 'threats' and ’threat perceptions’ important phenomena
in the study of IR is the implication that urgent action may be required. Urgency, of course, is where Waever first
began his argument in favor of an alternative security conception, because a convincing sense of urgency has been the chief culprit behind the
abuse of 'security' and the consequent ’politics of panic', as Waever aptly calls it.” Now, here - in the case of urgency - another baby is thrown
out with the Waeverian bathwater. When
real situations of urgency arise, those situations are challenges to
democracy; they are actually at the core of the problematic arising with the process of making
security policy in parliamentary democracy. But in Waever’s world, threats are merely more or less
persuasive, and the claim of urgency is just another argument. I hold that instead of 'abolishing'
threatening phenomena ’out there’ by reconceptualizing them, as Waever does, we should continue
paying attention to them, because situations with a credible claim to urgency will keep coming back and then we need to know more
about how they work in the interrelations of groups and states (such as civil wars, for instance), not least to find adequate democratic
procedures for dealing with them.
Apocalyptic Discourse Good
Apocalyptic rhetoric incites us to stop apocalyptic threats, creates social activism.
Blain 91 Michael Blain, professor of Sociology, RHETORICAL PRACTICE IN AN ANTI-NUCLEAR WEAPONS
CAMPAIGN, Peace & Change
Peace activism can be understood as a sociopolitical performance. It enacts a pattern of discourse that
can be rhetorically analyzed in terms of its strategy of incitement. As peace activists mobilized their forces in the
1980s, they built up a discourse -- a repertoire of possible political statements for use against nuclear weapons policies. Such statements
as nuclear annihilation, radiation pollution, and strategic madness have been the primary incitements
to peace activism. Activists use language pragmatically. As political actors addressing a public audience, they know they
must speak a language familiar to that audience. Nineteenth-century activists were educated, middle-class women, clergymen, educators, and
businessmen with a reform Christian conscience. Twentieth-century activists have included political leftists and cultural dissidents as well as
traditional pacifists and religious liberals.(n1) Middle-class professionals have played prominent roles in the peace movement. For example,
medical activists like Helen Caldicott and Robert Lifton have elaborated a discourse on the madness of "nuclearism"(n2) In fact, some analysts
interpret the
peace movement as a power struggle of middle-class radicals and countercultural rebels
against the power elite.(n3) This article presents the results of a rhetorical analysis of activists' discursive practices in a victorious
campaign to defeat a U.S. government plan to construct the first new nuclear weapons plant in twenty years in the state of Idaho, the Special
Isotope Separator (SIS). It shows how activists in the Snake River Alliance (SRA), a Boise, Idaho, antinuclear organization, mobilized hundreds of
"Idahoans" to act as "concerned citizens" and "Life Guards," to lobby, testify, demonstrate, and finally, to kill this plan. The article introduces a
perspective on how discourse functions in political movements. An effective movement discourse must accomplish two things: (1)
knowledge, or the constitution of the subjects and objects of struggle, and (2) ethics, or the moral
incitement of people to political action. I will show how this perspective can illuminate how anti-SIS
activists developed an effective discourse to kill this crucial nuclear weapons program. A critical
evaluation of this campaign can contribute to peace in at least three ways: it can celebrate the artful
practices these activists engaged in to achieve their political objectives; it can add a case study of a
victorious campaign to the emerging literature on the tactics of nonviolent action; and finally, it can
contribute to the current debate about the future of the peace movement in a post-cold war world.
The anti-SIS campaign involved an alliance of environmental and peace groups, which suggests one possible political strategy for future peace
actions. POLITICAL MOVEMENTS AS VICTIMAGE RITUALS Political
activists must engage in discourse to fight and win
power struggles with their adversaries. In political battles, such as the anti-SIS campaign, words are
weapons with tactical functions. Michel Foucault clearly articulates this perspective: Indeed, it is in discourse that power and
knowledge are joined together. And for this reason, we must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous
segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable ... as a multiplicity of discursive
elements that can come into play in various strategies. It is this distribution that we must reconstruct
... according to who is speaking, his position of power, the institutional context in which he happens
to be situated ... with the shifts and reutilizations of identical formulas for contrary objectives .(n4) A
power strategy refers to all means, including discursive practices, put into play by an actor in a particular power relationship to influence the
actions of others. The
language of political movements, including peace activism, is militaristic; activists
talk strategy, tactics, and objectives. And it is important to see that discourse is itself a part of any
power strategy. Kenneth Burke's concepts of victimage rhetoric and rituals can be used to illuminate
this process.(n5) Political activists use victimage rhetoric to mobilize people to fight and defeat their adversaries. Victimage rhetoric is
melodramatic in form. It functions to incite those who identify with it to engage in political acts of ritual scapegoating. Activists mobilize
people to engage in activism by getting them to identify with an actual or impending violation of
some communal "ideal"--a problem, concern, or danger. Activists mount "education" campaigns to get the public to
identify with the imminent danger. A critical knowledge of the nature of this danger is constructed, taking the form of villainous powers
inflicting or threatening to inflict some terrible wrong on the world. This
rhetorical practice is tactical in the sense that it is
designed to generate intense anger and moral outrage at what has, is, or could be happening to the
values of those who identify with it. These people can then be mobilized in a campaign to fight the
villain. This effect is intensified by emphasizing the negative features of the actions of the agents and
agencies responsible for the violation. Once implanted, this knowledge exerts an ethical incitement to activism.
Activists, this model suggests, must develop a discourse that does two things: vilify and activate. These two functions correspond to two
moments in a melodramatic victimage ritual. These two moments of identification are (1) acts of violation or vilification and (2) acts of
redemptive or heroic action. Movement leaders must construct images of both villains and activists fighting villains. They
must convince
us that acts of violation have occurred or will happen, and then they must goad us into doing
something about it. This analysis suggests that a movement discourse is a rhetorical system composed
of two elements working in tandem. One of the main features of motive in victimage ritual is the aim to destroy the destroyer. In
the anti- SIS campaign, as we shall see, the objective was to kill a Department of Energy (DOE) program to build a nuclear weapons plant. One
means of accomplishing that objective was to vilify its proponents. The second element in a movement discourse is redemptive or ethical. Once
leaders succeed in convincing their followers that there is a real threat, they must then incite those convinced to act. To accomplish these
objectives, peace activists have assembled a discourse charged with peril and power--a knowledge of the scene they confront and an ethic of
political activism. They have constituted a "knowledge" of the dangers posed by the nuclear arms race and nuclear war that is infused with a
redemptive ethic of political activism. Activists use this knowledge and ethic to goad people into campaigns to achieve antinuclear objectives.
For example, activists have invoked the term power in two distinct ethical senses. There is the "bad" power of the agents of the nuclear arms
race (politicians such as Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher; agencies such as the U.S. government, NATO, or the Department of Energy). And
there is the "good" power that activists produce by their concerted political actions, including a subjective effect called "empowerment."
Activists empower themselves by "taking personal responsibility for the fate of the earth," sacrificing
time, energy, and money to the cause. By engaging in political activism, peace activists say they
transcend psychological despair and obtain a sense of personal power.(n6)
Security Inevitable
Territorial securitization is inevitable—actors will always defend themselves against
the outside
Barry Buzan, Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics
and honorary professor at the University of Copenhagen, “Security, the State, the “New World Order,”
and Beyond,” On Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, 1998, CIAO
One assumption underlying this chapter is that differences in internal construction have a substantial impact
on how states define threats and vulnerabilities, and therefore on the whole construction of the security problematique. Given their
fundamental character, all states (or at least all of those that are embedded in an international system--and it is only these that will be
discussed here) will share bottom line security concerns about the maintenance of their territorial base
and their political autonomy. If the threat is of external armed attack aimed at seizing territory or
resources, or overthrowing the government, then, within the limits of resources, conceptions of
security will tend to be similar in all states, and the effect of internal differences will be pushed into
the background. Beyond that bottom line, however, internal differences can have radical effects on the construction of security, affecting
both the breadth of the security agenda (what kinds of actions--military, political, economic, societal, environmental--are perceived as threats),
and the definition of priorities for security policy.
Permutation
Perm solves, working through the state can be done.
Michel Foucault, 1980, Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, pg. 154
FOUCAULT We
must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against. After all, it is possible to face up to a
work with a government implies neither subjection nor total acceptance.
One may work with it and yet be restive. I even believe that the two things go together.
government and remain standing. To
Alt Doesn’t Solve
Alt doesn’t escape sovereignty—micro-level resistance only compounds the problem
by dispersing it and risks conservative co-option
Andrew W. Neal, “Cutting Off the King’s Head: Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended and the Problem
of Sovereignty,” Alternatives 29 (2004), p. 373-398
As I have already signalled, I wish to unsettle this common interpretation of Foucault on sovereignty. Certainly, the methods and approaches
that Foucault posits will be familiar to readers from diverse intellectual fields as being extremely sharp, productive, potent, and original.
However, these
moves do not "solve," "escape," or even "destroy" the problem of sovereignty. Foucault
does not succeed in "cutting off the King's head," at least not in this way. Moves into resistant forms of
subjectivity, historicism, or war do not help us to leave behind the problem of sovereignty; in fact,
they only compound it. It is true that the genealogical method of historicizing the ahistorical forms of political theory and pluralizing
"universal" forms of history is devastating to those models. But although Foucault may indeed succeed in cutting off the
head of modern juridical state sovereignty in this way, he does not succeed in cutting of the head of
sovereignty altogether. Foucault does not simply give us a methodological toolbox, but an armory of discursive weapons. If we go
down the road of "politics as the continuation of war by other means," wedded to a relentless
historicism to reveal war and confrontation as an underlying "reality," Foucault risks becoming a cipher for just about
any political position. The critical weapons themselves are politically ambiguous; they could just as
much be used by states, the far Right or left-leaning political theorists. Undermining modern state
sovereignty through these means does not rid us of the problem of sovereignty; it makes it even more
pressing. We are faced with the problem of how to justify alternative forms of political authority with neither the recourse to "ancient"
rights, to Hobbesian state reason, nor to the "blackmail" of the Enlightenment. If we "cut off the King's head," perhaps
another, possibly even nastier, bead will sprout elsewhere. In his determined regicidal project,
Foucault risks becoming the Lady Macbeth of political thought.
Environment Answers
Alt  Co-option
Kritiks of environmentalism are co-opted by the right
Paul Wapner, associate professor and director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at
American University. “Leftist Criticism of "Nature" Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age,”
Dissent Winter 2003 http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/archives/2003/wi03/wapner.htm
The postmodern argument also poses challenges for anyone concerned with environmental protection. Environmentalism is fundamentally
about conserving and preserving nature. Whether one worries about climate change, loss of biological diversity, dwindling resources, or overall
degradation of the earth's air, water, soil, and species, the nonhuman world is the backdrop of concern. What happens when critics call this
backdrop into question? What happens when they claim that one understanding of "nature" is at odds with another and that there is no
definitive way to judge which one is better? How can a movement dedicated to protecting nature operate if the very identity of its concern is in
doubt? These may seem like academic questions, but they go to the heart of environmentalism and have begun to worry even the most
committed environmentalists. After
scholars such as William Cronon, Timothy Luke, and J. Baird Callicott introduced "ecocriticism" to the scholarly and popular publics, various environmental activists and thinkers have
struggled to articulate a response. Their inability to do so in a decisive and persuasive manner has further damaged the
environmentalist position. Even more troubling, now that the critique is out of the bag, it is being co-opted by
people on the right. Anti-environmentalists such as Charles Rubin and Alston Chase, for example, now
claim that, if there is no such thing as "real" nature, we need not treat the nonhuman world with
unqualified respect. If we think it is in our interest, we can freely choose to pave the rainforest, wipe out the last panda bear, or pump
high levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What is critical to notice in both cases is that criticisms of
"nature," whether they come from the left or are co-opted by the right, are playing an increasing role
in structuring the confrontation between anti- and pro-environmentalists. And they are re-setting the
fault lines within the environmental movement itself.
Managerialism Good
We have a moral responsibility to protect nature, post-modern kritks of nature spend
time discussing while the environment is destroyed.
Paul Wapner, associate professor and director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at
American University. “Leftist Criticism of "Nature" Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age,”
Dissent Winter 2003
The third response to eco-criticism would require critics to acknowledge the ways in which they
themselves silence nature and then to respect the sheer otherness of the nonhuman world.
Postmodernism prides itself on criticizing the urge toward mastery that characterizes modernity. But isn't mastery exactly what postmodernism
is exerting as it captures the nonhuman world within its own conceptual domain? Doesn't postmodern cultural criticism deepen the modernist
urge toward mastery by eliminating the ontological weight of the nonhuman world? What else could it mean to assert that there is no such
thing as nature? I have already suggested the postmodernist response: yes, recognizing the social construction of "nature" does deny the selfexpression of the nonhuman world, but how would we know what such self-expression means? Indeed, nature doesn't speak; rather, some
person always speaks on nature's behalf, and whatever that person says is, as we all know, a social construction. All attempts to listen to
nature are social constructions-except one. Even the most radical postmodernist must acknowledge the distinction between physical existence
and non-existence. As I have said, postmodernists
accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal
world even if they argue about the different meanings we ascribe to it. This acknowledgment of physical existence
is crucial. We can't ascribe meaning to that which doesn't appear. What doesn't exist can manifest no character. Put
differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's expressions. And
all of us should be wary of those who claim to speak on nature's behalf (including environmentalists
who do that). But we need not doubt the simple idea that a prerequisite of expression is existenc e. This
in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse embodiments-must be seen by
eco-critics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of environmental
preservation. Postmodernists reject the idea of a universal good. They rightly acknowledge the difficulty of identifying a common value
given the multiple contexts of our value-producing activity. In fact, if there is one thing they vehemently scorn, it is the idea that there can be a
value that stands above the individual contexts of human experience. Such a value would present itself as a metanarrative and, as Jean-François
Lyotard has explained, postmodernism is characterized fundamentally by its "incredulity toward meta-narratives." Nonetheless, I can't
see
how postmodern critics can do otherwise than accept the value of preserving the nonhuman world.
The nonhuman is the extreme "other"; it stands in contradistinction to humans as a species. In
understanding the constructed quality of human experience and the dangers of reification,
postmodernism inherently advances an ethic of respecting the "other." At the very least, respect must involve
ensuring that the "other" actually continues to exist. In our day and age, this requires us to take responsibility for
protecting the actuality of the nonhuman. Instead, however, we are running roughshod over the
earth's diversity of plants, animals, and ecosystems. Postmodern critics should find this particularly disturbing. If they
don't, they deny their own intellectual insights and compromise their fundamental moral commitment. Now, what does this mean for politics
and policy, and the future of the environmental movement? Society is constantly being asked to address questions of environmental quality for
which there are no easy answers. As we wrestle with challenges of global climate change, ozone depletion, loss of biological diversity, and so
forth, we need to consider the economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic values at stake. These
considerations have
traditionally marked the politics of environmental protection. A sensitivity to eco-criticism requires
that we go further and include an ethic of otherness in our deliberations. That is, we need to be
moved by our concern to make room for the "other" and hence fold a commitment to the nonhuman
world into our policy discussions. I don't mean that this argument should drive all our actions or that respect for the "other"
should always carry the day. But it must be a central part of our reflections and calculations. For example, as we estimate the number of people
that a certain area can sustain, consider what to do about climate change, debate restrictions on ocean fishing, or otherwise assess the effects
of a particular course of action, we must think about the lives of other creatures on the earth-and also the continued existence of the nonliving
physical world. We
must do so not because we wish to maintain what is "natural" but because we wish to
act in a morally respectable manner. I have been using postmodern cultural criticism against itself. Yes, the postmodernists are
right: we can do what we want with the nonhuman world. There is nothing essential about the realm of rocks, trees, fish, and climate that calls
for a certain type of action. But postmodernists are also right that the only ethical way to act in a world that is socially constructed is to respect
the voices of the others-of those with whom we share the planet but with whom we may not share a common language or outlook. There is, in
other words, a limit or guiding principle to our actions. As political theorist Leslie Thiele puts it, "One can't argue for the diversity of views of
"nature" without taking a stand for the diversity of nature."
Managerialism is necessary to sustain the current environment, no other solutions
solve.
Neil Levy, Tutor at the Center for Critical Theory at Monash, Discourses of the Environment, “Foucault’s
Unnatural Ecology,” 1999 p. 214-215
If our current situation can really be accurately characterized as the extension of bio-power from the
realm of population to that of all life, does that entail that the strategies we should be adopting are
those of management of the non-human world, as well as that of the human? I believe that it does. But
I do not believe that this necessitates, or even makes possible, the genetically engineered, artificial world which McKihben and many others
who have advocated non-anthropocentric ethics have feared, the replacement of the natural world with ‘a space station’ (McKihbcn 1989: I
70). And not just for the reason that, after the end of nature, the artificial/natural distinction is impossible to maintain .
The world McKihhcn fears, in which forests are replaced by trees designed by us for maximum efficiency at absorbing carbon, and new strains
of genetically engineered corn flourish in the new conditions brought about by global warming, seems to me unlikely in the extreme. The
systems with which we are dealing, the imbrication of a huge variety of forms of life with chemical
processes, with meteorological and geographic processes, are so complex, and occur on such scale,
that I can see no way in which they could he replaced by artificial systems which would fulfill the same
functions. Every intervention we make in that direction has consequences which are so far-reaching,
and involve so many variables and as yet undetected connections between relatively independent
systems, that they are practically unforeseeable. To replace non-human systems with mechanisms of our own devising
would involve thousands of such interventions, each of which would then require follow-up interventions in order to reverse or control their
unintended consequences. Even when, and if, our knowledge of the environment were to reach a stage at which we were able to predict the
consequences of our interventions, it would be likely to be far easier, and, in the long run, cheaper, simply to turn the already functioning
natural systems to our advantage. No
method of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is
likely to be more effective than preserving the Amazonian rain forest. For this reason, I believe,
environmentalists have nothing to fear from such an apparently instrumental approach. If the
‘technological fix’ is unlikely to be more successful than strategies of limitation of our use of
resources, we are nevertheless unable simply to leave the environment as it is. There is a real and
pressing need for more, and more accurate, technical and scientific information about the non-human
world. For we are faced with a situation in which the processes we have already set in train will continue to impact upon that world, and
therefore us, for centuries. It is therefore necessary, not only to stop cutting down the rain forests, but to develop real, concrete proposals for
action, to reverse, or at least limit, the effects of our previous interventions. Moreover,
there is another reason why our
behavior towards the non-human cannot simply be a matter of leaving it as it is, at least in so far as
our goals are not only environmental but also involve social justice. For if we simply preserve what
remains to us of wilderness, of the countryside and of park land, we also preserve patterns of very
unequal access to their resources and their consolations (Soper 1995: 207). In fact, we risk exacerbating these
inequalities. It is not us, but the poor of Brazil, who will bear the brunt of the misery which would
result from a strictly enforced policy of leaving the Amazonian rain forest untouched, in the absence of
alternative means of providing for their livelihood. It is the development of policies to provide such ecologically sustainable alternatives which
we require, as well as the development of technical means for replacing our current green house gas-emitting sources of energy. Such
policies and proposals for concrete action must be formulated by ecologists, environ mentalists,
people with expertise concerning the functioning of ecosystems and the impacts which our actions
have upon them. Such proposals are, therefore, very much the province of Foucault’s specific intellectual, the
one who works ‘within specific sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or
work situate them’ (Foucault 1980g: 126). For who could be more fittingly described as ‘the strategists of life and death’ than these
environmentalists? After the end of the Cold War, it is in this sphere, more than any other, that man’s ‘politics places his existence as a living
being in question’ (Foucault 1976: 14.3).
For it is in facing the consequences of our intervention in the non-human
world that the fate of our species, and of those with whom we share this planet, will be decided.
Environmental Managerialism is the only way to prevent the environment from
collapsing
Soule 95 Michael E., Professor and Chair of Environmental Studies, UC-Santa Cruz, REINVITING
NATURE? RESPONSES TO POSTMODERN DECONSTRUCTION, Eds: Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease, p.
159-160
Should We Actively Manage Wildlands and Wild Waters? The decision has already been made in most places. Some of the ecological myths
discussed here contain, either explicitly or implicitly, the idea that nature is self-regulating and capable of caring for itself. This
notion
leads to the theory of management known as benign neglect – nature will do fine, thank you, if
human beings just leave it alone. Indeed, a century ago, a hands-off policy was the best policy. Now it
is not. Given natures`s current fragmented and stressed condition, neglect will result in an
accelerating spiral of deterioration. Once people create large gaps in forests, isolate and disturb habitats, pollute, overexploit,
and introduce species from other continents, the viability of many ecosystems and native species is compromised,
resiliency dissipates, and diversity can collapse. When artificial disturbance reaches a certain
threshold, even small changes can produce large effects, and these will be compounded by climate
change. For example, a storm that would be considered normal and beneficial may, following widespread clearcutting, cause disastrous
blow-downs, landslides, and erosion. If global warming occurs, tropical storms are predicted to have greater force than now. Homeostasis,
balance, and Gaia are dangerous models when applied at the wrong spatial and temporal scales.
Even fifty years ago, neglect
might have been the best medicine, but that was a world with a lot more big, unhumanized,
connected spaces, a world with one-third the number of people, and a world largely unaffected by
chain saws, bulldozers, pesticides, and exotic, weedy species. The alternative to neglect is active
caring – in today`s parlance, an affirmative approach to wildlands: to maintain and restore them, to become stewards, accepting all the
domineering baggage that word carries. Until humans are able to control their numbers and their technologies,
management is the only viable alternative to massive attrition of living nature. But management activities are
variable in intensity, something that antimanagement purists ignore. In general, the greater the disturbance and the smaller the habitat
remnant, the more intense the management must be. So if we must manage, where do we look for ethical guidance?
Climate Science Good
Climate science is necessary, without it we comply with fossil fuel industries.
Lever-Tracy ‘8 Constance Lever-Tracy, “Global Warming and Sociology,” Current Sociology 56 (3),
2008, pp. 445-466, http://ireswb.cc.ku.edu/~crgc/NSFWorkshop/Readings/LeverTracy%20Current%20Sociology%202008.pdf
There is a mystery in this lack of interest in developments that could conceivably open the door to chaos and barbarism later this century, or whose prevention might require a transformation
. Writers on the subject often come
from the field of environmental sociology, originating in rural sociology. Given the classical focus on
urbanization, rural sociology has tended to be marginalized from prestigious journals or degree
courses. There are, however, more essential reasons for the silence. Arguably, it derives from the interaction of two factors. The
first is our recently acquired suspicion of teleology and our mirroring of an indifference we find in
contemporary society towards the future. The second factor is our continuing foundational suspicion
of naturalistic explanations for social facts, which has often led us to question or ignore the authority
of natural scientists, even in their own field of study. Together, these two have often blinded us to the
predicted, fateful convergence of social and natural time, in a new teleological countdown to possible
disaster, coming towards us from the future. While the rate of change of natural processes is shrinking
towards the time scales of human society, social scientists have been theorizing a further shrinking in
cultural horizons, with an emphasis on immediate gratification, and a decline in long-term direction or
plans, so that even threats just decades away would now scarcely register. In his history of the 20th century, Eric Hobsbawm
in the core processes of industrial society. A contingent reason for the silence may lie in the status structure of the discipline
complained how men and women, at the century’s end, live in a ‘permanent present’ where a discounting of the past parallels inattention to the future. The editors of What the Future Holds:
Insights from Social Science, note in their introduction the sharp decline, since 1980, of academic discussions on future scenarios (Cooper and Layard, 2002: 4). For those of us brought up on C.
Wright Mills, historical grand narratives have seemed to be at the very foundation of our discipline, yet no sociologist contributed to this volume. To grasp this, we can contrast the classic
sociological paradigms of modern society with ours. Marx and Weber were motivated to understand both the origins and the distinctive nature of modern, capitalist, industrial, urban society,
and its future shape and likely trajectory. Marx expected contradictions in the society to work themselves out dialectically, through polarizing class conflict leading either to barbarism or an era
of freedom and plenty, while Weber, more pessimistically, foresaw a linear trajectory, with the uninterrupted advance of the calculating, depersonalized ‘cosmos of the modern economic
order . . . bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals. . . . Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of
fossilised coal is burnt’ (Weber, 1930: 181). Neither, however, expected any major interruption to strike suddenly from outside society. Sociologists have more recently sought to describe and
understand a new social reality, resulting from the dissolution of these expectations, and have come to reject any long-term future orientation as ‘teleology’. We have no expectation now of
socialist transformation, while both the progressive polarization of a collectively organized working class and an increasingly concentrated capital has been reversed. The iron cage and the
onward march of rationality and bureaucracy have also been countered. In their place we see a rise in entrepreneurial small businesses and religious fundamentalisms and in mantras of
competition, individualism and flexibility. This foreshortening of time horizons has often been made central to sociological theorizing in the late 20th century. Giddens saw the ‘dissolution of
evolutionism’ and the ‘disappearance of teleology’ as two of the most conspicuous features of his new stage of reflexive, radicalized modernity (Giddens, 1990: 52). Lash and Urry (1987)
described and theorized a transition, taking place from the 1970s, from ‘organized’ to ‘disorganized’ capitalism. As deregulation and globalization ratcheted up competition, the capacity of
corporations, unions and governments to coordinate the national economy and society was undermined. Short-term, ‘flexible’ responsiveness replaced long-term planning. The French
regulation school spoke of a transition from a Fordist to a flexible, post-Fordist regime of accumulation. In Britain, Harvey wrote in 1989 of the new wave of ‘space–time compression’, in which
a crisis of profitability was overcome by accelerating the turnover time of capital and technology. The half-life of a Fordist product, of five to seven years, was cut by half or more, and ‘the
postmodern aesthetic celebrated difference, spectacle, ephemerality and fashion’ (Harvey, 1989: 156). ‘The temporary contract in everything is the hallmark of postmodern living’ (Harvey,
1989: 291). The dominance of stock options and share turnover has increasingly subjected investment decisions everywhere to a very short-term profit motive. 9 Japanese capitalism,
distinctively and, for a time, successfully based on corporate planning, made possible by reinvested profits, managerial power and lifetime employment, entered a long period of stagnation
after 1991, undermining its relevance as an alternative model. The collapse of communism similarly removed another such alternative. Baumann (1988) extended the idea of postmodernity
from culture to society. He described postmodern art as the paradigm of postmodern culture and of a postmodern world view that rejected historical thinking, and cited Deleuze and Guattari’s
metaphor of the rhizome: ‘that peculiar rootstock which . . . seems to possess no sense of privileged direction, expanding instead sideways, upwards and backwards with the same frequency’
. This could
study postmodernity as ‘a fully fledged comprehensive and viable type of social system’, a historical
stage in which consumer freedom had been substituted for work ‘as the hub around which the life
world rotates. . . . Having won the struggle for control over production . . . capitalism can now afford
the free reign of the pleasure principle’ (Baumann, 1988: 808). It should not, we can add, pre-empt an awareness that a later stage might replace this
(Baumann, 1988: 791). However, he warned against a ‘postmodern sociology’ that would itself take on these attributes, advocating instead a ‘sociology of postmodernity’
rhizome-like postmodern social system by a countdown to a natural catastrophe. Where do such changes lead us? Is there life after information/ consumer/post whatever society? Too often,
one suspects, Baumann’s warning has not been heeded, and sociology has taken on some of the colouration of its subject matter. Without admitting it, many sociologists have acted as if
Sociologists
have thus described at length how contemporary society has turned its eyes away from the future, its
people focusing on immediate consumption and ephemeral fashions, its politicians on the next
election and its industrial leaders on the next annual report. To take global warming seriously involves
asking the kinds of questions about future directions that most sociologists believe they have now put
behind them. Preoccupied with analysing these ‘social facts’, sociologists are unwilling to be disturbed
by the voices of natural scientists, reporting from inaccessible upper atmospheres, ancient ice cores or
deep oceans, where no social facts exist. Unable themselves to judge the validity of the evidence, and
Lyotard’s postmodern evaporation of the historical ‘grand narratives’ or Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ were in fact upon us, as suitable guides to our own practice.
increasingly uncomfortable with predictions and teleologies, they prefer to avoid the subject. For the classics
(Marx, Weber, Durkheim), as for most sociologists since, nature, for practical purposes, was an unproblematic, stable background constant, increasingly understood and controlled by science
and technology. The role of sociology was to study social processes, trends and contradictions independently from the natural sciences. Such an insulation of society from nature has, indeed,
become a major subject of debate between realists and social constructivists within environmental sociology, since Catton and Dunlap first counterposed their ‘New Ecological Paradigm’ to
what they called the ‘Human Exemptionalist Paradigm’ in the late 1970s (Dunlap, 2002; Yearley, 2002). Since then, environmental sociologists have worked out an accommodation, enabling
them to take seriously the findings of natural scientists. See, for example, Mol and Spaagaren’s (2000: 27) claim that ‘What is conceived of as “social” . . . cannot be explained without
reference to the natural.’ Mainstream sociologists, on the other hand, have remained much closer to the social constructivist paradigm of nature. At best a middle road could be claimed for
the idea that science and society are ‘partially independent levels’, but this led to the same conclusion as constructivism: that knowledge of science is rarely relevant for sociologists (Lidskog,
2001). Such a ‘partial independence’ of the levels is, however, dramatically called into question by the time convergence that has become manifest in the last decades. Social processes that
impact on nature in unintended ways, such as emissions caused by economic growth and the destruction of carbon sink forests, have been speeding up exponentially since the industrial
. Natural change is usually very slow. It
used to be believed, for example, that it would take 10,000 years to melt an ice sheet, 10 but we can
no longer assume that, for practical purposes, changes in natural processes are not relevant to social
analysis. Global climate changes are now likely to impact within our own lives or those of our children.
The urgency for remedial action is now measured in decades, not able to be postponed to some
indefinite future. But even decades have now receded out of sight. The fact that macro theorists of
late 20th century society, from Daniel Bell to Ulrich Beck, continue to see nature as either irrelevant or
as socially controlled or even constructed, contributes to sociology’s marginal contribution to the
discussions about global warming. In this case, where the concepts and the evidence have been entirely the product of natural scientists, and beyond the
revolution. The result has been an unexpected and unprecedented speeding up also of changes in natural processes
expertise of social scientists to evaluate, the latter have found themselves on uncomfortable ground and have tended to shy away. Daniel Bell, in his influential Post Industrial Society,
proposed a three-part schema, comprising pre-industrial (or traditional), industrial and post-industrial stages. The third would be based on information technology, rather than on the use of
energy and raw materials, and on the displacement of the secondary, manufacturing sector by what we now call ‘services’. In his schema, the ‘game against nature’ was relegated to the ‘preindustrial stage’ (with no hint that it might return), and the ‘game against fabricated nature’ of the industrial stage was now also about to be displaced by the post-industrial ‘game between
persons’ (Bell, 1974: 117). Others later added theories of ‘information society’ and of ‘dematerialized production’ (Stehr, 2001: 77) to the concept of a post-industrial society – often ignoring
the fact that energy-intensive material production has been globalized rather than displaced, and continues to grow absolutely despite large increases in efficiency. Giddens has been
dismissive of the relevance of direct studies of natural ‘facts’, remarking that ‘Although ecology seems to be wholly about “nature”, nature in the end has very little to do with it’ (Giddens,
1994: 189). Perhaps for this reason, he has written little about global warming: it is not mentioned in his book on Reflexive Modernization (Beck et al., 1994) or in his introduction to the more
recent A Progressive Manifesto (Giddens, 2003). In Beyond Left and Right (Giddens, 1994), he did include global warming in his list of the ‘high consequence, manufactured risks’ of reflexive
modernity, but devoted to it only a few lines (Giddens, 1994: 3–4, 203). He understood such ‘manufactured risks’ as essentially a product of human intervention (Giddens, 1994: 3–4, 203, 206–
7) rather than (as this article argues) resulting from an, only partly understood, interaction of social and natural systems each with their own dynamic, and therefore requiring both social and
natural expertise. He argued global warming was ‘not undisputed’, and rather than referring to the collective conclusions of most climatologists since 1988, or the IPCC report of 1990
(expressing the views of 700 specialist scientists) or that of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, he preferred to cite Deepak Lal, the neoliberal economist, from his 1990 Wincott Memorial Lecture
for the Institute of Economic Affairs. ‘According to Lal,’ wrote Giddens, ‘the evidence about global warming is ambiguous and scientists disagree about its interpretation. Depending on which
scientist is consulted, “we could frizzle or we could freeze or there may be no change”’ (Giddens, 1994: 203); 11 easier then to ignore them all. Ulrich Beck’s concept of ‘Risk Society’ is the only
grand social theory with a major explicit focus on the interface of society and nature, but on closer examination it too proves inappropriate to the question of climate change. In fact, Beck does
not discuss the application of his concept to the greenhouse effect, but concentrates instead on such issues as toxicity, nuclear hazards or genetic engineering, and this is not surprising given
how inappropriate his analysis is for the former purpose. 12 Beck claims that ‘risks’ are products of today’s new stage of ‘high industrialism’ and its advanced ‘science/technology’ (he rarely
distinguishes the two), which often seem to be his primary enemy. But global warming does not fit, being a long-term cumulative effect, finally manifest, of the whole history of modern
society. The worst impact on climate comes not from advanced technology but from the burning of fossil fuels by basic industrial production. ‘The source of danger is no longer ignorance but
knowledge’, Beck (1992: 183) argues. One could counter that it is our ignorance of the risks that allowed them to accumulate. His solution to risk is often to attack the ‘dominance’ of
science/technology and to seek its subjection to common experience and democratic control (e.g. Beck, 1992: 223, 1995: 46). Beck usually hedges his bets, but in one exceptionally
constructionist moment, admitted he was mainly interested in cultural perceptions and definitions of risk, not in their reality. Indeed, he suggested that they ceased to count as ‘risks’ once
they had became manifest (Beck, 2000: 213). Whatever his intention, this would conveniently absolve sociologists from having an opinion on the validity and implications of scientists’ factual
findings. Unfortunately, this would leave sociology as an agnostic on the sidelines, continually withdrawing its concern about crucial issues dividing society, just as they become salient. But
global warming has been revealed by scientific studies of ice cores, ocean depths and stratospheres, beyond the range of daily experience. In fact, we do desperately need more and better
knowledge of this kind, and to protect the professional autonomy of natural scientists, under threat from capitalist interests and religious fundamentalists, well equipped to lobby democratic
institutions. 13 The anti-science arguments of such neoliberals as Deepak Lal (motivated by a dogmatic opposition to any kind of government intervention) have not only been taken up by the
paid sceptics of the fossil fuel lobby, but have also thus evoked an echo in the prejudices of sociologists, who should be more careful of the company they keep. In contrast, it seems to me that
Since we are not ourselves
competent to evaluate the debate between climatologists and sceptics, we have no option but to
accept the professional authority and integrity of the accredited experts, on questions of natural
processes, as a basis for our own analyses of social causes, consequences and choices. The alternative
is irrelevance or worse – an effective complicity with the vested interests of fossil fuel corporations.
a respectful division of labour is essential now that natural and social change are operating in tandem, on the same time scales.
Science Good
Science is helps empower people, increases conditions of living all over the world.
Stephen Eric Bronner, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, 2004, Reclaiming the
Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, p. 21-23
Something will always be missing: freedom will never become fully manifest in reality. The relation between them is asymptotic. Therefore,
most philosophes understood progress as a regulative ideal, or as a postulate,13 rather than as an absolute or the expression of some divine
plane or the foundation for a system.’4 Even in scientific terms, progress retained a critical dimension insofar as it implied the need to question
established certainties. In this vein, it is misleading simply to equate scientific reason with the domination of man and nature.15 All
the
great figures of the scientific revolution —Bacon, Boyle, Newton—were concerned with liberating humanity
from what seemed the power of seemingly intractable forces. Swamps were everywhere; roads were few; forests
remained to be cleared; illness was rampant; food was scarce; most people would never leave their village. What it implied not to understand
the existence of bacteria or the nature of electricity, just to use very simple examples, is today simply inconceivable.
Enlightenment
figures like Benjamin Franklin, “the complete philosophe,”’6 became famous for a reason: they not only freed people from
some of their fears but through inventions like the stove and the lightning rod they also raised new possibilities
for making people’s lives more livable. Critical theorists and postmodernists miss the point when they
view Enlightenment intellectuals in general and scientists in particular as simple apostles of
reification. They actually constituted its most consistent enemy. The philosophes may not have grasped the
commodity form, but they empowered people by challenging superstitions and dogmas that left them
mute and helpless against the whims of nature and the injunctions of tradition. Enlightenment thinkers were
justified in understanding knowledge as inherently improving humanity. Infused with a sense of furthering the public good, liberating the
individual from the clutches of the invisible and inexplicable, the Enlightenment idea of progress required what the young Marx later termed
“the ruthless critique of everything existing.” This regulative
notion of progress was never inimical to subjectivity.
Quite the contrary: progress became meaningful only with reference to real living individuals.
Critiquing science is dumb—there are no rational alternatives—criticism misses
science’s self-reflexive and progressive nature
Stephen Eric Bronner, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, 2004, Reclaiming the
Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, p. 162-63
Reclaiming the Enlightenment calls for clarifying the aims of an educated sensibility in a disenchanted world. But this requires science. The
assault upon its “instrumental” character or its “method” by self-styled radicals trained only in the humanities or social sciences is a selfdefeating enterprise. Criticizing
“bourgeois” science” is meaningful only with criteria for verification or
falsification that are rigorous, demonstrable, and open to public scrutiny. Without such criteria, the critical
enterprise turns into a caricature of itself: creationism becomes as “scientific” as evolution, astrology as instructive as astronomy, prayer as
legitimate a way of dealing with disease as medicine, and the promise of Krishna to help the righteous a way of justifying the explosion of a nuclear device by India.10 Striking is how the emphasis on “local knowledge”—a stance in which all science is seen as ethno-science with
standards rooted in a particular culture’1 —withdraws objectivity, turns the abdication of judgment into a principle of judgment, and recalls
what was once a right-wing preoccupation with “Jewish physics,” “Italian mathematics,” and the like. Forgotten
is that those who
do physics or biology or mathematics all do it the same way or, better, allow for open scrutiny of their
own way of doing it. The validity of science does not rest on its ability to secure an “absolute” philosophical grounding, but rather on its universality and its salience in dealing with practical problems.
There is a difference between the immanent method of science and the external context in which it
was forged. The sociology of science is a completely legitimate endeavor. It only makes sense to consider, for example, how an emerging
capitalist production process with imperialistic aspirations provided the external context in which modern science arose. But it is illegitimate to
reduce science to that context or judge its immanent workings from the standpoint of what externally inspired its development.12 Too
much time has already been wasted on “deconstructing” the scientific method for what Foucault
termed its “dogmatic approach” and its supposedly hermetic character. That is the case not simply
because the “scientific revolution” was directed against a scholastic view of nature that constrained
the possibilities of inquiry or because the Enlightenment spirit influenced many nontraditional notions
of science like homeopathy. It is primarily because, in political terms, the issue is not the “method” of science but the type of scien-
tific research that demands funding and, ultimately, the ends to which science is put. Again defined by what they oppose, ironically, those
principally concerned with the scientific method reflect the establishmentarian tendency to isolate science from politics. Whatever the
connection between this method and metaphysics, or the status of its original commitment to benefit humanity, there is no reason to believe
that science in the age of globalization has lost its ability to question previous claims or established authority: neither from the standpoint of
science nor ethics is it legitimate to maintain that “the enlightenment has lost any trace of its own self-consciousness. “13
Environmental Law Good
Environmental law allows us to punish those who harm it, other alternative don’t
work.
Doremus 3 Holly, Professor of Law and Chancellor`s Fellow at UC-Davis, Environs Environmental Law
& Policy Journal, v27, Fall, p. 239-40
I am not comparing most environmental violations to murder; obviously environmental transgressions are not subject to the same harsh and
near-universal societal condemnation. I am simply suggesting that environmental protection, like other social goals, may require more than a
societal consensus. Inevitably, some people will be “environmental deviants.” They may disagree with a society consensus in favor of
environmental protection, they may have strong contrary motivations, or they may simply lack an effective self-sanctioning mechanism. At
least some
actions those “environmental deviants” would commit could cause grievous environmental
harm and therefore merit deterrence or punishment by legal sanctions. But in the environmental
context there is a stronger and more generally applicable reason why law must persist even if we
develop a very firm consensus on societal values. Environmental problems are typically collective
action problems that cannot be solved without the concerted action of a large number of persons.
Individual action is futile; it costs the actor some effort or forgone opportunity without bringing the
desired environmental gain. Under those circumstances, persons who hold environmentally protective values are like not to act on
those values without assurances that others will follow suit. In theory, informal, non-legal, social sanctions could ensure sufficient compliance
to prevent futility. But
in our increasingly anonymous world, social sanctions such as shaming or
ostracization may not operate very effectively. Legal mandates can provide confidence that
environmentally protective action will not be futile and that others will bear their fair share of the
burden.
Eco-Pragmatism Good
Eco pragmatism allows us to avoid getting bogged down in different viewpoints,
allows for avenues of change to happen
Reitan 98 Eric Reitan (Seattle University Writer for the Electronic Green Journal) Pragmatism,
Environmental World Views, and Sustainability. December 1998
With the urgency of the current environmental crisis, we cannot afford to get bogged down in theoretic disputes that
mask a common mission and get in the way of making the practical changes that are so pressing.
Pragmatic Mediation of Deep Ecology and Christian Stewardship The example I have chosen to discuss is the theoretic debate between two
environmental philosophies that have emerged in the last few decades: the philosophy of stewardship that has evolved in Christian
communities, and the philosophy of deep ecology. I choose these two not on the basis of any special status they have, but rather because they
are the two environmental perspectives with which I have the most personal acquaintance, and because the nature of the debate between
them usefully illustrates the value of using pragmatic principles to guide theoretic environmental discourse. Before
applying
pragmatic principles to this example, some preliminary comments may be helpful. First, it is important
to keep in mind that complex worldviews or philosophical systems may impact more than one domain
of human life, and that they may have radically opposing pragmatic implications in one or more of
those domains while implying substantially the same behaviors in the domain of the human-nature
relationship. In such a case, we can say that while the worldviews do not have the same pragmatic meaning overall, they have the same
environmental meaning. As such, it is important not to let the real differences in other areas mask the genuine agreement in the environmental
domain. Second, it is worth noting that there is almost certainly more than one human social arrangement that harmonizes sustainable with
the natural environment. Put another way, there is more than one set of human practices that works in terms of promoting a healthy humannatural system. And
it follows from this observation that more than one worldview can be pragmatically
true: while two worldviews may imply environmental behaviors that are different, and hence have a
different pragmatic meaning, insofar as they both promote sustainable behaviors they are both true
from a pragmatic standpoint. Pragmatic truth is not monistic, but pluralistic. Given the urgent pragmatic goals of
environmental philosophy, sustained theoretic debates about meaning differences of this sort appear to be
unwarranted, and should be put aside in favor of the task of finding practical ways of integrating and
accommodating those alternative social arrangements which serve the common goal of sustainable
human-natural systems.