FW
1. Interpretation: your decision should respond to the question posed by the
resolution: Is a substantial increase non-military development and/or exploration of
the Earth’s oceans by the United States better than the status quo or a competitive
option?
A. The resolution calls for debate on hypothetical government action
Ericson, 3 (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al.,
The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In
policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements,
An agent doing the acting
---“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a
proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that
urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a
program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a
limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which
although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1.
would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce.
Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about
whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side
in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future
action that you propose.
B. The word “Resolved” before the colon reflects a legislative forum
Army Officer School ‘04(5-12, “# 12, Punctuation – The Colon and Semicolon”,
http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)
The colon introduces the following: a.
A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is an appositive:
Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers:
(colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael
Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle
[Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The President
declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second independent clause
which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon)
Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g. A
after the word "resolved:" Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.
formal resolution,
2. Violation: They claim solvency off of their ontological critique of nature-culture
dualism in waste disposal practices not through statutory action.
3. Vote Negative—
A. Decision Making
Debate over a controversial point of action creates argumentative stasis—that’s key
to avoid a devolution of debate into competing truth claims, which destroys the
decision-making benefits of the activity
Steinberg and Freeley ‘13
David Director of Debate at U Miami, Former President of CEDA, officer, American Forensic
Association and National Communication Association. Lecturer in Communication studies and rhetoric.
Advisor to Miami Urban Debate League, Masters in Communication, and Austin, JD, Suffolk University,
attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, Argumentation and Debate
Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, Thirteen Edition
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a controversy, a difference of opinion or a conflict of
interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a feet or value or policy, there is no need or opportunity for
debate; the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate
"Resolved: That two plus two equals four,” because there is simply no controversy about this statement. Controversy is an
essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions of issues, there is no
debate. Controversy
invites decisive choice between competing positions. Debate cannot produce
effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For example,
general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants live in the United
States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit
crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak
English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the
opportunity to gain citizenship? Does illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American
workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law
enforcement, housing, and businesses? How are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a
nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification card, or enforce existing
laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a
conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in
this “debate” is likely to be emotional and
intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and
identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively,
controversies are best understood when seated clearly such that all parties to the debate share an understanding
about the objective of the debate. This enables focus on substantive and objectively identifiable
issues facilitating comparison of competing argumentation leading to effective decisions. Vague understanding results
in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, general feelings of tension without opportunity for
resolution, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the U.S. Congress to make substantial progress on the
immigration debate. Of course, arguments may be presented without disagreement. For example, claims are presented and supported within
speeches, editorials, and advertisements even without opposing or refutational response. Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from
informal to formal, and may not call upon an audience or judge to make a forced choice among competing claims. Informal discourse occurs as
definition, debate
requires "reasoned judgment on a proposition. The proposition is a statement about which competing
advocates will offer alternative (pro or con) argumentation calling upon their audience or adjudicator to
decide. The proposition provides focus for the discourse and guides the decision process. Even when a
decision will be made through a process of compromise, it is important to identify the beginning positions
of competing advocates to begin negotiation and movement toward a center, or consensus position. It is
conversation or panel discussion without demanding a decision about a dichotomous or yes/no question. However, by
unproductive to attempt to make a decision when deciders are unclear as to what the
decision is about. The proposition may be implicit in some applied debates (“Vote for me!”); however, when a vote or consequential
decision is called for (as in the courtroom or in applied parliamentary debate) it is essential that the proposition be explicitly expressed (“the
defendant is guilty!”). In academic debate, the proposition provides essential guidance for the preparation
of the debaters prior to the debate, the case building and discourse presented during the debate, and
the decision to be made by the debate judge after the debate. Someone disturbed by the problem of a growing
underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, “Public schools are doing a
terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more
than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive
at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a
frustrating and usually
problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations,
anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state
of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A
gripe session would follow. But if a precise question
is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public education?”—then a more profitable area of discussion is
opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step.
One or more judgments can be
phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved:
That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities”
and “Resolved; That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing
with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be
investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. This focus contributes to better and more informed
decision making with the potential for better results. In academic debate, it provides better depth of
argumentation and enhanced opportunity for reaping the educational benefits of participation. In the next
section, we will consider the challenge of framing the proposition for debate, and its role in the debate. To have a productive debate,
which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be
made , the basis for argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about a topic, such as
‘"homelessness,” or “abortion,” Or “crime,” or “global warming,” we are likely to have an interesting discussion
but not to establish a profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement “Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the
sword” is debatable, yet by itself fails to provide much basis for dear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean Iliad the written word is
more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force
for a specific purpose, perhaps promoting positive social change. (Note that “loose” propositions, such as the example above, may be defined by
their advocates in such a way as to facilitate a clear contrast of competing sides; through definitions and debate they “become” clearly understood
statements even though they may not begin as such. There are formats for debate that often begin with this sort of proposition. However, in
any
debate, at some point, effective and meaningful discussion relies on identification of a clearly stated or
understood proposition.) Back to the example of the written word versus physical force. Although we now have a general subject,
we have not yet stated a problem. It
is still too broad , too loosely worded to promote weII-organized argument. What sort of
writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, cyber-warfare, disinformation, or
what? What does it mean to be “mightier" in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas,
nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be, “Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring
Laurania of our support in a certain crisis?” The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as “Resolved: That the United
States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania.” Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet
maneuvers would be a better solution. This
is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative
interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the
controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging.
The point is that debate is best facilitated by the
guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference , which will be outlined in the following discussion.
Learning about policy is key to being informed citizens, without it we never learn
about the political process and don’t take responsibility for the possible bad
outcomes of our actions. Simulating policy solves all their offense, allowing people a
safe space to test new ideas
Joyner, Professor of International Law at Georgetown, 1999 [Christopher C., “Teaching International
Law,” 5 ILSA J Int'l & Comp L 377, l/n]
Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education in the social sciences. Debates,
like other role-playing
simulations, help students understand different perspectives on a policy issue by adopting a
perspective as their own. But, unlike other simulation games, debates do not require that a student participate directly in order to
realize the benefit of the game. Instead of developing policy alternatives and experiencing the consequences of different choices in a traditional
role-playing game, debates present the alternatives and consequences in a formal, rhetorical fashion before a judgmental audience. Having the
class audience serve as jury helps each student develop a well-thought-out opinion on the issue by providing contrasting facts and views and
enabling audience members to pose challenges to each debating team. These debates
ask undergraduate students to examine the
international legal implications of various United States foreign policy actions. Their chief tasks are to assess the aims of the
policy in question, determine their relevance to United States national interests, ascertain what legal principles are involved, and conclude how
the United States policy in question squares with relevant principles of international law. Debate
questions are formulated as
resolutions, along the lines of: "Resolved: The United States should deny most-favored-nation status to China on human rights grounds;" or
"Resolved: The United States should resort to military force to ensure inspection of Iraq's possible nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
facilities;" or "Resolved: The United States' invasion of Grenada in 1983 was a lawful use of force;" or "Resolved: The United States should kill
Saddam Hussein." In
addressing both sides of these legal propositions, the student debaters must consult the
vast literature of international law, especially the nearly 100 professional law-school-sponsored international law journals now being
published in the United States. This literature furnishes an incredibly rich body of legal analysis that often treats topics affecting United States
foreign policy, as well as other more esoteric international legal subjects. Although most of these journals are accessible in good law schools,
they are largely unknown to the political science community specializing in international relations, much less to the average undergraduate. By
assessing the role of international law in United States foreign policy- making, students realize that United States actions do not always measure
up to international legal expectations; that at times, international legal strictures get compromised for the sake of perceived national interests, and
that concepts and principles of international law, like domestic law, can be interpreted and twisted in order to justify United States policy in
various international circumstances. In this way, the debate format gives students the benefits ascribed to simulations and other action learning
techniques, in that it makes them become actively engaged with their subjects, and not be mere passive consumers. Rather than spectators,
students become legal advocates, observing, reacting to, and structuring political and legal perceptions to fit the merits of their case. The
debate exercises carry several specific educational objectives. First, students on each team must work together to
refine a cogent argument that compellingly asserts their legal position on a foreign policy issue confronting the United States. In this way, they
gain greater insight into the real-world legal dilemmas faced by policy makers. Second, as they work with
other members of their team, they realize the complexities of applying and implementing international law, and the
difficulty of bridging the gaps between United States policy and international legal principles, either by reworking the former or creatively
reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates forces
students to become familiarized with contemporary
policy agenda and the role that international law plays in formulating and executing these policies. n8
The debate thus becomes an excellent vehicle for pushing students beyond stale arguments over
principles into the real world of policy analysis, political critique, and legal defense.
issues on the United States foreign
B. Extra-Topicality: Allowing them to claim solvency or advantages off of
ontological arguments is extra topical and is an independent voting issue for
fairness. It allows them to shift their advocacy in the 2AC and moots predictable
negative ground.
cap
Exploring the ontology of trash divorces critique from the material relations of
capital—garbage is merely the byproduct of capitalism’s alienation of workers from
their labor.
DeFazio ‘14
Kimberly DeFazio. Department of English at University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. Winter-Spring 2014. “The
Spectral Ontology and Miraculous Materialism”. The Red Critique.
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2014/spectralontologyandmiraculousmaterialism.htm.
In the wake of global economic crises of the 21st century, however, even these rewritings of the
material are losing their effectiveness. This is made clear in Coole and Frost's comments mentioned above about the limits of the
cultural turn (and these comments of course follow a long line of challenges within the last decade, especially by the "new communists," Badiou,
Žižek, Hardt and Negri, et. al.). Today textualism
is largely viewed as bankrupt—its emphasis on language found to be
too determining and its celebration of free play now revealed as too close to the anti-state mantras of neoliberalism—and
culturalism more broadly is seen as having ignored the economic relations that everywhere are
erupting through cultural surfaces. It is in this context of shifting common sense that, for instance, Mitt Romney's statement
during his 2012 presidential campaign that the economic inequality between Israel and Palestine is the effect of "cultural differences" was widely
mocked, and that the anti-Muslim hysteria of the New Atheists generated strong opposition from the new Atheist+ movement which engages
cultural differences as relations of inequality. Social theory requires a new basis upon which to spiritualize—with a green aroma—the
increasingly evident interconnections and contradictions of the global world. It requires a
planetary pantheism. It has found a
new theoretical basis in the "posthuman orientation" to ontology (Coole and Frost 7) that is at the center of the new
materialism and many other new theoretical trends, such as animal studies, biopolitics, the "spectral turn," and
object-oriented philosophy. Yet, as I have begun to suggest, all of the favorite tropes of deconstruction
("undecidability," "indeterminacy," "unpredictability," opposition to the "dogma" of
"determination" and "economism") remain firmly entrenched in the new materialist approach to
ontology (hence Cheah's poststructuralist essay is prominently placed in the collection), which it has hybridized with the new
terminological "currency" of various scientific discourses. 4. According to theorists like Bennett, Coole, Frost, and Cheah, changes in the
understanding of the material world—which they isolate from the social relations of production and attribute to technological and scientific
advances (e.g., biogenetics, teletechnologies, nanotech)—have put in crisis traditional humanist values and with them the humanist model of
subjectivity. The new materialists emphasize that the humanist subject informing the classical science of Descartes and Newton posits a false
essential (ontological) difference between the subject and the object that situates the human subject as an active agent in relation to its object.
This object is assumed to be fundamentally distinct from (rather than "entangled with") the subject, and capable of being known and controlled by
the subject. According to posthumanist theory, on the basis of its ontological dualism humanism assumes the possibility of developing objective
knowledge of the external world, and, moreover, sees the world of nature as there for humanity's taking, without regard for the environmental
consequences. Elaborating on these subject-object relations in her essay "The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh," Diana Coole writes
that the classical view of matter sees it as "inert" and "essentially passive stuff, set in motion by human agents who use it as a means of survival,
modify it as a vehicle of aesthetic expression, and impose subjective meanings upon it"; matter relative to the subject is thus "devoid of agency"
(92) in the humanist model. Repeating
the cultural turn's dogma that the most important battles should be
fought not against the material relations of exploitation but theoretical "essentialism," Coole's
argument suggests that any ontology that posits a difference between subject and object, human
and nonhuman, is a deeply "unethical" approach to the world. Such new developments as biogenetics, along
with other scientific discoveries and technologies, have thrown the traditional humanist subject even further into crisis. The
"crisis of the subject," new materialists suggest, is a daily reality and not just a textual decentering. They
claim it is no longer possible to ignore the way in which humans are "embedded in a material world" in which our actions have (un/intended) and
often destructive consequences for the bio and eco spheres, not just the human sphere. Andrew Poe speaks to the new posthumanist theoretical
consensus when he writes, "The subject, it seems, has come to care too much for itself," and he refers to this subject-focus as an "exceptionalism"
that denies objects agency (153, 154). Just as troubling for posthumanist theorists is that the classical (Cartesian, Newtonian) model of
subjectivity presumes that it can obtain reliable knowledge, allowing the subject to predict how matter will operate under certain (future)
circumstances; it conceives matter as "subject to predictable causal forces" (Coole and Frost 9). Causal forces that allow people to reliably
understand the workings of the natural and social world are assumed to be falsely and unethically imposed on the world by the human subject;
whereas "contingency" and randomness—what Cheah refers to the "absolute chance" (83) that is at the core of material existence—are somehow
assumed to speak the authentic (e.g., non-imposed, nonmediated) language of being. Because "there is no longer a quantitative relationship
between cause and effect," in the words of Coole and Frost (14), the new materialists affirm the "aleatory" nature of all reality (14) by celebrating
the "contingent, disparate capacities to structure that emerge haphazardly through corporeal practices" (Coole 102) and rejoice in "the element of
unpredictability and indeterminacy in action" (Bennett, "A Vitalist Stopover" 61). I will address new materialism's theory of "matter" in more
detail below. Here, I want to point out that the
new posthumanist ontological reorientation treats the crisis of
the subject as primarily a crisis of (cultural) values, which are seen as no longer capable of
responding to new realities. Theorists, in this context, regularly marshal as evidence "events" which reveal
the human subject to be not so much in control of the world as controlled by it: a subjected subject whose
intention is often subverted by the material world—a subject always already at the mercy of "the mismatch between actions,
intentions, and consequences" (New Materialisms 16). Or, in the words of Jane Bennett, whose essay in New Materialisms is developed
out of her influential book Vibrant Matter (which I therefore also address here), great attention is given to "the capacity of things…to impede or
block the will and designs of humans" because these things "act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their
own" (Vibrant Matter viii). What Bennett calls "thing-power" ("A Vitalist Stopover" 48) closely echoes cultural theory's catastrophe fetish, fed by
glorifying ever-more spectacular evidence of the human subject's failure to know the world. Following Nietzsche, rational human agency is taken
to be one of the most "mendacious" narratives of history ("On Truth" 42). Indeed, the subject's claim to know is dismissed in posthumanist theory
as the effect of a broader field of human "fantasies" (Orlie 120). Of course, what therefore quickly emerges from the "postdualist" ontology is less
a hybrid ontology than a reversal that privileges the object as a reified "thing" that mystically eludes understanding. (And at that point it is easy
enough to deify the thing as an "other" that "resists" knowing in order to appear "ethical" [cf. Ahmed 254]). But what posthumanist
theorists call the crisis of the subject is itself rooted in material relations—which remain in the background of
analysis of even the most ardent enthusiasts of "new materialism." The humanist subject is increasingly seen as outdated not
because its human-centeredness is now seen as unethical or even because of new technologies. The new technologies (including
biotech and nanotechnologies) and the new approach to ethics are themselves driven by changes in production. What is
obscured by new materialism is the structural crisis reached by capital—due to the falling rate of
profit—which has meant, especially in the last decade, a new round of attacks on labor in the effort to
increase profits on the one hand and, on the other, the hoarding, on the part of capitalists, of trillions of
dollars in capital rather than risk "unprofitable" investment. Any and all previously public programs
and resources—from education and health care to water—are rapidly being privatized, at the same time
wages are being cut and any remaining unions and worker protections are being eliminated, in a
flagrant theft of surplus value. These relations (and not simply "matter" as such) have made everyday life
precarious and unpredictable. This is especially the case with health care in the US. The new posthumanist
ontology claims to establish an entirely new hybrid notion of the human subject as thoroughly
"embedded" in the world and thus unable to know the world in any reliable way. But far from resisting
"instrumentalized" approaches to the world, it is itself an instrument of capitalist ideology. The new posthumanist
subject has become necessary to naturalize the increasingly unpredictable, crisis-ridden world of
global capital. The culture wars over the pets of the 2012 presidential candidates (Romney's Irish setter and Obama's Portuguese Water
dog) are telling in this regard. Why these candidates' dogs are made to matter is because they are taken in the popular culture to be signs of the
ethical character of their owners (Romney is a monster for tying his Irish setter Seamus' cage to the top of his car and Obama's Portuguese Water
dog Bo is "read" in racist ways). And yet the assumption here is that the condition of the workers will somehow be improved if they have "good"
bosses who "care" about all creatures and respect the dignity of the weak and unfortunate. As always, ethics deflects attention from underlying
causes. The
relations of wage labor today mean not only that working people increasingly struggle to
survive while a tiny few own virtually all social and natural resources, but that the material world
that is a product of social labor is increasingly an alien world, beyond the producers' control. Under
these relations of commodity production, "the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective
characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things" (Marx Capital vol. 1 164-5).
The new materialists do not just take the surface of commodity life for granted, they glorify a commodified vision
of the material world in which the subject is forever alienated from her labor and learns to embrace
this powerlessness relative to the world. This is another way of saying that the increasingly popular theoretical
framework within which objects as objects are given a new autonomy and agency independent of their producers, and the
(human) subject is itself reduced to the matter of corporeality whose agency is neither based on
labor nor rational thinking but the microdynamics and "creative contingency" (Coole and Frost 20) of
its biological nature—is the epitome of commodity fetishism. In fact, many of the new materialist writings read
as bad parodies of Marx's first chapter of Capital. They glorify the material conditions under which "Their own movement within
society has for them [workers] the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in
fact control them" (167-8). Instead of analyzing the historical conditions under which the object has
assumed an even more global and powerful subjectivity, while the vast majority of people have
been reduced to the "bare life" of objects, the products of social labor (and not the labor that produces them)
take the center stage of left theory. Having erased the labor that produces the material world, by the same logic, the new
materialism assigns objects and matter an independent, self-transforming agency, or an "inherent exuberance" (Coole 99). What is really an index
of profound social alienation resulting from private property relations is turned upside down by the new materialists into a magical sign of the
"vitality" of matter and the natural world in which "these things, far from being under [workers'] control, in fact control them" (Marx Capital,
new de-centered subject of posthumanist ontology—for whom matter
the subject of austerity who is expected to bow
down to the dictates of capital. It is the insecure subject for whom there will be no social security,
the subject for whom daily life is increasingly unpredictable, subject to chance, to the market. Which
167-68). To put this another way, the
emerges as the site of uncontrollable, unknowable contingency—is
is to say that the posthumanist ontology imports into "matter" the irrational, apparently lawless dynamics of human life under a
global market and then re-situates this market logic as the post-logic of nature and matter itself. This is the double-move
by which the new materialists foster the illusion of the inevitability of the world as it is. In this way, the
new materialist ideology obscures the fact that, the more capitalist relations "settle everywhere" around the world, the more
socialized production becomes, the more the material foundations are laid for socialism, the wresting of freedom from necessity
by the revolutionary collective. Behind the turn to "matter" is the corporate need to divert attention from
the growing contradictions between the socialized forces of production—which make it possible to feed,
clothe, educate, and provide healthcare for all—and the property relations that ensure social production is
privatized in the interests of the few. While the right-wing of capital produces a vehemently anti-government subject
who sees ethics as a ruse of the federal government to give "entitlements" to the "other" and who rejects social programs as
"handouts," the new materialist subject is the "caring" left-wing subject of capital for whom ethics
paves the way to a "fairer" capitalism (Obama's "compromise" capitalism in which both the rich and the poor are
expected to "pay their fair share" to bail out big business and save capitalism). In contrast to the "Say No to Sharing" ethos of
reactionary conservatives (aptly captured in Sprint’s commercial of the same title), new materialism essentially offers a more complex version of
the corporate argument that, as a Starbucks commercial puts it, our "community would be a better place" "if we cared all of the time the way we
care some of the time" (If You Vote"). "Fairness" is the banner of those seeking not to end the relations that produce unfairness, but to continue
exploitation on less egregious ("inhumane") terms. Its main goal is to disappear the system of capital that produces a widening gap between
exploited and exploiter. But it doesn't just try to convince workers that they should be exploited even more. It insists that they should find it "in
themselves" to willingly demand such exploitation as a sign of their ethical commitments—even in the face of brutal cuts to the services they rely
on to survive by their caring bosses. "Fairness" is a cover for making the workers pay for the crisis. To put this another way, while right
wing discourse normalizes the heightened competition of capital's private property relations, the
new materialism
translates the increased socialization of productive forces under capitalism into a "vibrant" force of
matter itself ("thing-power") so as to assert the force of "weak thinking" (Vattimo) and the messianic
vision of the Left which says goodbye to the working class as the agent of change. It thereby
naturalizes (de-historicizes) production, rendering impossible the collective transformation of
private property relations that is necessary for freedom from necessity. New materialists like Jane Bennett
admit as much. Speaking of the new materialist approach to matter, she writes, Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers
will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the
sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may
very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans. (Bennett Vibrant Matter 13) New
materialism acknowledges that it has little influence (let alone interest) in addressing "exploitation and
oppression" and in fact it substitutes for this political project a new ethics of equality through
"feeling." But in the name of feeling it in fact manufactures the illusion that a worker's "harming" of one
section of the "web" by, for instance, being inattentive to the contingent assemblages of "debris" in a gutter,
eating factory-farmed meat, not recycling, or polluting a river with waste water are ultimately the
same as a corporation's theft of surplus value, decision to fire workers, cut their benefits, or pollute
the environment. It would be more precise to say that this "newfound attentiveness to matter and
its powers" is "good" for the specific class interests of the human owners of capital . New
materialism is good for the bourgeoisie because it perpetuates the (green) class mythology that "we
are all in this together," when in fact class relations ensure that all the sacrifices in support of the common "web" come from the
property-less, who have been reduced to the status of things. One can look to what the appointed Emergency Manager of Detroit is proposing to
see the new forms in which brutal de-humanization of working people manifests. Both the right and left subjects of capital, in short, obscure the
foundation of the social in labor and production. But, trained to see herself "enmeshed" in multiple "interlocking systems" in which all people,
regardless of class, are implicated, and (still) seduced by the culturalist claim that there is no longer any "outside" from which to wage a struggle
to end capitalism, the feeling-green left subject is a more effective subject for the advanced sectors of (transnational) capital. It is attentive to the
(unavoidable) interconnectedness of production and consumption, rich and poor, the human and the nonhuman worlds. Yet precisely
on
this basis it refuses the "binary" thinking and explanatory knowledges that make it possible to
understand (and thus transform) the class structures that shape human life.
Ecological politics has become the new opiate for the masses—waste is merely the
byproduct of the exploitation of late capitalism.
Zizek ‘8
Slavoj Zizek. Foremost Slovenian psychoanalyst. 2008. “Nature and its Discontents”. SubStance 37:3.
However, all examples Heidegger provides of “keeping the fourfoldin things”—from the Greek temple and Van Gogh’s shoes to
numerousexamples from his Schwarzwald mountains—are nostalgic, i.e.,belonging to a past world, no longer ours. For example, he
opposestraditional farming practices to modern technologized agriculture; theBlack Forest farmer’s house to a modern apartment block. So what
wouldhave been examples appropriate to our technological times? Perhaps weshould take very seriously Fredric Jameson’s idea of reading
RaymondChandler’s California as a Heideggerian “world,” with Phillip Marlowecaught in a tension between heaven and earth, between his
mortalityand the “divine” shining through in the pathetic longing of his characters.And didn’t Ruth Rendell accomplish the same for UK suburbia
with itsdecaying backyards and grey shopping malls? Hubert Dreyfus’s notionthat the
way to be prepared for the upcoming
Kehre, for the arrival ofnew gods, is to participate in practices that function as sites of resistanceto the
technological total mobilization is all too short: Heidegger explores a kind of gathering that would enable us to
resist postmodern technological practices. […] he turns from thecultural gathering he explored in “The Origin of the Work of
Art”(that sets up shared meaningful differences and thereby unifies anentire culture) to local gatherings that set up local worlds. Suchlocal worlds
occur around some everyday thing that temporarilybrings into their own both the thing itself and those involved in thetypical activity concerning
the use of the thing. Heidegger calls thisevent a thing thinging and the tendency in the practices to bringthings and people into their own,
appropriation. […] Heidegger’sexamples of things that focus such local gathering are a wine jug andan old stone bridge. Such things gather Black
Forest peasant practices,[…] the family meal acts as a focal thing when it draws on the culinaryand social skills of family members and solicits
fathers, mothers,husbands, wives, children, familiar warmth, good humor, and loyaltyto come to the fore in their excellence, or in, as Heidegger
wouldsay, their ownmost.21 From a strict Heideggerian position, such
practices can—and as a ruledo—function as the very
opposite of resistance, as something that is inadvance included in the smooth functioning of the
technological mobilization (like the courses in transcendental meditation that makeyou more efficient in your job), which is why
the path to salvation onlyleads through the full engagement in technological mobilization.The
aftermath of the constant capitalist innovation is, of course, the permanent production of the piles of
leftover waste: “The main production of the modern and postmodern capitalist industry is precisely
waste. We are postmodern beings because we realize that all our aesthetically appealing
consumption artifacts will eventually end as leftover, to the point that it will transform the earth
into a vast wasteland. You lose the sense of tragedy, you perceive progress as derisive”(Miller, 1999, 19). The flip side of the
incessant capitalist drive to produce more and more new objects are the growing piles of useless
waste—mountains of used cars, computers, etc., like the famous airplane “restingplace” in the Mojave desert... In these ever-growing piles of
inert,dysfunctional “stuff,” which cannot but strike us with their useless, inertpresence, one can, as it were, perceive the capitalist drive at rest.
Thereinresides the interest of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, especially his masterpieceStalker, showing the post-industrial wasteland with wild
vegetationgrowing over abandoned factories, concrete tunnels and railroads full ofstale water, where stray cats and dogs wander. Nature
industrial civilization are here again overlapping, but through a common decay—civilization in
decay is in the process of being reclaimed, not by idealized harmonious Nature, but by nature in
and
decomposition. The ultimateTarkovskian landscape is that of a river or pond close to some forest, fullof the debris of human artifices—old
concrete blocks, rusty metal. Thepostindustrial wasteland of the Second World is the privileged “eventalsite,” the symptomatic point out of which
one can undermine the totalityof today’s global capitalism. One
should love this world, with its grey, decaying
buildings and sulphuric smell, for all this stands for history, threatened with erasure between the
post-historical First World andthe pre-historical Third World.Let’s recall Walter Benjamin’s notion of “natural
history” as “re-naturalized history”: it takes place when historical artifacts lose their meaningful vitality and are perceived as dead objects,
reclaimed by natureor, in the best case, as monuments of a past dead culture. (For Benjamin,it was in confronting such dead monuments of
human history reclaimedby nature that we experience history at its purest.) The paradox here is that this re-naturalization overlaps with its
opposite, with de-naturalization. Since culture is for us humans our “second nature,” since we dwell in a living culture, experiencing it as our
natural habitat, there-naturalization of cultural artifacts equals their de-naturalization.Deprived of their function within a living totality of
meaning, artifacts
dwell in an inter-space between nature and culture, between life and death, leading
a ghost-like existence, belonging neither to nature nor to culture, appearing as something akin to the monstrosity of
natural freaks,like a cow with two heads and three legs.The challenge of technology is thus not that we should
(re)discoverhow all our activity has to rely on our unsurpassable (unhintergebar) embeddedness in our
life-world, but, on the contrary, that we must cut off this embeddedness and accept the radical
abyss of our existence. Thisis the terror that even Heidegger didn’t dare to confront. To put it in theterms of a problematic comparison,
insofar as we remain humans, are we embedded in a pre-reflexive symbolic life-world, rather than beingsomething like “symbolic plants”? Hegel
says somewhere in his Philosophyof Nature that a plant’s roots are its entrails which, in contrast to ananimal, a plant has outside itself, in the
earth, which prevents a plantfrom cutting its roots and freely roaming around; for a plant, cutting itsroots is death. Isn’t our symbolic life-world in
which we are always-already pre-reflexively embedded something like our symbolic entrailsoutside ourselves? And isn’t the true challenge of
technology that weshould repeat the differentiation between plants and animals also at thesymbolic level, cutting off our symbolic roots and
accepting the abyss offreedom? In this very precise sense we can accept the formula that humanity will/should pass into post-humanity, since
being embeddedin a symbolic world is a definition of being-human. And in this sense,also, technology
is a promise of liberation
through terror. The subject that emerges in and through this experience of terror is ultimately the
cogito itself, the abyss of self-relating negativity that forms the core of transcendental subjectivity,
the acephalous subject of the death-drive. Itis the properly in-human subject.
Their strategy of “allowing trash to affectively capture us” treats waste as an affect
removed from subjectivity – replicating the logic of late capitalism and commodity
fetishism – their attempt to disrupt normalcy disavows capitalism as the Real of
modernity.
Zizek 2004 [Slavoj, Senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and a
professor at the European Graduate School, “The Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution’”, Critical Inquiry Vol. 30 No.2
http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Zizek.html]
What, however, if there
is no puzzled look, but enthusiasm, when the yuppie reads about impersonal imitation of
affects, about the communication of affective intensities beneath the level of meaning ("Yes, this is
how I design my publicities!"), or when he reads about exploding the limits of self-contained
subjectivity and directly coupling man to a machine ("This reminds me of my son's favorite toy, the action-man
that can turn into a car!"), or about the need to reinvent oneself permanently, opening oneself up to a
multitude of desires that push us to the limit ("Is this not the aim of the virtual sex video game I am
working on now? It is no longer a question of reproducing sexual bodily contact but of exploding the confines of established reality and
imagining new, unheard-of intensive modes of sexual pleasures!"). There are, effectively, features that justify calling Deleuze
the ideologist of late capitalism. Is the much celebrated Spinozan imitatio afecti, the impersonal circulation of
affects bypassing persons, not the very logic of publicity, of video clips, and so on, where what matters is not
the message about the product, but the intensity of the transmitted affects and perceptions?
Furthermore, recall again the hard-core pornography scenes in which the very unity of the bodily self-experience is magically dissolved, so that
the spectator perceives the bodies as a kind of vaguely coordinated agglomerate of partial objects.
Is this logic where we are no
longer dealing with persons interacting, but just with the multiplicity of intensities, of places of
enjoyment, plus bodies as a collective/impersonal desiring machine, not eminently Deleuzian? And, to go
even a step further, is the practice of fist-fucking not the exemplary case of what Deleuze called the "expansion of a concept?" The fist is put to
a new use; the notion of penetration is expanded into the combination of the hand with sexual penetration, into the exploration of the inside of
a body. No wonder Foucault, Deleuze's Other, was practicing fisting: is fist-fucking not the sexual invention of the twentieth century, a new
model of eroticism and pleasure? It is no longer genitalized, but focused just on the penetration of the surface, with the role of the phallus
being taken over by the hand, the autonomized partial object par excellence. And, what about the so-called Transformer or animorph toys, a
car or a plane that can be transformed into a humanoid robot, an animal that can be morphed into a human or robot. Is this not Deleuzian?
There are no "metaphorics" here; the point is not that the machinic or animal form is revealed as a mask containing a human shape but, rather,
the existence of the becoming-machine or becoming-animal of the human, the flow of continuous morphing. What is blurred here is also the
divide machine/living organism: a car transmutes into a humanoid/cyborg organism. And, is the ultimate irony not that, for Deleuze, the sport
was surfing, a Californian sport par excellence if there ever was one? No longer a sport of self-control and domination directed towards some
goal, it is just a practice of inserting oneself into a wave and letting oneself be carried by it.2 Brian Massumi formulated clearly this deadlock,
which is based on the fact that today's
capitalism already overcame the logic of totalizing normality and
adopted the logic of the erratic excess: the more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normalcy starts
to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen. This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalism's
dynamic. It's not a simple liberation. It's capitalism's own form of power. It's no longer disciplinary
institutional power that defines everything, it's capitalism's power to produce variety–because
markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective
tendencies are okay–as long as they pay. Capitalism starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but only
in order to extract surplus-value. It hijacks affect in order to intensify profit potential. It literally
valorises affect. The capitalist logic of surplus-value production starts to take over the relational field that is also the domain of political
ecology, the ethical field of resistance to identity and predictable paths. It's very troubling and confusing, because it seems to me that there's
been a certain kind of convergence between the dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance.3 So, when Naomi Klein writes that
"neo-liberal economics is biased at every level towards centralization, consolidation, homogenization. It is a war waged on diversity,"4 is she not
focusing on a figure of capitalism whose days are numbered? Would she not be applauded by contemporary capitalist modernizers? Is not the
latest trend in corporate management itself "diversify, devolve power, try to mobilize local creativity and self-organization?" Is not
anticentralization the topic of the "new" digitalized capitalism? The problem here is even more "troubling and confusing" than it may appear.
As Lacan pointed out apropos of his deployment of the structural homology between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment, what
if the
surplus-value does not simply "hijack" a preexisting relational field of affects. What if what appears
an obstacle is effectively a positive condition of possibility, the element that triggers and propels the
explosion of affective productivity? What if, consequently, one should precisely throw out the baby
with the bath water and renounce the very notion of erratic affective productivity, and so on as the
libidinal support of revolutionary activity? More than ever, capital is the "concrete universal" of our
historical epoch. What this means is that, while it remains a particular formation, it overdetermines all alternative
formations, as well as all noneconomic strata of social life. The twentieth-century communist movement emerged,
defining itself as an opponent of capitalism, and was defeated by it; Fascism emerged as an attempt to master capitalism's excesses, to build a
kind of capitalism without capitalism. For this reason, it is also much too simple, in a Heideggerian mood, to reduce capitalism to one of the
ontic realizations of a more fundamental ontological attitude of will to power and technological domination (claiming that the alternatives to it
remain caught within this same ontological horizon). Modern
technological domination is inextricably intertwined
with the social form of capital; it can only occur within this form, and, insofar as the alternative social
formations display the same ontological attitude, this merely confirms that they are, in their
innermost core, mediated by capital as their concrete universality, as the particular formation that colors the entire
scope of alternatives, that is, that functions as the encompassing totality mediating all other particular formations. In his new book on
modernity, Fredric Jameson offers a concise critique of the recently fashionable theories of "alternate modernities": How then can the
ideologues of 'modernity' in its current sense manage to distinguish their product–the information revolution, and globalized, free-market
modernity–from the detestable older kind, without getting themselves involved in asking the kinds of serious political and economic, systemic
questions that the concept of a postmodernity makes unavoidable? The answer is simple: you
talk about 'alternate' or
'alternative' modernities. Everyone knows the formula by now: this means that there can be a modernity for
everybody which is different from the standard or hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model. Whatever you
dislike about the latter, including the subaltern position it leaves you in, can be effaced by the
reassuring and 'cultural' notion that you can fashion your own modernity differently, so that there can be a
Latin-American kind, or an Indian kind or an African kind, and so on. . . . But this is to overlook the other fundamental
meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself.5 As Jameson is well aware, the line goes on and
on, up to those Muslims who dream about a specific Arab modernity that would magically bypass the destructive aspects of the Western global
capitalism. The significance of this critique reaches far beyond the case of modernity; it concerns the fundamental limitation of the nominalist
historicizing. The
recourse to multitude ("there is not one modernity with a fixed essence, there are multiple modernities, each of
false not because it does not recognize a unique fixed "essence" of modernity,
but because multiplication functions as the disavowal of the antagonism that inheres to the notion of
modernity as such; the falsity of multiplication resides in the fact that it frees the universal notion of
modernity of its antagonism, of the way it is embedded in the capitalist system, by relegating this
aspect just to one of its historical subspecies. And, insofar as this inherent antagonism could be designated as a "castrative"
them irreducible to others") is
dimension, and, furthermore, insofar as, according to Freud, the disavowal of castration is represented as the multiplication of the phallusrepresentatives (a multitude of phalluses signals castration, the lack of the one), it
is easy to conceive such a multiplication of
modernities as a form of fetishist disavowal. This logic holds also for other ideological notions, especially, today, for
democracy. Do those who want to distinguish another ("radical") democracy from its existing form and thereby cut off its links with capitalism,
not commit the same categorical mistake?
Capitalism’s exploitation of labor and resources will collapse modern civilization—
radical redistribution of resources is necessary to avert mass violence
Ahmed ‘14
Nafeez Ahmed. Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development. March 14 2014. “NASAfunded study: industrial civilization headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? The Guardian.
A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global
industrial
civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and
increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or
controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of riseand-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational
disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common." The
independent research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by
applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental
Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The HANDY model was created using a minor Nasa
grant, but the study based on it was conducted independently. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for
publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics. It finds that according to the historical record even
advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the
sustainability of modern civilisation: "The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced
Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to
the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and
impermanent." By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most
salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely,
Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy. These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to
generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the
ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and
Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These social phenomena have played "a central role in the
character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years."
Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources,
with "Elites" based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both: "... accumulated surplus
is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of
the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually
at or just above subsistence levels." The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these
challenges by increasing efficiency: "Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to
raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy
effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use ."
Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from
"increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput," despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same
period. Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharrei and his colleagues conclude that under conditions "closely
reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of these
scenarios, civilisation: ".... appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and
starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine
among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L
collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature." Another scenario
focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the
Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed
by the Elites." In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most
"detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners", allowing
them to "continue 'business as usual' despite the impending catastrophe." The same mechanism, they
argue, could explain how "historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious
to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases)." Applying this lesson to our
contemporary predicament, the study warns that: "While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is
moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their
supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing
nothing." However, the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no means inevitable, and suggest
that appropriate policy and structural changes
could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable
civilisation. The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution
of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing
population growth: "Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of
nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."
The alternative is a Marxist materialist criticism—foregrounding the materialism of
labor connects theory with a revolutionary anti-capitalist praxis
Tumino ‘8
Stephen Tumino. Teaches English at Kingsborough Community College. 2008. “Materiality in Contemporary
Cultural Theory”. The Red Critique.
http://redcritique.org/FallWinter2008/materialityincontemporaryculturaltheory.htm.
In fact, it will be useful here to briefly situate the increasing abstraction of visual art that Jameson celebrates as "Utopian compensation" in the
broader history of global capital to show the extent to which the senses are never "semi-autonomous" but conditioned by existing social
arrangements. As Teresa Ebert and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh argue in their sustained analysis of capital's "cultural turns," abstract
visual art
became a particularly important tool for replacing realist and referential modalities (whose ideological
effectivities had become exhausted in the postwar era) with anti-realist and anti-referential forms of culture, such as
abstract expressionism, that were instrumental to global capital's crushing of labor militancy in the
postwar era. While abstract expressionism "is often regarded to be an absolute text, a self-referring textuality with zero outside," in fact,
"what is depicted as an ecstasy of sheer color is like the joy of the absolute signified in writing, an articulation of the interests of the class in
supremacy, although the class affiliations are difficult to see in the sensuous rapture of the aesthetic" (Class in
Culture 59). "It is held up, like anti-referential writing, as an instance of free art and, by extension, of human freedom from all that may constrain
it by tying it down to an idea, a direction, or a 'cause' (which is represented as the embodiment of metaphysics)" (60), but
its real goal is to
demolish all causes but the cause of the market. Indeed, so important was abstract expressionism—an instance of Jameson's
supposedly "compensatory" abstract aesthetic experience—to the Cold War culture of capital that Nelson Rockefeller called it "free enterprise
painting" and the CIA actively funded and encouraged the international circulation of abstract expressionism as a cultural means of combating
socialism (Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; quoted in Ebert and Zavarzadeh 59). The value of such
cultural forms, as Ebert and Zavarzadeh go on to explain, is deeply related to ways in which "anti-mimetic art 'blanks' out [social] contradictions
in an orgy of the singularity of signs, whose abundance of color/meanings exceeds all representations" (60). As a result, in its primary aim of
keeping Thought and Concepts free from any content (keeping them "open"), abstract expressionism thus "produces a workforce for capital that
is 'Thoughtfully thoughtless'—it thinks but has no ideas, thinks about thinking about Thought. Self-reflexivity is the last space left under
capitalism for the subject of estranged labor" (60). The
role of the indeterminate and unrepresentable—whether it takes
to blank out material
contradictions and foster the cultural environment needed for frictionless capital. The "perceptual," in
short, is not, as Jameson claims, "a historically new experience" (236-37). The senses are manufactured. Culture, under
capitalism, is "mere training to act as a machine" (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 501). There is
nothing more impersonal and machine-like than the idea of culture as a privately "sensual" and
"experiential" matter free of the logic of capital in the world of global production and the massive
unmet need produced by capital. That Jameson can simultaneously acknowledge that the cultural production of the senses has an
the form of Cohen's "Absolute Other," Negri's "Passion," Arendt's cultural "Spirit," or Jameson's "Utopian"—is
economic function through which men and women "are culturally and psychologically retrained for life in the market system" (Political
Unconscious 236) and at the same time put forward the spontaneity of experience as the space of the utopian makes his defense of the senses all
the more problematic. Furthermore, the "place" where Jameson locates culture, at the site of consumption and in the immediacy of the senses,
actually contradicts his own understanding of the prior textualization, or, cultural work, behind the sense-perception of the world when such work
is understood in a materialist sense. When
one implicates this "cultural work" in the wider division of labor it
becomes possible to see that the senses are not the site of an immediacy but the site of class conflict
in which immediacy serves as an ideological mystification of the historical production of the senses .
Take the work of Matthew Barney, for example, which is read as a new way of seeing art in the new millennium; the New York Times has labeled Barney "the most
important American artist of his generation" and celebrated his work as heralding a "new freedom" for "art in the new century" (Kimmelman). The reason for such
praise is because his work is taken to be beyond ideology, or, as the Times critic puts it, it is "Free To Play and Be Gooey." Barney's art is taken to be beyond ideology
in the mainstream commentary because of its multi-media complexity—from Vaseline and self-lubricating plastic to tapioca, precious metals, sculpture, drawing, and
film, as well as its cross-cultural references to Masonry, Irish nationalism, pop culture, and high art—and the way such complexity of means disrupts its narrative
coherence which seems to eschew any decided content or closure (the Cremaster Cycle is among other things about the failure of gender differentiation and identity).
The Cremaster Cycle represents a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) that installs a new modality of seeing that exemplifies Jameson's diagnosis of the
contemporary as a crisis of metanarrative brought about by global commodification and its ceaseless production of sensual compensations. The basic commitment of
the Cremaster Cycle is to reactivate metanarrative as the after-effect of conflicting binary forces and to explore how this return to the extra-discursive real challenges
some of the basic assumptions of postmodernism, which argues that all the big issues that have divided masses, classes and nations in the past, such as social
inequality for instance, are essentially over and attention now needs to be shifted to the local and micro-political, the space of discursive ethics and care of the self
("little-narratives"). The exhibition of the Cremaster Cycle at the Guggenheim itself marks its importance beyond the culture wars that assume that people's values are
more important than class inequality. Barney was not the first recipient of the Hugo Boss award and given open access to the Guggenheim with funding in the millions
of dollars by Delta Airlines because these powerful institutions believe that people's values are more important than profits, after all. Rather, for the same reasons that
abstract expressionism was funded by the Museum of Modern Art and the CIA, Barney's celebrity signals his ideological usefulness for capital in a "new" age. More
specifically, at a time of rising class inequality it marks the need for institutionalizing and legitimating the end of the post-al dogma which has maintained that the
world has entered a new order where the conflicts and concepts of the past have lost their explanatory and transformative power and circulate as merely ghostly
simulacra and vehicles of consumer desires and cultural values. The main trope of Barney's work is "restraint" and it is graphically represented by the barred lozenge
figure that recurs again and again and stands in for the work as a whole as a kind of marketing logo. Barney's understanding of artistic production, and by implication
production in general, is that it is always the product of "restraint" whether of a self imposed discipline (such as the early "drawing restraint" harnesses and strategies)
or the social restraint of conventions and rituals, whose performances form such a major part of the films (especially Drawing Restraint 9, 2006). "Restraint" is what
Foucault called "discipline": the organization of bodies in practices producing a proliferation of counter-practices and narrative inversions. The "way of seeing"
produced by Barney's work, however, is not the product of restraint, whether understood as immanent and local as in Foucault or, as in Jameson, the end result of the
rationalization of the market. Rather, "restraint" is a mode of sense-making with which to contain awareness of the social determination of culture and the senses. In
other words, the need for a "total work of art" and the multiplex way of seeing it inaugurates is not necessitated by the technology of production fetishized and
ritualized in Barney's films, nor is it the necessary product of the destruction of metanarratives of the contemporary caused by the triumph of the market over social
life. These are superstructural effects that are treated as causes on the grounds that material causal knowledge is finally impossible now that "knowledge" has
displaced labor as the source of value. In actuality, "restraint" is necessitated by the absolute dependence of labor on capital in the contemporary which has normalized
the self-reproduction of the worker. It teaches the workers to see the privatization of social resources as the precondition for "self-fashioning" (acquiring an identity)
and it normalizes the flexibility (precariousness) of the current labor market. As Marx predicted, the
universalization of the market has
lead to the normalization of relative surplus value, through such techniques as speed-ups and
micro-taylorization, over absolute surplus value, cutting wages directly or increasing working
hours. This state of affairs represents the "real subsumption" of labor under capitalism in which capital takes
on the costs of its own augmentation through systematic innovations, rather than as in the past
when labor was only "formally" subsumed under capital through the mechanism of the market and
the costs of labor were subsidized through extra-economic means (such as the welfare state). In the "global
factory" the worker is totally dependent on the market and the capitalist has abandoned his role as
the organizer of the production process and turned it over, highly rationalized and de-skilled, to the
workers who now must manage themselves to be more productive at the risk of losing their
livelihoods completely. It is the emergence of the "global worker" who is both de-skilled and central to the relative production of
surplus-value that necessitates a "global art" which places a premium on complexity, multi-linguality, and a high tolerance of ambiguity and
sensual immediacy such as Matthew Barney's. The modality of seeing culture as a multifarious practice of "restraint" (of a primary "gooey-ness")
is to deny labor as the subject of history and normalize containment of such awareness under the guise of complexity and sheer pleasure. In his
critique of "sensuous certainty" as Feuerbach understood it, Marx was concerned to emphasize how the new ways to perceive that emerge in the
development of capitalism—"the secrets which are disclosed to the eye of the physicist and chemist" (German Ideology 46)—are the product of
"industry and commerce" as "[e]ven this 'pure' natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry,
through the sensuous activity of men" (46). It is in this sense that, as Marx says, "[t]he senses have therefore become directly in their practice
theoreticians," and, "they relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to
man, and vice-versa" (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 300). Thus, if
the senses are always a relation of production
between men and women to each other and the development of this relation has reached the point
where it becomes productive to experience objects in themselves (stripped of their relation to labor) according
to their essential natural properties like color and form (or gooey-ness), as in modern science and art, to the point
that the totality of human production itself is seen as an object (e.g., what Jameson calls a "narrative" and Barney
"restraint") free of labor, this is as much to say that culture has become commodified and thus its
"enjoyment and labor, production and consumption, devolve on different individuals" (Marx and Engels,
German Ideology 51). To hold out a libidinal compensation in consumption in the pleasure of the senses as Jameson proposes is to conveniently
forget that access to consumption is a class matter determined by one's place in production and thus acts to block access to consumption on the
part of the exploited who are thereby expected as always to make do with what is required to get them to return to work the next day. Jameson's
deployment of culture
as a libidinal compensation for exploitation deconceptualizes the senses and once
again turns culture into a self-enclosed locality cut off from the world historicity of labor. A
materialist reading of culture brings to the fore the necessity of praxis in all cultural productions:
"praxis" as what Marx theorized as the materiality of labor, a "'revolutionary' ... practical-critical,
activity" that in transforming the objective world transforms men ("Theses on Feuerbach" 143). For a materialist reading, culture
"reflects" objective reality, especially the dialectical interaction between humanity and nature and
between men and women themselves. The enclosing of culture in on itself that Jameson recognizes to be a product of capitalist
rationalization and the alienation of the senses it brings about, besides being a symptom of the commodification of culture and an index of
exploitation, is also a precondition for the emancipation of culture from capital. The
reification of culture from the labor
relations of which it is always a part and the phantom objectivity it assumes in ideology represents the moment when culture
ceases to be grasped in the mode of "tradition" or "convention" and becomes the object of
conscious activity. The commodification of culture coincides with the social production of culture. As the current battles over "intellectual
copyright" show, the political economy of culture problematizes its privatization on the market as an
article of private consumption. Contemporary culture is the combined activity of workers around the world in ways that call into
question the private norms of ownership demanded by capitalism. The dominant ideology of culture has fetishized the new forms of culture such
as the Internet and the global anti-corporatism and contrasts them with what is considered a hierarchal "modernist" past ruled by a linear and
analogical thinking obsessed with its own identity and reproduction. But there can be no freedom from oppression without awareness of the
ongoing collectivity of labor at the root of culture and the need of its emancipation from capital. The
"senses," "emotions,"
"passions," are not "spontaneous"—they are the product of a history of labor in production ("the
senses have ... become directly in their practice theoreticians"). By positing "emotions" (passions, etc.) as independent of the history of labor,
Negri and Jameson block any investigation into the theoretical (social) construction of the emotions. In short, "passions" (which is a code word
for "experience") is an effect which needs to be conceptually interrogated by investigating its conditions of production (through inquiry into the
social relations of production, as I am arguing) not taken as a given (i.e. as a self-motivating "cause"). By valorizing the experiential, Negri and
Jameson cut off the possibility of such a conceptual reading and reify the effects of capitalism, thus limiting their theories to the terms set by the
dominant "culturalist" ideology and its class politics. Culture
as free of the history of production is a reified view of
culture that corresponds to the interests of those who have already had their material needs met
from the labor of the other. The "place" of culture in the totality does not lie in the experiences of the "heart" (sensuality) but in root
knowledge (economics): "the all sided production of the whole earth" (Marx and Engels, German Ideology 59). It is only when the materiality of
culture in labor relations is grasped that the "liberation of each single individual will be accomplished" (Marx and Engels 59). Jameson
and
Negri are participating in a more general "ethical turn" to validate the experience of workers in
their celebrations of the compensatory value of culture in terms of experience. Against such a move it is
necessary to return to Lenin's critique of "spontaneity," "proletarian culture," and the "artificially
restricted limits of 'literature for workers'" promoted by "(bad) intellectuals [who] believe it is
enough 'for workers' to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them
over and over what has long been known" (What Is To Be Done?). Against all local delimitations of culture Lenin put
forward the universality of culture and the necessity of grasping and completing the thoughts and actions of the past through "critique" and thus
advancing culture to its inevitable conclusion in the construction of a truly free society—communism (The Tasks of the Youth Leagues). The
dominant discursive cultural theory I have been engaging with above rejects materialist theory as bad epistemology
because the materiality of labor subordinates the materiality and agency of the signifier—the formal
operations of language which is understood as primary and material in poststructuralist theory and is performed as such in idealist cultural theory
and consumer culture as well—to a secondary position determined by labor. The labor theory of culture is accused of
supporting what de Man calls "aesthetic ideology" (Aesthetic Ideology): the collapse of the phenomenal and the real in referential representation.
In these culturalist terms a
materialist cultural studies is dismissed as a "mirror of production" (Baudrillard)
that serves a conservative function in normalizing desire to the dominant order because it fails to
liberate the signifier in whose free play are imagined radical possibilities of regime change. The
attack on materialist reading, however, fails to engage with the materialist mode of reading through the relay
of an epistemological ruse that displaces the question of materiality from social praxis to rhetoric,
thus conflating the material with the experience of "pleasure" that is held to be the effect of the
opacity of errant tropes in a text. The lack of engagement of dominant theories of culture with the labor theory of culture can be seen when one
turns to Lenin's understanding of culture as "reflection." Lenin's understanding of culture as "reflection" is not intelligible if one only sees in it the secondary issue of
epistemology, the familiar question of how a text constructs meaning through (dis)simulation at the level of its immanent formal properties. Even such an otherwise
careful reader of Lenin as Pierre Macherey in his Theory of Literary Production argues that Lenin's materialist understanding of writing as "reflection" is not effective
because it fails to grasp the immanent "literariness of the text" (119), which for him is a matter of how the text performs "an internal displacement of ideology" (133)
that resists "all attempts to 'demystify'" (133) it from its outside. Lenin, according to Macherey, by failing to grasp the immanent function of literature "to present
ideology in a non-ideological form" (133) and that a text must always "include an ideology—which by itself does not belong to it" (127), is thus a slave to the idea of
historical "content" in the same way as "bourgeois criticism" (119) despite the oppositional use he makes of its concepts. But it is Macherey who in this way is
reinscribing the bourgeois ideology of the literary text by placing it in a zone held to be immune from ideology critique. The understanding of "reflection" in
bourgeois criticism has always done this by focusing on the means of representation as determinate to the exclusion of the function of representation in the social. For
Lenin, however, "reflection" is a recognition of the working of necessity behind all acts of knowledge production in which writing too is implicated into social praxis.
Writing, that is, as reflecting not the "free" consciousness of the writer, or the "excess" of "desire" as it is in culturalist theory, but rather writing as inserted into the
revolutionary dialectic of the social real (the class struggle). This is a reflection without mimesis: writing "reflects" the class struggle behind culture of which writing
is itself a more or less productive part and is therefore in no way to be understood as a static and transparent reflection (mimesis). When Lenin reads Tolstoy, for
example, he first emphasizes that by "reflection" he does not mean simple "mimesis," a formal operation of adequation between the codes and conventions of
language conceived as a pure medium of expression, a vessel of a timeless consciousness, or, the mirror of a presumably static and inert reality: To identify the great
artist with the revolution which he has obviously failed to understand, and from which he obviously stands aloof, may at first sight seem strange and artificial. A
mirror which does not reflect things correctly could hardly be called a mirror. ("Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution" 202) Reflection, in Lenin's terms, is
thus not about the "transparency" of "meaning," as Cohen for example assumes. It is about reading effects at the level of consciousness in terms of their more primary
causes in an unfolding revolutionary social process or, in other words, their "historical and economic conditions" ("Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution"
208). Furthermore, Lenin recognizes that "transparency" is not the issue because what is being reflected is itself contradictory. That is to say, the historical and
economic conditions themselves are conflicted such that any reflection is bound to be partial and to a certain extent distorting as it must reflect contrary class interests.
Lenin thus reads for social and ideological contradictions that militate against an ahistorical understanding of reflection as posited by (post)modern formalist reading
strategies. What Lenin reads as a reflection is the way in which contradictions at the level of consciousness—between Tolstoy's "merciless criticism of capitalist
exploitation," on the one hand, and "crackpot preaching of submission, 'resist not evil' with violence" ("Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution" 205), on the
other—are tied to contradictions in the social relations: The contradictions in Tolstoy's views are not contradictions inherent in his personal views alone, but are a
reflection of the extremely complex, contradictory conditions, social influences and historical traditions which determined the psychology of various classes and
various sections of Russian society in the post-Reform, but pre-revolutionary era. ("Leo Tolstoy" 325) Lenin's materialist reading, as Lukács has argued, is not
dependent on a naturalistic view of the text as a stylistic mode of reflecting on a reified reality, whether located in the mind or in the material
world. Rather, it directs reading to the interaction of the
text as a locus of ideological struggles over the social real
and the conflictual reality of social struggles in ongoing material praxis whereby the "writer is part
of, and determined by, the movement from and towards some goal" (Lukács 55) to which history is moving—socialism. Contrary
to the view that says a materialist cultural studies is disempowering because it reduces "agency" (the agency of consciousness, the agency of the
signifier, etc.) to a secondary position, the direct opposite is true. Without
the recognition of the determination of
"consciousness" by objective social reality, what is called agency is really a symptom of reification,
as a part of social reality is placed in the position of representing the whole of reality thus
stabilizing the dominant order by protecting it from critique. It is only when the whole is grasped that agency
becomes serious: A writer's pattern of choice is a function of his personality. But personality is not in fact timeless and absolute, however it may appear to the
individual consciousness. Talent and character may be innate; but the manner in which they develop, or fail to develop, depends on the writer's interaction with his
environment, on his relations with other human beings. His life is part of the life of his time; no matter whether he is conscious of this, approves of it or disapproves.
He is part of a larger social and historical whole. (Lukács 54) What is this whole? It is the fact that "no writer of the past century ... has been able to ignore [the]
ideological crisis of bourgeois society" (Lukács 60) and necessarily reflects this crisis in one way or another and thereby takes sides in the class struggle. In the
remainder of this essay I wish to turn to Kafka and his readers as an example of the crisis of the contemporary totality so as to make my arguments above regarding
culture as a site of conflict over materiality more concrete in terms of cultural practices and addressing the question what is to be done for a transformative cultural
theory. Kafka is popularly seen as the opposite of a "realistic" writer because of the attenuated view of the world in his texts and the impossibility of an authentic
human response to these conditions. This view fails to read Kafka's text as reflecting on social relations because it conflates reflection with "reference" and assumes
that as Kafka does not refer directly to the shape of social relations, or, indeed, any metanarrative of explanation, his texts cannot be said to be "about" social relations.
The conclusion is that because Kafka's writing lacks systemic awareness of society and modalities of change it must be read in "existential" or "metaphysical" terms
the labor theory of culture is needed
in order to penetrate the fog of "aboutness" (reference) and uncover the necessary reflection of labor
relations in the text. I argue that if class relations are absent in the narrative, this is more than a
problem of reference (knowledge); it is a social problem (ideology) while classes exist. The conflation of
reflection with reference that concludes class is absent in Kafka is itself a class narrative that not only provides
an apologetic for inequality but also distorts the intelligibility of narratives which are not exhausted
by their content, as Lenin's labor theory of reading shows in its understanding of a non-mimetic reflection. The labor theory of
reading is needed to turn reading from being quietist and complicit with the dominant culturalist
ideology and make it a struggle practice for social emancipation and equality.
that are common-sensically assumed to be above politics and free of labor. However, as I will show,
Alt solves the aff – waste is just an internal contradiction of capital
Yates ’11 [Michelle, Lecturer in the Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences at
Columbia College Chicago, The Human-As-Waste, the Labor Theory of Value and Disposability in
Contemporary Capitalism, Antipode Volume 43, Issue 5, pages 1679–1695, November 2011]
Marx argued that the overcoming of capitalism would occur through the contradictions embedded within
the dominant social categories of capitalism, or within the internal logic of capital itself. For example, in one passage from
Capital volume I, Marx writes: By maturing the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production, it matures the
contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process, and thereby ripens both the elements for
forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one (1990 [1867]:635). Following Marx, Postone argues for an
immanent critique of capitalism, which locates itself as internal to capitalism, the object of investigation. The social categories (ie value, labor,
the commodity, and capital) that grasp the object of study, capitalism, are by their nature inherently structured from within the context of that
object. An
immanent critique finds hope for another, more egalitarian mode of production from within
the capitalist social categories; it sees the contradictions embodied within these social categories as
possibly pointing towards resolution in another social formation.18 Waste is one of the products of the
contradictions embedded within value as the dominant form of social wealth and social category that
mediates social relations in capitalism. Waste also reveals how these contradictions point to the non-sustainability of capitalism,
to the natural and historical limits of capital, and toward capitalism's overcoming. On the one hand, how can capital produce use-values (to
embody value) if it has laid waste to the environment and natural resources necessary for production? On the other hand, how can capital
continue to accumulate, as mediated through the production of value (the dominant form of social wealth in capitalism), if it has rendered
labor superfluous, and excreted human labor from the production process? In striving for its own limitless (profit) accumulation, capital drives
toward its own natural and historical limits.19
Case
They claim incrementalism – policy debate is literally the worst forum to spread a
message, it takes two hours to tell 3 people your message. Policy Debaters have an
absurdly insular community – at best they’ll spread their message to other likeminded hyper-intellectuals, that produces no real world education
Social movements against environmental injustices fail – this narrative has been a
constant since 1969, their own cards discuss that the same movement they want to
instigate pushed against climate change and failed.
Reject their claims to prefer their impacts in all framings – evaluate all lives equally.
That’s the only moral framework, and anything else requires you to value one life
more than another – that’s evil
They can’t solve state violence – elites will never hear this aff and they will never
regard their claims seriously.
Overhyped claims of oceanic pollution confuse and alienate the public
Floyd ‘11
Mark Floyd. Press for Oregon State University. January 4 2011. “Oceanic “garbage patch” not nearly as big as
portrayed in media”. Oregon State University. http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2011/jan/oceanic%E2%80%9Cgarbage-patch%E2%80%9D-not-nearly-big-portrayed-media.
There is a lot of plastic trash floating in the Pacific Ocean, but claims
that the “Great Garbage Patch” between California and
the size of Texas are grossly exaggerated, according to an analysis by an Oregon State University
scientist. Further claims that the oceans are filled with more plastic than plankton, and that the patch
has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950s are equally misleading, pointed out Angelicque “Angel” White, an
assistant professor of oceanography at Oregon State. “There is no doubt that the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans is troubling, but this
kind of exaggeration undermines the credibility of scientists,” White said. “We have data that allow us to make reasonable
estimates; we don’t need the hyperbole. Given the observed concentration of plastic in the North Pacific, it is simply
inaccurate to state that plastic outweighs plankton, or that we have observed an exponential increase in plastic.”
White has pored over published literature and participated in one of the few expeditions solely aimed at
understanding the abundance of plastic debris and the associated impact of plastic on microbial communities. That
expedition was part of research funded by the National Science Foundation through C-MORE, the Center for
Japan is twice
Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education. The studies have shown is that if you look at the actual area of the plastic itself, rather than
the entire North Pacific subtropical gyre, the
hypothetically “cohesive” plastic patch is actually less than 1 percent
of the geographic size of Texas. “The amount of plastic out there isn’t trivial,” White said. “But using the highest concentrations ever
reported by scientists produces a patch that is a small fraction of the state of Texas, not twice the size.” Another way to look at it, White said, is to
compare the amount of plastic found to the amount of water in which it was found. “If we were to
filter the surface area of the
ocean equivalent to a football field in waters having the highest concentration (of plastic) ever
recorded,” she said, “the amount of plastic recovered would not even extend to the 1-inch line.” Recent
research by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that the amount of plastic, at
least in the Atlantic Ocean, hasn’t increased since the mid-1980s – despite greater production and consumption of materials made
from plastic, she pointed out. “Are we doing a better job of preventing plastics from getting into the ocean?” White said. “Is more plastic sinking
out of the surface waters? Or is it being more efficiently broken down? We just don’t know. But the
data on hand simply do not
suggest that ‘plastic patches’ have increased in size. This is certainly an unexpected conclusion, but it may in part reflect the
high spatial and temporal variability of plastic concentrations in the ocean and the limited number of samples that have been collected.” The
hyperbole about plastic patches saturating the media rankles White, who says such exaggeration can
drive a wedge between
the public and the scientific community. One recent claim that the garbage patch is as deep as the Golden Gate Bridge is tall is
completely unfounded, she said. “Most plastics either sink or float,” White pointed out. “Plastic isn’t likely to be evenly distributed through the
top 100 feet of the water column.”
Plastics
US plastic industry is on a robust upturn and demand is increasing
American Chemistry Council 14 (American Chemistry Council
http://www.americanchemistry.com/Jobs/EconomicStatistics/Plastics-Statistics/Year-in-Review.pdf)
The United States plastics resins industry continued its growth trend in 2013. According to the American Chemistry
Council (ACC) Plastics Industry Producers’ Statistics (PIPS) Group, U.S. resin production
increased 1.5 percent to 107.5 billion
pounds in 2013, up from 105.9 billion pounds in 2012. Total sales for the year increased 1.5
percent to 108.7 billion pounds in 2013, up from 107.0 billion pounds in 2012 . The Economic Environment The
global economic environment has remained challenging, preventing the U.S. from escaping its persistently slow growth pattern. Business and consumer confidence was still wavering in 2013, putting a damper on investment
growth and hiring as well as consumer spending. There was general weakness in manufacturing, cuts in U.S. federal spending, periods of uncertainty, and softness in demand at home and abroad. As a result, the U.S. economy
improvements are emerging and the fundamentals are in place for
moderate growth in the coming year. The U.S. employment situation is steadily improving
and recovery continues in the housing market. As incomes and real earnings rise and
household assets strengthen, American consumers will be better positioned to spend.
Domestic demand will build, driving the U.S. economy and in turn, bolstering global growth.
Indeed, after just 2 percent growth in 2013, global economic growth is set to expand and this will translate to acceleration in foreign demand for North American plastics. North American
manufacturing—and the chemical and plastics industries in particular—has the stage set for
robust performance. North American producers, with access to abundant supplies of competitively priced energy and feedstock, are presented with renewed opportunity. The U.S. manufacturing
grew only 1.9 percent in 2013. However,
sector, which represents the primary customer base for resins, is pulling out of a soft patch. Manufacturing growth slowed in 2013 largely due to the federal government sequester and to weakness in major export markets.
However, the surge in unconventional oil and gas development is creating both demand side (e.g., pipe mills, oilfield machinery) and supply-side (e.g., chemicals, fertilizers, direct iron reduction) opportunities. Indeed,
the
enhanced competitive position with regard to feedstock costs will support U.S. chemical
industry production going forward, with particular strength in plastic resins . Trends in Customer Industries
Although the demand for plastics is ultimately tied to overall economic growth, plastic resins are used in a
variety of end-use markets. A discussion
of performance in some of the most important end-use markets for resins follows. Packaging is the largest market for plastic resins and
historically, packaging resin use has been correlated with “real” retail sales, i.e., retail sales
adjusted for inflation. According to data from the Bureau of the Census and Bureau of Labor
Statistics, real retail sales grew 2.8 percent in 2013, following a similar 2.9 percent gain in
2012. Consumer spending appeared to be accelerating towards the end of the year and this trend is expected to continue as the job market recovers and household wealth advances. According to Statistics Canada, the
Canadian retail sector increased 2.5 percent in 2013 after a 2.5 percent gain in 2012. As a result, output of the North American retail sector experienced a 2.8 percent gain in 2013. Packaging industry output for the region
Building and construction
represents an important market for plastic resins. The housing market continues to recover
in the U.S. and housing starts were up 19 percent in 2013. While starts are still off 55 percent from their 2005 peak of 2.07 million units, they
have grown consistently for the last four years. In the U.S., housing starts increased from 783,000 units in 2012 to
931,000 units in 2013. Residential projects were the drivers for private construction spending. Public and private non-residential construction spending both declined in 2013. In Canada, housing
expanded in 2013 after having contracted in 2012.
americanchemistry.com® 700 Second St., NE | Washington, DC 20002 | (202) 249.7000
starts fell 13 percent from 215,000 units in 2012 to 188,000 units in 2013. The Canadian construction industry grew only marginally in 2013, reflecting a decline in residential construction offset by growth in non-residential
Transportation is another significant market for plastic
resins. Light vehicle sales continued to strengthen in the U.S., rising from 14.4 million units
in 2012 to 15.5 million units in 2013. Improvements in American incomes and the ability to
take on more debt combined with pent-up demand will encourage continuation of a positive
trend in vehicle sales. Canadian light vehicle sales also increased (from 1.72 million units in 2012 to 1.78 million units in 2013). According to the U.S. Federal Reserve Board,
projects. Overall North American construction activity grew by 4.0 percent in 2013.
production of motor vehicles and parts in the U.S. increased 6.8 percent in 2013. This
increase follows strong growth in the several years since the Great Recession (production
increased 17.4 percent in 2012, 9.0 percent in 2011 and 32.7 percent in 2010). In Canada, production of motor
vehicles and parts fell in 2013 after a gain in 2012. Overall North American production of motor vehicles and parts increased 5.6 percent in 2013. Another important plastics
market is that for electrical and electronics, much of which is centered in appliances. In the U.S. and in
Canada, the appliance industry’s output volume grew 7.1 percent, marking the first positive year-over-year comparison since 2004. This is a good
sign and reflects recovery in the housing market that was finally taking hold. Appliance production had moderated in recent years and, although it’s tied to the health of housing, it also reflected some appliance production that
has shifted to low-cost manufacturing countries. Much of the production that has left the U.S. has gone to Mexico and resin suppliers in the U.S. and Canada serve this nearby market. Production of both electronic products and
other electrical equipment increased in 2013, extending the trend of positive growth to four years. In 2013, production of computers and electronic products in North America rose 2.9 percent while production of other electrical
Furniture and furnishings represent a key market for plastics. The North
American furniture industry, also tied to the health of the housing market, grew 4.4 percent
in 2013, marking the third year of consecutive growth. In the U.S., production in the
furniture industry increased 4.6 percent, and in Canada, output grew 2.6 percent. North American production of carpeting and other textile furnishings contracted in
2013 after a small gain in 2012. The trend in these markets should accelerate with the improvements in
the
housing market though this connection will likely be more pronounced in furniture
production. Industrial machinery represents another important market, one aided by
increased business investment needed to enhance competitiveness, and to expand capacity,
both in North America and in rapidly growing emerging markets. North American production
of industrial machinery rose 2.8 percent in 2013. Growth in this market has been hampered as businesses continue to face uncertainty affecting their capital
equipment rose 4.6 percent.
investment decisions. The previous discussion examines the primary end-use markets which ultimately drive demand. The plastics products industry (NAICS 3261) is the key immediate customer industry for plastic resins. In
turn, this industry supplies these important end-use markets. During 2013, North American plastics products production rose 5.9 percent, reflecting improving demand among the end-use markets and the competiveness of
Both imports
and exports of plastic products and other finished goods incorporating plastics resins
continued to expand in 2013 and the pace of growth in exports has surpassed that of
imports. North American exports of plastics products grew to $15.5 billion in 2013. The
economic outlook for the North American resins industry is quite optimistic. For the most
part, demand from domestic customer industries is strengthening and foreign demand is
expected to improve as well. This positive outlook is driven by the emergence of the U.S. as the venue for chemicals investment. With the development of shale gas and the surge in
natural gas liquids supply, the U.S.
moved ahead as a high-cost producer of key petrochemicals and resins globally. This
shift boosted export demand and drove significant flows of new capital investment toward
the U.S. As of early 2014, nearly 149 projects have been announced with investments
totaling more than $100 billion through 2023.
American producers. There have been improvements in trade flows as well. Following a contraction in 2009, North American trade in plastic products recovered and has grown steadily.
Aff crushes plastics industry—Its profitability depends on consumers remaining
ignorant about the impacts of ocean waste
Boyle 2011 [7/31 Lisa, environmental lawyer, “Plastic And The Great Recycling Swindle”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-kaas-boyle/plastics-industry-markets_b_912503.html]
Every day, disposable plastics (bottles, bags, packaging, utensils, etc.) are thrown away in huge quantities after one use,
but they will last virtually forever. Globally we make 300 million tons of plastic waste each year. Disposable plastics are the largest component
of ocean pollution. While Fresh Kills Landfill in New York was once known as the planet's largest man-made structure, with a volume greater
than the Great Wall of China and a height exceeding the Statue of Liberty, our oceans are now known to contain the world's largest dumps.
These unintended landfills in our seas may cover millions of square miles and are composed of plastic waste fragments, circling the natural
vortexes of the oceans like plastic confetti being flushed in giant toilets. Plastics are made from petroleum; there is less and less available, and
we are going to tragic lengths to get at it as evidenced in oil spills around the globe with loss of life and habitat. Should we be risking life and
limb for single use-bags and plastic bottles that can easily be replaced with sustainable alternatives? Should
we be risking our food
chain as plastic fragments become more plentiful than plankton in our oceans? Should we be exposing our
fetuses, babies and children to the endocrine disrupting chemicals that leach out of plastic food containers into our food and drink? These
questions and their answers are exactly what the plastics lobby wants you to avoid. Plastic Industry Tactics:
Aggression and Distraction The Plastics Industry has been forced into a new position in order to preserve its
global market. It is no longer enough to pitch affordability and convenience of their products when consumers are
concerned about being poisoned by the chemicals in plastics and are tired of seeing more plastic bags than flowers on the roadside. Every
legislative restriction on plastics defeated by the industry and every consumer mollified into believing
that using disposable plastics is a sustainable practice means the continuation of enormous global
profits for industry. The petrochemical BPA, a hardening agent used in plastics that was developed first as a synthetic estrogen, alone
generates 6 billion dollars in sales for the American petrochemical industry. As preeminent endocrine researcher Dr. Frederick Vom Saal
observed: "If information [about toxics in plastic] had been known at the time that this chemical was first put into commerce, it would not have
been put into commerce.... but because it already is in commerce, and chemical industries
have a huge stake in maintaining
their market share using this chemical, how do they now respond to evidence that it really is not a chemical that you would want your
baby to be exposed to? [The industry] is still in the attack phase."
Plastics key to US economic growth—the Green Chemistry Industry revolution proves
Bienkowski ‘12 (Brian Staff Writer for Environmental Health News
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2012/chemical-plastics-industry-drives-economy July 24, 2012)
CHICAGO, Ill. – The chemical and plastics industry is a leading force in economic growth that is helping U.S. cities bounce
back from the recession, according to a new study commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The report paints a rosy picture of
economic growth and credits the manufacturing of plastics and chemicals with spurring a surge in jobs,
exports and research in many cities across the country. Behind the industry’s role as a growing economic force are rock-bottom natural gas
prices, largely due to technologies allowing extractors to tap into new reserves. Natural gas fuels most U.S. chemical processes. Chemical
companies are investing money into places as diverse as the Gulf of Mexico and Pittsburgh – wherever the gas is, according to the study
conducted by IHS Global Insight, a Colorado-based industry analytics company that focuses on energy issues. The report cites
2 to 4
percent job growth in the chemical and plastics industry in some large cities including Minneapolis, Los Angeles,
San Diego, Dallas and Milwaukee from 2010 to 2011. Smaller metro areas such as Warren, Mich., Spokane, Wash., Greeley, Colo.,
Gadsden, Ala., Janesville, Wis. and Alexandria, La., have seen more than 10 percent growth in the industry's employment. However, some
major cities, including Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, had a small decrease, the study says. Robert Atkinson, president of the Information
Technology and Innovation Foundation, a non-partisan economic think tank in Washington, D.C., said the chemical industry historically has
been strong in the U.S. compared to other industries and that this growth could continue to boost the economy. “Chemicals are a stable
industry ... partly because you have higher fixed costs, you don’t just walk away from a chemical plant,” said Atkinson, who did not participate
in the study. The report, which was prepared for a mayors' conference held last week in Philadelphia, predicts the U.S. economy will continue
to improve through the end of 2012, anticipating job growth of 1.4 percent and unemployment to fall to 8 percent. waltarrrrr/flickr Low natural
gas prices have driven new hiring at chemical companies. The metropolitan Chicago area has the highest employment in chemical and plastics
with 43,346 jobs, just above the Houston area at 42,834. Twenty-eight metropolitan areas have more than 10,000 people working in the
industry and 206 metro areas have more than 1,000, according to the report. Tracey Easthope, environmental health director at the Ecology
Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., said she hopes this trend will carry over into “green chemistry,” the design of chemicals and industrial processes
that are non-toxic and environmentally sound. “While green chemistry is growing, it’s still a relatively small proportion,” Easthope said. “As we
keep increasing domestic manufacturing of chemicals, it’s important that both the chemicals and production be more sustainable.” The report
did not mention how much of the growth was “green,” but it is typically a drop in the bucket. According to a 2011 report by Pike Research,
green chemistry was a $2.8 billion industry, compared with the $4-trillion global chemical industry. In the U.S. alone, the chemical industry is a
$760 billion enterprise, according to the American Chemistry Council. The report, however, predicted the green
chemical industry
would grow to $98.5 billion by 2020. Manufacturers of chemicals and plastics have been under fire recently, with scientists
linking many high-volume synthetic compounds – including flame retardants, plasticizers such as bisphenol A and phthalates, pesticides and
Teflon ingredients -- to a variety of health threats. The chemical industry has been able to grow in recent years because natural gas prices have
dropped dramatically. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, natural gas was $1.89 per thousand cubic feet (not including
transportation costs) in April 2012, down from $10.79 in July 2008. The combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, known as
fracking, led to the price drop, as shale gas production grew 48 percent from 2006 to 2010, according to U.S. Department of Energy estimates.
And when the prices dropped, out came the businesses that rely on cheap energy. “Four or five years ago manufacturers were bemoaning the
high prices of natural gas in the U.S., and they were going elsewhere,” Atkinson said. “Now you’re hearing something a lot different as the low
natural gas prices are driving their ability to be productive.” At the same time, concerns over the environmental safety of fracking are being
raised across the nation. Dow operates a chemical plant in Midland, Mich. From worries about water pollution in western Pennsylvania to
cancer rate concerns in north Texas, many communities have expressed unease with the nascent practice of injecting chemicals into the ground
near drinking water. Multiple towns have enacted moratoriums on fracking pending more research. Industry officials say the practice is not a
threat to drinking water and that natural gas burns much cleaner than coal. The cheap natural gas also could reduce incentives for
manufacturers to find replacements for fossil fuels. Cutting energy use and switching to renewable resources when available are two of the
principles of green chemistry. But Easthope cited low natural gas prices as an opportunity for companies to develop environmentally
sustainable chemicals and plastics. “This is a big chance to ramp up innovation,” she said. She said coupled with the lower costs of handling
hazardous materials, this could make green chemicals more competitive. Atkinson said the low natural gas prices are here to stay. “This is a
long-term, structural change in our energy supply,” he said. “With these new technologies like horizontal drilling, they’re bringing online a lot
more natural gas than we ever thought was available…These are not artificially low prices.” But Atkinson said it’s going to take more than just
low energy prices to keep the chemical and plastics industry driving growth. “It’s
innovation that’s going to sustain growth,
and there’s a fair amount in those industries right now,” he said. He said it's important to keep putting money into
research, and to use the low energy costs to constantly reinvent the industry. Atkinson pointed to plastics that conduct
electricity as a recent example of the industry pushing forward. “It’s not like they’re just cranking out a bunch of
plastic bottles," he said.
Economic decline triggers nuclear war
Harris and Burrows 9
(Mathew, PhD European History at Cambridge, counselor in the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and Jennifer,
member of the NIC’s Long Range Analysis Unit “Revisiting the Future: Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis”
http://www.ciaonet.org/journals/twq/v32i2/f_0016178_13952.pdf)
Increased Potential for Global Conflict Of course, the report encompasses more than economics and indeed believes the future is likely to be
the result of a number of intersecting and interlocking forces. With so many possible permutations of outcomes, each with ample Revisiting the
Future opportunity for unintended consequences, there is a growing sense of insecurity. Even so, history may be more instructive than ever.
While we continue to believe that the
Great Depression is not likely to be repeated, the lessons to be drawn from that period
include the harmful effects on fledgling democracies and multiethnic societies (think Central Europe in 1920s
and 1930s) and on the sustainability of multilateral institutions (think League of Nations in the same period). There is no reason to think that
this would not be true in the twenty-first as much as in the twentieth century. For that reason, the ways in which the
potential for
greater conflict could grow would seem to be even more apt in a constantly volatile economic environment as they
would be if change would be steadier. In surveying those risks, the report stressed the likelihood that terrorism and nonproliferation will
remain priorities even as resource issues move up on the international agenda. Terrorism’s appeal will decline if economic growth continues in
the Middle East and youth unemployment is reduced. For those terrorist groups that remain active in 2025, however, the diffusion of
technologies and scientific knowledge will place some of the world’s most dangerous capabilities within their reach. Terrorist groups in
2025 will likely be a combination of descendants of long established groups inheriting organizational structures, command and control
processes, and training procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated attacks and newly emergent collections of the angry and
disenfranchised that become
self-radicalized, particularly in the absence of economic outlets that would become narrower in an
economic downturn. The most dangerous casualty of any economically-induced drawdown of U.S.
military presence would almost certainly be the Middle East. Although Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is not inevitable,
worries about a nuclear-armed Iran could lead states in the region to develop new security arrangements with
external powers, acquire additional weapons, and consider pursuing their own nuclear ambitions. It is not clear that the type of
stable deterrent relationship that existed between the great powers for most of the Cold War would emerge naturally in the Middle East with a
nuclear Iran. Episodes of low intensity conflict and terrorism taking place \under a nuclear umbrella could
lead to an unintended
escalation and broader conflict if clear red lines between those states involved are not well established. The close proximity of
potential nuclear rivals combined with underdeveloped surveillance capabilities and mobile dual-capable Iranian missile systems also
will produce inherent difficulties in achieving reliable indications and warning of an impending nuclear attack. The lack
of strategic depth in neighboring states like Israel, short warning and missile flight times, and uncertainty of Iranian intentions may
place more focus on preemption rather than defense, potentially leading to escalating crises. 36 Types of conflict
that the world continues to experience, such as over resources, could reemerge, particularly if protectionism grows
and there is a resort to neo-mercantilist practices. Perceptions of renewed energy scarcity will drive countries to take actions to assure their
future access to energy supplies. In the worst case, this could result in interstate conflicts if government leaders deem assured access to energy
resources, for example, to be essential for maintaining domestic stability and the survival of their regime. Even actions short of war, however,
will have important geopolitical implications. Maritime security concerns are providing a rationale for naval buildups and modernization efforts,
such as China’s and India’s development of blue water naval capabilities. If the fiscal stimulus focus for these countries indeed turns inward,
one of the most obvious funding targets may be military. Buildup of regional naval capabilities could lead to increased tensions, rivalries, and
counterbalancing moves, but it also will create opportunities for multinational cooperation in protecting critical sea lanes. With water also
becoming scarcer in Asia and the Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is likely to be increasingly difficult both within
and between states in a more dog-eat-dog world.
Turn—plastic pollution improves ocean biodiversity
Sahagun ‘13
Louis Sahagun. Staff writer. August 1 2013. “Scientists find microbes thriving on plastic marine debris”. LA Times.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/aug/01/science/la-sci-sn-ocean-plastisphere-habitat20130801.
A scanning electron microscope image shows microbes on a piece of plastic marine debris. A
team of researchers in Woods Hole,
discovered a novel ecological habitat flourishing in one of the fastest growing segments of
civilization's toxic waste stream: plastic marine debris. Welcome to the Plastisphere, a biological
wilderness on microbial reefs of polyethylene and polypropylene in the open ocean teeming with single-celled animals, fungi and
Mass., has
bacteria, many of them newly discovered. Some may be pathogens hitching rides on floating junk. The effects of plastic debris on fish, birds,
turtles and marine mammals that ingest it are well documented. But little is
known about the effects of these diverse,
relatively new and evolving microbial communities on the surrounding marine environment. “We were
surprised to find microbes in such high numbers on these plastics,” said Tracy Mincer, an associate scientist in marine chemistry and
geochemistry at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and coauthor of a report on the findings published online in June in Environmental
Science and Technology. “Another surprise was that they
are distinct from their surrounding marine counterparts.”
Using scanning electron microscopes and gene sequencing techniques, the team found at least 1,000 different types of
bacteria, diatoms and algae attached to seaborne rubbish. They also discovered microbes embedded
in cracks and pits on plastic surfaces indicating they may be capable of degrading hydrocarbons. These
unique menageries, which arose on plastic debris introduced to the world’s ocean over the last six decades, make up extensive
food chains of bacteria and single-celled animals that produce their own food, bacteria that feed on
their waste products and predators that feed on all of them. "Each one of these plastic bits is a circle of
life -- one microbe’s waste is another microbe’s dinner,” Mincer said. “We want to know more about how
some microbes may be hanging out on plastic trash, just waiting to be eaten by fish so they can get
into that environment.”