Petro Cap Aff
Petro Cap Aff ........................................................................................................................................ 1
Advantage—Petrocapitalism .................................................................................................... 2
Impact – Structural Violence.................................................................................................. 10
Impact Exceptionalism ............................................................................................................. 11
Advantage--Biopower ............................................................................................................... 13
Advantage--Ecology/Heidegger ........................................................................................... 23
VTL Heidegger Impact .............................................................................................................. 33
Digger Solvency ........................................................................................................................... 35
Advantage--Gender .................................................................................................................... 38
Plan .................................................................................................................................................. 44
Solvency ......................................................................................................................................... 45
2ac ......................................................................................................................................................... 51
A2 Materiality/Reps Key/F/W.............................................................................................. 52
Capitalism Focus Key ................................................................................................................ 56
A2: Squo Solves ........................................................................................................................... 58
Automobility focus Key ............................................................................................................ 59
Oil Focus Key ................................................................................................................................ 61
Oil Addiction Impacts ............................................................................................................... 63
Now Key ......................................................................................................................................... 66
Internal Link – Oil Anxiety ...................................................................................................... 67
Warming Impacts ....................................................................................................................... 69
Cars and Consumption ............................................................................................................. 72
Biktivism ........................................................................................................................................ 80
A2 Agency Arguments .............................................................................................................. 81
Extend Biopower Advantage ................................................................................................. 84
AT Econ Impacts ......................................................................................................................... 90
A2: Warming Impact ................................................................................................................. 92
Petro Capitalism Prereq to Warming ................................................................................. 96
A2: Alt Causalities/Cars not Cause Warming .................................................................. 99
A2 Feminism ..............................................................................................................................101
A2 Neolib .....................................................................................................................................103
At Cede the Political.................................................................................................................106
A2: Utilitarianism/Impact Helper ......................................................................................108
Peak Oil True ..............................................................................................................................110
A2: Ks ............................................................................................................................................112
A2 Pragmatism ..........................................................................................................................113
A2: Realism .................................................................................................................................117
A2: Inevitability.........................................................................................................................118
A2: Oil Shocks/Oil DA .............................................................................................................119
A2 Micro Politics Fails ............................................................................................................120
A2: T-active transportation ..................................................................................................121
Advantage—Petrocapitalism
Oil is the lifeblood of American political culture. The mindless maximization of
the consumption of oil is indissolubly tied to our national identity. The to
investigate oil addiction naturalizes America’s entitlement to oil
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the “American way of life”,”
Antipode, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp 465-486, 2009, azp)
Now that gasoline is seen as a particular use-value embedded in the value of
labor power, I move to consider the imagined use-value of gasoline in
particular. When discussing gasoline I seek to move beyond conceptions that
narrowly define use-value in its most immediate transportation benefits. I
contend that the use-value of gasoline is entangled in a wider cultural
imagination of nationhood. By situating gasoline’s use-value within wider notions
of a shared national identity, I follow Michael Billig’s (1995), and Benidict
Anderson’s (1983) calls to understand how nationalist sentiments are
reproduced through banal social practices. Gasoline consumption represents a
concrete, everyday practice through which Americans imagine their own national
community. Not only are many gas station forecourts plastered with countless
American flags (Billig 1995:39), but in my travels across the country, I have
encountered many gas stations with names such as Liberty, Freedom, and the chain
SuperAmerica. Indeed, gasoline stations are important symbols of what is
constructed as the “American way of life” 12—open roads, suburbia, unending
consumption and, most importantly, the freedom of mobility (Jakle and Sculle 1994;
Mann 2007:51–79; Nye 1998:236–237; Urry 2004). Much of the cultural
imagination of freedom promulgated by the Bush Administration (and all
administrations before it for that matter), is indissolubly linked to a spatial
imagination of freedom. In our cars and with our cheap fuel we can, literally,
go anywhere “from sea to shining sea”. This is emblematic not only of “our”
freedom but “our” imperial power over global oil reserves. Gasoline’s historical
emergence as a use-value must be seen as useful in the sense that it enables—by
literally providing energetic force— a whole set of practices that are constructed as
distinctly “American”. Access to and control over low-cost gasoline completely
structures ways in which most Americans live and experience space (Nye
1998:181; Thrift 2004). The practices of filling up, scanning streetscapes for prices,
observing the price increase as the fluid enters the gas tank, consuming the constant
media reports on its price, are precisely the types of lived systems that edify US
control over vast amounts of petroleum. As Nye (1998:236) puts it in the context of
the “shock” of the first energy crisis, “Americans had come to regard easy access to
inexpensive energy as their right. Driving had become a part of the inalienable
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To think of a world without
wide open highways, electrified homes, and cheap and abundant gasoline, is for
many, unimaginable. Illustrated nicely by Gulf Oil’s recent ad campaign slogan—
“Life . . . one mile at a time”13—the command over space powered by cheap oil gets
naturalized as a most basic aspect in the constitution of life itself.
As such, oil represents an intersection of social power. Its naturalization is
closely tied to the ways in which oil is represented by oil companies and
intervenes against capitalism’s theft of agency
Huber 2011 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “Oil, Life, and the Fetishism of Geopolitics, Capitalism Nature
Socialism, Vol.2 22, No. 3, 32-48, 2011, azp)
Unifying these discourses is a remarkable agency bestowed upon oil itself. How
does it do it? It doesn’t do anything. Oil has no inherent power outside the social
and political relations that produce it as such a ‘‘vital’’ resource. In fact,
according oil such tremendous social and political power is a prime example
of what Karl Marx referred to as fetishism.4 According to Marx (1976, 1,005),
fetishism is rooted in circumstances where ‘‘certain social relations appear as
the natural properties of things in society.’’ As capitalism is governed through
abstract, impersonal, and ultimately reified relations of exchange, particular
objects or things*the railroad, the Internet, the nation-state, and oil*‘‘appear as
autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own’’ (Marx 1976, 165). The power
of a thing does not appear as it really is*the product of social relations*but rather,
‘‘as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, the socio-natural
properties of these things’’ (Marx 1976, 164165). Thus, the power of oil appears
to be rooted in its ‘‘socio-natural properties’’*rather than the particular
historical geographies and social relations that metabolize the capacities of oil in
particular ways. Of course, petroleum contains very particular ‘‘socio-natural
properties’’ that have become essential to its ‘‘centrality’’ in particular historical
circumstances. For example, it contains an unparallelled energy density, a liquid
propensity to flow (providing cheap transport), and, in most cases, a subterranean
location surrounding tremendous gas and/or water pressure which force it to the
surface when tapped (i.e., making it easier to extract than coal or other hard rock
minerals). Moreover, petroleum itself is a hydrocarbon assemblage that not only
provides energy, but also a molecular drawing board allowing chemists to transfix
the molecules into thousands of useful commodities from pesticides to plastics.
These properties themselves are ultimately finite products of the millions of years of
‘‘buried sunshine’’ that was once marine plant life such as phytoplankton (Mitchell
2009, 401). Thus, it would be a mistake to ignore the materiality of oil (Bakker
and Bridge 2006), though oil’s biophysical capacities are only realizable through
particular uneven social relations of culture, history, and power. Indeed, as many
have pointed out (e.g., Yergin 1991, 7-8), many cultures through ancient history
have made use of petroleum (usually the kind that seeped to the surface) for a
variety of purposes from medicine to waterproofing, but it took very particular
historical circumstances and sociotechnical relations to produce the ‘‘use
values’’ we now enjoy from petroleum.
Likewise, oil’s centrality to the American psyche reveals that the status quo
attempt to sequester anxieties over unsustainable oil consumption is
implicated in a broader fear of uncertainty
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the “American way of life”,”
Antipode, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp 465-486, 2009, azp)
Gasoline’s position within the imaginative geography of nationhood comes
with a dark side—the specter of “foreign oil”. This banal calling of nationhood
reflects the routine insideness/outsideness so common to what ´O Tuathail and
Dalby (1998:5) refer to as “popular geopolitics”. Not only is oil constructed as
foreign and outside (despite continued high levels of domestic production in the
US), but culturally implicated with the threat of terrorism and danger (see
Schlosser 2006). Oil companies and politicians need merely claim their policy
prescriptions aim to lessen our dependence on “foreign oil” and they garner
immediate legitimacy. In February 2007, the first “terror-free oil” gasoline
station opened up in Omaha, NE; claiming their gas was refined from oil produced
only in the USA and Canada (although commentators agreed global oil markets
render such a claim difficult to make; see Byron 2007).Because access to cheap oil
is seen as an internal prerequisite of life, it becomes an external source of
cultural anxiety about foreignness (D. Campbell 2005). The structured
coherence of everyday livelihood strategies combine with cultural
imaginaries of nationhood, to deem access to and control over cheap gasoline
as a natural, commonsensical right. Following Joseph (2002), it is plain to see
how use-values entrenched within ideas of community serve to supplement the
circulation of particular kinds of value. The practice of gasoline consumption in
everyday life does not require the consumer to give second thought to
complex socioecological impacts of global oil provisioning (Bridge 2008; Emel
et al 2002;Watts 2005), the wars fought over its access (Jhaveri 2004, Watts
2004), or the US’s extremely cheap energy market in relation to the rest of the
world (GAO 2005:44). Rather, hegemonic discourses naturalize gas consumption in
practice as only an isolated consumer “choice”; thereby reproducing the
entrenched power structures embedded in the overall totality of petrocapitalism. Furthermore, the constant interventions of these historically
embedded use-values consistently act as barriers to taking sustained political
action to reduce oil consumption; no matter how obvious such reforms are
increasingly positioned.
This fundamental uncertainty has grim implications for the direction of
American foreign policy. The history of oil acquisition is written in blood – the
seizure of petroleum occurs through dispossession, accompanied by violence
and colonial brutality. As long as oil remains as the constitutive locus of
American foreign policy the oil industry will consciously destabilize the Middle
East in order to prolong an era of profit and military adventurism.
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the “American way of life”,”
Antipode, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp 465-486, 2009, azp)
How have critical geographers and other social theorists conceptualized this
dynamically changing political economy of oil? Because of the highly volatile
and sometimes overtly imperial relations that shape control over petroleum
reserves, most of the critical literature almost exclusively focuses upon the
geopolitical economy of petroleum production (see Bina 2004; Bromley 2005;
Harvey 2003; Hiro 2007; Klare 2004; Le Billon and El Khatib 2004; Retort
2005; Vitalis 2007; Watts 2005). Conflicts over oil arise precisely because of
the fragmented geography of low-cost reserves (Labban 2008), that is, most lowcost, “valuable” reserves1 lie within specific nation-states distant from oil
intensive industrial societies in the US, Europe, Japan, and now China. The history
of conflict over this particular geography of low-cost oil is—to borrow a phrase
(Marx 1976 [1867]:875)—“written in . . . blood and fire”. This history contains not
only the politics of conflict and compromise over the distribution of value (and
rent) between oil capitals and what Coronil (1997:8) calls “landlord states” (see
Emel and Huber 2008), but also how petroleum is seized through what Harvey
(2003) calls “accumulation by dispossession” accompanied by war, violence and
theft (see also Jhaveri 2004; Le Billon and El Khatib 2004). Moreover, Watts (2005),
along with Retort (2005), demonstrates the insidious links between petrodollar
wealth and the arms trade in the Middle East—or, the “Weapondollar–petrodollar
coalition” (Nitzan and Bichler 2002). In crucial ways, oil is not only an object of
military conflict; it not only literally fuels the war machine (planes, tanks,
hummvees); it also finances war and conflict. Although Retort sits in
uncomfortable proximity to Nitzan and Bichler’s (2002) conspiratorial explanations
of the trajectory of oil prices (Balakrishan 2005:12–15)— suggesting that US policy
consciously destabilizes the Middle East to keep oil prices high and appease a
host of financial, military and construction interests2—it is crucial to
understand how oil’s “liquid” qualities (in the financial and physical sense) are not a
boon to Big Oil alone, but also, wider circuits of petrodollar investment. The value
of oil, however, cannot be realized through the control over reserves and the
process of production alone. As Karatani (2003:223) put it, “regardless of what
happens in the process of production, surplus value is finally realized in the process
of circulation”. What Harvey (2003:25) calls “the global oil spigot”—referring to
the Middle East— can only be realized in markets for exchange. In order to
conceive of capital as a process of value in motion one must understand production,
distribution, exchange and consumption as “not . . . identical, but . . . members of a
totality, distinctions within a unity” (Marx 1973[1857]:99). In the emerging
literature, the massive oil consumption market within the United States is
often treated as a taken-for-granted backdrop to the dramatic geopolitical
conflicts over oil reserves. This focus persists despite the fact that this consumer
market constitutes just under 25% of the global total and nearly more than China,
Japan, Russia, Germany and India combined (EIA 2006).3 These massive patterns
of petroleum consumption are not given, but co-constitutive of the historical
specificities and sociospatial relations embedded within whatWatts (2004:195)
calls “petro-capitalism”.4 This demands not only a critical geography of oil value
production, but also of circulation.
And, great power wars are inevitable while oil remains the core criterion for
political action – the finitude of oil reserves combined with a history of OPEC
antagonism makes confrontation unavoidable.
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “Lifeblood: Geographies of Petro-Capitalism in the United States”,”
Graduate dissertation, Submitted to the faculty of Clark University-WorcesterMassachusetts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Geography, May 2009, azp)
Thus, the third contradiction of US oil governance is now expressed in popular
discourse through a recursive trope - "our increasing dependence upon
foreign oil." Yet, the political problematization of "foreign oil" is best
understood as emerging out of the historical experience detailed in this
dissertation - that is, a largely self-sufficient national form of petro-capitalism.
Given that almost every other major petroleum producer has not been a major
petroleum consumer (except to a lesser degree, the USSR), the specificity of the
American petro-capitalist experience cannot be overstated. As detailed in
chapter 4, oil fired Fordism was reproduced through a particular set of institutional
mechanisms meant to balance domestic supply with domestic demand. As the US
was the number one oil producer and consumer throughout the middle of the
twentieth century, this system basically created a nationally circumscribed oil
market. With the peak of US domestic production in 1970 at around 9.6 million
barrels per day with demand already rising around 14.7 million barrels (Energy
Information Administration 2007b;2008a), the social construction of "foreign oil"
underwent a dramatic sociopolitical reorganization. The OPEC oil embargo placed
the US at the mercy of exporting nations in the Middle East for the first time in
history.80 Suddenly "foreign oil" was constructed as a problem from the
perspective of consumption and the wage-relation. Because petro-capitalism
requires the provision of not only cheap, but also reliable flows of petroleum, OPEC
began to represent an "external" threat to the lifeblood of American society
and national identity. Since the "peak" of US oil production, a new global
regime of oil provision emerged. Although the United States has imported the
majority of its oil from a number of non-Middle Eastern nations (e.g. Canada,
Mexico, Venezuela), the large percentage of reserves and transportation
infrastructure in the Middle East guaranteed it as the strategic center of global oil
governance. The conflation between US national security interests and Middle
Eastern oil was officially acknowledged through the "Carter Doctrine" of 1980.
Jimmy Carter declared that any threat to the control of Middle Eastern oil "will be
repelled by any means necessary, including military force" (Carter quoted in, Klare
2004: 3-4). This entailed several Pentagon bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and, now,
Iraq and the general militarization of the Middle East (Jhaveri 2004; Klare 2004; Le
Billon and El Khatib 2004). It also required the financial and military support of
repressive oil regimes like Saudi Arabia and Nigeria (Watts 2006; Vitalis 2007). The
decline of US production capacity necessitated a scalar strategy of forging bilateral
trading agreements with particular nations granting privileged access to the US's
vast oil consumer market (Jaffe 2004). Of course, the most significant agreement is
the "special relationship" between Saudi Arabia and the United States (Klare 2004;
Vitalis 2007). During the Fordist national oil regime described in chapter four, this
special relationship was characterized by the dominance of American oil capital in
Saudi oil production. Since the 1970s, however, it has also meant the considerable
flow of Saudi oil into the United States for consumption.81 As control over oil
production and transportation facilities becomes increasingly contested, it sets the
conditions for further conflict between landlord-producing states Venezuela, Russia,
Iran, Saudi Arabia- and consuming countries in the USA, Europe, and,
increasingly, China and India. Thus, the world's oil resources exist upon a
terrain of geopolitical conflict amongst nation-states, international oil capitals,
and national oil companies. This variety of interests and factions are beset by
the scalar preconditions of international oil conflict - the fact that, oil exists in
fixed territorial spaces under the jurisdiction of a particular state (c.f., Labban
2008). The contemporary question is: are we living through a moment where the
decline of global spare capacity - one prerequisite for market stability and cheap
(enough) prices - takes us as much by surprise as the sudden disappearance of US
spare capacity did? With the onset of the current global economic crisis, it seems as
if this prospect has been substantially postponed. Oil demand is decreasing
everywhere from China to the United States (Mouawad 2008). However, a recent
International Energy Agency Report (2008) suggests that production declines
within some of the most historically prolific producing countries (Russia, Mexico,
Venezuela, and even, possibly Saudi Arabia (Simmons 2005)) forebode oil supply
constraints immediately upon the recovery from the global economic slowdown.
The question is - as indicated above - how vigorous will the demand for petroleum
be in the context of a projected (or at least hoped for) economic recovery?
Defiance against the brutal system of petro-capitalism must begin at the level
of the self. We think it’s important to acknowledge individual complicity.
Everyday actions, at the local level, inform global power and energy struggles.
It is necessary to critically inquire into the structures we participate in that prop
up the hegemony of petro-capitalism.
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “Lifeblood: Geographies of Petro-Capitalism in the United States”,”
Graduate dissertation, Submitted to the faculty of Clark University-WorcesterMassachusetts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Geography, May 2009, azp)
How is hegemony realized in the system of oil governance? Popular
conceptions of the oil industry always envision large, powerful, integrated oil
businesses prone to monopoly, price gouging and environmental destruction from the Standard Oil monopoly revealed by Ida Tarbell (1904) to today's landscape
of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, global climate change, high gas prices and super-profits
all wrought by "Big oil" (Yergin 1991; Olien and Olien 2000). These conceptions
promote a theory of power that suggests "Big" oil companies have simply
captured the state overtly and directed it toward selfish ends. Many books in
the past and present have advanced this point of view (Tarbell 1904; Sampson
1975; Blair 1977; Engler 1977; McElroy 2006). While this theory of "Big oil"
domination does hold kernels of truth, it does not reveal the precariousness
and complexity of power relations in capitalist society - that is, it doesn't
capture how the hegemony of multinational oil capital is achieved through a
set of tactical bargains and strategic compromises appeasing certain social
blocs. Gramsci (1971: 161) describes the complexity of hegemony: Undoubtedly
the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and
the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that
a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed - in other words, that the
leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But there
is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the
essential; for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic,
must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading
group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. As I will demonstrate in
chapter four, while it may be appropriate to conceptualize "Big oil" as the
"leading group," it is crucial to understand how "Big oil's" power is
reproduced only through a set of "sacrifices of the economic-corporate kind" to
what I call "little oil" or small, high-cost "independent" producers - and "the
consuming public." While others have emphasized the role of petty commodity
production in legitimating capitalist ideologies of laissez-faire in agriculture (de
Janvry 1981), fisheries (Mann 2007) and other natural resource industries (Walker
2001), the role of oil producers has received less attention. In addition to purely
economic "sacrifices," hegemony requires the production of "ethico-political"
meanings, ideas and cultural practices that lend legitimacy to power and
domination. By "ethico-political", I refer to Gramsci's (1971: 167) focus on the
realm of meaning and the forces of "persuasion and consent" (ibid: 299) in making
power and domination appear logical, just and commonsensical in the absence of
"brute coercion" (298). Thus, Big oil's domination is also reproduced through
powerful ideological narratives of oil consumption as necessary to a
sacrosanct "American way of life" and oil production founded on ideas of "the
little guy," competition, and private property.
Impact – Structural Violence
Complicity in automobility is slaughter – the processes by which oil is obtained
are murderous, and individual complacency perpetuates the system.
Böhm et al 2006 (Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Chris Land, Mat Paterson,
Steffen Böhm is Professor in Management and Sustainability at the University
of Essex, The Sociological Review, Vol. 54, Issue supplement s1, pp 1-16,
October 2006, “Part One Conceptualizing Automobility: Introduction:
Impossibilities of automobility,” azp)
A second antagonism, which seems well established and understood today, points to
the concerns about ecological sustainability of the contemporary regime of
automobility. Automobile use contributes significantly to three principal forms
of environmental degradation. It contributes significantly to the depletion of
non-renewable resources, notably oil (including production of plastics), rubber,
platinum, lead, aluminium and iron (Freund & Martin, 1993: 17–19). It is important
in the generation of a range of pollution problems, including urban air pollution,
acid rain, global warming, and water pollution from road building and run-off.
Finally, it dominates space, especially urban space, accounting for in the extreme
case of Los Angeles 67 percent of all space, and has contributed to the radical reorganization of urban space which means towns and cities are now much more
spread out, both displacing land from other uses and transforming the use of cars
themselves from choice to necessity. There are a range of potential technological
fixes for this environmental antagonism, which is built into the regime of
automobility, but only the most technologically optimistic (eg, Hawken, Lovins and
Lovins, 2000) suggest that it can be resolved by a series of technological fixes. The
dependency on oil, a natural resource which, when burnt, creates vast
environmental problems ranging from air pollution to global warming, defines the
third antagonism of automobility. The fact that oil is a scarce resource, which
has only a finite lifetime (most suggesting a century at best), yet is the single
most important fuel for the organization of mass transport, connects the regime
of automobility to a host of global geopolitical problems. To satisfy the developed
world’s thirst for oil, access to cheap oil has to be maintained and enormous
amounts of money have to be spent in order to explore, produce, transport,
refine and store oil so that it can finally be consumed at a petrol station in
Washington, London or Berlin. Automobility is not just a system of car transport; it
is a defining geopolitical factor that may even influence governments’ decisions to
go to war (see Martin-Jones, this volume). In this sense automobility quite literally
kills, even though the victims of these wars remain largely invisible to the
driver gliding through post-industrial suburbia.
Impact Exceptionalism
The reproduction of oil-centric discourse is inextricably tied to the Eurocentric
basis of modern capitalism. The class compromise that enabled petrocapitalism as we know it also enabled the widespread ecological and social
inequity that underpins American exceptionalism.
Huber 2011 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “Oil, Life, and the Fetishism of Geopolitics, Capitalism Nature
Socialism, Vol.2 22, No. 3, 32-48, 2011, azp)
This new ‘‘way of life’’ centered upon something Marx theorized the proletariat as
without*property, or specifically a home on a parcel of land. As early as the 1920s,
leaders of the capitalist state in the United States saw homeownership as a
possible financial and ideological anchor of capitalist social reproduction. In
1922, Calvin Coolidge published a tract entitled ‘‘A Nation of Homeowners’’ where
he posited capitalism would be saved if it could ‘‘demonstrate . . . that property
is of the people’’ (quoted in Archer 2005, 263). When he was Secretary of
Commerce, Herbert Hoover wrote in a bestselling book, American Individualism,
that homeowners ‘‘have an interest in the advancement of a social system that
permits individuals to store the fruits of their labor’’ (quoted in Archer 2005, 264).
By the 1930s, the Great Depression and New Deal response gave Franklin
Roosevelt the political capital to use the power of the state to build roads and
other infrastructure in massive public works projects for an increasingly
suburbanized geography (Cohen 2003; Katz 2009). With the Federal Housing
Administration and the Home Owners Loan Corporation, credit was extended to
masses of potential (white, middle-to-upper-income) homeowners (Florida and
Jonas 1991). In combination with public infrastructure, FDR claimed that the
automobile ‘‘made it possible for those of us who live in cities to get out into
the country, whole families at a time’’ (quoted in Flink 1975, 181). Although
many have noted the New Deal inner circle’s concern with spurring purchasing
power and mass consumption (e.g., Brinkley 1995; Reich 2010), the extension of
home ownership to the masses was also seen by FDR as ‘‘a guarantee of social
and economic stability . . .’’ (New York Times 1933). Thus, in the face of crisis, the
institutional and state construction of this new ‘‘American way of life’’ represented
an economic and ideological project to rescue capitalism as a whole. Fordism was
not possible simply because of Ford’s $5 per day wage. It also emerged out of the
concrete victories of labor with the Wagner Act of 1935 and the establishment of the
National Labor Relations Board. This unprecedented labor victory would not have
occurred without the explosion of labor unrest and unemployed council struggles in
1934 that forced the Roosevelt Administration to take the concerns of labor
seriously (Piven and Cloward 1977; Davis 1986; Cohen 1991). These victories
brought minor but not insignificant rights for workers to organize and collectively
bargain with their employers. FDR and other New Deal policymakers saw these
reforms as a critical step in the rescue of capitalism in the global context of rising
fascism and communism. As Senator Wagner himself stated, ‘‘let men know that
they are free in their daily lives, and they will never bow to tyranny in any quarter of
their national life . . . .’’ (New York Times 1937). Only through this ‘‘capital-labor
accord’’ were relatively high wages assured for a widening (but by no means
exhaustive) spectrum of the white working class in the United States who now
could actually afford homes, cars, and countless other things dependent upon
petroleum products (Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf 1986). With these high
wages came the increasing commodification of many forms of social
reproduction. For example, the mortgage commodified one’s life itself through its
linkages to a life of debt and entanglement within financial circuits (Katz 2009).
Moreover, the very geography of everyday life*simply the vast travel from
home to work*necessitated massive amounts of commodities. Thus, the ‘‘class
compromise’’ was also a kind of ecological compromise that ensured the basic
social reproduction of capitalism, and its ideological legitimation was
contingent upon a profligate ‘‘standard of living’’ based around massive material
and energy consumption and the production of waste.
Advantage--Biopower
The quest for perfect transportation infrastruction and the delusion of the
atomistic individual at the heart of the status quo obsession with cars is
indicative of a broader attempt by systems of control to manage the population
Urry 2004, (John, Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, “The 'System' of
Automobility,” Theory, Culture & Society, Oct 1, 2004,p. 28,
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/21/4-5/25.full.pdf+html).
Automobility has irreversibly set in train new socialities, of commuting, family life,
community, leisure, the pleasures of movement and so on.2 The growth in
automobility has principally involved new movement and not the replacement of
public transport by the car (Adams, 1999; Vigar, 2002: 12). David Begg of the UK
Centre for Integrated Transport definitively notes that: ‘Most car journeys were
never made by public transport. The car’s flexibility has encouraged additional
journeys to be made’ (quoted in Stradling, 2002). These new mobilities result
from how the car is immensely flexible and wholly coercive .
Automobility is a source of freedom, the ‘freedom of the road’. Its flexibility
enables the car-driver to travel at any time in any direction along the complex road
systems of western societies that link together most houses, workplaces and leisure
sites (and are publicly paid for). Cars extend where people can go to and hence what
they are literally able to do. Much ‘social life’ could not be undertaken without the
flexibilities of the car and its 24hour availability. It is possible to leave late by car, to
miss connections, to travel in a relatively time-less fashion.
But this flexibility is necessitated by automobility. The ‘structure of auto space’
(Freund, 1993; Kunstler, 1994) forces people to orchestrate in complex and
heterogeneous ways their mobilities and socialities across very significant
distances. The urban environment has ‘unbundled’ territorialities of home,
work, business and leisure that historically were closely integrated, and
f ragmented social practices in shared public spaces (SceneSusTech, 1998).
Automobility divides workplaces from homes, producing lengthy commutes into
and across the city. It splits homes and business districts, undermining local retail
outlets to which one might have walked or cycled, eroding town-centres, non-car
pathways and public spaces. It separates homes and leisure sites often only
available by motorized transport. Members of families are split up since they live
in distant places involving complex travel to meet up even intermittently.
People inhabit congestion, jams, temporal uncertainties and healththreatening city environments, as a consequence of being encapsulated in a
domestic, cocooned, moving capsule.
Automobility is thus a system that coerces people into an intense flexibility. It forces
people to juggle fragments of time so as to deal with the temporal and spatial
constraints that it itself generates. Automobility is a Frankenstein-created
monster, extending the individual into realms of freedom and flexibility
whereby inhabiting the car can be positively viewed and energetically
campaigned and fought for, but also constraining car ‘users’ to live their lives
in spatially stretched and time-compressed ways. The car is the literal ‘iron
cage’ of modernity, motorized, moving and domestic.
Likewise, the automobility regime reveals a problematic mode of subjectivity in
which individuals internalize their separateness from others as a prerequisite to
gaining political recognition—those who don’t buy in are rendered deviant
Böhm et al 2006 (Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Chris Land, Mat Paterson,
Steffen Böhm is Professor in Management and Sustainability at the University
of Essex, The Sociological Review, Vol. 54, Issue supplement s1, pp 1-16,
October 2006, “Part One Conceptualizing Automobility: Introduction:
Impossibilities of automobility,” azp)
The third element involves a regime of subjectivity. Again, there are several
elements here. Perhaps the most fundamental is the intertwining of automobile
discourses with those of individualism, where the two mutually inform and support
each other (see especially Rajan and Thacker, this volume). In many respects the
subject of automobility is also the subject of the contemporary political arena.
Particularly assumed in neo-liberal formations of the subject is the idea that
an individual is self-motivating. Whether voting or consuming, the subject should
know its own mind and interests and act in accordance with them. The subject
so conceived is, or should be, both autonomous from external control and selfmoving as opposed to the victim of external influence. A chain of equivalence
is constructed whereby to drive is to embody a modernist subjectivity (see
Thacker, this volume), and to be in favour of such a subjectivity is to regard
driving as unproblematically legitimate (Lomasky, 1997). Such a chain of
equivalence creates at the same time a normalization of driving and car
ownership – that car driving is what normal people do – which both produces and is
legitimized by the construction of alternative modes as deviant. ‘Margaret Thatcher
once said that a man who after the age of 30 finds himself on a bus can count himself
a failure in life’ (Parris, 2003). Cyclists, for example, are routinely rendered as
deviant, both in planning processes which assume their non-existence, and
where the car driver is manifestly the ‘normal subject’, and in more active
moral panics such as the one about ‘lycra louts’ (see Fincham, this volume). Such
normalizations frequently involve differentiation of subjectivities around
standard categories of class, gender or race. These serve to produce hierarchies of
difference among car drivers, with different makes and models serving to signify
(and be signified by) different subject positions along these lines, and also
serving as sites of resistance to this subjectification, as in the appropriation of
BMWs by African Americans serving to signify a certain resistance to such
racial hierarchies (Gilroy, 2001), and of course to the policing of such boundaries
as these drivers are then harassed for being seen in cars regarded as inappropriate
for their ‘station’. But these categories also produce such differentiated
subjectivities through their intertwining with patterns of car ownership itself
– with access to jobs and services structured significantly by access to cars,
poverty (itself already gender and ethnically differentiated) is automobilized.
Specifically, automobility is a tool for political repression - in the 60s, the hitchhiker was vilified to limit their mobility and disenfranchise them.
Packer 07, (Jeremy, Associate professor in the School for Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, “Automobility and the driving force of warfare: From
public safety to national security,” Conference lectured at the Symposium
"Architectures of fear. Terrorism and the Future of Urbanism in the West" CCCB 1718 May 2007, http://www.publicspace.org/ca/text-biblioteca/eng/b032automobility-and-the-driving-force-of-warfare-from-public-safety-to-nationalsecurity).
This “new normal” is both a historical period, hence “new”, but one that predicts its
own longevity, it is now “normal”. The question remains to what degree safety as the
animating logic for governing automobility will indeed be replaced by concerns over
national security. Regardless of the extent to which it comes to define how
automobility comes to be governed and the longevity of its application, a number of
key concerns need to be reiterated in terms of what the effects of such a
transformation might be. Most generally safety has been used as a means for
legitimating a number of restrictive measures on the mobility of subjugated
populations over the past 50-plus years in the United States. This by no means
undermines the relative gains made in the survival rate of traffic accidents or the
number of fatalities per 1,000,000 miles driven (the most widely used statistical
measure). It does however seriously call into question the legitimacy of safety as the
only means for determining policy initiatives regarding automobility. Furthermore,
care has been taken to expand the debate beyond a simple binary opposition
between freedom and rights vs. regulation and public good. Automobility provides a
perfect example for how freedom and regulation operate in a symbiotic relationship,
not simply in opposition to each other. Of far greater importance, debate regarding
safety and automobility needs to acknowledge how different populations are
adversely affected and unfairly targeted by many safety crises and subsequent
crackdowns.
For instance, during the late 1960s and early 1970s hitchhiking in the U.S. was
a means for youth to organize and build community across vast spaces and in
specific locales. It also aided in amassing radical protesters throughout the U.S.
during a period often glorified for just such political engagement. Lastly, it
provided a form of mobility necessary, where none existed, to the everyday lives of
young people making their way through a life-period generally characterized by
relative economic disenfranchisement. In spite of, or more likely due to, these
uses, police, legislators, and public interest groups joined forces to outlaw,
villainize, and severely curtail hitchhiking by citing concerns for the safety of
young people, young women in particular. Such an example points out the
limitations of thinking about mobility purely in terms of individual rights. When
particular forms of mobility are a means of constructing and maintaining
community and cultural affiliation, as well as a possible means for activating
political participation, the simple discourse of individual rights fails to
acknowledge the complexities of culture and power. As such, it is both a
violation of civil rights to unduly profile any given segment of the population for
harassment, citation, and possible arrest (the three are very intricately linked as one
very often leads to the other). But of equal or greater importance, this sort of
profiling is an attack on the very mechanism through which these groups
build, perform, and negotiate their cultural identities and their place in the
larger society in which they operate. When examining the effects of post 9/11
racial profiling, we need to examine closely the economic, cultural and political
effects such profiling has upon the profiled in terms of their ability to maintain the
international community ties that so often mark the space of their already liminal
existence.
And it strengthens social inequality- - claims of safety are used to ensure
continuation of the repressive SQ.
Packer 07, (Jeremy, Associate professor in the School for Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, “Automobility and the driving force of warfare: From
public safety to national security,” Conference lectured at the Symposium
"Architectures of fear. Terrorism and the Future of Urbanism in the West" CCCB 1718 May 2007, http://www.publicspace.org/ca/text-biblioteca/eng/b032automobility-and-the-driving-force-of-warfare-from-public-safety-to-nationalsecurity).
A photo of a mushroom cloud rising above the waves of what can only be imagined
by an American audience as a far-off tropical land, featured this caption, “Today’s
great problem is modern man’s control of power”. This second metaphor was both
timely, seeing as the atomic bomb was newly configuring global relations of power,
and prescient, given the political changes in the U.S. that have followed the attacks of
9/11/2001. As Whitney explained over 50 years ago, “inteligent control” (italics in
the original) was the means for dealing with “power” whether it be “obtained from
atomic fission, or from the combustion of a gasoline-air mixture” (Whitney, 1949, p.
4). This shift in emphasis from “self-discipline” to “inteligent control” mirrors
the broad shift described as that from a disciplinary society to a control
society (Deleuze, 1995). Automobility provides not only a useful example for
understanding how such a shift has been occurring, but it will be argued that
recently formulated means for controlling automobility are experiments for
the more general control of mobile populations. Strange as it may seem, the
automobile’s power is no longer simply metaphorically related to war. For the War
on Terror and U.S. Homeland Security, the automobile needs to be controlled
precisely because it has come to be problematized as a bomb.
Altering driving behavior over the past 100-plus years through scare tactics, traffic
rules, education programs, and surveillance has been a massive undertaking by a
cluster of invested governing agencies. I have previously shown (Packer, 2008) how
a series of safety crises have created different problematic mobile populations
which have been the target for disciplining. Women, youth, motorcyclists,
transportation laborers, and racial minorities have all been represented as
automotive threats to themselves and others. As groups who historically have
been lacking in political, economic, and cultural capital gained access to
automobility or created different forms of automobility, their mobile behavior
was popularly represented as dangerous. These “threats” were almost
exclusively responded to in terms of traffic safety and police surveillance. If the
danger they posed is instead understood in terms of how increased mobility
disrupts social order, then safety, at least partially, needs to be understood in
political terms. One question that follows is: “How has safety been used as a
means for altering or maintaining asymmetric relations of power?” This is not
just a question though of who gets to drive and with how much latitude as if the
equation is simply automobility=freedom=equality. Automobility and the
freedom it promises need also to be understood as an obligation. The systems
of automobility in the United States and other highly industrialized countries
very often nearly demand that one must drive a car. Thus, the disciplining of
mobility organized through traffic safety is a means for keeping other
interconnected economic and social systems running smoothly, including
systems of social inequality. With this said, the relationship between the state and
citizen under a rubric of safety could be described as a sort of paternalism, or what
Michel Foucault has described as pastoralism (Foucault, 1982). In this conception of
automobility, each paternal subject of the state, the “safe citizen” (Packer, 2003), is
looked after as an individual subject worthy of care and protection as an integral
part of the population as a whole, even if safety campaigns were at the same time
maintaining other forms of social and political inequality. There is an assumed
symbiotic relationship between the two in which what is good for the individual
subject further benefits the population more generally. Health, or the maintenance
and creation of the productive capacity of the body – biopower, provides a good
example. The general health of the society, the “public health”, depends upon the
relative health of the individuals of which it is comprised. Healthier individuals, for
instance, minimize the spread of communicable disease, decrease the overall strain
placed on the health care system, which allows for the better allocation of medical
resources, which leads to healthier individuals, and so on. Traffic safety has been
similarly imagined and in fact is, in some governmental quarters, treated as a public
health issue. In order to create a safe driving environment, each individual’s
driving behavior is targeted for alteration both for their own benefit and the
benefit of other drivers. Thus, a safe driving environment depends upon safe
individual drivers, and the safer the environment, the safer each individual. Two
coalescing changes in the political formulation of citizen to state are altering this
formulation for the governance of automobility. The first will be characterized as a
shift in how automobility, and mobility more generally, is problematized. The
second alteration was initially popularized in the 1930s, but has really gained
administrative force since the 1960s when technological solutions to traffic safety
were beginning to be imagined as more effective than driving behavior
modification.7 Increasingly, the technological solutions as noted above are enabled
by C3 networks with the military often initiating their development.
Likewise, the founding dream of the auto industry and squo infrastructure
inevestment is that of the driverless car and a frictionless highway system, a
dream inextricably linked to state surveillance.
Packer 07, (Jeremy, Associate professor in the School for Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, “Automobility and the driving force of warfare: From
public safety to national security,” Conference lectured at the Symposium
"Architectures of fear. Terrorism and the Future of Urbanism in the West" CCCB 1718 May 2007, http://www.publicspace.org/ca/text-biblioteca/eng/b032automobility-and-the-driving-force-of-warfare-from-public-safety-to-nationalsecurity).
As one of the earliest, and certainly the most widely cited and recognized of these,
GM’s Norman bel Geddes-designed “Highways and Horizons” (more often called
“Futurama”) exhibit, provided what would become a fairly common sensibility
of what this future world might look like. In this vision, cars were radio
controlled – a feat accomplished in 1924, in which the car was said to be driven “as
if a phantom were at the wheel” (New York Times, 1925). Somehow the frightening
otherworldly nature of these technological feats would soon disappear. The set of
six enormous dioramas were viewed by Fair visitors from their moving seats which
ran on a track surrounding the exhibit. Futurama envisioned a highway system that
seamlessly drifted into, through, and back out of the rapidly expanding “Midwestern
City of 1960”. The driverless automobile and its attendant highway system was
not only the engine for suburban expansion, but also an individuated coach to the
furthest reaches of the U.S. where mountains, the monotony of the plains, and vast
bodies of water all would easily be surmounted in a mere 20 years in the future.
Thus, the automobile would motor commerce and family adventure; free
markets aligned with the freedom of movement said to be part of the natural
make-up of everyday-Americans’ frontier spirit. It is vitally important to note
that it is a vision of the automobile as a vision of the future. The automobile
was conceived of as the key to both understanding and implementing a
supposed better life, a freer, yet controllable future . GM would revisit the
future numerous times over the next six decades, most notably with their 1964
update of Futurama again at the New York World’s Fair. During the 1950s the future
popped up all over the place for GM. In particular their Firebird series of cars (the
“laboratory on wheels”) with its turbine engine, was presented as “an amazing
experience in automatic car control”. In addition to showing up at promotional
events and GM’s various Motorama exhibits, the car appeared in GM’s 1956 womentargeted short Design for Dreaming (produced by Victor Solow), in which the driver
proclaims “Firebird II to control tower, we are about to take off on the highway of
tomorrow”, at which point the happily middle-class couple drive into the future. The
Firebird’s electronic guidance system was said to be ready for the “electronic
highway of the future” which GM, along with GE and others, flirted with throughout
the decade. Given the post-war/cold-war intermingling of scientific exuberance and
anxiety, GM’s auto-future is no great surprise as it offers up a vision of social
progress through better science and personal satisfaction through the consumption
of the fruits of that science. But, at a time when the Interstate Highway System was
just beginning to really take off in its already-antiquated, non-electronic form, the
notion that what America needed was a new system, prior to the implementation of
the original, seems now more than simply a bit far-fetched. What does become
clear is the long-standing desire for a truly free, yet electronically controlled
freeway system. The freedom derived from the task of driving is, however,
always dependent upon an obligation to an electronic system. This electronic
highway would pass from designer’s dream to traffic engineer’s Holy Grail. The U.S.
Department of Transportation’s Urban Freeway Surveilance and Control: State of
the Art (or more accurately, art of the state) presented an auto-centric conception of
how auto-control might look. This particular vision of control appeared in 1972,
before a number of events radically changed the driving environment, including the
OPEC oil crisis, extensive emissions controls, and safety standards that were just
beginning to appear.
And, this fabricated form of agency convinces us to cede political agencyrisking the creation of a totalitarian state.
Sieler 2003, (Cotton, Associate professor of American studies, “Statist Means to
Individualist Ends: Subjectivity, Automobility, and the Cold-War State,” American
Studies, 44:3 (Fall 2003), p. 23,
https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/viewFile/3015/2974).
Jean Baudrillard, driving the colossal and tortuous Los Angeles freeways in the
1980s, observed that, despite automobility's much-hailed emancipatory
sensations, "the freeway is a place of integration," its codes constantly
organizing "a total collective act." One feels the rush of freedom (the "truly
profound pleasure . . . of keeping on the move") amid the mandatory protocols
and procedures of highway driving.104 Joan Didion has noted that the highway
offers "the only secular communion Los Angeles has," a pleasurable submission to
the stream of traffic. For the protagonist of Didion's novel Play It As It Lays, driving
the freeways is both a way to feel a small degree of agency and a singularly effective
tranquilizer; elsewhere Didion describes the participation in the freeway
community of motion as requiring "a total surrender, a concentration so intense as
to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway."105 More recently, Margaret
Morse has described the "virtual" practice of freeway driving as enabling the
"derealisation" of the subject: the driver sits "in a realm of passage, both over the
outside world and from inside an idyllic, intensely private, steel-enclosed world of
relative safety."106 I contend that, like Riesmanian autonomy, which struck a
balance between a robust inner individualism and outward acquiescence to social
norms, driving enables an affirmative performance of energy, speed, and
motion as it diminishes other types of individual agency.
Christopher Newfield has recently examined the specific features of the American
individualism deriving most directly from Emerson. Emersonian individualism,
Newfield argues, has contributed to and normalized a subjectivity of submission, in
which the individual, instead of expanding his personal autonomy and political
agency, abdicates both. According to Newfield, the linguistic blandishments of
individualism, self-reliance, and independence that surround the liberal subject
disguise its actual status as a subjectivity of accommodation and obedience through
which "nondemocratic modes of democratic governance continue to actualize
themselves." Newfield sees ample evidence of this "Emerson effect" in current
liberal rhetoric about the global market, the federal government, and other
seemingly unassailable institutional powers, under the thrall of which "[t]he
autonomous individual has disappeared, but so has democratic sovereignty."
Genuine individualism has given way in middle-class culture to a makebelieve autonomy, "the seeing of freedom as an uncontrollable system's
flexibility."107
Newfield's trenchant analysis of the kernel of submission at the center of
Emersonian individualism echoes the nineteenth-century critique leveled by
Tocqueville. As Tocqueville envisioned it, individualisme, with its emphasis on
private gratification and spectacular or performative independence, was
essentially a practice of withdrawal; it turns political nonparticipation and
inefficacy into a sort of virtue, and leaves to an abstract "majority" the power to
govern.108 This withdrawal into privatism therefore had the potential to establish
the conditions for the rise of an antidemocratic power. Tocqueville had no name
for the regime he saw looming on the American horizon, though he did, at the
conclusion of Democracy in America, sketch its features. This "immense and tutelary
power" would preclude genuine freedom in citizens, instead functioning only
“to secure their gratifications and watch over their fate. That power is absolute,
minute, provident, and mild. . . . [I]t tries to keep them in perpetual childhood ...[;] it
daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of
free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the
proper use of his own faculties. . . . I have always thought that this brand of orderly,
gentle, peaceful slavery which I have just described could be combined, more easily
than is generally supposed, with some of the external forms of freedom.. . ,109”
The irony is striking: the individualist ethos ultimately produces an apathetic
and infantile citizenry that willingly abdicates its authority to a paternalistic
power; in return that power maximizes the opportunities for the spectacular
expression of freedom and autonomy so affirming to the individualist.110
Tocqueville suggested that as real democratic freedom—participation in and direct
influence over the political, social, and economic forces that shape one's life—
erodes, the range of opportunities for the performance of freedom may increase.111
The individualist thus withdraws further from the political sphere, consoling
himself with a life increasingly oriented toward "a display of energy"— circulation
and consumption in lieu of democratic engagement.112
Tocqueville found no appropriate name for the type of regime he saw approaching
on the American horizon (perhaps he had only one good neologism, individualisme,
in him). "Our contemporaries," he wrote, "will find no prototype of it in their
memories The thing is new."113 Neither "tyranny" nor "despotism" represented
accurately its form of control, which would masquerade as the proliferation of
freedoms and choices. Tocqueville's "soft totalitarian" scenario finds affinity
with the later analyses of modern power and consumer society advanced in the
critical theory of the Frankfurt School and in poststructuralist theories of
subjectivity. It echoes in the descriptions of "totalitarian democracy" and
"repressive tolerance" in the work of Herbert Marcuse; in Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer's condemnation of the deception at the heart of massculture
escapism and market choice; and in Michel Foucault's theory of the "productive"
rather than repressive orientation of power in modernity.114 Tocqueville
presciently glimpsed the signal element of modern power—its deployment of
seduction and consent rather than coercion as the central means of social
control. Under this type of regime, power is understood less as the capacity to
control subjects than as the ability to create them through discursive practice and
ideological interpellation.
This impulse towards biopolitical control risks genocidal violence
David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle,
Writing Security, 1998, pg. 199-201
As invitation to this line of thought can be found in the later work of Michel Foucault,
in which he explicitly addresses the issue of security and the state through the rubric of
“governmental rationality.” The incitement to Foucault’s thinking was his observation
that from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century,
political treatises that previously had been written as advice to the prince were now
being presented as works on the “art of government.” The concern of these treatises
was not confined to the requirements of a specific sovereign, but with the more
general problematic of government: a problematic that included the government of
souls and lives, of children, of oneself, and finally, of the state by the sovereign. This
problematic of governance emerges at the intersection of central and centralizing
power relationships (those located in principles of universality, law, citizenship,
sovereignty), and individual and individualizing power relationships (such as the pastoral relationships of the Christian church and the welfare state).n Accordingly, the
state for Foucault is an ensemble of practices that are at one and the same time
individualizing and totalizing: I don’t think that we should consider the “modern state”
as an entity which was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are and even
their very existence, but on the contrary as a very sophisticated structure, in which
individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be
shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns. In a way we can
see the state as a modern matrix of individualization.24 Foucault posited some direct
and important connections between the individualizing and totalizing power
relationships in the conclusion to The History of Sexuality, Volume I. There he argues
that starting in the seventeenth century, power over life evolved in two complementary
ways: through disciplines that produced docile bodies, and through regulations and
interventions directed at the social body. The former centered on the body as a
machine and sought to maximize its potential in economic processes, while the latter
was concerned with the social body’s capacity to give life and propagate. Together,
these relations of power meant that “there was an explosion of numerous and diverse
techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations,
marking the beginning of an era of ‘bio-power.”’25 This era of bio-power saw the art
of government develop an overtly constitutive orientation through the deployment of
technologies concerned with the ethical boundaries of identity as much (if not more
than) the territorial borders of the state. Foucault supported this argument by reference
to the “theory of police.” Developed in the seventeenth century, the “theory of police”
signified not an institution or mechanism internal to the state, but a governmental
technology that helped specify the domain of the state.26 In particular, Foucault noted
that Delamare’s Compendium — an eighteenth-century French administrative work
detailing the kingdom’s police regulations — outlined twelve domains of concern for
the police: religion, morals, health, supplies, roads, town buildings, public safety, the
liberal arts, trade, factories, the supply of labor, and the poor. The logic behind this
ambit claim of concern, which was repeated in all treatises on the police, was that the
police should be concerned with “everything pertaining to men’s happiness,” all social
relations carried on between men, and all “living.” As another treatise of the period
declared: “The police’s true object is man.” The theory of police, as an instance of the
rationality behind the art of government, had therefore the constitution, production,
and maintenance of identity as its major effect. Likewise, the conduct of war is linked
to identity. As Foucault argues, “Wars are no longer waged in the name of a
sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of
everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of slaughter in the name of
life necessity.” In other words, countries go to war, not for the purpose of defending
their rulers, but for the purpose of defending “the nation,” ensuring the state’s security,
or upholding the interests and values of the people. Moreover, in an era that has seen
the development of a global system for the fighting of a nuclear war (the infrastructure
of which remains intact despite the “end of the cold war”), the paradox of risking
individual death for the sake of collective life has been pushed to its logical extreme.
Indeed, “the atomic situation is now at the end of this process: the power to expose a
whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s
continued existence.”
Advantage--Ecology/Heidegger
The current automobility regime reveals an existential anxiety rooted in
mind/body dualism—the status quo is on a trajectory which maximizes
efficieny at to cost of coming to terms with the scope of modern technology
Böhm et al 2006 (Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Chris Land, Mat Paterson, Steffen
Böhm is Professor in Management and Sustainability at the University of Essex, The
Sociological Review, Vol. 54, Issue supplement s1, pp 1-16, October 2006, “Part One
Conceptualizing Automobility: Introduction: Impossibilities of automobility,” azp)
In addition to these practical antagonisms lies a deeper conceptual
impossibility. Automobility is ultimately impossible in its own terms. Its
impossibility is contained in the very combination of autonomy and mobility. At the
point at which a subject attempts to move, the specifics of that movement – the
technologies deployed, the spaces which need to be made available, the
consequences of the form and place of movement, and so on – require a set of
external interventions to render it possible. Cars need roads, traffic rules, oil,
planning regulations, and the representation of car driving as autonomous
movement involves disguising such conditions. It seems obvious that the more cars
are around, the more rules have to be invented (eg, congestion charges and
motorway tolls) to allow the regime of automobility to work ‘normally’, even though
this ‘normality’ might be contradictory to the image of a completely autonomous
movement. The investment of cars with the concept of autonomy thus
contradicts these dependencies that are needed to make automobility work.
Instead of an autonomous subject that moves freely in space (it is no
coincidence that television advertisements show cars on traffic-free mountainous
roads with their drivers enjoying the freedom of movement), what we have is a
continuously increasing disciplining of drivers. Rajan (1996) has shown this in great
detail in relation to air pollution policy in California; in order not to challenge the
universal goal of automobile use, legitimized as it was in terms of individual
freedom, policymakers intruded ever more intrusively in the manufacture of the
cars themselves, in the maintenance regimes owners were forced to operate, in the
identification of ‘sick cars’. Bonham (this volume) similarly shows the disciplining
both of car drivers and of other road users in early twentieth century Adelaide,
while Merriman (this volume) shows the necessity of fostering new driving
sensibilities in the context of the development of motorways in the UK. At the most
extreme, contemporary developments present the possibility of completely
automated automobile use, raising fundamental questions about who, or
what, is in the driving seat. Such difficulties and dependencies are, of course, not
unique to a regime of automobility built around cars. The representation of any
form of mobility as autonomous is similarly impossible. Even walking (at least in
modern conditions) requires external labour to construct paths, clear land, etc. But
given the sense that the later chapters in the book, in particular Fincham and Miller,
posit the possibility of regimes of automobility not premised on cars, the question
that remains is whether such regimes are themselves possible. It seems to us that
any regime of automobility would be inherently impossible, precisely because
automobility as such is conceptually impossible. There will always be
dependencies – complete autonomy of movement is an illusion. The concept of
autonomous mobility is riven with antagonisms that have a philosophical heritage
harking back to scholastic debates on the possibility of an unmoved prime mover. In
this sense the auto-mobile liberal humanist has ascended to take the place of a now
dead God. Again the connections proliferate: automobile subjects not only transport
themselves efficiently from A to B, but should also be self-motivated, self-starters
whose social mobility is a reflection of moral worth and effort (see Bonham, this
volume). In a car it is fairly clear that autonomous mobility is impossible. If it
were ever doubted then, in the UK at least, the fuel protests of 2000 made this all
too evident, with queues of cars stretching for miles in hope of a gallon of petrol. A
car’s movement is beyond the control of an individual subject given its
systematic interdependencies. Traffic is itself a socially negotiated
phenomenon where trajectories cross and intersect in a complex but never
independent movement. In the term ‘automobile’ itself there are also a number
of unresolved tensions. It is ambiguous whether the autonomy in movement refers
to the machine or the person. Is it the auto that is mobile or moved by the driver?
Reflecting a complexification of mind/body dualism, should we consider the motor
of movement to be primary (literally the engine), or the increasingly amputated
and immobilized body of the driver whose physical movements are minimized
whilst the driver’s (autonomous?) desire determines the direction and
trajectory of movement? To resolve, or sometimes reflect, this tension we have
seen the rise of discourses of hybrid subjectivities: cyborgs and ‘carsons’
(car/persons) who are part machine part human agent but always already socially
and technically situated and constituted in their subjectivity as a driver (see
Michael, 2001; Lupton, 1999). But whilst this human-auto hybridity proliferates
alongside the wider networks of heterogeneous elements that constitute
‘automobility’, it is simultaneously hidden by a parallel moment of purification (see
Latour, 1993). The complex hybrid network of automobility produces, as one of
its effects, the appearance of independent automobility. Whilst the
heterogeneous interdependencies that make mobility possible would
threaten the apparent autonomy of the subject in motion, this parallel
movement of purification enables ‘the car’ to be dismissed as just a tool or
prosthesis to be mastered and controlled by an autonomous subject. To
paraphrase Latour, the Gordian knot of hybrid automobility is severed to
reinstate a clear separation of subjects and their objects: drivers and their cars
are seen as fetishised commodities independent of any social relations. In this sense,
‘automobility’ is an effect of parallel movements of hybridization and
purification. On one hand proliferating heterogeneous rhizomes constituting
bodies, rulebooks, licensing authorities, pressure groups, expertise, capital, tarmac
and steel; and on the other, their simultaneous sundering into the automobile
subject and the objects of the car and traffic system. Without hybridity, automobility
would be impossible. Without purification, automobility would be impossible. On
both counts, automobility is impossible.
Likewise, the aff’s call to reflect on automobility is a prerequisite to challenging
technological enframing—premised on faulty ontological commitments, status
quo sustainability movements are doomed to fail.
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal) p. 195-197,
http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/1/2/187).
The twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger provides an approach that
allows us to transcend the ideological-bound techno-rationalization
represented in Gore’s analysis of the problem of global warming so that we
engage a more fundamental analysis that uncovers deeper interpretive roots. A
more reflective total approach (versus the instrumental rationality of
problem-solving) is necessary to inform the development of sustainability, for
we must uncover the presuppositions of the worldview that deliver us over to
auto-mobility, which opens us to a new reflection on sustainability. In his magnus
opus, Being and Time, Heidegger puts forth a thesis—that Being itself is not a
being/entity—that strikes at the core of Western thinking [15]. For example,
Aristotle privileged primary substance, the individual entity, as the fundamental
being, linking all other manners of being to it, his ten categories. According to
Heidegger, Western thinking has continued to misunderstand the question of Being
as a question of beings. In doing so, correctness, or the relation between a statement
and a state of affairs, has substituted for a deeper sense of truth. When we focus on
beings, trying to properly define them, Being hides, for Being is other than the
entities brought forth from its context. Being is the whole or horizonal context that
allows for the appearing of beings in the first place. This sounds like mysticism to
those who don’t understand the metaphysical tradition of the West. But Heidegger’s
notion here is no less understandable the scientific principle of Gestalt psychology
that the whole is different than the sum of the parts. So, if your way of knowing
limits you to examining parts, you will not understand the meaning of the
whole. A way of Being (a whole—a worldview) is what we are seeking to
understand through this attempt to engage in a deeper analysis. Thus, Being must be
pursued in a way that we arrive at the happening of truth, how a particular way of
Being brings forth or unconceals beings, which means that we must think beyond
the whatness of beings in terms of the correctness of definitions. Truth involves
unconcealment of the essence of something through a way, an interpretive form of
Being. “Some things” concretely manifest through socio-historical worldviews that
allow entities to be brought into the clearing, that is, to be recognized/understood
as something, as a type of being/entity. Before correctness can be established, the
being must first be allowed to appear as something and this unconcealment is the
deeper domain of truth. So a way of Being is an ontological agency, an ontological
interpretive filter that allows certain beings to appear as the something that they
appear as, as a function of the interpretive context. It is this essence/Being of
automobility indicated by its symptom, global warming, that we must seek to
uncover. Taking up Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology in its reflection on Being
allows us to envision global warming as a symptom, as an appearing, complex
phenomenon through a particular way, the interpretive form of Being to which
modern human life has been claimed. We are led to the essence of which global
warming is an appearing symptom, which is other than its correct definition—
one of the goals of Gore’s book is to responsibly inform the average nonscientifically educated person as to the whatness of global warming, a correct saying
of the phenomenon. From a Heideggerian standpoint, Gore’s shallow analysis is
blind to deeper truths that concern more than establishing correct statements
describing the whatness of global warming. In the analysis of a later treatise, “The
Question Concerning Technology”, Heidegger maintains that the essence of
technology is not something technological—its Being is not to be interpreted as
itself a being (a technology). He provides what is regarded as the
(standard/accepted) correct definition of technology as a human activity and as a
means to an end. By contrast to the correct definition, Heidegger’s analysis
shows that the truth in the revealing/unconcealment or the essence/Being of
modern technology that allows for modern technological entities to show
themselves as such is a “challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable
demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such. But
does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in
the wind; they are left entirely to the wind‟s blowing. But the windmill does not
unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it [16]”. The challenging is a
setting-in-order, a setting upon nature, such that “the earth now reveals itself as
a coal mining district” and “what the river is now, a water-power supplier,
derives from the essence of the power station [16]”. What is the character of this
unconcealment? “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be
immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a
further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We
call it standing reserve [16]”. And the challenging that claims man to challenge
nature in this way Heidegger labels, enframing. “Enframing means the gathering
together of that setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal
the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that the
way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that is
itself nothing technological [16]”. Modern physics, which interprets nature as a
system of calculable forces is the herald of enframing. The way of Being through
which entities stand in the clearing, as technological instrumentalities, is enframing
and the way of Being of those entities is that of standing reserve.
This very brief discussion of Heidegger is important for two reasons. First, because
my conception of automobility emphasizes the spatial organization of standing
reserve, which Heidegger does not treat, and because automobility entails an
empirical manifestation of man’s ordering attitude and behavior in terms of
spatial production, we recognize an already established ontological analysis from
which automobility is to be interpreted. Secondly, we have an exemplar by which
we can see what is to be done to uncover the Being that allows something to
appear as that something, which is always other than the appearing beings.
Heidegger‟s hermeneutics provides the possibility to claim that the solution to the
technologically induced problem of global warming is not itself something
technological, if indeed we are to open ourselves to other possible
interpretational modes of Being such that other kinds of entities would then
be unconcealed . We want to free ourselves up to sustainability as a way of
Being by being open for a new way of interpretation, a new worldview, a new
paradigm for living, other than enframing, by which new kinds of entities other
than those of standing reserve will show themselves from its clearing.
More specifically, automobility is the logical extension of the politics of the
standing reserve—all beings becoming replaceable once reduced to the status
of an object, only useful in further implicating individuals in the fossil fuel
economy
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal), p. 201-202
,http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/1/2/187).
The modern world “levels” the place-character of life through the automobility of
material culture that has been made possible by the stored energy potential of fossil
fuels. Leveling is defined as the disvaluing of spatially inscribed qualitative
differentiation. The flows of goods made possible through the spatializing ether
of fossil fuels allow for locale-transcendence. A single unearthed, unrooted
material, fossil fuel, sounds innocuous, except for the fact that as stored energy it
transforms all of culture in its image, especially manifest through revolutionizing
transport. Stored energy allows for the automobility of all goods, which alters life
foremost on the basis of revolutionizing spatiality. The transport capabilities of
automobility “level” the placed-based character of goods. Goods can be brought
from anywhere to any-other-where. The produce grown five miles away can be
presented alongside produce brought from across the globe. Material objects from
far away lands are no longer exotic, but common place, and the local ecology does
not appear so important, because the local can be inundated with every other locale,
which is a mere physical marker on a flowchart. Petroleum-based products can
come from Thailand, (toys from McDonald‟s Happy Meals) along with some sort of
beef product from agribusiness cows in newly formed pastures on land once
Brazilian rainforest that are fed with genetically altered foodstuffs from some
chemical company in New Jersey. No locatable real place need be the source for any
of these products. The perfection of neo-liberal economics is for the unrooted flow
of goods, which can be made anywhere and marketed anywhere. The earth is
forced to function as merely a neutral grid for the flow of auto-mobile
commodities. This leveling flow of auto-mobile goods constitutes the dis-valuing of
the place-being of material culture. There is another aspect of leveling that we have
mentioned: those products that are made through mixture with the unearthed
materials—plastics, various synthetic products, metals, etc. Where do such products
come from? Geography has no relevance in their material production.
Petroleum-based products, being artificially-formed are only possible on the basis of
the admixture of unearthed material, take on the quality of being unearthed. These
products formed from unearthed materials are immediately unrooted. Does it
matter where your petroleum-based products, such as cellophane, are made? Still
another aspect of leveling comes from automation. Do you have personal
relationship with the machines that make your goods, or provide your service at
self-check-outs? And even if you engage a person, there is no place-based
relationship that they have with the goods they sell or the companies for which they
work.
Fossil fuel energy is the material condition for modern technology’s rendering
of the natural world as a mere resource for creating the standing reserve
necessary for automobility. Nature is to be ordered about according to the need
of the requirements of an auto-mobile material culture. “Orderability” is
indicative of the non-autonomy of automobility, for the Being of natural entities is
erased and becomes standing reserve waiting to be ordered about; entities as
standing reserve are on call as non-renewable energy orderings serving the automobile function. Automobility is a totalizing ordering, an ordering that includes
humankind. By being ordered about in the image of automobility, there is no
autonomy; humankind as automata are unfree and this unfreedom as a way of
Being leads to the “de-struction” of the earthed. The self-moving machine
technologies along with their auto-mobile loads order life on the basis of converting
fossil fuel into energy for the unearthing, unrooting, and spatial leveling of all of the
materials of the earth. So by the unearthing of fossil fuel everything is ordered about
according to its Being, resulting in the dissolution of the earthly characteristics of
being-earthed, rooted, and qualitatively differentiated on the basis of spatially
inscribed environmental niches. This way of life is unsustainable.
Nuclear war is ONLY possible from within a system of technological enframing—
the alternative is a prerequisite to a form of ethics that would discount the
possibility of nuclear relationality
Jacerme, 2k2 (Pierre,Prof. of Philosophy @ Lycee Henri IV Paris , “Is There an
Ethics for the ‘Atomic Age’?”, Heidegger and Practical Philosophy, p. 307-10)
Hence, Heidegger’s anger and sarcasm when he sees his contemporaries neglect this
crucial event in favor of superficial activities: “Defiant man is utterly at a loss simply to say what is" (EGT,
57). And close to anger, there is a passionate hope, akin to despair. "Perhaps the world's time is now becoming the completely
destitute time. But also perhaps not, not yet, not even yet, despite the immeasurable need, despite all the suffering, despite nameless
sorrow, despite the growing and spreading peacelessness, despite the mounting confusion."9 This
is why we need to
understand that what is essential can only come from Being itself and not from the
management of entities , or the entity man, even when he lives with " atomic fear ":
"Long is the time because even terror, taken by itself as a ground for turning, is powerless as long as there is
no turn with mortal men. But there is a turn with mortals when these find the way to their own being [Wesen]" (PLT,
93, trans. slightly modified). How can we dwell in our "proper being"? On the basis of the instancy in the
"truth of Being." The atomic bomb is nothing but another sign —neglected, as in the case of the
others— of
what has existed from the beginning, namely, the lack of concern for Being
itself in favor of the will to control everything: "What is deadly is not the muchdiscussed atomic bomb as this particular death-dealing machine. What has long
since been threatening man with death, and indeed with the death of his own nature,
is the unconditional character of mere willing in the sense of purposeful selfassertion in everything" (PLT, 116). Hence, the atomic bomb can have the inverse effect of
blinding man about being and concealing the fact that "the terrifying has already
taken place": "Man ... stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with
it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission
of what
has long since taken place, has
already happened," namely, "the way in which everything presences [...1
despite all conquest of distances the nearness of things remains absent."1° What is "terrifying" is that there is
no concern whatsoever for presence as such, which remains in the withdrawal: "Science's knowledge,
which is compelling within its own sphere, the sphere of objects, already had
annihilated things as things long before the atom bomb exploded [...] the thing as a thing
remains nil" (PLT, 170). This annihilation deprives all that is of its life. "Atomic physics [...j
observes nature (phusis) insofar as nature exhibits itself as inanimate."11 Here appears
the first demand of the " originary ethic ": to see what is, "Instead of shying away from this demand, by taking
refuge in powerless determinations of goals which are limited to safeguarding humanity."12 "Demand," because even if he
concerns himself with entities alone, man is still able to hear (although not always
aware of it) a call of Being that speaks to him through language. Rockets, atomic
bombs, reactors, those things that are, are "what they are in the name of their
name"; "hurry" acts insofar as it speaks to man and to that extent "has" its being: "If that call to such hurry had not challenged him
and put him at bay, if the word framing that order and challenge had not spoken: then there would be no sputnik."13 In the word the
withdrawal of being speaks, and according to this modality we are given various dispensations of presence on the basis of which
entities will be present to us in various ways (as phenomena, as objects , or as standing reserve, etc.). Therefore—and this is another
demand of "original ethics"—man is always in a relation to a call, and always called to a destiny of unveiling. In 1955-56, ire The
Principle of Reason, Heidegger noted that "the characterization of an epoch as the^ atomic age probably touches on what is" (PR, 29).
This nomination will help us determine the fundamental mood on the basis of which we would be able to feel and tlen characterize the
modality of givenness of presence that determines our being. ccording to Heidegger, this mood is "uncanniness" hidden under "an
apparently harmless naming." This uncanniness lies in the fact that, "Humanity defines an epoch of its historical-spiritual existence by
the capacity for, and the availability of, a nat ural energy" (ibid.). Now, "there would be no atomic age without atomic science," aiid
no microphysics without reassembling the manifold of elementary particles into new unity, that is, without obeying the call of the
principle that reason be given (bid.). On that basis we reach an ethical characterization in the sense of that which concerns the sojourn
or dwelling of existent man: "As the global epoch of humaniety, the atomic age is distinguished by the fact that the power of the
mighty Principle=, of the principium reddendae rationis, displays itself (if not completely unleashed) in m strange manner in the
normative domain of human existence" (PR, 30). Why strange [unheimlich]? Because "the
demand to render
reasons threatens everything of the humans' being-at-home [alles Heimischel [...] it robs
them of the roots of their subsistence [...] the more decisively humans try to harness the
"mega-energies" [...] the more impoverished becomes the human faculty for building
and dwelling in the realm of what is essential" (PR, 30-31). In what form is presence given to us when we
#eel this uprooting? In fact, not only have not there not been "things" for us for a lor- ag time now, but "we already move in a world
where there are no more ob-jects" (PR_, 33). That point is important in order to determine correctly that which is, that is, "what
approaches us from what has-been and, as this, is what approaches" (PR, 80).The
very presence of nature in the
thematic region of nuclear physics remains unthinkable as long as we still represent
it as objectivity and not as "orderability " (Bestellbarkeit), which means ti-Elatthe entity is present in a sense
of "proposed to. . . ordered to ... (bestelIt] while being at the same time summoned, provoked ... (Gestellt)."The consequence of this, as
Heidegger -explains in a carefully worded letter to Kojima Takehiko on September 2, 1963, is that "through modern technology the
energy hidden in nature is unleashed, unleashed is transformed, what is transformed is amplified, what is amplified is set forth, and
vhat is set forth is organized" (Philosophie, 14). The modality of the withdrawal of beirig that governs this deployment resonates as a
call to place everything under a regulation that is itself guaranteed by what Heidegger names Die Macht des Stellens [The power of
summation]; we also could render that expression as follows: the force of the summon. "Everywhere reigns the provocative,
calculative, and justifying summon (Ste lien)" (ibid.). It
follows, then, that "everything that can be and
is" only gives itself as a "stable calculable ground (Bestand)" and is only
experienced from the perspective of securing that ground. Such a power, because it is not
human, always "calls" for more security , more summons, more guarantees—we also should add, in remembrance
of the survivors of Hiroshima, more dignity, more humiliation, more shame—and rules over technology, science,
industry, economy, and the rest, without anything—coming from man—being able to
oppose it: "the ineluctable and irresistible character of this summoning force leads
to the unfolding of its domination over the entire planet " (ibid., 15).
The aff’s methodological approach is a prerequisite to making sustainability
thinkable
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal), p. 189-190,
http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/1/2/187).
In his discussion of technology and science, Gore writes of advances or progress
and their unintended side-effects [1]. This way of speaking already fosters
human-centered chauvinism in the sense that human intentions are taken as the
hegemonic constitutive measure, while the unintended phenomena accompanying
or associated with human activities are glitches in a humanly designed world, as if
the earth/world does not have constitutive efficacy and as if human expressivities
are not simply one set of agencies in a complex context of many agencies [2]. In
addition, the doctrine of side-effects does not take into account that all cultural
objectivations of human expressivities exhibit their own Being, incommensurate, to
some degree or another, with our intentions [3]. Moreover, this received hubris of
modern scientific ideology, “the control and elimination of side-effects”, leads Gore
to a sanguine position concerning the solving of the climate crisis—that we can
tackle the crisis technologically through a new political will and with the recognition
that we need not choose between environmental and economic health. His
related enthusiastic adoption of the information age and computer technology is
indicative of this fundamental belief in so-called technological progress [4].
On the issue of economics, many environmentalists that develop a doctrine of
sustainability do not agree with him [5]. We will indeed have to continue to choose
between environmental and economic health as long as we support an economic
system that requires growth (e.g., surplus value and a continued consumerism) and
we choose growth-oriented solutions (e.g., green products with green economic
incentives as the way to eliminate unwanted side-effects are to be counted as a
shallow approach). Green technologies contextualized in an economic system of
growth remain impotent when considering the strident goal of developing viable
policies of sustainability. Sustainability requires a new contextualization of
human intentions whereby unintended results from continued growth are not
a cue for a greater manipulation of the natural world, but less. In the cases just
cited we see that intentions involving technological mastery and environmentalism
as a function of economics must be called into question. Thus, automobility, as the
major factor of global warming and other environmental problems, is treated in
a way that calls for the continual hegemony of economic concerns, as green
machines and vehicles are suppose to save us from our environmental
degradation while economic expansion continues on its same course.
Many environmental thinkers have questioned the presupposed tenets, e.g., the
doctrine of linear progress, on which Gore bases his belief in the success of a
scientific/technological solution to global warming and environmental problems in
general. “Professional ecologists such as Frank Egler have countered that “Nature is
not only more complex than we think, it is more complex than we can think [6]‟”. I
believe that a commitment to sustainability must recognize limits to human
cognition and thus must take a radically different approach. This does not mean
that science and technology have reduced roles, but that their roles must be based
on a new attitude of respectful humility [7]. The manipulation and appropriation
of nature must no longer be our technological goals. Rather, we should be
modifying our own societal/cultural forms, which include science and technology, to
live in greater harmony within the context of natural conditions and agencies.
Sciences and technologies that apprehend those conditions can serve to help us
become much more respectful of natural conditions. Neither science nor technology
needs to challenge natural processes; it rather needs to challenge us to live more
responsibly. The chauvinist worldview with its doctrine of reactive reparation when
it comes to environmental degradation, no longer can be promoted as a viable
behavioral process. We can no longer appropriate nature and then deal with the so
called “unintended side-effects”—a dealing that amounts to a continual reengineering of nature, which leads to consequences that dangerously exceed our
powers of forecasting. But a new pro-activity conducive to sustainability should be
more focused on changing our relation to nature, not so much on changing nature.
Gore’s critical analysis merely focuses on wiser uses of technology; he does not
call into question radically enough the doctrine of forcing nature to serve us
and does not clearly advocate a science and technology that serves nature as first
priority. This can be accomplished only by fundamental transformations in human
interpretative praxes. In practical language the transformation advocated here
means that we dramatically minimize our ecological footprints, which entails
new geo- economic/political/social spatial productions, concerning which
science and technology play a vital role. Cultural transformation for
sustainability requires a new epistemological basis that recognizes the
ontological structure of sustainable ecology as having priority over human
intentions such that we eliminate certain of our expressivities and
objectivations, rather than continuing with the manipulation of nature to
accommodate our intentions—a move away from anthropocentric hegemony to a
model of human contextualization that leads away from a worldview that
presupposes the culture/nature dualism.
VTL Heidegger Impact
The politics of the standing reserve reduce all beings to objects of its own
manipulation—destroys value to life by sacrificing ethics in the name of protecting
instrumental value
Mitchell, 2k5
(Andrew J., Stanford University, “Heidegger and Terrorism”, Research in Phenomenology, 35)
The elimination of difference in the standing-reserve along with the elimination of
national differences serve to identify the threat of terrorism with the quest for security. The
absence of this threat would be the absence of being, and its consummation would be the absence of being as well. Security is
only needed where there is a threat. If a threat is not perceived, if one believes oneself invulnerable, then there is no
need for security. Security is for those who know they can be injured, for those who can be damaged. Does America know that it can
be damaged? If
security requires a recognition of one’s own vulnerability, then security can
only be found in the acknowledgment of one’s threatened condition, and this means that
it can only be found in a recognition of being as threat. To be secure, there must be the threat. For this
reason, all of the planned securities that attempt to abolish the threat can never achieve the
security they seek . Security requires that we preserve the threat, and this means that we must act in
the office of preservers. As preservers, what we are charged to preserve is not so much the present being as the concealment that
inhabits it. Preserving
a thing means to not challenge it forth into technological availability,
to let it maintain an essential concealment. That we participate in this essencing of being does not make of it a
subjective matter, for there is no isolated subject in preservation, but an opening of being. Heidegger will name this the clearing of the
truth (Wahrheit) of being, and it is this clearing that Dasein preserves (bewahrt). When a thing truthfully is, when it is what it is in
truth, then it is preserved. In preserving beings, Dasein participates in the truth (preservation) of being. The truth of being is being as
threat, and this threat only threatens when Dasein preserves it in terror. Dasein is not innocent in the terrorization of being. On the
contrary, Dasein is complicit in it. Dasein refuses to abolish terrorism. For this reason, a
Heideggerian thinking of
remain skeptical of all the various measures taken to oppose terrorism, to root it out or to
circumvent it. These are so many attempts to do away with what threatens, measures that are themselves in the highest
degree willful. This will can only impose itself upon being, can only draw out more and more of its wrath, and
this inward wrath of being maintains itself in a never-ending supply. The will can only devastate the earth.
Rather than approaching the world in terms of resources to be secured, true security can only be found in the
preservation of the threat of being. It is precisely when we are busy with security
measures and the frantic organization of resources that we directly assault the things we
would preserve. The threat of being goes unheeded when things are restlessly shuttled back and forth, harried, monitored, and
surveilled. The threat of being is only preserved when things are allowed to rest. In the notes to the
terrorism must
“Evening Conversation,” security is thought in just such terms: Security (what one understands by this) arises not from securing and
the measures taken for this; security resides in rest [in der Ruhe] and is itself made superfluous by this. (GA 77: 244)23 The
rest
in question is a rest from the economic cycling and circulating of the standing reserve.
The technological unworld, the situation of total war, is precisely the era of restlessness
(“The term ‘totality’ says nothing more; it names only the spread of the hitherto known into the ‘restless’” [GA 69: 181]). Security
is superfluous here, which is only to say that it is unnecessary or useless. It is not found in
utility, but in the preserved state of the useless. Utility and function are precisely the
dangers of a t°xnh that has turned antagonistic towards nature. In rest, they no longer determine the being of
the thing. In resting, things are free of security measures, but not for all that rendered insecure. Instead, they are preserved. There
is no security; this is what we have to preserve. Heideggerian thinking is a thinking that thinks away from
simple presence and absence. It thinks what Heidegger calls “the between” (das Zwischen). This between is a world of nonpresence
and nonabsence. Annihilation
is impossible for this world and so is security. The terror
experienced today is a clue to the withdrawal of being. The world is denatured, drained of
reality. Everything is threatened and the danger only ever increases. Dasein flees to a
metaphysics of presence to escape the threatened world, hoping there to find security. But security
cannot do away with the threat, rather it must guard it . Dasein guards the truth of being in the
experience of terror. What is perhaps repugnant to consider in all this is that being calls for terrorism and for terrorists. With the
enframing of being and the circulation of standing-reserve, what is has already been
destroyed . Terrorism is merely the ugly confirmation of this point. As we have seen, being does not linger behind the scenes
but is found in the staging itself. If being is to terrorize—if, in other words, this is an age of terrorism—then being must call for
terrorists. They are simply more “slaves of the history of beyng” (GA 69: 209) and, in Heidegger’s eyes, no different from the
politicians of the day in service to the cause of Americanism. But someone might object, the terrorists are murderers and the
politicians are not. Granting this objection despite its obvious naïveté, we can nonetheless see that both
politicians and
terrorists are called for by the standing-reserve, the one to ensure its nonabsence, that the
plan will reach everyone everywhere, and the other to ensure its nonpresence, that all beings will now be put into
circulation by the threat of destruction. In this regard, “human resources” are no different from “livestock,”
and with this, an evil worse than death has already taken place. Human resources do not
die, they perish.
Digger Solvency
We need to reflect- that unconceals possibilities for other ways of living.
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal) p. 195-197,
http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/1/2/187).
The twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger provides an approach that
allows us to transcend the ideological-bound techno-rationalization
represented in Gore’s analysis of the problem of global warming so that we
engage a more fundamental analysis that uncovers deeper interpretive roots. A
more reflective total approach (versus the instrumental rationality of
problem-solving) is necessary to inform the development of sustainability, for
we must uncover the presuppositions of the worldview that deliver us over to
auto-mobility, which opens us to a new reflection on sustainability. In his magnus
opus, Being and Time, Heidegger puts forth a thesis—that Being itself is not a
being/entity—that strikes at the core of Western thinking [15]. For example,
Aristotle privileged primary substance, the individual entity, as the fundamental
being, linking all other manners of being to it, his ten categories. According to
Heidegger, Western thinking has continued to misunderstand the question of Being
as a question of beings. In doing so, correctness, or the relation between a statement
and a state of affairs, has substituted for a deeper sense of truth. When we focus on
beings, trying to properly define them, Being hides, for Being is other than the
entities brought forth from its context. Being is the whole or horizonal context that
allows for the appearing of beings in the first place. This sounds like mysticism to
those who don’t understand the metaphysical tradition of the West. But Heidegger’s
notion here is no less understandable the scientific principle of Gestalt psychology
that the whole is different than the sum of the parts. So, if your way of knowing
limits you to examining parts, you will not understand the meaning of the
whole. A way of Being (a whole—a worldview) is what we are seeking to
understand through this attempt to engage in a deeper analysis. Thus, Being must be
pursued in a way that we arrive at the happening of truth, how a particular way of
Being brings forth or unconceals beings, which means that we must think beyond
the whatness of beings in terms of the correctness of definitions. Truth involves
unconcealment of the essence of something through a way, an interpretive form of
Being. “Some things” concretely manifest through socio-historical worldviews that
allow entities to be brought into the clearing, that is, to be recognized/understood
as something, as a type of being/entity. Before correctness can be established, the
being must first be allowed to appear as something and this unconcealment is the
deeper domain of truth. So a way of Being is an ontological agency, an ontological
interpretive filter that allows certain beings to appear as the something that they
appear as, as a function of the interpretive context. It is this essence/Being of
automobility indicated by its symptom, global warming, that we must seek to
uncover. Taking up Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology in its reflection on Being
allows us to envision global warming as a symptom, as an appearing, complex
phenomenon through a particular way, the interpretive form of Being to which
modern human life has been claimed. We are led to the essence of which global
warming is an appearing symptom, which is other than its correct definition—
one of the goals of Gore’s book is to responsibly inform the average nonscientifically educated person as to the whatness of global warming, a correct saying
of the phenomenon. From a Heideggerian standpoint, Gore’s shallow analysis is
blind to deeper truths that concern more than establishing correct statements
describing the whatness of global warming. In the analysis of a later treatise, “The
Question Concerning Technology”, Heidegger maintains that the essence of
technology is not something technological—its Being is not to be interpreted as
itself a being (a technology). He provides what is regarded as the
(standard/accepted) correct definition of technology as a human activity and as a
means to an end. By contrast to the correct definition, Heidegger’s analysis
shows that the truth in the revealing/unconcealment or the essence/Being of
modern technology that allows for modern technological entities to show
themselves as such is a “challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable
demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such. But
does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in
the wind; they are left entirely to the wind‟s blowing. But the windmill does not
unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it [16]”. The challenging is a
setting-in-order, a setting upon nature, such that “the earth now reveals itself as
a coal mining district” and “what the river is now, a water-power supplier,
derives from the essence of the power station [16]”. What is the character of this
unconcealment? “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be
immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a
further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We
call it standing reserve [16]”. And the challenging that claims man to challenge
nature in this way Heidegger labels, enframing. “Enframing means the gathering
together of that setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal
the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that the
way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that is
itself nothing technological [16]”. Modern physics, which interprets nature as a
system of calculable forces is the herald of enframing. The way of Being through
which entities stand in the clearing, as technological instrumentalities, is enframing
and the way of Being of those entities is that of standing reserve.
This very brief discussion of Heidegger is important for two reasons. First, because
my conception of automobility emphasizes the spatial organization of standing
reserve, which Heidegger does not treat, and because automobility entails an
empirical manifestation of man’s ordering attitude and behavior in terms of
spatial production, we recognize an already established ontological analysis from
which automobility is to be interpreted. Secondly, we have an exemplar by which
we can see what is to be done to uncover the Being that allows something to
appear as that something, which is always other than the appearing beings.
Heidegger‟s hermeneutics provides the possibility to claim that the solution to the
technologically induced problem of global warming is not itself something
technological, if indeed we are to open ourselves to other possible
interpretational modes of Being such that other kinds of entities would then
be unconcealed . We want to free ourselves up to sustainability as a way of
Being by being open for a new way of interpretation, a new worldview, a new
paradigm for living, other than enframing, by which new kinds of entities other
than those of standing reserve will show themselves from its clearing.
Advantage--Gender
The automobile industry defines our modern conception of a women- their
interaction defines our current political structures.
Jain 05, (Sarah S, Associate Professor of Anthropology, awarded the Cultural
Horizons Prize by the Society for Cultural Anthropology for best article published in
the journal Cultural Anthropology in 2004. a National Humanities Center Fellow in
2006, and currently a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, “Violent
Submission: Gendered Automobility,” Cultural Critique, No. 61 (Autumn, 2005), p.
198-199
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4489227.pdf?
These exclusions of women from the representations of car culture are
reflected in other areas, namely in their exclusion from whole professions that
range from automobile and safety engineering, design, sales, repair, policy
making, and commentary to taxi driving, industry executive positions, racing,
road construction, and, until recently, urban planning (see Gregory). In short,
women are virtually excluded from a range of careers that together account for onesixth of the U.S. economy. According to Carol Sanger's analysis, women are
defined as women through their purported preceding relationships to cars.
The infrastructures of automobility, while excluding women from the economies of
automobility, have required them to do unremunerated car labor such as
chauffeuring children. These exclusions work within the stereotypes of women's
supposed mechanical inabilities and overcautious driving to sustain and enhance
"traditional understandings about women's abilities and roles in areas both
public and private" (Sanger, 707).
That women have so often been the subterfuge for the sexual forays of men and
cars, or men and men, however, does not make the car immaterial. Indeed, it is the
very materiality of it that makes it such an important site of analysis. As the
New York Times quoted one woman car owner as saying, "It's dangerous to get too
good a car, you will only end up wishing men would look at you with the same
admiration and lust in their eyes" (Stanley, D11). The female owner of this car is
caught between desiring the gaze of the male and owning the means of his
homosocial identification. Her rather banal, even naively heterosexual comment
illustrates the extent to which misogyny and the car underpins gendered
American economic and political structures. What would it take to have a female
director for one of the BMW films? How would the Ritchie film have meaning if
Madonna and Owen switched roles?
And those interactions perpetuates gender norms and gendered violence made
invisible by its structural nature.
Jain 05, (Sarah S, Associate Professor of Anthropology, awarded the Cultural
Horizons Prize by the Society for Cultural Anthropology for best article published in
the journal Cultural Anthropology in 2004. a National Humanities Center Fellow in
2006, and currently a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, “Violent
Submission: Gendered Automobility,” Cultural Critique, No. 61 (Autumn, 2005), p.
187-188, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4489227.pdf?acceptTC=true).
Thus, both the film's legibility and its ironic reversals make it an ideal site for better
understanding the car as a highly ambiguous gendered space. Its implied
simplicity (two people make a journey) belies a deeply gendered
heteronormative narrative that underpins American understandings of
technology and consumption, safety and security-and influences the ways that
these relations play out in everyday life and practices of representation. Specifically,
I examine the tenets of these normative narratives to better understand how the
violence of the film makes sense in the context of its ironies. I argue that
automotive technology, engineering studies, and cultural notions of masculinity
carry notions of gendered violence that have remained both central to the
structuring of the kinds of violence played out by automobility and have
naturalized to the point of invisibility both policy itself and mainstream
social histories of the automobile . The car, not only an object or container
moving through a city but a particular kind of composite, has been at least as
much about defining social relations as it has been about transporting people
and goods. "Star" presents the interaction between two individuals, but its legibility
rests on the gendered and classed spaces of the auto itself.
Most crucially here, I analyze the way in which the various spaces at play in
automobility have been articulated and understood through the varied layers of
representation that make meaning of cars and, specifically, how these have both
enforced and constituted gender. To get at these questions I borrow Eve
Sedgwick's notion of "triangulation" to examine, in relation to a series of popular
films, the way in which the technology of the car and the skill of driving has
organized heterosexuality in the twentieth century. These social relations of homoand heteronormative social relations lead us not only toward a richer
understanding of the social role of automobiles but they also demonstrate the
physicality of social reproduction. If, as Judith Butler argues, "recognition becomes a
site of power by which the human is differentially produced" (Butler, 2), car culture
reminds of the relentless physicality of that production. Although safety
movements have typically been understood as humanist moves toward
economies with fewer human costs, safety-engineering studies of the second
collision that were taking place in the 1950s and '60s show these to be deeply
gendered projects. These have been reiterated not only through the gendered
car-death statistics but also through the ways the popular-culture narratives
about crash deaths have reiterated stories of masculine heroism. Finally, I
situate this set of critiques within the ironies that the film sets out: that Madonna is
in some ways the most powerful actor in the film; that the film enters her varied
genre of production, one that includes so many aspects of popular culture; and that
the fact that she is beaten by no means renders her impotent or powerless but
rather demands us to ask if and how this film challenges cultural feminist thought.
It’s historically proven- cold war- the dream of frontiers explored by automobile
was used in the cold war in an attempt to recreate the patriarchical male
pioneer.
Sieler 2003, (Cotton, Associate professor of American studies, “Statist Means to
Individualist Ends: Subjectivity, Automobility, and the Cold-War State,” American
Studies, 44:3 (Fall 2003), p. 14,
https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/viewFile/3015/2974).
The postwar celebration of mobility as a revitalizing force was predictably
gender-coded. As mentioned above, many social critics' conceptions of the new
American character equated the transformation of that character with the
assumption of traditionally feminine qualities and sensibilities; a number saw
mobility as a practice capable of counteracting what, in the Cold War context,
appeared to be a crippling "domestication" of American men. If men were to
reclaim their manhood, the "open road" stood as one of the sites of that
reclamation. Male social critics of the era tended, therefore, to emphasize actual
and metaphorical motion in their prescriptions for the revitalization of American
society (which was inseparable from a renewal of masculinity). Yet in an age of
effortless automobility, the vision of journey-as-trial became increasingly difficult to
sustain. Hence George Pierson lamented the process of travel standardization as
"the emasculation of the journey," movement in which "much of the excitement has
been drained off."61 Yet despite the less arduous nature of travel by modern
automobile, the notion of the journey as recreating the salutary conditions of
the male pioneer remained powerful and pervasive.62
This form of institutional and systematic violence is a prerequisite to warfare—
it is impossible to understand war as an event separate from the ongoing war
against the periphery
DeFrancisco and Palczewski 2k7 (Victoria Leto Catherine Helen, 2007, Professors
of Communication at the University of Northern Iowa, Communicating gender
diversity: a critical approach, 149-150)
The institutionalization of violence has effects beyond the microlevel of
interpersonal relations. The fear of sexual violence affects women's participation in civic
institutions. Political scientist Amy Caiazza (2005) analyzed factors affecting men's and women's levels of civic
participation. She asked,"Do pemeived levels of safety from crime or violence influence men's and women's decisions to
become involved in their communities?" (p. 1607). Because many activities involved with civic participation occur at night,
when women feel most vulnerable to attack, it is important to start thinking about the way systemic, institutionalized forms of
sexism might influence women's full civic participation. Caiazza studied women's levels of participation and correlated them
to women's fear of potential violence. She found that "far women as a group, a sense of perceived safety is strongly related to
involvement in the community, while a lack of perceived safety is linked to disengagement. In contrast, among men as a group,
safety plays a relatively insignificant role in encouraging or discouraging engagement" (p. 1608). Of course, this conclusion is
moderated when one recognizes that safety is not equally experienced by all women; poor women tend to be less safe, and so
their participation is not influenced by the perceived loss of safety (which they normally lack anyway) but by other factors.
Caiazza's research makes dear that “gender-based violence is an issue relevant to political and civic participation" (p. 1627).
Some women participate less than men in politics, city councils, and legislatures not became they am disinterested in politics
but because their fear of violence functions as a deterrent to participation. When sexual violence is examined in this way,
antiviolence measures are no longer just a way to decrease crime or maintain law and order but are also "a
way to strengthen U.S. democracy and women's access to it" (p. 1627). This exposes how
gender/sex affects something as taken-for-granted as citizenship. Although every person is equal under the law of the land, the
reality is that gender as an institution, and the institutionalization of gender/sex violence, make women's ability to participate
unequal to men's. The
preceding discussion has focused on an acute act of violence: rape.
However, violence is committed not only in the form of overt acts of physical
aggression. Because it is systemic, it also occurs in subtle, pervasive ways. Poverty,
famine, environmental destruction, lack of adequate water, lack of adequate health
care, and lack of adequate education also can be understood as forms of systemic
violence (Tickner, 1992); and with their chronic status, they kill just as effectively as, if
not more than, acute acts of violence such as war (Reardon, 1985). For example, philosopher
Chris Cuomo (1996) documents less obvious, yet pervasive, violence done by the
military. She urges people to consider the effects of militarism on the environment and
women, explaining that "military institutions probably present the most
dramatic threat to ecological well-being on the planet" (p. 41). Why might this claim be true?
Because the military is the largest generator of hazardous waste in the United States, a
massive consumer of fossil fuels; 9% of all the iron and steel used by humans is
consumed by the global military. Where did Cuomo find her information? In a book by William Thomas
(1995),a U.S. Navy vet-an. Poverty, too, does violence to a person's body. Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich (2001) attempted to
live for one year on the wages possible for a U.S. woman without higher education credentials or personal connections. She
found out quickly that one cannot live on the minimum wage; her nutrition suffered, her safety was placed at risk in lowerincome housing, she was more often the victim of verbal abuse by strangers, and she was sleep deprived.
Understanding the complex ways in which violence is normalized by
communication practices across social institutions should make one better able to identify sources of gender
oppression and social control for women and girls and for men and boys (Miedzim, 1993). You can begin to trace
the links between predominant cultural ideology and its tools of control. These are
the necessary first steps toward ending violence. Communication scholar Julia Wood (2005)
writes, "Widespread violence exists only if a society allows or endorses it. In other
words, the epidemic of gendered violence reflects cultural values and social
definitions of femininity, masculinity, and relationships between women and men"
(pp. 258-259). Wood names violence an epidemic to make clear the intensity of the problem. Renaming is needed for one to
begin to realize the functions violence serves in social institutions. By
examining violence as gendered, one
can begin to identify the ways in which it is socialized into such things as raising
children, work, education, religion, media, and even interactions with the
environment. One can also begin to understand how institutions contribute to and
are related to a continuum of violence around the world, from gender
intimidation to verbal and psychological abuse, to sexual coercion, to physical abuse
and murder (ICramarae, 1992; Wood, 2005). The subtler forms create a context in which
even the more explicit forms of violence become normalized. Wherever violence
happens, the incidents are not isolated but systemically related. In the chapters to follow, we
hope to help you identify the links between gender, violence, social institutions, and communication.
Our gendered focus is necessary to challenge the ideological blinders that
prevent a traditional policy making framework from understanding discursive
nature of the problem
Shepherd, 2008 [Laura J. Shepherd, Department of Political Science and
International Studies, University of Birmingham, “Gender, Violence and Global
Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies,” EBSCO]
As discussed above, ideas about masculinity and femininity, dignity and sacrifice may not only be violent in themselves, but
are also the product/productive of physical violences. With this in mind, the
feminist argument that
'peacetime' is analytically misleading is a valid one. Of interest are the 'in-between days' and the
ways in which labelling periods of war or peace as such can divert attention away from the
myriad violences that inform and reinforce social behaviour. [W]ar can surely never
be said to start and end at a clearly defined moment. Rather, it seems part of a
continuum of conflict, expressed now in armed force, now in economic sanctions or
political pressure. A time of supposed peace may come later to be called 'the pre-war period'. During the
fighting of a war, unseen by the foot soldiers under fire, peace processes are often
already at work. A time of postwar reconstruction, later, may be re-designated as an inter bellum– a mere pause
between wars (Cockburn and Zarkov, cited in El Jack, 2003, p. 9). Feminist security studies interrogates the pauses between
wars, and the political processes – and practices of power – that demarcate times as such. In doing so, not only is the remit of
recognisable violence (violence worthy of study) expanded, but so too are the parameters of what counts as IR. Everyday
violences and acts of everyday resistance ('a fashion show, a tour, a small display of children's books' in Enloe, 2007, pp. 117–
20) are the stuff of relations international and, thus, of a comprehensive understanding of security. In the following section I
outline the ways in which taking
these claims seriously allows us to engage critically with
the representations of international relations that inform our research, with
potentially profound implications. As well as conceiving of gender as a set of discourses, and violence as a
means of reproducing and reinforcing the relevant discursive limits, it is possible to see security as a set of
discourses , as I have argued more fully elsewhere (Shepherd, 2007; 2008; see also Shepherd and Weldes, 2007).
Rather than pursuing the study of security as if it were something that can be
achieved either in absolute, partial or relative terms, engaging with security as discourse enables
the analysis of how these discourses function to reproduce, through various strategies, the
domain of the international with which IR is self-consciously concerned. Just as violences
that are gendering reproduce gendered subjects, on this view states, acting as authoritative entities, perform violences, but
violences, in the name of security, also perform states. These processes occur simultaneously, and across the whole spectrum
of social life: an
instance of rape in war is at once gendering of the individuals involved
and of the social collectivities – states, communities, regions – they feel they
represent (see Bracewell, 2000); building a fence in the name of security that separates people from their land and
extended families performs particular kinds of violence (at checkpoints, during patrols) and performs particular subject
identities (of the state authority, of the individuals affected), all of which are gendered. All of the texts under discussion in this
essay argue that
it is imperative to explore and expose gendered power relations
and, further, that doing so not only enables a rigorous critique of realism in IR but
also reminds us as scholars of the need for such a critique. The critiques of IR offered by feminist
scholars are grounded in a rejection of neo-realism/realism as a dominant intellectual framework for academics in the
discipline and policy makers alike. As Enloe reminds us, 'the
government-centred, militarized version
of national security [derived from a realist framework] remains the dominant mode of policy
thinking' (Enloe, 2007, p. 43). Situating gender as a central category of analysis
encourages us to 'think outside the "state security box"' (p. 47) and to remember that
'the "individuals" of global politics do not work alone, live alone or politic alone –
they do so in interdependent relationships with others' (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, p. 200) that are
inherently gendered. One of the key analytical contributions of all three texts is the way in which they all challenge what it
means to be 'doing' IR, by recognising various forms of violence, interrogating the public/private divide and demanding that
Feminist security studies
should not simply be seen as 'women doing security', or as 'adding women to
IR/security studies', important as these contributions are. Through their theorising, the
authors discussed here reconfigure what 'counts' as IR, challenging orthodox
notions of who can 'do' IR and what 'doing' IR means. The practices of power
needed to maintain dominant configurations of international relations are exposed,
and critiquing the productive power of realism as a discourse is one way in which the
authors do this. Sjoberg and Gentry pick up on a recent theoretical shift in AngloAmerican IR, from system-level analysis to a recognition that individuals matter.
However, as they rightly point out, the individuals who are seen to matter are not gendered
relational beings, but rather reminiscent of Hobbes' construction of the autonomous
rational actor. '[T]he narrowness of the group that [such an approach] includes
limits its effectiveness as an interpretive framework and reproduces the
gender, class and race biases in system-level international relationship scholarship' (Sjoberg and Gentry 2008,
p. 200, emphasis added). Without paying adequate attention to the construction of individuals as gendered
attention is paid to the temporal and physical spaces in-between war and peace.
beings, or to the reproduction of widely held ideas about masculine and feminine behaviours, Sjoberg and Gentry remind us
that we
will ultimately fail 'to see and deconstruct the increasingly subtle, complex
and disguised ways in which gender pervades international relations and global
politics' (2008, p. 225). In a similar vein, Roberts notes that 'human security is marginalised or
rejected as inauthentic [because] it is not a reflection of realism's (male) agendas
and priorities' (2008, p. 169). The 'agendas and priorities' identified by Roberts and acknowledged by
Sjoberg and Gentry as being productive of particular biases in scholarship are not simply 'academic' matters,
in the pejorative sense of the term. As Roberts argues, 'Power relationships of inequality
happen because they are built that way by human determinism of security and what
is required to maintain security (p. 171). Realism, as academic discourse and as policy guideline, has material
effects. Although his analysis employs an unconventional definition of the term 'social construction' (seemingly
interchangeable with 'human agency') and rests on a novel interpretation of the three foundational assumptions of realism
(Roberts, 2008, pp. 169–77), the central point that Roberts seeks to make in his conclusion is valid: 'it is a challenge to those
who deny relationships between gender and security; between human agency (social construction) and lethal outcome' (p.
183). In sum, all three texts draw their readers to an inescapable, and – for the conventional study of IR – a devastating
conclusion: the dominance of neo-realism/realism and the state-based study of security that derives from this is potentially
pathological, in that it is in part productive of the violences it seeks to ameliorate. I suggest that critical
engagement
with orthodox IR theory is necessary for the intellectual growth of the discipline,
and considerable insight can be gained by acknowledging the relevance of feminist
understandings of gender, power and theory. The young woman buying a T-shirt from a multinational
clothing corporation with her first pay cheque, the group of young men planning a stag weekend in Amsterdam, a group of
students attending a demonstration against the bombing of Afghanistan – studying these significant actions currently falls
outside the boundaries of doing security studies in mainstream IR and I believe these boundaries need contesting. As Marysia
Zalewski argues: International politics is what we make it to be ... We
need to rethink the discipline in
ways that will disturb the existing boundaries of both that which we claim to be
relevant in international politics and what we assume to be legitimate ways of
constructing knowledge about the world (Zalewski 1996, p. 352, emphasis in original).
Plan
**You can have some fun with the plan—the idea is to fund an impossible, utopian
active transportation project**
As an act of imagining a world after cars:
The United States federal government should substantially increase its
transportation infrastructure investment for active transportation
infrastructure.
Solvency
This act of imagining past the status quo deadlock on increasing support for
active transportation is a discursive intervention into broader systems of
control
Herr 12 (Samantha Z., University of Kentucky, “Biopolitics of Bike Commuting:
Bike Lanes, Safety, and Social Justice”, Theses and Dissertations,
http://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/2)
Since the car boom of the 1950s, transport cycling in the US has been particularly
stigmatized as childish and negatively associated with poverty and/or deviancy (Aldred 2010;
Blickstein and Hanson 2001; Carlsson 2010; Furness 2005a; Furness 2005b; Horton 2006; Horton 2007; Horton, Rosen and Cox
2007; Skinner and Rosen 2007). As a response to dominant car-culture, environmental activists in the 1970s deployed bikecommuting
bikecommuting has generally disappeared as a potential means of transport for all but those
who are too young or cannot afford a car (exemplified in such statistics as less than 1% of
Americans commute by bike (McCarthy 2011; Pucher and Buehler 2009) … that is, until now. In cities across
the U.S., biking is being touted as an energy-efficient, low carbon footprint, healthy, communitybuilding form of transport, a sustainable solution to perceived urban ills. As city governments have become increasingly
advocacy, but this was largely seen as a counterculture threat to the status quo (Furness 2005b; Horton 2006). Thus,
motivated to make their cities more sustainable, transport cycling has become integral in these plans. Boston is one such city
enthusiastic about bicycle transportation. After appearing three times on Bicycling Magazine’s ‘The Worst’ list, the last of which was
in 2006, the City of Boston changed its tune. In 2007, Boston Mayor, Tom Menino, launched a multipronged strategy to encourage
bicycle transportation and make it a more viable option in the city. Since then, bike lanes and racks have been installed, a bike map
project has been completed, and various city-wide bike-commuting events have taken place (City of Boston 2011). In 2011, Boston
launched one of the first bike sharing programs in the U.S. (City of Boston 2011). Recent enthusiasm and efforts for cycling transport
integration by Boston residents and the City made Boston an interesting case for my research. For this geographical investigation, the
Bike lanes are key
infrastructure and symbols of the present ‘bikeways’ and ‘complete streets’ strategies
for transport cycling integration. Since the mid-2000s, cities around the U.S. have been restructuring their streets to
include bike lanes in unprecedented proportions. While increasingly a feature of the U.S. urban landscape, bike lanes are
vehemently contested and ambiguous spaces. For example, Ben Adler, writer for The Nation, reports that in
2010, ‘Colorado’s Republican gubernatorial nominee attacked his Democratic opponent for
building bike lanes, warning that they “could threaten our personal freedoms” and
“convert Denver into a United Nations community"’ (2011:22). Adler also cites cases in New York City,
one in which the city was sued for painting a bike lane that removed street parking in a
wealthy area, and another in which a Hasidic Jewish community contested a lane in their
neighborhood, believing that women on bicycles were dressed immodestly (2011:23-24). How
departure point has become the bike lane, an emerging feature in U.S. urban landscapes.
did bike lanes come to be on the street in the first place, and what does it mean for them to be there? These are the questions of my
first chapter. Because bike lanes are such ambiguous and contested spaces, it is interesting to ask, “what is at stake?” What is the
thrust of bike lane enthusiasm? Through my second chapter, I come to understand that bike
lanes are embedded in a
process of re-imagining urban life toward more inclusivity and humanistic ideals of public space.1 I
investigate the complex discourse of safety that works through discussions about bike lanes in
transport literature, planning paradigms, bike advocacy, and for everyday bike commuters. What begins
as a concern of the physical body leads to ideals of legitimacy and inclusivity, of which
the bike lane has become a key symbol and act of these imaginings. The logic of bike
lane safety becomes one that employs a right-based notion of social justice in which
legitimacy, and ultimately safety, is garnered through becoming intelligible, or visible, as
cycling subjects. I find this rights-based logic of social justice problematic in the context of bicycling integration and the issue
of safety. My fieldwork research indicates that increasing
visibility and legitimacy of cyclists doesn’t
lead to felt experiences of increased safety for cycling bodies. This leads me to question
the usefulness of a rights-based strategy of social justice to affect everyday embodied
experiences. In the third chapter, I use the case of transport cycling to explore another option for conceptualizing,
understanding, and strategizing for social justice in the city. In the third chapter, I depart from a liberal democratic notion of social
Security is
an affective technology of power that aims to preemptively intervene through the milieu
to effect the population so as to maximize benefit for the greatest number. There is, of course,
always a margin of failure, those who will encounter harm. I connect fear, and more specifically cyclists’ fear, to the
dimension of social in/equality. I explore the connection between difference, fear, and risk in the context of transport
cycling, showing how the bikeways discourse of inclusivity works through bike lanes as
mechanisms of security. This understanding is at odds with the understanding of bike lanes as territorial rights-claims, a
justice and make a case for understanding how bike lanes work through the lens of what Foucault terms “security.”
common understanding demonstrated by bikeways proponents (from scholars to cyclists themselves). To be at odds, however, is not to
be a critique. The Foucauldian perspective that I suggest is an additional perspective that highlights less seen aspects of the transport
cycling experience, project towards integration, issues of social justice, and elements of power relations more broadly. I do not
disagree with a rights-based interpretation of bike lanes and social justice; rather, I intend to bring to the fore an alternative dimension
that simultaneously exists alongside it. While in actuality I believe that representational
and affective dimensions
are inextricable from each other, in this thesis I will express these dimensions dichotomously. This dichotomy is solely
used heuristically in an effort to highlight and explain the nature of difference between these two dimensions. I engage in this project
to hopefully flesh out what I believe has been a monochromatic painting of bike lanes, transport cycling integration, cycling safety,
and social justice in the city. From the perspective of security that I adopt, bike lanes are not understood as features of a rights struggle
that claim space in the city for an under-represented population of cyclists, or that simply wave the banner for an ideology of a more
humanistic way of life, but rather are mechanisms working within the bikeways discourse of inclusivity that physically shift the urban
milieu, affecting spaces and bodies in important ways. Inclusivity
discourse, which advocates for the
inclusion of cycling as an option for travel on city streets and for the inclusion of many different kinds of
cyclists, intervenes at the conjunction of subject positionality, perception, probability, potentiality,
and embodied reality. It renders cycling safety into a problem of fear and risk, and responds by negotiating difference and
normalcy within the milieu. I then apply this Foucauldian-influenced understanding of the bikeways approach to cycling safety to the
problem of reaching real bodies in our efforts towards social justice and safety in the city. Cycling safety within the bikeways context
provides a productive opportunity to explore this new way of thinking and acting because the
problem of cycling
safety is directly situated within our bodies, in encounters with one another, as we each traverse the
city. There is a timeliness, and maybe even urgency, for this exploration as transport cycling becomes increasingly promoted and
popularized as a mode of transport in cities across the U.S. How can we capitalize on the mechanisms at work in our changing streets
and cities for a more equitable and fearless future?
Imagining alternatives to fossil fuel based transportation discursively
intervenes in the mode of intelligibility that renders consumption invisible
Herr 12 (Samantha Z., University of Kentucky, “Biopolitics of Bike Commuting:
Bike Lanes, Safety, and Social Justice”, Theses and Dissertations,
http://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/2,)
Efforts toward social equity can take many forms. Bikeways
logic implicitly understands bike lanes as a
discursive intervention that responds to our constructions of legitimacy—legitimate
behavior, legitimate bodies, legitimate identities—in the city. In other words, bike lanes generate and
contribute to a rights-based discourse of social justice and safety in the city. A rightsbased framework of social justice is the common one we are familiar with here in the United States and many other
places. It is a representative notion of social justice, where rights are designated, protected, and mitigated based
on a person or group’s ability to become recognized by the whole (or the authoritative body empowered with the role of distributing
justice). Judith Butler
calls this intelligibility. One must be intelligible to have rights, to be
considered legitimate, or conversely to have rights or legitimacy taken away, and this is
ultimately important for Butler because our access to the human—to a livable life—hangs in the
balance of our intelligibility. In her book, Undoing Gender, she says: To find that one is fundamentally
unintelligible (indeed, that they laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet
achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human,
but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one’s language is hollow, and that no
recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in
one’s favor” (2004a:30, 218). The import of this idea for bicycle transportation integration is that bicycles need to be
rendered intelligible as transportation in order that cyclists become legitimized on the
street, providing them access to road rights and safety. In other words, cyclists need to become
cycling subjects, set apart from an identity and subjectivity as motor vehicle drivers, to have
access to their own rights as cyclists, and obtain accommodations for this type of transport mode and lifestyle. This is to say,
cyclists must be rendered visible; they must be seen. One research participant put it this way: …I think that
visibility is hugely important. Visibility and legitimacy. Visibility has made those of us who are not the
crazy eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old-boy on their fixed bike darting in and out of
traffic being stupid, more comfortable and therefore more visible. And that's important because…
they're not the kind [of cyclists] who are going to make drivers think cyclists should be here and that's important to me... (interview
transcript 7-2-10). In this quote, this bike commuter expresses how the
visibility of bicycling is intricately
connected to its legitimacy as a transport mode. For her, making space for the potential
inclusion of different kinds of transport cyclists is tied to making cycling visible, which works
to establish legitimacy for cyclists. This, as she states, is important to her; it is important to her that drivers recognize that cyclists
‘should be here,’ on the street and in the city. According to bike commuters who participated in this research, bike lanes make cycling
more visible. They “remind drivers that [bicyclists] are supposed to be there” (interview transcript 7-2-10), and they “…let[] the car
know that when they open their door, they’re opening their door into someone else’s space” (interview transcript 6-3010). Expressions
like “supposed to be there,” “should be there,” and “someone else’s space,” strongly display cyclists’ concerns with legitimacy.
Bike lanes are seen to contribute to creating legitimacy for cyclists both through being
visible markers, and as claims to the use of space. In a word, they provide cyclists with representation, an
avenue by which to be known, an avenue by which to become a cycling subject. Thus, bike lanes are essentially understood by cyclists
and advocates through a rights-based, or representative, discourse of social justice. Prominent geographer and theorist of urban social
justice, Don Mitchell, conceives of social justice in the same way, and expounds on what he views to be the
inherent interplay between social justice and the city. In his seminal work, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for
justice that follows a dialectical “logic of
representation” that “centers on the right of groups and individuals to… represent
themselves to others and to the state—even if through struggle—as legitimate claimants to public
considerations” (2003:33). In this way, “a space for representation—a place in which groups and individuals can make
themselves visible, is crucial” (2003:33). “Representation, whether of oneself or a group, demands space” (2003:33). It is
precisely in the “public” spaces of the city that representations and negotiations of
legitimacy are hashed out. For transportation cyclists and advocates, the street is such a space. To follow Mitchell’s
Public Space (2003), Mitchell outlines his conception of social
theorizing further, the street is such a space, not because it is inherently so, but because a group has made it so. In Mitchell’s terms, he
would call this a ‘public’ space. “[W]hat makes a space public,” says Mitchell, “…a space in which the cry and demand for the right
to the city can be seen and heard--is often not preordained ‘publicness.’ Rather, it is when, to fulfill a pressing need, some group or
in order to obtain
and exercise rights to the city—to lead a legitimate existence and way of life in the space
of the city—a group must claim their right. This “claim” is understood for Mitchell as a spatial
gesture; it is the taking of space. To use Mitchell’s terms, bikeways logic understands bike lanes
as a “cry and demand for the right to the city;” bike lanes are the taking of space and making it public, and they
another takes space and through its actions makes it public” (2003:35). Thus, from Mitchell’s perspective,
are acts of representation that claim a ‘right to the city’—legitimacy—for cyclists. Bike lanes make transport cyclists intelligible as
cyclists. But what is this legitimacy qua visibility doing for cycling safety in Boston?
More specifically, Imagining a world after cars creates an epistemic break which
is a prerequisite to thinking novel responses to the sustainability crisis
Urry 2004, (John, Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, “The 'System' of
Automobility,” Theory, Culture & Society, Oct 1, 2004, p. 32-33,
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/21/4-5/25.full.pdf+html).
Thus in order to break with the current car system, what Adams terms ‘business as
usual’ (1999), we need to examine the possibilities of ‘turning points’. Abbott
argues that change is the normal order of things and indeed many assessments of
contemporary social life emphasize the increasingly accelerating nature of such
profound changes. But there are certain networks of social relations that get
stabilized for long periods of time, what are often called social structures. One
such structure is the car system that is remarkably stable and unchanging, even
though a massive economic, social and technological maelstrom of change
surrounds it. The car-system seems to sail on regardless, now over a century old and
increasingly able to ‘drive’ out competitors, such as feet, bikes, buses and trains. The
car system, we might say, is a Braudelian longue durée (Abbott, 2001: 256).
But as Abbott notes, and indeed it is a key feature of complexity approaches to
systems, nothing is fixed forever. Abbott maintains that there is: ‘the possibility
for a pattern of actions to occur to put the key in the lock and make a major
turning point occur’ (2001: 257). Such non-linear outcomes are generated by a
system moving across turning or tipping points (Gladwell, 2000). Tipping points
involve three notions: that events and phenomena are contagious, that little
causes can have big effects, and that changes can happen not in a gradual
linear way but dramatically at a moment when the system switches. Gladwell
describes the consumption of fax machines or mobile phones, when at a particular
moment every office appears to need a fax machine or every mobile ‘cool’ person
requires a mobile. Wealth in such a situation derives not from the scarcity of goods
as in conventional economics but from abundance (Gladwell, 2000: 272–3).
Current thinking about automobility is characterized by linear thinking: can
existing cars can be given a technical fix to decrease fuel consumption or can
existing public transport be improved a bit (see Urry, 2003, on non-linearity)? But
the real challenge is how to move to a different pattern involving a more or
less complete break with the current car system . The current car-system could
not be disrupted by linear changes but only by a set of interdependent changes
occurring in a certain order that might move, or tip, the system into a new path (see
Gladwell, 2000; Sheller and Urry, 2000).
Our open ended strategy is necessary to open a form of agency outside of the
status quo’s ideological blinders
Brincat, 2k9 (Shannon, U of Queensland, “Reclaiming the Utopian imaginary in
IR theory”, Review of International Studies (2009), 35, 581-609)
When Mannheim is portrayed in this critical light, it dramatically alters the frame of reference for the
debate between realism and utopianism in IR. It shifts focus from one centred on the subjectivity of
utopianism to one that implicates realism with serving, in actuality, the subjective interests of the
existing powers. For by making the ontological error that what it considered
unrealisable in the given order as if it were unrealisable in any other, realism
suppresses the validity of any claims that suggest the possibility of change. By
labelling everything that goes beyond the present order utopian, the realist
can set at rest the anxiety that may arise from utopias that would be realisable
in another order.45 It cannot countenance that the utopianism of today may
become the reality of tomorrow.46 In this context, Mannheim reinforces the
importance of the utopian imagination because he seeks to locate where
‘transcendent ideas’ become active, that is, where they become forces leading
to the transformation of existing reality.47 Mannheim goes on to espouse the
importance of individual creative power, the ‘novel’ and unique human mind
that can break beyond the bounds of the existing order, though he warns us to not
overestimate the prominence of the individual or our abilities to affect such transformations..48
Mannheim posits that imaginary imperatives are not absolute but are a part of
concrete life processes, they die away when they are outmoded and they can
be realised only in given structural situations.49 As such, Mannheim offers a
processual view of utopianism that explicitly refers to the transformative,
mobilising nature of utopian ideas. Yet if Mannheim is considered as taking a
processual view of utopianism, the question is how concrete does this
depiction of utopia have to be? If utopianism can shatter reality only by being an
end-state, then this would prescribe set blueprint forms of utopia. Alternatively, if utopia is
viewed as a process (that is, that whatever is ‘different’ has the potential to
shatter reality), then it does not require a telos of any kind. In fact, from this
processual view, deterministic blueprint utopian ideas inevitably become
ossified ideologies over time. When viewed as a process however, the
imaginary of utopia acts as a negative pushing and pulling against reality, a
joint process of thought and action (praxis). Utopianism here becomes
something for agency and something against reality that need not be confined
to any set form. The Life of Brian therefore captures the power of the utopian
imagination far better than the rigid rule of Plato’s Philosopher Kings. Brian’s
plea that he ‘hates the Romans’ is not followed by a detailed plan to be followed by the People’s Front
of Judea, nor is his imagination fixed on one monist alternative but simply evokes a sense, no matter
how vague, of a place somewhere else.50 Rather than lamenting this lack of
concreteness, it is being against reality, knowing the possibility of change and
imagining something that is not yet (no matter how ill-defined or ‘fuzzy’ the
notion may be) that is the power of the utopian imaginary as a process for
human agency.
Imagining the impossible is a necessary prerequisite to challenging dominant
status quo modes of intelligibility
Brincat, 2k9 (Shannon, U of Queensland, “Reclaiming the Utopian imaginary in IR
theory”, Review of International Studies (2009), 35, 581-609)
Sometime in the shadowy inter-war years saw the demise of utopianism as a viable aspect of IR theory.
E.H. Carr gave the date of utopianism’s actual death in the events of 1931, 24 and while that may or may not
be accurate, one of the many casualties of World War II was the utopian imaginary
and its replacement with what Levitas has described as an ‘anti-utopian utopianism’
– a political sphere that represses and obscures images of the good life, effectively
removing them from consideration.25 One reason why IR theory has shown only the
most sedentary flickers of a transformative capacity is, I contend, because of this
dismissal of the utopian tradition near to the discipline’s inception in the debates
between realism and liberal internationalism. Carr’s so-called ‘devastating attack’ on
utopianism contained in the opening salvo of The Twenty Years’ Crisis has been the widely accepted as the
coup d’état of all utopian thought in IR.26 In the aftermath of this First Great Debate, it was the
methodology of realism that prevailed having ‘irrefutably’ discredited its alternative. Since then, like Alice
in Wonderland, IR theory has had little practice in imagining what it considers
‘impossible things.’ For all its sensibilities, mainstream IR simply cannot see beyond
the lens of its own looking-glass, where what is possible is deemed impossible, where
what is in principle alterable is cast with permanence. That is, if the dominant
approach to the field cannot believe what it considers impossible – and the
immutability thesis of realism holds that any form of progressive change constitutes
such an impossibility27 – then not only is all imagination of betterment expunged
from disciplinary knowledge but so too is any conceptualisation of change at all. In
this way, realism asphyxiates thought in IR because of its inability to imagine
anything other than what is.28 As shall be seen however, the philosophical grounds on which the
forced exile of utopianism from IR was compelled are not as unassailable as is so widely assumed. Carr
dismissed utopianism on the epistemic ground that it was abstract and metaphysical, and on the normative
ground that the utopianist’s desire for justice and perfection could rupture the ordered fragility of the
international status quo.29 In distinction, realism sought to compel IR theorists to reflect only
on empirical, non-ideal features of the world system, and to thus constrain the
political imagination to present conditions alone. Yet these core realist assumptions
suffer from two fatal contradictions. The first is the ontological problem that
pertains to the relative position of different actors within the world system that
would give different considerations to what is deemed objectively possible and
desirable in world politics. What is considered impossible for the realist may be
considered possible (and necessary) for peripheral groups who have long-term aims
for the transformation of political power and community.30 The second
contradiction relates to the false logic inherent to Carr’s assumption of impossibility
– any estimation of the possibility or impossibility of utopian transition is not a
prima facie ground for dismissing utopianism altogether. There can be no logical
certainty deducible from a subjective estimate of what is considered possible, nor does
Carr substantiate what it is exactly that makes utopianism impossible, other than vague references to the
superiority of a scientific approach.31 This view completely excludes the powerful ideational
role that the utopian imagination can have at the level of will formation of agents in
inspiring change. Moreover, such an argument only concerns the probability of
change – and one could contend that the material/productive basis of society today
provides far more potential for positive transformations towards utopia than has
hitherto existed in history.
2ac
A2 Materiality/Reps Key/F/W
Automobility is a discursive construction—our framework is necessary to come
to terms with the symbolic foundations of automobility
Böhm et al 2006 (Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Chris Land, Mat Paterson,
Steffen Böhm is Professor in Management and Sustainability at the University
of Essex, The Sociological Review, Vol. 54, Issue supplement s1, pp 1-16,
October 2006, “Part One Conceptualizing Automobility: Introduction:
Impossibilities of automobility,” azp)
As its name implies, automobility can be understood as a patterned system
which is predicated in the most fundamental sense on a combination of
notions of autonomy and mobility. Autonomy and mobility are to be
understood in the terms of this system as both values in themselves, but also
as conjoined – one expresses and achieves autonomy when mobile. Similarly, true
mobility can only be achieved autonomously – the distinction between moving
and being moved, a passive and decidedly dependent (as opposed to
autonomous) state. These concepts of autonomy and mobility come together
around material and symbolic artefacts through which the combination is
expressed. In our era, the predominant artefact is the car. In contemporary
societies, the car stands in place of automobility itself. It is so thoroughly invested
with the constitutive flows of modernity – material, financial, and libidinal – that
it has come to appear universal and incontestable. These connections operate in
terms of what Laclau and Mouffe (1985) call ‘chains of equivalence’ in which
things which bear no a priori relation to each other are made to be the same.
These connections become, ironically, ‘automatic’. The production and
consumption of the automobile becomes the production and consumption of
automobility itself.
Tracing the material geographies of oil production is not enough; instead it is
critical to investigate the social relations that imbue oil with its monolithic
status.
Huber 2011 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “Oil, Life, and the Fetishism of Geopolitics, Capitalism Nature
Socialism, Vol.2 22, No. 3, 32-48, 2011, azp)
Uncovering the ‘‘hidden’’ material geographies of oil extraction,
transportation, refining, and so forth is undeniably a worthy pursuit*and one
that has been performed in a variety of contexts.7 However, thingified discourses
around oil as the cause of wealth, poverty, democracy, authoritarianism, war
and peace are not so much false, but rather discursive expressions of
particular historical geographies, lived practices, and social relations of capitalist
life. Understanding the social relations that produce the imaginary of oil as a
powerful thing is a different and perhaps less dogmatically materialistic
exercise than simply tracing the geographies of oil’s material production.
Following nature-society threads of historical materialism, the fetishism
around oil expresses a deeper set of relations between oil and the ‘‘production
and reproduction of real life’’ under capitalism. But, first, I show how the
critical literature surrounding the political economy of oil tends to reproduce
geopolitical (and fetishistic) narratives of oil as a strategic ‘‘thing.’’
It is impossible to understand oil outside of the ways in which it is
represented—our focus is a prerequisite to a political solution
Huber 2011 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “Oil, Life, and the Fetishism of Geopolitics, Capitalism Nature
Socialism, Vol.2 22, No. 3, 32-48, 2011, azp)
Oil is not a thing-in-itself. Contrary to fetishistic discourses of ‘‘oil states,’’ ‘‘oil wars,’’
and ‘‘oil addictions,’’ a dialectical approach must seek to understand oil as
produced through a set of social relations. While fetishistic discourses of oil are
not surprising in popular discourse, it is disconcerting to see them on the Left, which
tends to only see oil as an object of geopolitical or imperial conflict. Through a
geopolitical optic, oil is envisioned as a vital and strategic ‘‘thing’’ through
which imperial relations are solidified, (petro)states are formed, and local
livelihoods are violently destabilized. Thus, the site of extraction becomes the
territorial center through which conflictual social forces congregate, and
struggle over the oil ‘‘prize’’ unfolds. As a counter to this geopolitical optic, this
paper attempts to situate oil more broadly within the social relations of class
struggle and accumulation animating American capitalism. From this
perspective, oil is a social product of intense political battles over the
production and reproduction of life itself. As the incredible dense energy of oil
was put to work in producing immensely profligate geographies of social
reproduction, those very geographies began to shape the politics of capitalism more
generally. Once oil became more and more entrenched within the
(re)productive forces of everyday life, those forces informed a politics of
‘‘hostile privatism’’ where individual homeowners imagined themselves as
autonomous, hard-working subjects whose very freedom was threatened by
the ever-extending tentacles of ‘‘big government.’’ The dialectics of oil suggests a
different form of politics against ‘‘petro-capitalism.’’ Rather than an
overwhelming focus on oil as an object of power*as cries of ‘‘no blood for oil!’’
suggest*we need to begin to see oil, in particular, and energy more broadly as a
struggle over the production and reproduction of life. Moving beyond oil fetishism
means constructing imaginaries through which oil is not an addictive ‘‘thing’’
that we are helpless to control, but rather, a contingent and historically
situated socioecological relationship that is prone to contestation and
transformation toward a post-petroleum future.
Narratives of evil “big oil” are useless and false – these monolithic
representations distort the role of the individual in petro-capitalism. Our
framework for the round is about individual complicity – we need to remain
cognizant of our the way everyday actions, at the local level, inform global
power and energy struggles, if we hope to problematize the dominant
structures of automobility.
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “Lifeblood: Geographies of Petro-Capitalism in the United States”,”
Graduate dissertation, Submitted to the faculty of Clark University-WorcesterMassachusetts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Geography, May 2009, azp)
How is hegemony realized in the system of oil governance? Popular
conceptions of the oil industry always envision large, powerful, integrated oil
businesses prone to monopoly, price gouging and environmental destruction from the Standard Oil monopoly revealed by Ida Tarbell (1904) to today's landscape
of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, global climate change, high gas prices and super-profits
all wrought by "Big oil" (Yergin 1991; Olien and Olien 2000). These conceptions
promote a theory of power that suggests "Big" oil companies have simply
captured the state overtly and directed it toward selfish ends. Many books in
the past and present have advanced this point of view (Tarbell 1904; Sampson
1975; Blair 1977; Engler 1977; McElroy 2006). While this theory of "Big oil"
domination does hold kernels of truth, it does not reveal the precariousness
and complexity of power relations in capitalist society - that is, it doesn't
capture how the hegemony of multinational oil capital is achieved through a
set of tactical bargains and strategic compromises appeasing certain social
blocs. Gramsci (1971: 161) describes the complexity of hegemony: Undoubtedly
the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and
the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that
a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed - in other words, that the
leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But there
is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the
essential; for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic,
must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading
group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. As I will demonstrate in
chapter four, while it may be appropriate to conceptualize "Big oil" as the
"leading group," it is crucial to understand how "Big oil's" power is
reproduced only through a set of "sacrifices of the economic-corporate kind" to
what I call "little oil" or small, high-cost "independent" producers - and "the
consuming public." While others have emphasized the role of petty commodity
production in legitimating capitalist ideologies of laissez-faire in agriculture (de
Janvry 1981), fisheries (Mann 2007) and other natural resource industries (Walker
2001), the role of oil producers has received less attention. In addition to purely
economic "sacrifices," hegemony requires the production of "ethico-political"
meanings, ideas and cultural practices that lend legitimacy to power and
domination. By "ethico-political", I refer to Gramsci's (1971: 167) focus on the
realm of meaning and the forces of "persuasion and consent" (ibid: 299) in making
power and domination appear logical, just and commonsensical in the absence of
"brute coercion" (298). Thus, Big oil's domination is also reproduced through
powerful ideological narratives of oil consumption as necessary to a
sacrosanct "American way of life" and oil production founded on ideas of "the
little guy," competition, and private property.
Capitalism Focus Key
The aff’s focus on the intersection between capitalism and American culture is a
prerequisite to overcoming the squo
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the “American way of life”,”
Antipode, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp 465-486, 2009, azp)
Over the last few years, a central node of US political discourse in the 1970s
has re-emerged with a vengeance—the gasoline pump. On 8 June 2008, the
nationwide average of gasoline prices exceeded the symbolic threshold of
$4.00/gallon (Krauss 2008), and for the first time in nearly two decades it appears
that driving less has become the only option for American motorists (Federal
Highway Administration 2008). The cover of October 2005 issue of the American
Association for Retired People (AARP) Bulletin displayed the text “The big hurt:
High gas prices take their toll” and a picture of a man being strangled by a gasoline
pump. Republicans have labeled the 70% run up in prices since January 2007 the
“Pelosi Premium”; Democrats have answered that the 183% rise since 2001
constitutes a “Bush bonus” (Energy Information Administration—EIA 2008a). Four
years after a Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign ad accused John Kerry of having “wacky
ideas—like taxing gas, so people drive less” (Maas 2005), presidential candidates
John McCain and Hilary Clinton proposed a summer “gas tax holiday” to help ease
the “pain at the pump”. Even Moveon.org—the flagship liberal web-based
organization—has complained of the suffering of consumers, “just in time to crimp
summer vacation plans” (Hogue 2007). No matter what side of the political
spectrum, the “outrageous” price of gasoline appears to represent the apex of
everyday oppression; a symbolic barometer of everything wrong in the United
States—from the sub-prime housing crisis to the Iraq War. What is it about
gasoline that—as the New York Times reported—“inspires intense emotion?” (Cave
2008). Political scorn for high gasoline prices in the United States is not new.
Yergin (1991: 211) asserts that since at least the 1920s, gas price increases have
been an endemic “source of rancor, a subject to be reported on by the press,
discussed by governors, senators and even presidents”. The contemporary furor,
however, reveals an interesting contradiction. As the social and ecological
contradictions of the US “oil addiction” express themselves in ever-more
tangible mediums (war, sprawl, climate change) there persists a cultural and
political sense of entitlement to the very low gas prices that allow for the
continuation of mass oil consumption. When gas prices rise, all we hear is a
discourse of “anger”, “pain” and “gouging”. Any price other than the traditionally
low price—which in real terms, apart from the second oil shock in 1979–1980 has
always been under $2.00/gallon (EIA 2008b)—is seen as above its real “value”. In
this paper, I employ a value-theoretical approach to examine the politics of gasoline
prices as a particular moment in the larger structure of relations between
petroleum and capitalist society in the USA. While the existing critical literature has
focused on the geographies of petroleum production, I posit that the cultural politics
of gasoline prices emerge as a considerably undertheorized realm in which the
logics of domination over petroleum geographies are reproduced. While my focus
on the price of gasoline might suggest a discussion of the totalizing subjugation of
abstract value relations under capitalism, my aim is quite different. I seek to
understand how the abstract forms of domination embedded in the value-form
constantly stand in dialectical tension to historically and geographically situated
usevalues. As I will show, current outrage over gasoline’s exchange-value should be
understood in relation to historically sedimented use-values produced through a
particular sociospatial form predicated upon cheap and abundant petroleum. The
use-value of gasoline is not simply about the instrumental need to move from
point A to point B, but has become entangled within wider imaginaries of
work, home, mobility, freedom, and a specifically “American way of life”; in
short, ideas that go to the heart of capitalist ideology in the USA. In the context of
higher oil prices, “pain at the pump” discourse reveals how these socially produced
use-values constantly intervene to make efforts to curb patterns of petroleum
consumption cumbersome at best, and ineffectual at worst. More optimistically,
these interventions expose the purported “law of C value” as an open and
discontinuous process that must always confront the social pivot of use-value
as an open site of cultural and political struggle.
The continuation and maintenance of the oil industry is enshrined as a foundational
idol of American political cultural. The sense of entitlement that exists in oil price
discourse demonstrates the sickly convergence of everyday life and the particular
brand of American exceptionalism that has fueled interventionism and violence for
decades.
A2: Squo Solves
We must investigate the underlying causes of apathy around the gas pump
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the “American way of life”,”
Antipode, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp 465-486, 2009, azp)
Thus, in official pronouncements and everyday street talk one can discern the
specific calling of livelihood to legitimate and rationalize specific resource
practices. The “American way of life” is constructed as sacrosanct—Fleisher
calls it “blessed”. Because “our” way of life emerges from the natural and social
fruits internal to the USA; it is just and patriotic to clamor for its continuation.
The linkages between oil and a way of life do not only call upon warm feelings
of American exceptionalism (Beauregard 2006; Vitalis 2007), but also reveal more
insidious implications—the “American way of life” must be defended. This
posture serves to sanction unquestioned access to foreign petroleum reserves
in the Middle East and beyond that—after the Carter doctrine—any threat
toward, “will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force”
(Carter quoted in Klare 2004:3–4). As a solider serving in Iraq and interviewed in
the production of the 2006 documentary TheWar Tapes, MikeMoriarity put it:
You’ve heard people say—“we’re over there for the oil . . . that’s the only reason
we’re in Iraq—it’s oil, it’s oil, it’s oil . . .”, Well, listen— No . . . we’re not there for the
oil . . . If it were for oil, would that not be enough reason to go to Iraq? You bet your
ass it would be. If you took oil away from this country tomorrow, what do you think
would happen to this country? It would be . . . devastating . . . So let’s all stop crying
about whether we had reason to go in there or not . . . it’s a done deal—we’re in Iraq.
Support what it takes to make this thing work or shut up. Here we see the crucial
link between oil and the vitality of Americanness and the “devastating”
consequences if that linkage is not upheld with—if necessary—military force. The
task now before us is to explain how Americans continue to feel entitled to cheap
gasoline—despite the plain and obvious contradictions of the US “oil
addiction”.Why do Americans see $4.00/gallon gasoline as excessive? Because
this claim centers upon a commodity and its price, the answer requires an
analysis of the terrain of value relations. While the price of a particular
commodity must be understood as but the mere material expression of value
relations on the surface of social life, my analysis will uncover the underlying
relations that make certain gas prices objectionable. But first I will review the
concept of value itself.
Automobility focus Key
Our focus on automobility is key—it is a unique intersection fo power
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the “American way of life”,”
Antipode, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp 465-486, 2009, azp)
Understanding gasoline as a use-value within the value of labor power
requires understanding the historical process of motorization and
suburbanization in the United States (Gonzalez 2005; Newman and Kenworthy
1999; Rutledge 2005). Harvey (1989:17–59) describes the post-World War II
urban process in the United States as a historically contingent response to
capitalist crisis tendencies manifested in the 1930s. In short, John Maynard
Keynes (1980 [1936]), and others, recognized this as a crisis of “effective demand”,
and, therefore mobilized an economy wherein “social, economic and political
life [was] organized around the theme of state-backed, debt financed
consumption” (Harvey 1989:38). The social struggles of the 1930s and immediate
post-World War II era erected institutional and political arrangements conducive to
a “social consumption norm” able to absorb the specifically Fordist regime of mass
production (Aglietta 1979:71). This was not simply a matter of state policy, but
became imbricated in space. Specifically, the urban form was organized more and
more around the spatial division of consumption promulgated by the great
suburban dispersion of both the residential and industrial sectors (Beauregard
2006; Florida and Feldman 1988; Gonzalez 2005; Jackson 1985; Walker 1981). The
mass democratization of suburban housing and the automobile—backed by
debt-financing through the state alongside the political manipulation of the
auto and oil industries (Black 2006; McShane 1995; Yago 1980)—made the
spatial dispersion of the post World War II urban form possible (Florida and
Feldman 1988; Jackson 1985; Muller 1981; Urry 2004). Harvey (1989:39) describes
these dynamics in succinct fashion: The means of dispersal—the automobile—
had also been on hand since the 1920s. But it took the rising economic power
of individuals to appropriate space for their own exclusive purposes through
debt-financed homeownership and debt-financed access to transport services
(auto purchases as well as highways), to create the “suburban solution” to the
underconsumption problem. Though suburbanization had a long history, it
marked post-war urbanization to an extraordinary degree. It meant the mobilization
of effective demand through the total restructuring of space so as to make the
consumption of the products of the auto, oil, rubber, and construction industries a
necessity rather than a luxury. Thus, the “total restructuring of space” could only
be achieved as a result of the “mobilization of effective demand” achieved
through the reconfiguration of class relations between capital and labor.8 Social
struggles to redistribute a greater share of the total social product gave some
(but not all!) workers social power to appropriate space in particular ways—a
house, a car, and a yard. As Harvey indicates, one of the most “necessary” usevalues marking this emerging sociospatial arrangement was oil. Without the
energy to power internal combustion machines propelling worker consumers
through the vast spaces interlinking home, work, shopping center, and school, such
an arrangement would be impossible (Gonzalez 2005; Rutledge 2005). Predictably,
in the postwar period demand for gasoline rose astronomically—rising 409%
between 1946 and 1980 (Carter et al 2006:Table Df473). Therefore, the mass
consumption of oil has as much to do with the postwar reconfigurations of
class relations as it does with “urban spatial form” as an asocial determinant
(Newman and Kenworthy 1999)9 or, even a political conspiracy of auto-oil
capitals to force internal combustion motorization on an unsuspecting
consumer public through the destruction of public transit and electric vehicles
(Black 2006; Yago 1980).
Oil Focus Key
The pervasiveness of petroleum is not limited to transportation – oil is the
metaphorical and physical glue that holds together basic infrastructure and
culture in the United States.
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the “American way of life”,”
Antipode, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp 465-486, 2009, azp)
Although our focus is gasoline here, it is important to note that the vast
number of ways in which oil facilitated the cheapening of all use-values
composing the value of labor power—from the lowering of transportation costs
for all goods to the petrochemicalization of largescale agriculture; from
plastics to asphalt. As the fluid lubricating the flow of capital and labor alike,
cheap and sustained access to petroleum resources represents a contingent
factor facilitating the remarkable accumulation of capital in post-World War II
USA; a contingency that become more and more buried in the reproduction
capitalist society itself.
Framing it either as an addiction or a necessity, the dominating rhetoric of oil
dependence naturalizes the commodity’s monolithic power over the individual.
Huber 2011 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “Oil, Life, and the Fetishism of Geopolitics, Capitalism Nature
Socialism, Vol.2 22, No. 3, 32-48, 2011, azp)
Because of oil’s power, access to and control over petroleum reserves is
framed as a matter of grave concern for geopolitical elites and the
intellectuals of statecraft. Indeed, the very uneven geography of petroleum
reserves*and the spatial fixity of the most lucrative reserves in the Middle
East*situates oil at the center of geopolitical strategies of territorial control and
domination. Oil can automatically generate wealth and conflict because of its
centrality to industrial capitalist life. Although this centrality itself had to be
produced historically, statements like this one from Congressman William Cole in
1941 are rampant throughout the 20th century: ‘‘The progress of the people as a
whole depends upon this lifeblood of commerce and industry*petroleum . . .’’ (Cole
1941). As the societal ‘‘lifeblood,’’ oil’s finite quantities become an intense object
of social concern and scientific contestation. Since at least the 1920s, petroleum
geologists have warned of the imminent exhaustion of U.S. petroleum supplies
(Olien and Olien 1993). The most recent incarnation are those proclaiming the
imminence of ‘‘peak oil’’ when global production climaxes before declining (e.g.,
Heinberg 2003; Kunstler 2005; Simmons 2005).2 Because oil is endowed with
this generative power, it follows that oil scarcity prophesizes nothing less than
a collapse of modern industrial society itself. Oil’s centrality was celebrated for
much of the 20th century. However, since the oil ‘‘shocks’’ of the 1970s, it is
increasingly framed not as the lifeblood, but as an addiction3*an unnatural
fluid uncontrollably entrenched within the American bloodstream. It seems no
matter how much oil is linked directly to war, climate change, or catastrophic
oil spills (most recently witnessed in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010), its
embeddedness within everyday social reproduction persists. Thus, whether
framed as the lifeblood or addiction, oil’s singular power over us is naturalized.
Oil Addiction Impacts
Oil addiction is the biggest policy threat to the US
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “Lifeblood: Geographies of Petro-Capitalism in the United States”,”
Graduate dissertation, Submitted to the faculty of Clark University-WorcesterMassachusetts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Geography, May 2009, azp)
It can be said without hyperbole that the United States "oil addiction" is
perhaps the most profound policy challenge facing the United States in the
21st century. Oil sits at the center of the geopolitical relations of war and
peace, the ecological relations of global climate change and disaster, and the social
relations of suburbanized auto-centrism. The challenge of moving past an oilfired capitalism is often framed in terms of technical innovation or economic
efficiency, but in this dissertation, I argue that the main barriers to a post-fossil fuel
energy system are social and political. While the political barriers to this problem
are often simplified in terms of "Big oil's" domination of the state and society, such
perspectives often ignore the ways in which such domination only exists
alongside the centrality of oil to basic social reproduction. Thus, "energy"
cannot be framed as simply a disembodied technological force that can be
tweaked and transformed by the innovative captains of industry and socially
minded policymakers, but rather pinpoints the productive force of oil as
internal to sociospatial imageries of a specifically "American way of life." As the
first President Bush stated at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, ecological politics often
ensues under the assumption that the, "American way of life is not negotiable"
(quoted in, Neville 2003: 17). Even at the time of this writing (September 2008), the
equation of oil with a specifically "American" life has generated immense
popular support for "drill here, drill now" programs that only guarantee further
entrenchment of the "addiction" problem. Such popular support has led both
presidential candidates to promise the voters some level of off-shore drilling to
extract more oil, for more oil consumption. Despite all this rhetoric, it is clear that
reconciling this "way of life" with the social and ecological future of humanity
will be the foremost challenge of the 21st century. It is up to political struggles to
envision a world in which this "way of life" is negotiable. In order to address these
pressing social and political concerns, the regulation approach offered in this
dissertation contributes mostly to the sub-discipline of political economy in
proposing a specific energy-capitalism analytic that approaches the provision of
fossil fuel as a problematic, yet necessary precondition of capitalist development. I
am convinced that energy can not simply be seen as an empirical object of inquiry,
but must be recast as a critical concept of political economic analysis alongside
familiar notions of labor, capital, value, and, increasingly, space, ecology and nature.
A critical social theory of energy will enhance understandings of the ecology of
capitalism with much greater precision. As human geography has largely
overlooked the extreme importance of energy in the reproduction of social life
in developed industrial societies (Solomon et al. 2004), this project offers a
fresh perspective with both spatial and ecological implications. In so doing, I
hope to further a narrow disciplinary mission to unite the "space-society" and
"nature-society" wings of human geography (Hanson 1999) toward what
Margaret Fitzsimmons (1989: 117) famously promoted two decades ago -"We
are working towards an integrated geography of nature ands space. Let us join
together."
A wider, relational investigation of petro-capitalism is the most effective solution.
Huber 2011 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark University,
“Oil, Life, and the Fetishism of Geopolitics, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol.2 22,
No. 3, 32-48, 2011, azp)
The geopolitics of oil and absolute space are not as much incorrect as
incomplete. A dialectics of oil requires a more relational spatial outlook that
considers the wider geographies of social relations, lived practices, and
meanings through which oil is objectified and fetishized as a vital and
strategic thing. This requires not just looking at the site of extraction, but also in
the multiple oil spaces through which particular forms of accumulation and
subjectivities are tied to the refining, distribution, and consumption of petroleum
products. A wider, relational understanding of oil, will allow us not only to see
power in the traditional ‘‘geopolitical’’ sense of major state leaders struggling
over territory and resources, but also through the more complicated
processes through which resources are embedded in everyday social
reproduction. Only through this wider theorization of oil is it possible to conceive of
oppositional political strategies to the geographies of imperialism and
environmental injustice.
Combatting petro-capitalism necessitates not only a reconceptualization of US
energy profligacy, but also a critical inquiry into the epistemological basis of the
capitalist system proper.
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark University,
“Lifeblood: Geographies of Petro-Capitalism in the United States”,” Graduate
dissertation, Submitted to the faculty of Clark University-Worcester-Massachusetts
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in
the Department of Geography, May 2009, azp)
Although chapters two, three and four explain the generalization of
petrocapitalism during the postwar era, this conclusion reveals that the
relations between oil and capitalist society will likely be best by crisis and
instability in the coming years. Although the process will be driven by social and
political forces, supply constraints make it likely that the 21st century will end
with substantially less oil consumption across the world economy (including
the United States). In this dissertation, I assert that understanding this process
over the long term requires a mode of political economic analysis that
approaches energy, in general, and oil, in particular, as a central element to the
social regulation of capitalism. Such an energy-capitalism analytic is not only
necessary for understanding, but also in crafting political challenges to the
ecological contradictions of capital accumulation entwined with the fossil fuel
economy. Changing the relationship between energy and economy requires an
approach that does not simply see energy as a "technical" problem, but rather,
requires re-thinking and contesting the very basis of capital accumulation itself the majority of workers' livelihoods deepening upon the wagerelation and
commodity relations for survival. Thus, struggles to move into a "postpetroleum"
age should also consider the social basis of energy profligacy - capitalist
promotion of growth and accumulation. Moving away from fossil fuel, but retaining
the capitalist imperative of profit over any consideration of social and ecological
needs will not result in a sane ecological future. It seems to me that a socially just
and ecologically sustainable direction depends upon imagining a society beyond
capital.
Now Key
We are living through the death throes of American hegemony. The tenuous
post-Fordist economy of petro-capitalism was brought to its knees by the
recession – times like these are vital opportunities for critical inquiry.
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “Lifeblood: Geographies of Petro-Capitalism in the United States”,”
Graduate dissertation, Submitted to the faculty of Clark University-WorcesterMassachusetts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Geography, May 2009, azp)
The economic crisis of 2007-2008 might be the "end game" of the fragile edifice
of overwork and debt supporting mass consumption in the United States. It is
instructive that the current crisis slashes through one of the pillars of postwar
Fordist consumption - home ownership. Indeed, another source of perhaps
fictitious "income" supplementing stagnating wages is the "equity" bound up
in the home. As this debt was increasingly viewed as a profit opportunity for
financial capital, "home equity" loans were marketed as a quick fix to pay for large
purchases like automobiles and college tuition (Story 2008). The crisis in housing
has circulated into the "real" economy leading to mass layoffs and even
further wage cut backs. In late 2008, data on consumer spending has revealed
dramatic decreases and retail outlets across the nation are filing for bankruptcy
(Leonhardt 2008). While it is perhaps too early to pronounce the "American
consumer" dead - and with her/him Fordist mass consumption - a revival of
wages and purchasing power structurally necessary for the restoration of
consumption patterns seems unlikely. As detailed in chapter two, Fordist mass
consumption only emerged out of the 1930s reconfiguration of the wagerelation to provide the critical institutional supports for increased purchasing
power on the part of the American working class. Despite rampant comparisons
between the incoming Obama administration and FDR's New Deal (e.g., Packer
2008), few point out the lack of working class militancy or left opposition today that
was essential to pushing FDR toward social democratic reforms in the 1930s
(Brenner 2007; Davis 2008). As the economic centers of power continue a
protracted shift toward East Asia, the demise of American consumerism might
be simply another sign of an empire in decline (Harvey 2003; Arrighi 2007).
Internal Link – Oil Anxiety
The extensive exchange value of oil along with the commodity’s roots in US
nationalism gives it an elevated status amongst other US commodities. Spikes
in oil price garner such backlash precisely because of the commodity’s lofty
status. The inaccessibility of oil, for the consumer, represents the very
constriction of freedom.
Huber 2009 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the “American way of life”,”
Antipode, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp 465-486, 2009, azp)
The politics of gas prices in the US reflects the intractable persistence of usevalues that do not easily re-adjust to the vicissitudes of the value form. As
pointed out in the introduction, in recent years one cannot escape the media
blitz on the “outrageous” price of gasoline. The hegemonic mobilization of “the
American way of life” is thus part and parcel of a wider culture of entitlement
to gasoline expressed through commonsensical exchange-values. Price
becomes inseparable from imagined use-values. This whole nexus depends upon
the relatively stable relational coherence between cheap gasoline, lived
practice and the meanings of a national way of life. The contemporary politics of
gas prices (and during the 1970s) reveal how that relational coherence marking the
commodity form is destabilized through the quantitative marker of high prices. This
is why the image of $4.00/gallon pervading sprawling streetscapes becomes a
sensational story for the nightly news reports—because the price of gasoline is not
simply any commodity, but, perhaps, the commodity under which so much valued
stuff rests. As high prices make consumer subjects anxious, the freedom of
consumer choice becomes constrained, the spatial imaginary of freedom
becomes problematized, and subjection to the whim of a global political
economy of oil becomes recognizable. The point I want to reassert is that the
scorn for gasoline’s exchangevalue is largely fought out through the cultural
terrain of use-value. While reviewing the hundreds of political and media
reflections on the high price of gasoline, the most salient stories are those that not
only imply that high gas prices “hurt” consumer budgets, but show, concretely, how
that “hurt” is expressed through the scaling back of the most American of usevalues. A recent article entitled “Gasoline prices fuel anger” (Bucyrus Telegraph
Forum 2007) interviewed numerous consumers who detailed how high prices
were affecting their lifestyles. A common theme was that the “hurt” of high
prices were crimping their summer travel plans. One respondent noted, “The
American consumer can’t get a break,” while another bemoaned, “Now I just go
where I have to. No more trips in the country or out to the reservoir.” Another
article reflected similar “pain at the pump” (Guay 2007), with a consumer
complaining, “In the past we would drive to the ocean for the day or visit other
states . . . This year we won’t be able to do that.” Thus, high gas prices destabilize
one of the most important emblems of the concrete bundle of use-values
constituting the “American way of life”— the summer road vacation. As satirized
on the 11 June 2008 episode of TheDaily Show,media outlets nowopenly
discuss a reconfigured spatial imaginary of leisure—the “staycation”.
Warming Impacts
We access most impacts- global warming causes climate disruption, costal
flooding, droughts, and damages economies
ACEE 12 Greenercars.org, American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy,
http://www.greenercars.org/guide_environment.htm
The gasoline-powered automobile was invented just over 100 years ago, when the
industrial revolution was still young. Streams had long been dammed to turn mills, and coal was on its way to widespread
use—it was already powering steamships and locomotives. But most energy used by humans still came from traditional fuels
such as wood. In 1890, the world population was about 1.5 billion but growing rapidly. The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in
the atmosphere was just over 290 parts per million, not yet noticeably over its level throughout pre-industrial civilization. The
world population has now topped six billion and is still growing rapidly. During the past century, the amount of fossil fuel we
consume has risen nearly five times faster than population. As a result, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is now over 360
parts per million and climbing. This
rapid increase in CO2 concentration represents the
enormous impact of our energy-consumptive lifestyle on the planet, and it is causing dangerous
changes to the earth's climate. The past decade has already seen many years with above-normal
temperatures. The changes in weather patterns and increases in severe events are
consistent with climate disruption. Recent years have been among the warmest ever recorded. Carbon
dioxide is the most important of what are known as greenhouse gases, compounds that enable the earth's atmosphere to trap
heat, like a greenhouse, but on a global scale. Too much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere causes global warming, an increase
in global average temperatures above what they normally would be. The risks of global warming are many. Human
health is threatened by more frequent and severe heat waves and the spread
of tropical diseases. Lives can be lost because of rising sea levels and more
severe storms, which can also damage regional and national economies. The
disruptions to climate are unpredictable but certainly risky. While some areas may see greater coastal flooding
and inundating rains, other regions may experience droughts. Both agriculture and natural
habitats can be harmed. Future generations will bear the brunt of these risks, but the effects of global warming have
already been detected. Although we cannot attribute any given event to climate change, the increased risks have created a call
for action to curtail CO2 emissions around the world. Oil is now the world's dominant fuel. There are over 600 million cars and
trucks in the world. Both here and abroad, transportation accounts for most oil use. In the United States, we now have more
motor vehicles than licensed drivers, and we travel over 2 trillion miles per year, burning 120 billion gallons of gasoline. Not
counting the "upstream" emissions from producing the fuel, the result is over a billion tons of CO2 pollution each year. U.S.
cars and light trucks alone account for more energy-related CO2 than the
nationwide emissions of all but four other countries in the world (China, Russia, Japan,
and India). Our vehicles produce nearly as much CO2 as all of India, which has more than triple our population. U.S. cars and
trucks emit more than twice as much fossil-fuel CO2 as the economies of either South Korea or Mexico, and over three times as
much as the whole of Brazil. Although some of these countries are growing and industrializing rapidly, it will be decades
before their level of CO2 pollution per person approaches ours.
Climate change will lead to global catastrophe- food shortages, flooding,
economic downfall, and military intervention
Broder 09 By JOHN M. BRODER NYT “Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security
“ Published: August 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html?pagewanted
=all
The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the
United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention
to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and
pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say. Such climate-induced crises could topple
governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the
analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national
security implications of climate change. Recent
war games and intelligence studies conclude
that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan
Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of
food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate
change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response. An exercise last December at the
National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a
destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off
religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. “It gets real complicated real quickly,”
said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to
incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning. Much of the public and political debate on global warming
has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering
negotiations toward an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges. But a growing number of policy
makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.
If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel
consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this
view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and possibly
military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to address. This argument could
prove a fulcrum for debate in the Senate next month when it takes up climate and energy legislation passed in June by the
House. Lawmakers leading the debate before Congress are only now beginning to make the national security argument for
approving the legislation. Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations
Committee and a leading advocate for the climate legislation, said he hoped to sway Senate skeptics by pressing that issue to
pass a meaningful bill. Mr. Kerry said he did not know whether he would succeed but had spoken with 30 undecided senators
on the matter. He did not identify those senators, but the list of undecided includes many from coal and manufacturing states
and from the South and Southeast, which will face the sharpest energy price increases from any carbon emissions control
program. “I’ve been making this argument for a number of years,” Mr. Kerry said, “but it has not been a focus because a lot of
people had not connected the dots.” He said he had urged President Obama to make the case, too. Mr. Kerry said the
continuing conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and displaced tens of
thousands of people, is a result of drought and expansion of deserts in the
north. “That is going to be repeated many times over and on a much larger
scale,” he said. The Department of Defense’s assessment of the security issue came about after prodding by Congress to
include climate issues in its strategic plans — specifically, in 2008 budget authorizations by Hillary Rodham Clinton and John
W. Warner, then senators. The department’s climate modeling is based on sophisticated Navy and Air Force weather programs
and other government climate research programs at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The
Pentagon and the State Department have studied issues arising from dependence on foreign sources of energy for years but
are only now considering the effects of global warming in their long-term planning documents. The Pentagon will include a
climate section in the Quadrennial Defense Review, due in February; the State Department will address the issue in its new
Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. “… The National Intelligence Council, which produces government-wide
intelligence analyses, finished the first assessment of the national security implications of climate change just last year. It
concluded that climate
change by itself would have significant geopolitical impacts
around the world and would contribute to a host of problems, including
poverty, environmental degradation and the weakening of national
governments. The assessment warned that the storms, droughts and food
shortages that might result from a warming planet in coming decades would
create numerous relief emergencies. “The demands of these potential humanitarian responses may
significantly tax U.S. military transportation and support force structures, resulting in a strained readiness posture and
decreased strategic depth for combat operations,” the report said. The intelligence community is preparing a series of reports
on the impacts of climate change on individual countries like China and India, a study of alternative fuels and a look at how
major power relations could be strained by a changing climate. “We will pay for this one way or another,” Gen. Anthony C.
Zinni, a retired Marine and the former head of the Central Command, wrote recently in a report he prepared as a member of a
military advisory board on energy and climate at CNA, a private group that does research for the Navy. “ We
will pay to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic
hit of some kind. “Or we will pay the price later in military terms,” he warned. “And
that will involve human lives.”
Co2 from fossil fuels causes drought, inundation, adverse climate, and natural
disasters. Only a reduction of consumption can mitigate these impacts.
Zobaa and Bose 11 Ahmed. F. Zobaa and Bimal. K. Bose, School of Engineering and Design Brunel University
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science The University of Tennessee “Renewable Energy, Global Warming
Problem and Impact of Power Electronics” April, 2011 http://www.icrepq.com/icrepq'11/PL3-zobaa-
bose.pdf
Global energy consumption is increasing dramatically due to our quest for higher living standards and an increasing world
population. Most
of our energy comes from fossil fuels, and burning these fuels
causes global warming. Global warming raises the sea level, brings drought to
tropical regions near the equator, increases hurricanes, tornadoes and floods,
and spreads disease.
These consequences are serious and will eventually bring tremendous unrest
in the world. Various measures to solve or mitigate global warming are outlined in the paper.
Power electronics help improve the energy efficiency of apparatus, and helps the generation of environmentally clean or green
energy. Renewable green energy sources will constitute the bulk of our energy sources in the future. It
has been
estimated that widespread energy efficiency improvement, by power
electronics and other methods with the existing technologies, can save 20% of
global energy demand, and another 20% can be saved by preventing waste,
i.e., by various conservation methods. “Global warming problem is solvable by the united effort of
humanity”… Undoubtedly, energy is the lifeblood of the continued progress of human civilization. Per capita energy
consumption is the barometer of a nation’s prosperity. Global energy consumption has increased dramatically to accelerate
our living standard. The USA with 5% of the world’s population, consumes 25% of total energy. Japan with 2% of the world’s
population consumes 5% of total energy. China and India with 35% of the world’s
population consume only 3% of total energy. But this scenario is changing fast .
The Earth’s atmosphere
accumulates solar heat due to GHG concentrations and raises the temperature.
This causes: • melting of glaciers and polar ice caps • inundation of low-lying
areas • adverse effect on world climate • severe drought in tropical countries
near the equator that damages agriculture and vegetation • hurricanes,
tornados, heavy rain and floods • spread of disease • extinction of some
animal species • acidity increase in seawater. According to UN predictions, some example
scenarios due to global warming are: • 50% of Bangladesh will be under water in 300 years displacing 75M people • Several
island nations in the Pacific will be under water within 100 years. • India’s agricultural production will decrease by 38% by
2080 due to drought, but CO2 fertilization will offset it by 9% • Melting of ice in Antarctica and Greenland will cause ocean
level rise by 200 ft. • Melting of all the ice in the world will cause ocean level to rise by 210 ft. • Arctic regions will be virtually
free of ice by 2070 • If fossil fuel burning is completely stopped today, ocean level will rise by 4.6 ft. in next 1000 years
Cars and Consumption
Consumption of oil is motivated by transportation- American systems were
built to favor cars over public transportation
Bromley 05 (Simon Bromley -The Open University in 1999, Previously at University
of Leeds PHD in social and political sciences from Cambridge “The United States and
the Control of World Oil” Article first published online: 15 MAR 2005 Government
and Opposition Volume 40, Issue 2, pages 225–255, Spring 2005)
All of these changes in the distribution of production, reserves, consumption and inter-country/regional trade in the world oil
indus- try have taken place against the backdrop of a massive overall expan- sion. The oil industry expanded rapidly
throughout the twentieth century: between 1913 and 1948 the annual growth rate of produc- tion was about 6.5 per cent; and
from 1948 to 1973 (during the post- war boom) the growth rate was 7.5 per cent annually. However, the ending of the postwar boom ushered in a fundamental shift in the pattern of demand. In 1979 production was only 12 per cent higher than in
1973 and by 1985 it was 12 per cent lower than in 1979; by 1991–2 production had just recovered to the 1979 level; since
then the industry has seen a steady but lower increase of around 2 per cent annually, falling to just over 1 per cent in times of
recessions such as the period after the 1997/98 financial crises in Asia and else- where. In a similar manner to these changes
in the demand for oil, total energy demand faltered during the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s and then recovered,
and now expands at an energy ratio (the amount of energy used per unit of GDP) of less than one-to-one in the OECD bloc, and
somewhat more than this in the developing world. Overall, then, the price increases of oil in the 1970s and the per- ceived
instability of the main source of supply, the Middle East, reduced the demand for oil and encouraged a search both for greater
efficiency of energy use and for alternative sources of supply (whether non-OPEC oil or other fuels). But it was also true that
the growth of energy demand (and energy ratios) were falling in the OECD
bloc because of changing economic patterns, essentially from manufacturing
to services and away from energy-intensive manufac- turing. This trend predated the oil crisis and continued despite the fall in the real price of oil in the
mid-1980s. However, in the OECD bloc, and particularly in the United States,
there remains a core market for oil: namely, the transport sector. (BP used to say that
it got 75 per cent of its profits from 25 per cent of the barrel – the part that made petrol.) About 70 per cent of US oil. These
are only approximate measures of import dependence as even net import- ing regions like the United States also export some
of their production, largely in order to balance the quality of the oil needed for refining. Consumption
is
transport related and of this some three-quarters is for road vehicles. This is
reinforced by the tax system in the United States: while the pre-tax price of US
petrol is higher than in most developed countries, ‘the rest of the developed
world imposes a tax over six times larger’.20 More generally, as Clyde Prestowitz has pointed out,
oil use is built into the very fabric of the American way of life: By 1975 the
[United States] was designed and built to favour cars and air- planes over
trains and buses, private transportation over public. Most of us lived in large,
widely spaced houses far from our jobs, recreation, or any place else we might
go. The lifestyle that cheap energy had given us was no longer a choice: The
very architecture of the country demanded it.
The status quo obfuscates impacts of massive oil consumption
Campbell 05 [Colin Campbell, founder: Association of the Study of Peak Oil, independent advisor, 2005 (The
Assessment and Important of Oil Depletion, Final Energy Crisis, Andrew McKillop and Sheila Newman, p29-30)
Oil provides some 40 per cent of the world's energy needs and as much as 90
per cent of its transport fuel. It also has a critical role in agriculture, which
provides food for the world's population of 6 billion people. It is however a
finite commodity, having been formed in the geological past, which means that
it is subject to depletion. Given that it is of such great importance to the modem world, it is indeed surprising
that more attention has not been given to determining the status of depletion. There are several possible explanations for this
strange state of affairs. First,
it is counter-intuitive. The weekly trip to the filling station
is such a normal part of daily life that most people see a continued supply of
oil as being as much a part of nature as are the rivers that flow from the
mountains to the sea. Second, depletion is strangely foreign to classical
economics, which depict Man as the master of his environment under
ineluctable laws of supply and demand. Never before have resource
constraints of such a critical commodity begun to appear without sign of a
better substitute or market signals. The reason for the absence of early market warning is due to
expropriations that have obscured the natural trends that would otherwise have alerted us to growing shortages and rising
costs. Tax by both consuming and producing countries has furthermore distorted the position. A related issue is a blind faith in
technology, as epitomized by the dictum "the scientists will think of something." Unfortunately, if they do, they will simply
deplete the remaining oil faster. Third
is the denial and obfuscation by the oil industry,
which is in a position to understand the situation but finds itself the victim of
an investment community driven by imagery and a very short-term view of
the future. The industry is itself subject to internal vested interests,
represented for example by the explorers, whose careers are not served by
pointing out the natural limits. The oil companies can accordingly be excused
for choosing their words with such extreme care. Fourth is the nature of socalled democratic government that finds it easier to attract votes by reacting
to crises than by anticipating them, especially where unpopular or even
draconian responses are called for. Fifth are possible conspiracies by
countries already dependent on rising oil imports, which seek to secure access
to supply and hold prices down by any means at their disposal. There may be other
factors at work too, but these five elements offer a range of possible explanations for why the subject is so clouded by mystery
and disbelief. In strictly technical terms, there is nothing particularly difficult in assessing the size of an oilfield or in
extrapolating the discovery
Oil is the root of American consumerism. The way we view transportation
shapes our outlook on the world
Cave 08 (By DAMIEN CAVE- B.A. from Boston College and an M.S. from Columbia University's Graduate School of
Journalism Published in NYT: May 6, 2008)
If experience with such gas tax “holidays” is any guide, drivers would save less than politicians suggest. But that is not
necessarily the point. “It’s about trying to serve the people and trying to understand and have caring, compassionate hearts for
what they’re dealing with at the kitchen table,” said Mr. Crist, a Republican. He added, “I’m supposed to respond to the people
and try to make them happy.” Rising frustration with gas prices has led two presidential candidates, Senators John McCain and
Hillary Rodham Clinton, to promote proposals to suspend the federal gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day. But state gas
taxes, which run as high as 45.5 cents a gallon, often add far more to the price of gas than the 18.4-cent federal excise tax and
are the primary cause of price disparities across state lines. So lawmakers and candidates at the state level have been getting
into the act. The
response speaks not just to the reality of skyrocketing gas prices. It also highlights the
political potency of anything that affects Americans’ bonds with their cars. Gas
is a product that no one can ignore — and one that inspires intense emotion. “It clearly
evokes a visceral response because we’re the only industry that has our prices
in two-foot-high letters on the street corner,” said John Felmy, chief economist at the American
Petroleum Institute. “We’ve seen other things go up in prices, like milk, but if you ask
10 people on the street what’s the price of milk they may not know. All of them
will know the price of gas.” The gut-level frustration is especially visible at gas stations near borders between
states with wide differences in gas taxes. The pumps here have the feel of a discount store, flush with bargain hunters and
families on the edge of an economic precipice. At two gas stations in southern Alabama, at least half the cars were from
Florida, where gas taxes are 13 cents higher. A similar flow of California drivers appeared last week at gas stations in Yuma,
Ariz., where gas can be more than 70 cents cheaper a gallon. Many said that in the last few months, they had reached a
breaking point with gas prices that had forced them to change their lifestyle. Rebecca Laster, a mother of four from
Campbellton, Fla., near the Alabama line, said she now stayed near her children’s school after dropping them off to avoid a
second trip. “Gas takes up a majority of what I spend,” Mrs. Laster said after putting $40
worth of gas in the tank of her minivan. Referring to politicians, she said: “I don’t think they know what it’s like to count every
penny. They’ve never been in that position.” Economic studies have shown that high gas prices disproportionately affect
lower-middle-class Americans like Mrs. Laster, whose family lives on her husband’s salary from McDonald’s. And these appear
to be the voters politicians are trying to appeal to. One of the Democratic presidential candidates, Senator Barack Obama of
Illinois, has criticized the gas tax holiday as a gimmick, saying it would save drivers little money. But his Democratic rival, Mrs.
Clinton, and Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, have defended their plans with emotional appeals. A recent
Clinton advertisement highlighting her support for a summer gas tax suspension ends with a raspy, apparently working-class
narrator saying: “People are hurting. It’s time for a president who’s ready to take action, now.” Suspending federal and state
gas taxes, however, would not necessarily lead to a commensurate drop in prices. Since 2000, four states have enacted gas tax
holidays: Florida, Georgia, Illinois and Indiana. In general, retailers did not pass on all of the intended savings. When Illinois
and Indiana suspended about 7 cents of their state gas taxes in the summer of 2000, prices fell by an average of only 4 cents,
according to a study by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, which opposed the plans .
Drivers
saved no more than $2.50 a month, while each state lost tens of millions of
dollars in tax revenue. Previous gas tax holidays caused other problems, too.
During the last gas tax suspension in Florida in 2004, people hoarded
gasoline, driving up demand and prices. It is not clear how the new proposals would prevent such
unintended consequences. Texas lawmakers are not in session, so their ideas have been limited to public calls for relief. The
draft measures in Florida, Missouri and New York do not require retailers to pass on the tax suspension to consumers, nor are
there provisions to prevent hoarding. … Jeff
Hamilton, the owner of a small gas station in
Graceville, Fla., just a few miles away, said that when it came to gas, Americans
did not necessarily behave rationally.
And, patriotism has become inexorably linked with our consumption of oil,
making us blind to consequences of consumerism
Banerjee 01 ('Made in America,' and Never Mind the Gas Mileage By NEELA BANERJEE Published in NYT: November
23, 2001)
Andrew Serkanic has been a patriot since he was 7 -- ''from the first time I saw the flag,'' he said. Not that the other parents
picking up their grade-schoolers at the Pines Lake School in Wayne, N.J., could doubt it. Mr. Serkanic's choices in apparel
sometimes include T-shirts with Osama bin Laden's face surrounded by the words ''Wanted Dead or Alive.'' Mr. Serkanic's
business is God Bless America Meats, and he says that Kate Smith sings on the company's answering machine. And then there
is his car, part ornate chariot and all political megaphone: a white Ford Explorer with gold trim, its tailgate and tinted windows
emblazoned with the flag and ''God Bless America.'' ''It gets 12.8 miles per gallon that I love to pay for,'' Mr. Serkanic said,
beaming. ''It's made in America, or at least half of it anyway.'' For Mr. Serkanic and many others like him in this part of North
Jersey, there
is no contradiction between patriotism and driving a gas guzzler.
Some talk-show commentators and op-ed page writers may be connecting the
dots between oil and terrorism, but few people in this area seem to have
heard the idea -- and fewer still believe -- that individual Americans, by buying
more fuel-efficient vehicles, can make the United States less dependent on
Middle Eastern countries and others that so many of them now rage against.
And they give little credence to the notion that the United States has earned
the enmity of many Arabs and Muslims because it refrains from criticizing the
corruption and human rights violations in oil-producing countries. ''In my simple
mind, this has nothing to do with oil,'' Mr. Serkanic said. Indeed, there is less these days to remind Americans about the
relationship between their gasoline use and global politics than at times in the past when war or the threat of war roiled the
Middle East. The retail price of gasoline in the United States has been falling, after a steeper drop in the commodity price of
crude oil. And with the Big Three automakers offering zero-percent financing on many purchases, car dealers around Wayne,
like their counterparts nationwide, have been selling record numbers of sport utility vehicles and other light trucks. The
country's best-selling vehicles last month -- Ford's F-Series trucks, the Chevrolet Silverado and the Ford Explorer -- on average
get about 16 miles to the gallon, according to government figures. ''Gas mileage concerns haven't been slowing sales down,''
said Robert Singh, sales manager at Fette Ford, on Route 46 in Clifton. ''We've been selling S.U.V.'s like crazy.'' At the Costco
parking lot down the road, Cindy Goldstein acknowledged, laughing a bit abashedly, that her six-year-old Land Rover devours
gasoline, and then she pondered where that fuel came from. ''I don't know how we get it from the Middle East,'' she said
recently, the American flag on her sport utility vehicle fluttering in the breeze like others in the lot. ''I think there's some oil in
Texas.'' Once she heard the concept of how American dependence on oil may in a variety of ways help nurture terrorism, her
laughter died off. ''I never thought of it that way,'' Mrs.
Goldstein said -- ''that we should be conserving more.'' Sue
Smith had already heard the theories, and she dismissed them entirely. ''I don't think it's unpatriotic to
use so much gas,'' Ms. Smith said, loading her silver Chevy Tahoe with
groceries. ''It's very patriotic. It's our way of life.'' And what of the
consideration that the American way of life means that a country with less
than 5 percent of the world's population uses 25 percent of the world's crude
oil? ''Why should we cut back?'' Ms. Smith, 40, asked. ''We're an affluent
society. Should I hate my neighbor because she has a better house, a better
car, more money?'' Though a smaller percentage of United States oil imports come from the Persian Gulf region
than 30 years ago, the nation imports more of its oil than it ever has, leaving it vulnerable to sharp swings in prices. For Ms.
Smith and many others here, the answer to that vulnerability is not reducing demand or developing alternative fuels, but
drilling at home. (Few people realize that the United States has only 3 percent of the world's proven oil reserves.) ''We should
go on living the way we're living,'' Ms. Smith said. ''And we should think about the wacko environmental groups that are
forcing us to get oil someplace else.'' In the gathering twilight, at the park-and-ride lot on Route 46, Robert Boesch, 64, a textile
designer, walks to his Chevrolet Blazer after returning on the bus from work in New York. M r.
Boesch is aware of
how dependent the United States is on foreign oil, but he has no plans to
change his driving habits or to stop leasing sport utility vehicles, as he has for
eight years. ''We don't have an alternative right now,'' Mr. Boesch maintained,
''and I don't see our government jumping to the fore on this issue.'' That may change.
Senate Democrats are drafting an energy bill that would call for increasing the fuel economy of sport utility vehicles and other
light trucks; the Ford Motor Company has pledged a 25 percent improvement in the fuel efficiency of its sport utility vehicles
by 2005, and both General Motors and Chrysler
have promised to match Ford. S.U.V. owners,
especially women, say they picked their vehicles because they make them feel
safer. But when pushed a bit, most say that they simply love being in huge
vehicles that make them feel powerful on the road. Sheila King, 27, a teacher from Clifton, came
one evening to look at what she called ''a big monster'' sport utility at the McGuire Auto Group on Route 46 in neighboring
Little Falls. ''It's as much about road rage as anything else,'' Ms. King said. ''You don't want others to do more damage to you
than you can do to them.'' Ryan McGuire, the dealership's general manager, was not enthusiastic about having a reporter
discuss gasoline mileage with his customers. ''Because that will get them thinking about it,'' he said, ''and we don't want that.''
But relatively few people in this area seem to be thinking about gas mileage, and the circumstances that would prompt
Americans to opt for more fuel-efficient vehicles have not yet shaken the country. ''What would get people to stop driving
S.U.V.'s?'' Ms. Smith said earlier in the day. ''If God came down from heaven and said, 'You can't drive S.U.V.'s anymore.' ''
Photo: Andrew Serkanic in Wayne, N.J., with his vehicle of choice and tattoo. He and others doubt that buying a fuel-efficient
vehicle would make the United States less dependent on foreign oil exporters.
Maintaining our obsession with oil leads to U.S “intervention” in foreign
countries
Hakes 08 (Hakes, Jay- PhD, MA, Duke University- Assistant to Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus during the Carter
administration, Director of the Governor's Energy Office for Florida Governor (later U. S. Senator) Bob Graham, Administrator
of the highly regarded, nonpartisan Energy Information Administration at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Clinton
administration, and Director for Research and Policy for President's Obama's BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Commission.
“Declaration of Energy Independence : How Freedom from Foreign Oil Can Improve National Security, Our Economy, and the
Environment”)
U.S. military planning for protecting oil assets in the Middle East was rarely
discussed in public, but now released records over many presidencies
demonstrate a sustained interest in the subject. Even a president like
Eisenhower, who was reluctant to commit troops abroad, knew he might have
to if America became overly dependent on foreign oil… Attempts to soft pedal the role oil has
played in U.S. military actions against Saddam Hussein make it necessary to demonstrate what is on close inspection obvious.
Oil is not the only reason we went to war twice in Iraq. But it was reason
enough on its own and, to a large extent, pervaded the other factors involved. If
we want to accurately calculate the price of reliance on Persian Gulf oil, we must include the costs of conducting wars in Iraq…
Coming in the very different post-9/11 world, the second confrontation with Saddam in 2003 is more difficult to unravel and
will likely remain so, even when the relevant documents are declassified. President Bush’s explanation for going to war on
March 17 gave several justifications for his decision. “Intelligence gathered by this and other countries,” he asserted, “leaves no
doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” He reported that
Iraq had “aided, trained, and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaida.” He warned of a clear danger that Iraq
would furnish its “chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons” to these. terrorists, who could then “fulfill their stated
ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other.” Thus, the use of force
was authorized to assure national security. None of the reasons given in the speech were true. Moreover,
it is hard
to find much evidence of serious due diligence to determine whether the
information was true or false. Clearly, the rationale for the war was something
not revealed to the public. As Alan Greenspan—a frequent advisor to presidents Nixon and Ford on
energy issues and long-term chair of the Federal Reserve Board—confirmed last year, the unstated
reason was oil. The United States and Iraq have long tangled over oil issues. During the Arab oil embargo, the United
States maintained positive relations with many boycotting nations behind the scenes. Not so with Iraq. Just before the
embargo began, Iraq nationalized Exxon and Mobil oil facilities in Basra to protest U.S. support for Israel and took the lead in
arguing the embargo was not severe enough. The
eviction of the U.S. companies was
particularly frustrating because of the immense potential of oil resources in
Iraq. According to published rankings, Iraq stood second in the world in
conventional oil reserves. Among the world’s major oil domains, Iraq has been
the least explored. As a result, it is widely believed among oil experts that the
published numbers may well underestimate the amount of oil there. When Iraq’s oil
industry needed foreign technical assistance, Saddam Hussein turned to the French and the Russians. This decision frustrated
American companies, as world oil reserves came increasingly under the control of state-owned oil companies, thus shrinking
the areas open for private exploration. The oil alliance with the French and the Russians also bumped up against American
foreign policy goals. As the United States attempted to maintain sanctions on Iraq during the 1990s, the French and Russians
sometimes sided with Iraq. The idea that the United States could get back into the Iraq oil business was very tempting on many
levels. Iraq was kept in check during most of the 1990s due to United Nations sanctions on oil sales. The United States wanted
to keep severe restrictions on Iraq’s exports. With Russia and France reluctant to adopt the American position, however, it
appeared international sanctions would be loosened and Saddam would eventually regain his access to massive revenues from
oil sales…. This decision frustrated American companies, as world oil reserves came increasingly under the control of stateowned oil companies, thus shrinking the areas open for private exploration. The oil alliance with the French and the Russians
also bumped up against American foreign policy goals. As the United States attempted to maintain sanctions on Iraq during the
1990s, the French and Russians sometimes sided with Iraq. The idea that the United States could get back into the Iraq oil
business was very tempting on many levels. Iraq was kept in check during most of the 1990s due to United Nations sanctions
on oil sales. The United States wanted to keep severe restrictions on Iraq’s exports. With Russia and France reluctant to adopt
the American position, however, it appeared international sanctions would be loosened and Saddam would eventually regain
his access to massive revenues from oil sales. from power those associated with the ruling Ba’athist party, restructure the Iraqi
economy, and manage the rebuilding of the country’s infrastructure.
The automobile is the cultural definition of American consumption
Gartman 04 (David Gartman Professor of Sociology at the University of South
Alabama “Three Ages of the Automobile: The Cultural Logics of The Car” Theory
Culture Society 2004)
The automobile entered American society in the late 19th century, a time of
economic crisis and class conflict with which the vehicle was inevitably
associated. The auto marked out these increasingly contentious class divisions, for
its high price ($600 to $7500) put ownership beyond the reach of all but the high
bourgeoisie. These prices were the result of a skilled, craft labor process, in which
the aesthetic appearance of these cars was as important as their mechanical
function. Their bodies, in particular, were works of the coach-building art, produced
in elaborate styles to match the tastes of the upper classes. Not only the
production but also the use of these early cars solidified their association with
class privilege. In the United States, where freedom had always been conflated
with geographic movement, autos gave their wealthy owners the freedom of a
rapid, flexible and individual form of mobility, unencumbered by the
collective regimen- tation of railway timetables and itineraries. But these
beautiful, expensive vehicles were more often used not for practical transport
but for leisure activities and public ostentation. They became an essential
accessory of the leisure class, which used them for touring, racing and parading
down fashionable boulevards. Consequently, the automobile quickly became
defined in American culture as an instrument of freedom and leisure, and a
symbol of the wealth that removed an entire class of people from the
mundane concerns of work and functional effort.
Automobiles served as a mean to attack the laborers, and cut social spending in
order to increase profitability
Gartman 04 (David Gartman Professor of Sociology at the University of South
Alabama “Three Ages of the Automobile: The Cultural Logics of The Car” Theory
Culture Society 2004)
Automakers began restructuring their production process in the 1970s in
order to restore profitability and compete with escalating foreign competition. Foreign automakers gained
an even stronger foothold in the American market after the oil embargo of 1973, which sent gasoline prices soaring and placed
a premium on the small, fuel-efficient cars that Japan and Germany had been producing for years. Disadvantaged
in
this competition by rigidly standardized Fordist production processes and
bureaucracies, American automakers scrambled to cut costs and find more flexible
production methods capable of producing a wide variety of constantly
changing products. Taking their cues from Japanese producers, especially Toyota, these corporations
began closing plants and shifting parts production to independent
contractors, many of which operated in low-wage, Third World countries. And
within the remaining plants, attempts were made to render production more flexible and accommodating to variety by using
general-purpose machines and workers trained to handle a wide variety of tasks. Sometimes called ‘lean production’ or
‘flexible specializa- tion’, this new organization of production substantially cut the costs of manufacturing and allowed
automakers to shift a larger proportion of their capital to the increasingly important nonproduction functions of design and
marketing. All of these corporate
restructuring measures were facilitated, however, by a
neoliberal restructuring of the state, which attacked organ- ized labor, cut
social programs, slashed taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and
deregulated the financial sector of the economy. These measures not only
facilitated the technological restructuring of the work- place but also allowed
the capital mobility necessary to cut the high fixed costs of an organized
workforce with legal protections and shift production to low-wage, casual
workers with few rights and protections.
Cars serve as a diversion from the harms of oppressive totalizing hierarchies
Gartman 04 (David Gartman Professor of Sociology at the University of South
Alabama “Three Ages of the Automobile: The Cultural Logics of The Car” Theory
Culture Society 2004)
Hebdige also applies his model of lifestyle subcultures as subversive difference to motor vehicles in his collection entitled
Hiding in the Light (1988). Here he argues that cars,
like other consumer objects, have a multi-
tude of meanings assigned by different groups that appropriate them for their
own purposes. There are no essential relations of production to reveal or
conceal, only a multitude of competing, surface meanings that can cancel and
undermine an oppressive, totalizing hierarchy (1988: 77–80). In his essay on the British
reception of American mass-produced cars in the 1950s, he argues that these cars were perceived as and
actually were a threat to the established hierarchy of tastes that legitimated
class differ- ences. Any upper-class Britons saw in the popular consumer affluence
of the postwar period a pernicious ‘leveling down process’, in which elite
moral and aesthetic standards were eroded. Large, superfluously decorated American cars like the
Cadillac El Dorado were considered particularly decadent and offensive, for they catered to the vulgarity of the masses and
destroyed true elegance and refinement in design. For
workers, however, these cars were symbols of
progress, that is, the improvement in their standard of living and the advances
in science making this possible. Hebdige argues that these mass-produced American cars did hasten the
liquidation of the distinctive cultural heritage on which the authority of the elite rested. But he asserts that the conservatives
were wrong about the homogenizing effect of this leveled consumer culture.
Our cars symbolize a system of progress and over-consumption
Gartman 04 (David Gartman Professor of Sociology at the University of South
Alabama “Three Ages of the Automobile: The Cultural Logics of The Car” Theory
Culture Society 2004)
As Earl put it, he tried to ‘design a car so that every time you get in it, it’s a relief –
you get a little vacation for a while’ (quoted in Sloan, 1972: 324). But auto
consumers wanted their goods not merely to obscure work but also to fulfill
needs denied them there. And one of the most important of these was
individuality. The mass-production process reduced work to standardized,
repetitive tasks with little room for the expression of personal uniqueness
and difference. Not surprisingly, therefore, people subjected to this process
sought to compensate in their consumption lives by buying goods that were
individual and unique, that made them seem different from but not necessarily
superior to others, as in Bourdieu’s notion of distinc- tion. As GM’s Alfred Sloan
stated in 1934: ‘People like different things. Many people do not want to have
exactly the same thing that the neigh- borhood has’ (Sloan, 1972: 207).
Consequently, it became the policy of GM and other mass producers to build
many different types of cars to accommo- date consumer demand for
individuality, or, as Sloan put it, to produce ‘a car for every purse, purpose, and
person’… makes in order to justify differential pricing. All the makes were given
the unified, rounded look of luxury, which covered over the signs of mass
production. But in addition to this, the brands in the price hierarchy were
differentiated by relatively inexpensive styling cues, such as chrome strips and
grilles. These arbitrary features made the mass- produced body shells shared
between makes appear different. Beyond these cues, what differentiated the
top makes from the bottom ones was not quality but the quantity of their
features – they had more of what everyone wanted. The high-priced Cadillac was
longer and heavier and had more cylinders and accessories than the low-priced
Chevrolet. So the Cadillac buyer felt not only different but somehow ‘better’ than the
Chevy buyer, not due to superior taste but because he or she could afford more of
what everyone recognized as desirable. A second policy devised by Sloan and
implemented by GM’s styling department provided consumers with a superficial
substitute for another desire denied in production – progress. Sloan knew that
consumers wanted not merely different things but also products that were
constantly changing in order to symbolize progress. The solution that Sloan
devised to deliver symbolic progress was the annual model change.
Biktivism
Herr 12 (Samantha Z., University of Kentucky, “Biopolitics of Bike Commuting:
Bike Lanes, Safety, and Social Justice”, Theses and Dissertations,
http://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/2)
The plague for bicycle transportation integration in the U.S. has not only been the
perceived physical risk, but also the stigmatization that cycling transportation has accrued
over the years. Bicycles have been perceived as recreational at best, childish, a rebellious act, or
a utilitarian option for the poor, at worst (Aldred 2010; Blickstein and Hanson 2001; Carlsson 2010; Furness 2005a;
Furness 2005b; Horton 2006; Horton 2007; Horton, Rosen and Cox 2007; Skinner and Rosen 2007).22 Furthermore, the bicycle
commuting lifestyle puts demands on the body and its appearance that make it harder to
achieve standing expectations of professional or appropriate appearance and demeanor that are
also inherently classed, raced, gendered, aged, etc. (fieldnotes 6-25-10; interview transcript 7-7-10; Cupples
and Ridley 2008; Horton 2007; Horton et. al. 2007). As one research participant eloquently put it: I think that everyone is capable of
becoming a cyclist and not necessarily everyone is motivated to become a cyclist. I
think there's a lot of fear that
prevents people from becoming a cyclist. There's a certain element of stigma to the idea
of being a cyclist as well. I mean, like 'ah, I'm gonna get to work and I'm gonna be all sweaty',
or 'that's something that hippies do, and I'm dignified. I deserve a car'. There's a lot of class
dynamics I think with owning and operating an automobile. It gives you a certain amount of dignity and also power that people seek.
That everyone seeks to some extent (interview transcript 6-30-10). It
can thus be understood how the act of
bicycle commuting extends beyond the marginalization of a transport mode and reaches into
other realms of daily life in the city. The project of mainstreaming bicycle transportation integration
has had to battle these everyday concerns and logistics, as well as ingrained assumptions and habits of
living-automobile dependence and infrastructural hegemony, perceived social dissidence,
assumptions about class markers, feelings about the sweaty, working body, and ideas of what is
desirable and possible for life in the city. Bike lanes are an attempt to legitimize bicycling
in the city by sectioning off space and making cycling more visible, but in doing so, they
are an attempt to legitimize more than that. As bicycling transportation is situated within a web of lifestyle
factors related to gender, race, class, age, etc., bike lanes become not only statements for modal method
inclusivity, but inclusivity writ large. Bike lanes are spaces for the accommodation of
difference. Bicycle transportation research shows that women feel less safe riding next to cars than men, and are less likely to
bike if there are not specified lanes because of this perception of risk (Emond 2009; Krizek 2004). Children and the
variedly able do not always have the capability to ride at high speeds to keep up with
traffic. Researchers and bike lane advocates have also acknowledged economic barriers to accessing bicycles that could cruise at
car speeds due to maintenance issues or quality of the machine (Horton et. al. 2007). Bike lanes are a response to these situations with
the intent to expand the population of people for which cycling is a viable option (Pucher and Buehler 2009, my research). In this way,
advocating for bike lanes is advocating for a broader urban milieu of acceptance and
inclusion. Bike lanes, from this perspective, become mechanisms designed to accommodate for
differences of ability, preferences, and lifestyle demands, and thus mitigate the tension between
hegemony and diversity in the city. Cycling integration becomes a project toward social equity.
A2 Agency Arguments
Our world is shaped by automobility- areas are made only accessible by carinsulating the driver from the outside world and disenfranchising those
without.
Urry 2004, (John, Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, “The 'System' of
Automobility,” Theory, Culture & Society, Oct 1, 2004, p. 30,
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/21/4-5/25.full.pdf+html).
More generally, ‘[M]odernist urban landscapes were built to facilitate
automobility and to discourage other forms of human movement. . . .
[Movement between] private worlds is through dead public spaces by car’ (Freund,
1993: 119). Large areas of the globe consist of car-only environments – the nonplaces of super-modernity (Augé, 1995; Merriman, 2004). About one-quarter of
the land in London and nearly one-half of that in LA is devoted to car-only
environments. And they then exert spatial and temporal dominance over
surrounding environments, transforming what can be seen, heard, smelt and
tasted (the spatial and temporal range of which varies for each of the senses). They
are sites of mobility within which cardrivers are insulated as they ‘dwell-withinthe-car’. They represent the victory of liquidity over the ‘urban’ (see Morris, 1988,
on the motel).
Entrenchment of the SQ- we become locked into a system that forecloses
agency
Sieler 2003, (Cotton, Associate professor of American studies, “Statist Means to
Individualist Ends: Subjectivity, Automobility, and the Cold-War State,” American
Studies, 44:3 (Fall 2003), p. 26-27,
https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/viewFile/3015/2974).
Those wagons, however, move in determined ways. Roadbuilders have
continually sought to contain the potentially dissenting/destructive agency of
the driver. One analyst commented that "The man at the wheel is in many ways the
most complex and baffling element in the trafficway-driver-vehicle system."118
Norman Bel Geddes noted in 1940 that the contemporary driver's car "has been
entirely remodeled" and that "his highway is being remodeled." Looking ahead to
the "magic motorways" of 1960, Bel Geddes mused, "How can the driver be
remodeled?" Like 1950s Federal Highway Administration chief Bertram Tallamy,
Bel Geddes proposed that this remodeling entail a structural diminution of
human agency on the road, effected through automotive and highway design.
While Bel Geddes's prescription predates the Cold War and the conception of
freedom that prevailed during its early years, it speaks to the ever-present
themes of discipline and regulation at the heart of automobility:
“. . . these cars of 1960 and the highways on which they drive will have in them
devices which will correct the faults of human beings as drivers. They will prevent
the driver from committing errors. They will prevent him from turning out into
traffic except when he should. They will aid him in passing through intersections
without slowing down or causing anyone else to do so and without endangering
himself or others. Many present beginnings give hints of the kind of over-all
planning on which the near future could realize. Everything will be designed by
engineering, not by legislation, not in piecemeal fashion, but as a complete job. The
two, the car and the road, are both essential to the realization of automatic safety. . . .
[I]n 1960 [all drivers] stay out of the ditch. It is not done by law, but through the
very nature of the car and the highway.119”
While Bel Geddes's dreams have not yet come to pass, there can be little doubt that
the limited-access highways of the 1950s augmented the disciplinary effect on
the driver—increasing the speeds at which and the distances over which one could
travel, but also regulating access and egress, and standardizing the experience of
travel.
While the expanded automobility of the postwar era increased white
middleclass consumer and residential choice and provided the sensory
experience of freedom, it simultaneously limited the possibilities for
alternative spatial, economic, social and political configurations.120 As a
quotidian performance of both self-direction and acquiescence to systemic
parameters, driving served as a metaphor for American citizenship during the
early Cold War, a time in which certain beliefs, utterances, and practices would
quickly, so to speak, wreck one in the ditch. The narrative of the automobile as a
centrifugal entity, a bringer of wild and outlaw freedom, was precisely what
enabled it to function as such an effective tool for the centripetal regulation of
the subject. To drive was to live motion without change.
Concern with mobility reinforces the SQ inequitable distribution of power- the
traveler claims mastery over those unable to do so.
Sieler 2003, (Cotton, Associate professor of American studies, “Statist Means to
Individualist Ends: Subjectivity, Automobility, and the Cold-War State,” American
Studies, 44:3 (Fall 2003), p. 10,
https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/viewFile/3015/2974).
Mobility has thus been idealized as freedom's inaugural moment and its
affirming performance. Of course, self-determined mobility—as opposed to that
of the refugee—has generally been a perquisite of social, political, and
economic power. The traveler, James Clifford has observed, "is someone who has
the security and privilege to move about in relatively unconstrained ways."38 Hence
the free traveler as a cultural and political symbol reinforces and is reinforced
by specific discourses that distribute power along lines of race, gender,
ethnicity, class, nationality, and other visible markers of identity. Mobility,
ostensibly a universal right, has remained a condition of status insofar as its
true goal is "not movement as such; it is access to people and facilities."39 Hence the
mobility of the traveler has symbolized proprietorship and mastery over both
space and self.40
Extend Biopower Advantage
The dream of Utopia hides the political motivations- automobility enables a
surveillance state.
Packer 07, (Jeremy, Associate professor in the School for Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, “Automobility and the driving force of warfare: From
public safety to national security,” Conference lectured at the Symposium
"Architectures of fear. Terrorism and the Future of Urbanism in the West" CCCB 1718 May 2007, http://www.publicspace.org/ca/text-biblioteca/eng/b032automobility-and-the-driving-force-of-warfare-from-public-safety-to-nationalsecurity).
Such proclamations mark a considerable shift in the primary concern of U.S.
government agencies whose work it is to monitor, regulate, and govern
transportation technologies.1 In short, rather than primarily focusing on avoiding
accidents, the new mandate is to deter terrorists. What I want to accomplish in this
essay is to explain how such a shift is being enacted through the automobile and
what this may mean for future driving practices. Secondarily, this essay is an
attempt to formulate a theoretical framework adequate for understanding this new
formulation for the governance of automobility in the United States specifically, but
with the considerable chance of such formations spreading across the globe due in
no small part to the global war on terror.2 Dangers arise when attempting to
characterize the emergent, to, in essence, predict the future. In their essay “A
History of the Future”, James Carey, the founder of the American strain of cultural
studies within the field of communications,3 and John Quirk argue that much critical
insight can be gained through an examination of predictions about the future (Carey
and Quirk, 1989). As they maintain, such an undertaking does not provide guidance
in accurately predicting what shall come to pass. Rather, it reveals how the blind
faith in the imagined potential of technology, very often communications
technology, to solve contemporaneous problems, covers up the political and
economic motivations behind such applications. They characterize this faith in
technology to lead us into a better tomorrow the “rhetoric of a sub-lime future”
(Carey and Quirk, 1989, p. 180).
By foregrounding Carey’s insight, the following examination of past and
contemporary imagined futures of the automatically driven and guided automobile
provide insight into two interrelated processes. First, expectations and
formulations of how to seamlessly join the driver, automobile, and driving
environment expose underlying theories of governance. Such a history makes
evident a shift from a disciplinary apparatus to that of something akin to
control society. Second, an understanding of the imagined problems to which
automobile governance might be applied makes evident a change in the political
rationality of said governance. The U.S.’s response to the events of 9/11 have
configured the automobile as a new site for the conduct of warfare. The
political rationale for governing automobility is no longer only that of ensuring the
safety of each driver as in a pastoral formulation of state-citizen responsibilities.
Under the auspices of the war on terror and in the perpetual period of “the
new normal”4 all terrain is imagined as a battlefield; drivers and their
automobiles are cautiously approached as potential ene-mies and allies.
Ultimately, such an investigation of the specific technological assemblages
imagineered5 to combat such a thorny problem as suicide bombers or the
increasingly popular subset, the car bomb, can potentially provide a means for
making the sublime seem rather grotesque. Carey and Quirk provide appropriate
context here as well. They note that in 1929, HG Wells imagined that the British
Empire was a precursor to a World State and “the royal military equipped with the
latest technology of communication and transport as the forerunners of a ‘world
police’ able to dispatch quickly to any trouble spot to quell insurrectional activity”
(Carey and Quirk, 1989, p. 184). In the new formation of Empire, the U.S. military
sees all communication and transport technologies as potential weapons in
the global war on terror. The communications-enabled, tracked, and guided
automobile serves as merely one such example.
The imagined future of the automobile has a long history and it is dominated by
one feature. Automobiles will be made to drive themselves. Drivers will be freed
to conduct all forms of business and leisure from the seat of their automobile; not
having to concern themselves with the tedium of paying attention to stop signs,
highway exits, and the always present danger of other drivers’ errors or ire. The
dream of such a future has been part of the American popular imaginary for threequarters of a century. Yet, such imagined futures have been entirely dependent
upon a network of communication, control, and command technologies (C3)
that could create a degree of surveillance and control over the automobile
population historically only imagined in dystopic science-fiction narratives.
Recent scholarship has begun to examine current technological advances in the C3automobile couplet. Dodge and Kitchin (2006) have thoroughly examined how the
automation of drivers and the driving environment have radically altered the
governance of what John Urry calls “the ‘system’ of automobility” (2004). They make
evident how a vast array of C3 technologies work to more actively produce “safety
through software” (p. 10) as well as hardware (cars, roads, etc.) which ultimately
create a system of “automated management”. More generally, they are interested in
how this complex of technologies is establishing new modes of self-disciplining and
governance while altering how drivers imagine and move through space. Mimi
Sheller (forthcoming) draws upon a dense complex of work (Featherstone 2004,
Katz 2000, Thrift 2004) oriented by investigations into the phenomenological and
embodied practices of the driver-automobile/human-technology couplet as they are
reoriented due to the presence of C3 technologies in automobiles. She argues that
the more profound effects upon everyday life and driving are infrastructural as the
apparatus-produced agency is “increasingly impersonal, and ominously
distributed amongst software, vehicles, and algorithms (25)”. In this sense,
Sheller pushes for a broader perspective that examines the power relations
ingrained and maintained by these emergent technologies. What I want to add to
this dialogue concerns the political dimensions and centrality of automobility in
changing citizen-state relations and how a wartime state of exception further
embroils drivers into a global network of power relations. The importance of
automobility in these processes can be witnessed in how the Office of
Homeland Security expects to fight national security battles in the United
States and in how the U.S. military approaches war theaters abroad.
Automobility is an integral element in both. This is not the first time the
automobile has figured as a key component in fighting war, nor is the rhetoric of
war new to explaining how to govern automobility. Two such metaphors will now
be used as a starting point for examining the shift from public safety to national
security.
The auto industry is the vehicle by which the government experiments with the
control of society.
Packer 07, (Jeremy, Associate professor in the School for Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, “Automobility and the driving force of warfare: From
public safety to national security,” Conference lectured at the Symposium
"Architectures of fear. Terrorism and the Future of Urbanism in the West" CCCB 1718 May 2007, http://www.publicspace.org/ca/text-biblioteca/eng/b032automobility-and-the-driving-force-of-warfare-from-public-safety-to-nationalsecurity).
It is in the past and the past future, that we can see the beginnings (for
technological, military, economic, and political reasons) of this future auto-control
society. The automobile in the United States currently accounts for over 90%
of travel and, excepting for wartime rationing, its use has increased annually for
over 100 years running.13 Even given the various nightmare scenarios
regarding its ultimate demise , this astounding saturation of use continues to
gain. Acknowledging the enormity and ubiquity of automobile use and its continued
growth, an obvious point of investigation into the technologies and machinic
arrangements of the (be)coming control society is automobility. The automobile has
been a site for remote control innovations for years and it has primarily been
achieved via a network of communications technologies. As noted above, it was
most often done at the behest of safety and economic efficiency. What follows is a
brief history of some of the developments and imagined plans for creating a fully
controlled automobile/highway system. More importantly, it is through an
examination of these imagined futures that we can witness just how deeply rooted
and widely spread the desire for auto-control society has been over the past
century. Furthermore, contemporary imaginings regarding the automobile are
taking place in two distinct arenas. First, there were a number of pre-9/11
initiatives for what have generally been called Automated Highway Systems
(AHS), Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), or more specifically the Intelligent
Vehicle Highway System (IVHS); research and development upon which began in
the early 1990s via a billion U.S. dollars of start-up capital from the U.S. Congress.
Second, the U.S. military is currently developing a program they call Combat
Zones That See (CTS) touted for initial use as part of the U.S. military’s operations
in Baghdad. These two historically and technologically overlapping initiatives
need to be thought of in tandem as a set of theaters for experimenting with
implementations of control society. It is not simply that there is a desire to
control automotive conduct, but increasingly under the logic of perpetual war, the
more far-reaching consequences are that the automobile acts as the site for
experimentation on the control of all bodily mobility.
Social control- history proves auto programs are used to entrench surveillancewe are all treated like terrorists.
Packer 07, (Jeremy, Associate professor in the School for Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, “Automobility and the driving force of warfare: From
public safety to national security,” Conference lectured at the Symposium
"Architectures of fear. Terrorism and the Future of Urbanism in the West" CCCB 1718 May 2007, http://www.publicspace.org/ca/text-biblioteca/eng/b032automobility-and-the-driving-force-of-warfare-from-public-safety-to-nationalsecurity).
Whether at border crossings, airport terminals, roadside police interrogations,
ports, or security checks at government buildings, what is often referred to as
“freedom of movement” has become one site where the “homeland’s” security
is seen to be at risk. Conceptions of who has such freedom, how, when, where,
and with what velocity it can be enacted, has all changed. As the epigraph above
from the Department of Homeland Security’s website makes clear, there is a
heightened sense that modern terrorism demands a rethinking of how to govern the
U.S. transportation system. This rethinking is not purely defensive. The system is
also imagined as a productive force for ensuring homeland security as a
number of programs call upon the automobile citizen to expand the capacities of
state surveillance.
For instance the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) calls for
citizens to keep an eye out for potential terrorist activity while driving, asking
them to use cell phones to alert police forces of suspicious activity. The 300,000
transportation industry workers in the United States were called upon by the
American Trucking Association and the Department of Homeland Security to take
part in Highway Watch which would conscript truckers as part of a mobile
surveillance system. Such governmental attempts have been used in the past to
link automobility and mobile communications into a mobile surveillance
system, including widespread attempts to organize Citizens Band Radio users to
monitor the roadways in the 1970s (Packer, 2002). But in the past, automotive
behavior was itself the object of surveillance. This isn’t to say we are simply facing
a more repressive form of power in which we are constantly being told “No. You
cannot enter (or leave) here”. Though for many this has been the case. 8
Rather, how mobility is governed has changed. It is in essence a question of “how
has mobility been differently problematized?” For one, the space of governance has
changed significantly. The advent of the Office of Homeland Security and the Global
War on Terror, as much as the first attacks on the U.S. mainland in nearly two
centuries, have turned all of global space, all terrain, into a war zone. As such, we
must ask to what degree the logic of national security now organizes policing
mechanisms in the U.S. and abroad. Further, when the secrecy of terrorists’
identities creates a situation in which combatants “cannot be known,” in any field
of battle, this means all will be policed as if they are potentially terrorists. At the
same time, all citizens are asked to join in the War on Terror as part of Homeland
Security initiatives. This alteration and bifurcation in the relationship between the
state and citizenry is particularly telling in terms of automobility.
The dream of the car-> a surveillance state- the force that shapes our travels
will be used to track us.
Packer 07, (Jeremy, Associate professor in the School for Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, “Automobility and the driving force of warfare: From
public safety to national security,” Conference lectured at the Symposium
"Architectures of fear. Terrorism and the Future of Urbanism in the West" CCCB 1718 May 2007, http://www.publicspace.org/ca/text-biblioteca/eng/b032automobility-and-the-driving-force-of-warfare-from-public-safety-to-nationalsecurity).
One element of the model of the control society is the management of access to
space. That is, the ability to be mobile, to move from one place to another can be
governed at the level of the individual. Within a disciplinary regime, this access took
place in terms of the precept; particular forms of mobility operated according to the
rules of conduct in that space which couldn’t necessarily disallow access to mobility
in general or to particular spaces according to who but rather only according to
how. For instance, driving might be governed according to population (only those
aged 16 and older) and by the rules of conduct of the road (at certain speeds, in
certain directions, in particular types of vehicles). Thus, automobility and the spaces
open to it were controlled according to a set of precepts which were surveilled and
in theory internalized. It was only at particular checkpoints, most notably borders,
through secondarily anti-drunk driving road blocks, and in cases of witnessed rule
infractions, that the who of mobility came into being through technologies of
verification,12 most notably the drivers license, but also technologies such as proof
of insurance, automobile registration and license plates. As will be noted below,
these forms of verification can be made mobile and not just activated by the
checkpoint. However, through the integration of various communications,
insurantial, verification, and information technologies the precept/surveillance
couplet can be replaced by the password.
As Deleuze argues, we need to see into and before the dawning of this control
society in order to prepare modes of resistance. He looks to Felix Guattari’s
imagined future in which all must use an electronic card to move into and out of
particular spaces. This card can be made to provide access on one day, but not the
next or only at specific times through particular entrances. It is not the precept, the
rule for conduct that determines access, but rather the constantly modulatable
password, actualized via the pass-card. If we take this future as our ground zero, we
can move in time in two directions. Forward, we can imagine not simply specific
sites through which one must pass, nor cards which stand in as a sign of one’s
identity. Rather, as recent science fiction movies Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997) and
Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) suggest, the body, in conjunction with
biometric recognition technologies, becomes its own technology of verification
(Gates, 2005). But, in both of these movies there are still checkpoints or mobile
surveillance forces that must surveil and search space for individuals. In simple
terms it is still the space that is the site of control, not the very mobility of any given
individual or population. For this second possibility to come into being, all of space
would be a perpetual checkpoint. In Deleuzean terms, this space would be neither
striated nor smooth, but smoothly striated. Striated space is that which has been
organized according to a set of rules and patterns for how the space can be used,
traversed, and even imagined. Smooth space has no such rules. There would not be a
grid covering space according to a set of coordinates as if on a map with boundaries,
but rather each and every point in space would always be the center of spatial
organization for the individual at that point. Forces of control would always have
the potential to be focused upon every occupied point, but ideally do so through
the occupant as opposed to a spatial apparatus. Mobility would become that
which is the imagined “site” of control, not space. Furthermore, the trace of
movement would become the predictor for what might happen in the future. For
this to happen, all mobilities would have to be fully monitored, a data-base of
recorded movement would need to exist, an algorithm would make
predictablesense of such movement, and all mobilities would need to be
potentially remotely controlled. That is the dystopic vision of a control society
future: all individuals remotely controllable. And in fact, Minority Report provides
just such a vision when the automobile John Anderton – the movie’s protagonist
played by Tom Cruise – is using to escape an unjustified police arrest, is remotely
controlled in an attempt to bring Anderton to the police station and “justice”. The
automobile, so long envisioned by Hollywood as a mode of escape, was turned
into a mobile jail cell.
AT Econ Impacts
Disregard their economy impacts- it’s the lie used to justify a surveillance state.
Packer 07, (Jeremy, Associate professor in the School for Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, “Automobility and the driving force of warfare: From
public safety to national security,” Conference lectured at the Symposium
"Architectures of fear. Terrorism and the Future of Urbanism in the West" CCCB 1718 May 2007, http://www.publicspace.org/ca/text-biblioteca/eng/b032automobility-and-the-driving-force-of-warfare-from-public-safety-to-nationalsecurity).
Furthermore, the use of on-board computers, GPS systems, black boxes, and other
communications devices had not yet fully arrived. In other words, much of the
regulatory and technological forces currently at play simply didn’t exist or had yet
to be integrated into the automobile. Yet, their understanding of power points to
some of the underlying methods and goals of such “surveillance and control”. The
automobile quite clearly functions as the central focus of such initiatives and in
essence operates as the sender, message, and receiver in a communicative network
encompassing the automobile driver and “central control”. In their description of
proposed intelligent highway systems the network was organized with the
automobile at its center and was surrounded by “Vehicle presence detectors”. Three
important points can be gleaned from a closer analysis of how the automobile
figured as the central figure toward which the freeway system was to be focussed.
First, “presence” is primary as it is the space which is imagined to both pre-exist the
vehicle and to supersede its importance. After all, it is the “freeway” being surveilled
and controlled while the vehicle is treated as a potential problem, as a disrupting
force in that spatial system through its potential to create inefficiencies – via
breakdown, accident, or collective congestion. Second, each automobile represented
nine specific groupings of technologies including, though not limited to,
photoelectric, infrared, sonic, radar, inductive loop, magnetic, pneumatic, hydraulic,
chemical, and smoke detectors. Thus various communicative forms are made
conspicuous to the freeway monitoring systems. (Can we think of the exhaust
system as a medium and CO2 emissions as a message or sign? We must if we are to
understand how these elements “speak” to each other.) The freeway is not only
imagined as a track on which cars are guided and moved along, but it is turned into
a surveillant recognition machine in a control network. Lastly, this recognition
is just one element in what is imagined as a circulatory system akin to that in the
human body in which various other systems recognize and respond to potential
blockages, inadequacies of flow, the movement of contaminated elements, or even
full blown rupture. The system is then what is at stake, and in many ways it is a
closed system. Individual mobilities are merely an element to be managed for the
relative health of the whole. In most aspects this was still the operative logic for AHS
right up to 9/11/2001. Government-granted research money and the promised
profits of a new market fueled extensive research, development, and public
relations’ hype. News stories told of a not-too distant future where highway
deaths would be radically diminished by eliminating human error from the
system. Furthermore, the cost benefits of developing a far more efficient automated
system compared to that of building more highway lanes was said to make
undeniable fiscal sense. Within the economic sector, AHS was described as a boom
industry worthy of capital investment and was said to be a quantum leap for
efficiency and the minimization of productivity losses. On the consumer level it
was sold as a means for expanding freedom and ensuring greater safety. AHS
would turn the car into an efficient networked mobile office and a safe media-savvy
family room. These networked capabilities were not only a consumer-driven
“option”, they were also the means by which this newly automated highway could
be made to function. As in early models of highway management, a command,
control, and communications (C3) system was envisioned as the synaptic
trigger connecting dreams with realities.
A2: Warming Impact
Automobility is the root cause of global warming- our worldview entrenches
un-sustainability.
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal), p. 187-188,
http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/1/2/187).
The purpose of this paper is to clear a way for an investigation of the spatial
parameters of forms of life that need to be developed in order to reach the goal of
sustainability. Sustainability involves the healthy functioning of the more-thanhuman world in a way that sustains the continuance of life and promotes its wellbeing. Part One is based on the distinction in environmental philosophy between
shallow ecology and deep ecology; it does not envision these rubrics in a
dichotomous fashion, but rather as poles of a continuum. Al Gore’s popular and
widely-accepted liberal-based position is critically challenged as too shallow for
the goals of sustainability and various points are raised by which deeper
ecological paths and solutions need to be forged. Part Two develops the concept
of automobility and employs Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology as strategy for
understanding the essence of automobility as the spatial aspect of modern
technology. This reflection provides a deeper understanding of the worldview
that has led us to ecological disaster and thus provides us with the key factor
to open ourselves toward a new worldview of sustainability.
To avoid misunderstanding at the outset, the term ‘automobility’ is employed not to
refer to automobiles, even though they are perhaps the paradigmatic exemplar
of automobility, for we have built our landscapes in their image, but rather to
emphasize the spatial production of modern technology. ‘Modern technology’ is to
be taken in the Heideggerian sense of the term: as that which sets upon nature in
order to extract and store energy. Traditional technologies do not unlock energy in a
way that it can be stored. Heidegger distinguishes modern from traditional
technology in that the modern transforms the experienced life-world and its
experienced ecological patternings into a function of energy production An
example is a regional landscape transformed into a coal mining district, e.g.,
the Ruhr Valley, which had existed for centuries in the support of small farms
and human-scaled towns being transformed over decades into a site for coal
extraction. Another example is the transformation of a river into a “power
station”. Automobility is a correlative concept that captures the production of
space as a function of these transformations made possible by modern technologies.
These spatial productions in themselves are unsustainable.
Concern with global warming hides the real problem- auto culture’s the root
cause.
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal p. 191-192, http://www.mdpi.com/20711050/1/2/187).
My fundamental criticism, however, is that Gore sees global warming as the
problem rather than as a symptom of a much deeper flaw/problematic in
culture, and this delimits his thinking to remain within a shallow ecological
viewpoint, foiling an analysis that would develop toward a viable
sustainability. His focus on global warming limits his solution to the environmental
crisis to a shallow technological fix. Sure he advocates a change in forms of life, but
these are merely a function of, or the requirement for, the implementation of
technologies that will save us and the planet. In this way his thinking remains within
the modern scientistic attitude that in a deep or foundational sense has led to the
predicament in which we find ourselves [10]. The efforts to dominate nature,
dominations implemented through modern technological praxes, have led to
drastic changes to the planet as a whole in an extremely short time. We now
see that those changes, based on considering our needs only (the mentality of
natural resources to be ordered about on our terms), are destroying the life of, and
on, the planet.
In this paper I will treat global warming as a symptom and address that which I
have been calling „automobility‟ as the true source of the problem of global
warming. Global warming is the most apparent symptom of automobility, but at the
same time global warming dangerously averts our attention away from
discovering the real cure for our “dis-ease”, and from a complex of interrelated
dangerous and egregious problems, which are to be confronted through an
archaeological hermeneutics that traces back to the interpretive ground from which
the complex manifests. Specifically, if we want to address environmental problems
for the purpose of developing a policy of sustainability, we will need to critically
reflect on automobility as the fundamental principle of modern material
culture from which our environmental problems have ensued. Thus global
warming is a jumping off point, a kind of leading clue to engage in a deeper way of
thinking, which is required for the development of the concept of sustainability,
from which we then are to be drawn to develop a new and viable worldview from
the seed concept of sustainability. There can be no viable policies of
sustainability without dealing with the egregious obstacle of an auto-mobile
material culture.
And regardless of the sector’s resource consumption, the mindset behind it is
one of enframing- that means they’ll treats the environment as disposable
regardless of making the industry less wasteful.
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal), http://www.mdpi.com/20711050/1/2/187).
Abstract: The argument of this paper is that sustainability requires a new
worldview-paradigm. It critically evaluates Gore‟s liberal-based environmentalism
in order to show how “shallow ecologies” are called into question by deeper
ecologies. This analysis leads to the notion that global warming is better
understood as a symptom indicative of the worldview that is the source for
environmental crises. Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutics and its critique of
modern technology show that the modern worldview involves an enframing (a
totalizing technological ordering) of the natural. Enframing reveals entities as
standing reserve (on demand energy suppliers). My thesis maintains that
enframing is geographically expressed as automobility. Because of the energy
needs used to maintain automobility, reaching the goal of sustainability requires
rethinking the spatial organization of life as a function of stored energy
technologies.
We control the inevitability debate- Even if tech thought solves in the short
term, it doesn’t solve underlying problems- neoliberal excesses, social
structures that drive us to consumption.
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal), p. 191, http://www.mdpi.com/20711050/1/2/187).
Bio-regionalists have called for new and radical political changes such as the reconstruction of political boundaries to be correlative with biospheric boundaries so
that the political domain becomes interfused with the natural domain in an organic
development pattern [8]. Forms of human life then are organized in context with
natural ecologies—an interrelation for mutual benefit. This ecological rootedness to
a place, to its place-character or genius loci as the key to ecological bounded praxes,
must be accomplished without the fascist tendencies of race/nation imperialisms of
the past, which are avoidable through the political tactics of decentralization and
networking and the value of diversity within local-bounds. Gore champions the
democratic process but really offers no proposals that would restructure political
bodies in a way that would support the implementation of sustainability. A society
that culturally and politically does not attune its practices to place-bound ecologies
and their interrelations does not merit the accolade of supporting sustainability. As I
will show, to call into question the geography of automobility requires
thinking about how the task to de-structure automobility might show us how
to re-structure life toward the goal of sustainability. There is still another point
germane to the issue of automobility which shows the non-viability of Gore’s
shallow ecology. Peak oil theorists are issuing very serious warnings
concerning non-renewable energy consumption [9]. Hypothetically, if we could
immediately solve the global warming (climate change) problem in Gore’s
shallow, technological sense, then we would nevertheless still be in the most
utterly grave circumstances concerning energy. Even if it were possible to solve
the problem of global warming with the use of alternative energy sources, there still
would remain an energy crisis both in terms of shortages and
implementations that carry many unwanted so-called side-effects. A policy of
sustainability would entail tackling the energy crisis directly, not because of its link
to the global warming problem; sustainability entails more dramatic measures,
necessary curbs on modern excesses promoted by neo-liberal economic
globalization and the social structures that it constructs, concerning which
Gore’s sanguine liberal-based ideology is not prepared to face.
Petro Capitalism Prereq to Warming
Our current set of values is one that puts nature secondhand to our material
desires. Even if technology is able to alter climate change, our set of values will
continue to cause environmental damage.
Jamieson 92 Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming Author(s): Dale Jamieson Source: Science, Technology, &
Human Values, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 139-153 Dale Jamieson is Director of Environmental Studies at New York
University, where he is also Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, and Affiliated Professor of Law URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/689781
Since the end of World War II, humans have attained a kind of power that is unprecedented in history. While in the past entire
peoples could be destroyed, now all people are vulnerable. While
once particular human societies
had the power to upset then natural processes that made their lives and
cultures possible, now people have the power to alter the fundamental global
conditions that permitted human life to evolve and that continue to sustain it.
While our species dances with the devil, the rest of nature is held hostage. Even if
we step back from the precipice it will be too late for many or even perhaps most of the plant and animal life with which we
share the planet (Borza and Jamieson1990). Even
if global climate can be stabilized, the future
may be one without wild nature(McKibben 1989). Humans will live in a humanized
world with a few domestic plants and animals that can survive or thrive on
their relationships with humans. The questions that such possibilities pose
are fundamental questions of morality They concern how we ought to live,
what kinds of societies we want, and how we should relate to nature and other
forms of life. Seen from this perspective, it is not surprising that economics cannot tell us everything we want to know
about how we should respond to global warming and global change. Economics may be able to tell us how to reach our goals
efficiently, but it cannot tell us what our goals should be or even whether we should be concerned to reach them efficiently. It
is a striking fact about modern intellectual life that we often seek to evade the value dimensions of fundamental social
questions.
Social scientists tend to eschew explicit talk about values, and this is
part of the reason why we have so little understanding of how value change
occurs in individuals and societies. Policy professionals are also often
reluctant to talk about values. Many think that rational reflection on values
and value change is impossible, unnecessary, impractical, or dangerous. Others see it as a professional,
political, or bureaucratic threat (Amy 1984). Generally, in the political process, value language
tends to function as code words for policies and attitudes that cannot be
discussed directly. A system of values, in the sense in which I will use this notion, specifies permissions, norms,
duties, and obligations; it assigns blame, praise, and responsibility; and it provides an account of what is valuable and what is
not. A
system of values provides a standard for assessing our behavior and that
of others. Perhaps indirectly it also provides a measure of the acceptability of
government action and regulation.
We need a different approach to the world rather than another quick fix, to
truly overcome climate change
Jamieson 92 Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming Author(s): Dale Jamieson Source: Science, Technology, &
Human Values, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 139-153 Dale Jamieson is Director of Environmental Studies at New York
University, where he is also Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, and Affiliated Professor of Law URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/689781
Science has alerted us to the impact of human kind on the planet, each other, and all
life. This dramatically confronts us with questions about who we are, our relations to nature, and what we are willing to
sacrifice for various possible futures. We
should confront this as a fundamental challenge to
our values and not treat it as if it were simply another technical problem to be
managed. Some who seeks quick fixes may find this concern with values frustrating. A moral argument will not change
the world overnight. Collective moral change is fundamentally cooperative rather
than coercive. No one will fall over, mortally wounded, in the face of an argument. Yet if there is to be meaningful
change that makes a difference over the long term, it must be both collective and thorough going. Developing a
deeper understanding of who we are, as well as how our best conceptions of
ourselves can guide change, is the fundamental issue that we face.
In order to tackle environmental issues, we must change our outlook on how to
address problems
Jamieson 92 Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming Author(s): Dale Jamieson Source: Science, Technology, &
Human Values, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 139-153 Dale Jamieson is Director of Environmental Studies at New York
University, where he is also Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, and Affiliated Professor of Law URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/689781
I believe that our dominant value system is inadequate and inappropriate for
guiding our thinking about global environmental problems, such as those
entailed by climate changes caused by human activity. This value system, as it
impinges on the environment, can be thought of as a relatively recent
construction, coincident with the rise of capitalism and modern science, and
ex- pressed in the writings of such philosopher sas Francis Bacon([1620] 1870),
John Locke ([1690] 1952), and Bernard Mandeville ([1714] 1970; see also
Hirschman1977). It evolved in low-population-density and low-technology
societies, with seemingly unlimited access to land and other resources. This value
system is reflected in attitudes toward population, consumption, technology,
and social justice, as well as toward the environment. The feature of this value
system that I will discuss is its conception of responsibility. Our current value
system presupposes that harms and their causes are individual, that they can
readily be identified, and that they are local in space and time. It is these aspects of
our conception of responsibility on which I want to focus. Consider an example of
the sort of case with which our value system deals best. Jones breaks into Smith's
house and steals Smith's television set. Jones's intent is clear: she wants Smith's TV
set. Smith suffers a clear harm he is made worse off by having lost the television set.
Jones is responsible for Smith's loss, for she was the cause of the harm and no one
else was involved. What we have in this case is a clear, self-contained story about
Smith's loss. We know how to identify the harms and how to assign
responsibility. We respond to this breech of our norms by punishing Jones in order
to prevent her from doing it again and to deter others from such acts, or we require
Compensation from Jones so that Smith may be restored to his former position. It is
my contention that this paradigm collapses when we try to apply it to global
environmental problems, such as those associated with human-induced global
climate change. It is for this reason that we are often left feeling confused about
how to think about these problems. There are three important dimensions along
which global environmental problems such as those involved with climate
change vary from the paradigm: Apparently innocent acts can have
devastating consequences, causes and harms maybe diffuse, and causes and
harms maybe remote in space and time. (Other important dimensions may
concern non line are causation, threshold effects, and the relative unimportance of
political boundaries but I cannot discuss these here [see Lee 1989].)
Discussion of environmental abuse is key to alter historically constructed values
and conceptions
Jamieson 92 Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming Author(s): Dale Jamieson Source: Science, Technology, &
Human Values, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 139-153 Dale Jamieson is Director of Environmental Studies at New York
University, where he is also Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, and Affiliated Professor of Law URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/689781
Today we face the possibility that the global environment may be destroyed, yet no
one will be responsible. This is a new problem. It takes a great many people and a
high level of consumption and production to change the earth's climate. It
could not have been done in low-density, low-technology societies. Nor could it have
been done in societies like ours until recently. London could be polluted by its
inhabitants in the eighteenth century, but its reach was limited. Today no part of
the planet is safe. Unless we develop new values and conceptions of we will
have enormous responsibility, difficulty in motivating people to respond to
this problem. Some may think that discussion about new values is idealistic.
Human
Nature can not be changed, it is sometimes said. But as anyone who takes
anthropology or history seriously knows, our current values are at least in part
historically constructed, rooted in the conditions of life in which they
developed. What we need are new values that reflect the interconnectedness
of life on a dense, high-technology planet. Others may think that a search for new
values is excessively individualistic and that what is needed are collective and
institutional solutions. This overlooks the fact that our values permit our
institutions and practices. Reforming our values is part of constructing new
moral, political, and legal concepts. One of the most important benefits of
viewing global environmental problems as moral problems is that this brings
them into the domain of dialogue, discussion, and participation. Rather than
being management problems that governments or experts can solve for us,
when seen as ethical problems, they become problems for all of us to address,
both as political actors and as everyday moral agents.
A2: Alt Causalities/Cars not Cause Warming
Car dependent societies are polluted, ruin ecosystems, and spend tons of
money
Environment 12 (Ministry of the Environment “Environmental effects”
http://www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/ 1998-2012)
The development of car-dependent environments imposes higher average
living costs on families and can also restrict mobility for the elderly, children,
the poor, the disabled and those who do not wish to own a motor vehicle.
Congestion also imposes some significant costs on communities. These
include: environment costs through higher levels of air pollution economic
costs – Auckland’s congestion is estimated to cost the national economy more than
$1 billion per year social costs, for example, increased levels of stress and less time available for other activities.
Emissions Vehicle exhaust emissions are a major source of air pollution in
some areas, particularly around busy road corridors. Pollutants include
carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), benzene, and particulate
matter. Vehicle emissions affect people’s health, and a recent study estimated that 399 people
will die prematurely each year because of vehicle air pollution. Vehicles also emit
carbon dioxide (CO2), which is a greenhouse gas. Transport is responsible for 44 percent of New Zealand’s carbon dioxide
emissions, and around 16 percent of our total greenhouse gas emissions. For more information visit the Climate Change
section of this website. Byproducts Heavy metals and petroleum products from vehicles can contaminate the land and
stormwater. Transport
is also responsible for some of the extensive heavy metal
contamination of some harbours and estuarine areas. Contaminated
stormwater can make receiving water unsafe to swim in, drink, or collect
shellfish. Culverts for transport infrastructure can disrupt fish migration.
Suspended sediments, from road works for example, can affect water clarity,
favouring species that prefer cloudy conditions. Transporting hazardous
substances carries a risk of spillage. Marine oil spills can devastate marine
and coastal environments.
And cars lead to harmful emissions that cause not only pollution but also cause
health issues- even in seemingly healthy individuals
Lararoff 02 Cat Lazaroff “Air Pollution Constricts Healthy Blood Vessels” Associate Director for our climate and energy
quoting Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2002/2002-03-1207.html
ANN ARBOR, Michigan, March 12, 2002 (ENS)
For the first time, researchers
have shown that air pollution can harm the blood
vessels of healthy humans. The study provides further evidence that everyone - not just people
with heart disease or other health problems - may be at risk from breathing
polluted air. A study published in Monday's issue of "Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association"
found that blood vessels in healthy lungs became constricted after exposure to
polluted air. In the study, 25 healthy people inhaled elevated concentrations of fine particles plus ozone for two hours.
Gasoline and diesel burning vehicles are a major source of the type of air
pollution examined in the study. (Two photos courtesy U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) After
exposure, volunteers' blood vessels constricted between two percent and four percent on
average. Their vessels did not constrict when they were exposed to ozone free and particle free air. "We have a wealth of
epidemiological data saying that air pollution is associated with adverse respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes, but there is
still a lack of understanding as to how the association occurs physiologically," said Dr. Robert Brook, study coauthor and
assistant professor of internal medicine in the division of hypertension and vascular medicine program at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor. "These
findings suggest a possible reason why the rate of heart
attacks and other cardiovascular events increases with exposure to air pollution for people
with known heart and blood vessel disease," added Brook. The researchers focused on ozone and fine particulate matter. Fine
particles - those with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers - are emitted from burning fossil
fuels, such as in car engine exhaust, power generation and many industrial processes. Ozone and
additional particulate materials are created when sunlight interacts with
these emissions. "In other research, exposure to fine particles has been implicated in coronary events such as heart
attacks," Brook explained. "… Because the 25 subjects in this study were all healthy and young, with an average age of 35,
these results call attention to the need for further research on the air pollution problems that plague most of the world's major
cities, Brook said. "Our
results are a clear demonstration that environmentally
relevant concentrations of common air pollutants that can occur in urban
settings adversely affect the blood vessels of healthy people," Brook said, adding that
more research is needed to understand why air pollution has negative effects on blood vessels and to clarify the public health
implications of these initial studies. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that air
pollution contributed to 60,000 heart related deaths in 1996, according to figures in the
federal register.
Automobiles are THE main contributor to global warming, and there’s
consensus; it’s real
Bose 10 Bimal K. Bose “Global Warming: Energy, Environmental Pollution, and the Impact of Power Electronics” Dr. Bimal
K. Bose Life Fellow, IEEE Condra Chair of Excellence/Emeritus in Power Electronics & Power Electronics Consultant. Bose has
B.E. degree in 1956 from IIEST, India, M.S. degree in 1960 from University of Wisconsin, Madison,, and Ph.D. degree in 1966
from Calcutta University, March 2012
Unfortunately, burning
of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) generates pollutant gases such
as SO2, Co Nox, HC, and CO2, that cause environmental pollution problems. For
example, acid rain that destroys vegetarian is cause by SO2 and NOx, and urban
pollution is caused mainly by automobile exhaust gases (CO, NOx, and HC.) The more
dominant effect of fossil fuel burning is the global warming problem that is
mainly cause by CO2 (called HGH), which traps the solar heat in the atmosphere (called the greenhouse effect.) It
may be mentioned here that nuclear power does not have the traditional environmental pollution problem, but safety of
nuclear plant temperature. The
major amount of Co2 emission in the atmosphere is
caused by burning fossil fuels. In 2007, the IPCC of United Nations established (with
90% certainty) that man-made generation of CO2 is the principal cause of global
warming problem. Not that human beings and other animals exhale GHG, but the
trees absorb CO2 by the photosynthesis (called carbon fertilization effect).
A2 Feminism
The car has always been envisionsed as a tool for patriarchy- it provides a way
for men to affirm their masculinity.
Jain 05, (Sarah S, Associate Professor of Anthropology, awarded the Cultural
Horizons Prize by the Society for Cultural Anthropology for best article published in
the journal Cultural Anthropology in 2004. a National Humanities Center Fellow in
2006, and currently a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, “Violent
Submission: Gendered Automobility,” Cultural Critique, No. 61 (Autumn, 2005),
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4489227.pdf?
p. 195-196
Traversing space itself has been found to be gendered,13 and early twentiethcentury automobiles gave the gendering of space particular valance in the
ways it allied both the internal space of the car and the space-takings required
by the automobile to the technological and commodity object of the car.
Automobiles asserted themselves rather aggressively into the social order of the
early twentieth century, and the implications of this were seen in both nuclear
sexual relations (the ways that men and women could identify) as well as in the
wider politics of urban sociality, the latter of which I will discuss further later in the
paper.
Historically, the car was picked up nearly immediately as a tool to renew a
masculinity challenged by industrialization's needs for assembly-line and
white-collar work. This assertion of masculinity through technology followed two
ambivalent tracks. On the one hand, the driver's seat reasserted the male as the
family head in control of its destiny. The car became a symbol of paternity-daddy
driving the family around on Sunday. On the other hand, the car provided the male
with the means of escape from the family and domesticity--it was the private
place that gentlemen could drink, swear, and court.14 Obviously women were not
unaware of the power of the automobile and, even early on, many of those who
could, drove expensive cars. But as the early banning of women from auto racing
and auto clubs demonstrates (Joan Cuneo became one of the top racers of the
early century and apparently for this reason women were banned from racing
altogether), this provenance of masculinity was viciously guarded. As Virginia
Scharff outlines in her history of automobility, this guarding took place after the
First World War, in which American women had worked as volunteer
ambulance drivers in Europe, mainly by questioning their sexuality and
implicating independent
woman as lesbians.
That the car offered a definitively new kind of social space is obvious from the ways
that anxieties about the car were expressed in the early media. Not only did
concerns arise about the ways that automobility was reconstituting urban spaces
through the way it tended to take over previously vibrant street space, but the car
offered a place that could not be fully understood or accounted for. Thus, it became
the locus of new versions of courting and, for good and ill, parents lost control
of who and how their daughters dated (see Bailey). In 1925, with the highly
publicized murder of Bobby Franks in a car in a wealthy area of Chicago, the car
became a space, untethered to possible witnessing communities, in which
unspeakable horrors could take place. The industry responded to these anxieties
with commercial short films such as "The Safest Place," which in 1936 compared the
car favorably to the multiple household dangers of stepladders and soap ready to be
slipped on.15
This domestication of the automobile gains momentum through the 1940s and '50s.
With the rise of suburbanization and the garage as the faqade onto the street, the car
became a sort of second living room, featuring fabrics and upholstery that followed
trends in home design. As Ford claimed as early as 1949 in one of its brochures,
"The '49 Ford is a living room on wheels: ... There's room to spare for three people
on each of these 'sofa seats,' trimly upholstered in new, modern, fabrics. And there's
'picture window' visibility.... Yes, it's a living room on wheels, this '49 Ford!" (quoted
in Eastman 1984, 129). Indeed, even as this suburbanization marked the beginning
of the woman as domestic chauffeur, the car was perhaps the only domestic space
that men, as proper men, could care for, clean, and caress.16
Thus, the driver's seat, with its disciplined, seated immobility, occupies a space
in an oscillating order of living room and cockpit, or patriarchal domestic and
masculine technological.17 But the brutal protection of this male physical and
symbolic space also belies a queer triangulation to the social, historical, and
cultural integration of the car in gendered social relations. Elements of car
culture, from enthusiast magazines to auto shows and Saturday-afternoon washes,
manifests a performative hypermasculinity verging on overcompensation.
A2 Neolib
While the valorization automobility began as a post-New Deal program of
liberal outreach to the working class, after the Second World War II it
morphed into a far more privatized, deregulated industry. The unrelenting
surge of energy profligacy paved the way for an equally unrelenting, and far
more destructive regime of neoliberal expansion.
Huber 2011 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark University,
“Oil, Life, and the Fetishism of Geopolitics, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol.2 22,
No. 3, 32-48, 2011, azp)
And, of course, this appearance of autonomy was absolutely fueled through
voluminous consumption of petroleum products. In the postwar period and
today, petroleum became more and more constitutive of ideas of life itself
(Huber 2009). The dispersed geography of private homeownership and
automobility depends upon energy to propel individuals across the sprawling
landscapes of everyday life. Energy profligacy in the United States powers a
particular atomized command over and experience of space that*while
certainly not guaranteeing anything*is conducive to ideologies privileging the
private realm over and against notions of the public sphere. With all the ‘‘work’’
(or energy) accomplished through the combustion of taken-for-granted
hydrocarbons, people more and more imagine themselves as individuals to be
masters of their own lives. Rather than focusing exclusively on geopolitical
elites, we can begin to trace political connections between the heroic, oilpowered homeowner and wider geopolitical narratives of security (Campbell
2005). Thus, at first, oil was a central feature in the effort to remake capitalism in
favor of a sector of the working class. Oil became constitutive of an ‘‘American way
of life’’ based around high wages, steady employment, and government safety
nets. Yet, as history unfolded thirty years after WWII and suburbanization
exploded into the postwar years, the private and individualist nature of oilfueled life under this broader social arrangement began to swing American
politics away from working-class liberalism and toward right-wing populism.
Indeed, during the crisis of postwar Fordism in the 1970s, the oil ‘‘shocks’’
themselves stood in as an external explanation for rising inflation and
declining standards of ‘‘life’’ for the bulk of the working population. Rather
than seeing these changes as the beginning of ‘‘the restoration of class power’’ of
capital over labor (see Harvey 2005), outrage over gasoline lines pointed to the
forces impeding the free market*racialized Oil Sheikdoms, monopolistic oil
corporations, and above all, the machinations of ‘‘big government.’’ In fact, the oil
crisis*and the government response of oil ‘‘price controls’’*was perhaps Milton
Friedman’s most prized example of the inefficiencies of government intervention.
According to Friedman and Friedman (1980, 14), the long gasoline lines were due
to: one reason and one reason alone: because legislation, administered by a
government agency, did not permit the price system to function . . . The smooth
operation of the price mechanism*which for many decades had assured every
consumer that he could buy gasoline at any of a large number of service stations at
his convenience and with minimal wait*was replaced by bureaucratic
improvisation.14 Thus, the obvious popular response was to set the oil market free,
as Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign colloquialism articulated: ‘‘Our problem isn’t
a shortage of oil. It’s a surplus of government’’ (Reagan quoted in Jacobs 2008,
209). By the 1980s, the forces of neoliberal deregulation and financialization
were set free in the energy sector (see Juhaz 2008).
The rise of Fordism and subsequent valorization of automobility is tightly
entwined with the dominating rhetoric of neoliberalism – the false
cosmopolitanism that such ideologies create encourage policy that approaches
populations as if they all have equal access to resources, and an equal level of
social mobility.
Huber 2011 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “Oil, Life, and the Fetishism of Geopolitics, Capitalism Nature
Socialism, Vol.2 22, No. 3, 32-48, 2011, azp)
It is generally recognized that Fordism was constituted through this class
compromise that essentially bought labor peace in exchange for relatively
high wages for a middle-to-upper strata of white workers. Ironically enough, while
Fordism was institutionalized through the public solidarity of New Deal liberalism,
it helped produce a rather privatized geography of social reproduction. As
postwar accumulation was materialized through the construction of vast
sprawling suburban housing tracts, liberal ideas of government intervention
and the social safety net were slowly transfixed into more and more privatist
forms of politics. As many suburban historians have shown (e.g., Davis 1986; Edsall
and Edsall 1991; McKensie 1996; McGirr 2001; Lassitter 2009), the political
victories of the Right in the United States*and with it the neoliberalization of
American capitalism*depended upon the mobilization of a petty-bourgeois
strata of white suburban homeowners increasingly distrustful of government
handouts, high taxes, and the redistribution of wealth. Underlying the suburban
geography of private homeownership was what Evan McKenzie (1996, 19) refers to
as an ‘‘ideology of hostile privatism.’’ The hostility itself emerges from what Edsall
and Edsall (1991, 147) call ‘‘conservative egalitarianism,’’ which posits that
everyone has an equal opportunity to work hard and succeed in life and,
moreover, that life success was itself purely a product of entrepreneurial life
choices. Thus, from this perspective, government programs were seen as
‘‘unfair’’ handouts to individuals who simply had not worked hard enough.
The construction of suburban spatialities of property ownership and
automobility seemed to reinforce the core of capitalist consent that Perry
Anderson (1976, 30) defined as ‘‘a fundamental form of belief by the masses that
they exercise an ultimate self-determination within the existing social order.’’
Again, while this entrepreneurial subjectivity employs neoliberal ideas of
‘‘freedom’’ and ‘‘choice’’ in the realm of reproduction (particularly in terms of
consumption and exchange), the realm of production remains under the despotic
control of capital.
At Cede the Political
The assumed neutrality of tech hides its destructive effect on the communitydestroys political will.
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal), p188-189, http://www.mdpi.com/20711050/1/2/187).
The book, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and
What We Can Do About It, by Nobel Prize winner and former Vice President of the
United States, Al Gore, offers “a convenient way” to introduce my problematic [1].
Gore organizes his treatise on the basis of three grave concerns—phenomena
that are altering our relation to the earth in destructive ways: overpopulation (of
humans), scientific and technological misuses and “side-effects”, and the
misconceptions and outdated ways by which we think about the
climate/environmental crises. Throughout his exposition Gore delineates moral,
political, economic, and technological issues that must be addressed if humankind is
to divert transformations that threaten the current life-systems on the planet.
Gore‟s profound sensitivity toward environmental problems is admirable.
Nevertheless, I do have strongly critical remarks about his exposition that
provide a way into my discussion concerning the development of a basis for
sustainability. These criticisms lead us away from a shallow ecological
orientation, which does not call into question the Weltanschauung at the basis
of our praxes and attitudes, to a hermeneutic ontology that founds a deep ecology
that engages a fundamental questioning of historico-cultural paradigms, which in
this paper is argued to be a necessary moment in the adoption and implementation
of a program of sustainability that can be successful.
Gore unwittingly bases his exposition on unwarranted epistemological
assumptions that comprise an ordering function in the received modern liberal
worldview, which has enjoyed hegemony since the eighteenth-century bourgeois
revolutions. His delineation of the modalities of morality, sociality, politics,
economics, and technology implies that they are separate domains that are then
linked through thought and forged together by cultural relations, which is an
ideology based in the doctrine of atomistic association. Gore does not recognize a
holistic interrelation whereby each of these modalities is already pregnant with the
others, e.g., that some technology or other already implicates political,
economic, social, and moral processes and structures in its very essence/Being.
Gore’s assumed doctrine of functional neutrality, i.e., “it depends on how you
use it”, carries some sense of correctness in that forms of implementation do matter
within the overall cultural context, but the doctrine of technological neutrality
remains dangerously naïve. For example, with his concern for the lack of
community, Gore seems not to recognize that certain forms of technology may
indeed undermine the very possibility of community, and moreover by
exacerbating this undermining in a free market system where people can basically
buy and sell what they want, th e proliferation of such communitydisintegrative technology may destroy the possibility for the political will that
he so cherishes. No such radical and critical reflection enters his discussions. The
major consequence of his assumed modern epistemological atomism (in this case
partitioned forms constitutive of a culture) is that Gore’s evaluation of a need for
cultural change and his proposed solutions to the environmental crisis do not go
deep and far enough, if indeed we are to hold ourselves to the goal of
sustainability. The concept-formation of sustainability is not compatible with an
atomistic epistemology through which problem-solving directives issue forth only
as the shallow implementations of instrumental rationality. My treatment of
automobility as the fundamental obstacle in the way of developing sustainable
forms of life involves a holistic ontological approach that uncovers the way of
Being from which the auto-mobile organization of life is its spatial
concretization. Martin Heidegger’s radical ontological hermeneutics can provide a
clearing that supports the concept formation of sustainability by starting with a
critical investigation into the restructuring matrix of automobility, the spatial
moment of a modern technological way of life that is the anthropogenic source
for global warming, or what we now call climate change.
A2: Utilitarianism/Impact Helper
Sustainability’s a priori to questions of who dies- it’s death of the planet as a
whole- change is inevitable, it’s only a question of whether we do it before we
destroy the planet.
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal), p. 192, http://www.mdpi.com/20711050/1/2/187).
Donald Scherer, in his “The Ethics of Sustainable Resources”, makes very useful
distinctions concerning the sustainability of choice, lifestyle, and resources in the
important task of defining and elaborating the concept of sustainability [11]. Just
what is to be sustained and how it is to be sustained is fundamental to a program of
implementation. But I maintain that Scherer’s undergirding principle, which is
acceptable to many as viable, is flawed. He states, “In all these formulations
sustainability implies that what we do will not constrain others like us from
carrying on as we have.… The same choices, the same lifestyle, the same resources
ought to be available to them as to us [11]”. There seems to be a contradiction
contained here—that we change while not changing. Sustainability requires a major
paradigm shift that does not leave us with the same possibilities of engagements
(social relations, activities, events), entities (objects of material culture), and spatial
organizations (at the basic level, the auto-scape). I will go on to show that the
fundamental basis of the non-sustainable matrix is automobility. And, even in
Al Gore‟s shallow ecology there is the realization that we cannot carry on in the
same way that we have been carrying on, although he shallowly tries to maintain
our fundamental liberal/bourgeois paradigms. If we are going to provide for a
future, we recognize that there will not be a future if the same things that we
enjoy are still available to future generations. It is not merely that we change our
ways so that future generations can enjoy the same choices, lifestyles, and
resources, rather sustainability requires us to change our ways in order to save
the planet so that future generations will be enabled to enjoy other forms, that is,
sustainable, modes of life. In support, many environmentalists have called on us to
minimize consumption, discourage attitudes of consumerism, replace materialistic
goals, and direct our attention to find other—natural, social, and spiritual—
enjoyments. I maintain that such moral principles of parsimony/exhortations for
restraint are a necessary requirement for sustainability. Thus, future generations
will not and can not consume the amount of goods as the average first world citizens
do today. But consuming less still does not alter the huge expenditure of energy
that it takes to fuel automobility.
Furthermore, I maintain that sustainability carries with it a therapeutic dimension
in t he demand for healing degraded environments and sickly life forms, as
well as maintaining the good health of life on earth as well as the earthly ecosystems
that sustain it, which include non-living constituents [12]. The therapeutic
dimension requires a rejection of human chauvinism so that we think about the
good of the earth, and not first and foremost how we can appropriate the earth and
its non-human constituents as instrumentalities for selfish human wants.
Implementation of therapeutics obviously delimits choices a priori and requires
goals of a healthy earth as prerequisite to human health . So, it seems to me
clear that we are in the position of having to say to future earth dwellers: “don‟t do
that which has been done, or don‟t do what we are still doing, but instead, do as
required in order to make progress in developing sustainability”. And this means:
“do not live as we have”. Thus in my concept-formation of sustainability, I see that it
necessarily carries a non-consumer lifestyle model along with a therapeutic
dimension that requires constraining humanity from enjoying the same as we have,
for the good of the earth and thus all life forms, including human life. The
fundamental ineluctable principle is that sustainability requires developing a
new paradigm for human civilization. This sounds dramatic and it is; one need
only see what is happening at this time in the world to recognize that wholesale
change must be advocated and implemented as soon as possible, that is,
immediately. We either do this proactively or we will be forced to do so
reactively with the additional problem of the most grave of geo-political and
natural consequences. Sustainability is not a choice, given the immanent
consequences.
Peak Oil True
Peak oil is real- production decreasing now
Kerr 11 Richard A. Kerr
B.A. Ph.D. in chemical oceanography from the University of Rhode Island “Peak Oil Production
May Already Be Here: Running to stay in place” Science 25 March 2011
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6024/1510.full
There's no debate about the reality of the 6-year-and-counting plateau of nonOPEC production. Output stagnated at about 40 million barrels a day beginning in 2004 after rising from an
earlier plateau in the early 1990s, one induced by a low price for oil. But prices have been anything but low lately.
They have gone from about $35 a barrel early in the past decade to double and
nearly triple that. Normally, higher prices would encourage more production, but
not this time. Since 2004, “there's been a tremendous increase in price, yet this is all we get for it, stable
production,” Kaufmann says. “It's quite stark.” The problem up to this point, all agree, has been increasing difficulties
extracting conventional oil. That's the easiest oil to get at, oil that freely flows out
its own accord or with a minimum of encouragement, such as pumping it out or pushing it out with water.
of a well of
Production of conventional oil from any one well or field typically increases,
peaks, and then goes into decline. Larger producing regions behave the same
way. Production from the United States, once the world's largest oil producer, peaked in 1970 as rising output from
newly discovered fields failed to compensate for declines in old fields. Mexico's production peaked in 2004 as its huge,
aging Cantarell field went into steep decline. North Sea production peaked in 1999, just 28 years after starting up. The
same pattern now seems to be emerging across much of the world. “We believe—and pretty much everybody else
believes—that non-OPEC [conventional] production has plateaued,” says oil analyst Michael Rodgers, a partner with PFC
Energy in Kuala Lumpur. “Arguing that you're going to get continued and sustained growth of conventional oil is a very
hard case to make.” PFC Energy has just done a complete reassessment of the prospects for non-OPEC conventional
production, he says. As in most oil outlooks, a country-by-country or even field-by-field survey of what producers are
planning for the next 5 to 10 years was combined with an educated guess of how much oil remains to be discovered in
each region. That forecast of added production is balanced against how fast production from existing fields is declining.
In the past decade, analysts have realized that rather than the 2% to 3% per
year decline once assumed, production from existing fields is declining 4% to
5% per year. Some believe the depletion is even faster. The balance between
added and declining production, in the PFC Energy assessment, is a plateau,
though the plateau may undulate from year to year. “You bring on a [new] 100,000-barrel-a-day field,” Rodgers says, “and
somewhere else you've lost a 100,000-barrel-a-day field.”
Don’t buy their tech args- won’t be enough to boost production
Kerr 11 Richard A. Kerr
B.A. Ph.D. in chemical oceanography from the University of Rhode Island “Peak Oil Production
May Already Be Here: Running to stay in place” Science 25 March 2011
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6024/1510.full
But what about unconventional oil, the hard-to-get-at oil that's only extractable using the latest in high technology? There's the
oil beneath kilometers of seawater far offshore of the U.S. Gulf Coast, Brazil, and West Africa. It wasn't reachable until
development of the necessary deep-water drilling and production technology. There is also the oil—more like tar—that is so
viscous that steam must be piped underground to thin it before pumping it out. In Alberta, Canada, huge shovels just dig up the
“oil sands” so it can be trucked to oil-extraction plants. And American drillers have lately taken to drilling into rock formations
that would normally only dribble oil and fracturing the rock with high-pressure fluids in order to wrest worthwhile amounts
from the rock. That's how drillers have been “fracking” stingy natural gas formations (Science, 25 June 2010, p. 1624). Such
unconventional oil is out there in abundance, everyone agrees, and more will be produced than in the past. However, some
major oil companies as well as other analysts don't see unconventional oil
boosting non-OPEC production much in the next 20 years. In their most recent annual
energy outlooks to 2030, both ExxonMobil and BP—two of the world's largest independent oil companies—forecast that nonOPEC production will more or less hold its own, no better. “It's quite an accomplishment to keep non-OPEC supply flat level,”
says analyst Kyle Countryman, who as a member of ExxonMobil's energy and economics group in Dallas, Texas, helped put the
outlook together. Adds his colleague, group manager Robert Gardner: “We're
not optimistic we'll see a
significant increase in unconventional liquids.” The problem with unconventional oil is that, by
definition, it is hard to extract. “It's a matter of timing,” Gardner says. “It depends on the pace of technology
development.” And even after the essential technology is developed, unconventional
oil will still be difficult—as well as expensive—to extract, limiting the rate at
which it can be produced. All in all, “technology matters, economics matters, but geology really does matter,”
says oil analyst David Greene of the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. “ Progress
in technology is not fast enough to keep up with depletion” of oil reservoirs. Oil analyst
Richard Nehring of Nehring Associates in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is more optimistic about prospects on oil's frontiers and
how fast some kinds of unconventional oil can be brought online, but he still finds that “non-OPEC will be stable or at the very
best slowly increasing” over the next couple of decades.
A2: Ks
Perm solves- we need to forge political coalitions to deal with unsustainability
Hakes 08 (Hakes, Jay- PhD, MA, Duke University- Assistant to Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus during the Carter
administration, Director of the Governor's Energy Office for Florida Governor (later U. S. Senator) Bob Graham, Administrator
of the highly regarded, nonpartisan Energy Information Administration at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Clinton
administration, and Director for Research and Policy for President's Obama's BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Commission.
“Declaration of Energy Independence : How Freedom from Foreign Oil Can Improve National Security, Our Economy, and the
Environment”)
Forging good energy policy requires accurate information and clear analysis.
But attempts to find better policies are too often derailed by factual
distortions and ideological thinking. Some people take comfort in seeing only
the facts that support their ingrained positions. Similarly, if someone makes statements they
disagree with (e.g., arguments for or against nuclear power), they stop listening, assuming that they will
automatically disagree with everything else. I call this the problem of
ideological blinders to make the point that unquestioned doctrines and
political correctness often block out the ability to accurately grasp the whole
energy picture. Ideological thinking can be lethal to good energy policy. We need to
transcend the narrow visions of the Right and the Left if we want to declare energy independence. People should bring their
own values to the energy debate. How one prioritizes the natural environment, ranks personal freedom versus government
action in pursuit of the common good, or chooses an ideal lifestyle can be a personal preference that is not necessarily
susceptible. to change by a new study on the issue. What I am talking about goes beyond adhering to one’s value system. It
is
the proclivity to shut out useful information—a trait common on a whole
variety of national issues, not just energy. Like many problems of modern
energy, the prevalence of ideological thinking is so enmeshed in our national
consciousness that we rarely look for a better way to do things. On the major
issues of our day, the television talk shows seem required to pick one
commentator from the Left and one from the Right of the political spectrum.
Without any genuine effort to find a common set of facts or disinterested
analysis, such encounters frequently end up as shouting contests. If we do not
confront the problem of ideological blinders, we are unlikely to overcome the
problem of energy dependence.
A2 Pragmatism
The way the automobile shapes our culture necessitates consumption- clean
tech can’t solve.
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal), p. 195 , http://www.mdpi.com/20711050/1/2/187).
Before leaving this section, let us make it clear how automobility is materially
connected to global warming—the burning of the fuels used in the material
culture of the “Industrial Revolution” is precisely responsible for global
warming (climate change). If we could eliminate the hegemony of auto-mobile
spatial patternings we would greatly reduce the need for such fuels. Yet, it does
not follow that if we did not have those fuels we would not be auto-mobile, for
alternative sources of energy also allow for auto-mobility. Even though many
environmentalists, including Gore see merit in alternative sources, and
pragmatically I do too, nevertheless quite crucially there are still spatial
productivities/patternings that are a function of automobility that are
inherently problematic for the goal of sustainability and they need to be
uncovered and discussed [14]. Yet, it is important to treat the problem sociohistorically in order to call into question the worldview, which means to regard the
link to fossil fuels and global warming.
Globalization blinds human to ecological destruction- even in the face of global
warming, we still resist noticing the problem.
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal p. 203-204,
http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/1/2/187).
What calls on humankind to eradicate earthly spatial meanings? The same meanings
that constitute the modern science paradigm of a quantifiable mechanical
universe—progress understood to be the quantifiable increment. The more material
culture, the faster material culture, the highest GNP, the bigger burger, the more TV
shows, the more automobiles sold, the more money made, the most efficient beer
can plant, all constitute progress. Globalization insures that material culture gets
bigger, gets faster, gets richer, gets jazzier, etc. All of this is spatially
constitutive of automobility, its unearthing, its unrooting, its leveling, and our
uprooting follows from the mechanization of motion and its accelerating progress of
quantitatively incremental additions and subtractions. As automata of automobility,
humankind measures the matter in motion of material culture and the more
and the faster of its flow is the progress that blinds humankind to the
destruction of its Being—de-geographication. And even in the face of its
symptom, global warming, one of the famous automata by the name of Al Gore,
stills cannot resist its ideology.
Just recognizing something’s unsustainable isn’t enough- we have to question
the paradigm that brought it in to being.
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal p. 199, http://www.mdpi.com/20711050/1/2/187).
Radical transformations in the socio-historical contents of these basic existential
structures occur through automobility. Automobility entails fundamental
spatiotemporal transformations—spatially expanded zones of operation on the
basis of truncations of time. Landscapes are appropriated on the basis of the
implementation requirements of operating machines with certain
characteristics and spatial requirements, phenomena that are quite disruptive to
natural ecological processes, which are forced to accept these changes, whether
destructive or not. For example, much is naturally changed just by the surfacing
for auto-mobile transport: ground water, water tables in general, ground surface
temperatures, destruction of flora and fauna. But transportation geographies—
roads, parking lots, etc., radically transform the spatial organization of human
life. It does this in a fundamental, overall way, but it is the interpretation of Being, a
worldview that has “paved the way” for these transmogrifications to which we place
our concern. Again, our point is that a viable doctrine of sustainability requires a
deeper analysis than just an exhibiting that these transmogrifications are nonsustainable, for solutions then remain in a paradigm or worldview that itself
must be called into question.
We need to re-interpret Being as a way to create a new paradigm- change is
impossible within the constraints of automobility.
Backhaus 2009, (Gary, teaches philosophy at Morgan State University, served as
program chair and currently serves on the executive committee for the Society for
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. He serves as Administrative Assistant for
the World Phenomenology Institute. He is co-organizer for the annual conferences
at Towson University for the International Association for the Study of
Environment, Space, and Place. “Automobility: Global Warming as
Symptomatology,” Sustainability (journal), p. 205- 206,
http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/1/2/187).
Automobility has not led to a qualitatively better life, unless one believes that
the increase in material consumption at the expense of the environment and
traditional human cultures constitutes quality of life. Our culture maintains that
it has only because it is the fabric of material conditions that seemingly have made
life easier, at least for some. But for sustainable ways of life, material conditions
must be radically altered in a way that dramatically curbs automobility—
leading to a qualitatively better life without the endless consumption made
possible by the spatial flows of automobility. Rethinking spatial flows is
necessary for a sustainable world because automobility is not friendly to nonhuman environments and ecosystems, the atmosphere, and whether we recognize
it or not—its de-geographication destroys human environments. In the long run
it has neither proved to be expedient nor conserving. Automobility constitutes a
non-sustainable mode of spatial organization. To make this claim is not to
renounce automobility. Rather, to implement the paradigm of sustainability
requires that we will have to thoroughly rethink the role of automobility in a
radically re-organized space to which earthly functions other than the non-earthly
machine will be served.
Further discussion of how automobility has affected the various interrelated aspects
of life is the next step in this discussion. But such a step would not issue from a deep
enough reflection without first this Heideggerian turn to look for truth beyond
correctness, to ask about the way of Being that claims humankind, which as a
modern scientistic hubris has exhausted itself in the near destruction of the
earth. And, we have had to uncover the spatiality of enframing, automobility,
and the essence of automobility, de-geographication. Yes global warming is
the obvious manifestation of dangerous environmental problems, but the essence
of automobility is the deep source of a way of Being, a spatial manifestation of the
interpretation of our own Being. So new technologies are not the solution, but
rather they shall continue to be a manifestation of a much deeper destruction
if we remain within the present paradigm. We must give ourselves over to critical
reflection, not to the instrumental rationality of techno-thinking. Sustainability is
nothing less than a new interpretation of our Being, a new way of Being that
can claim humankind if we open ourselves to it.
Instead of adopting a shallow and uncritical understanding of oil we must
critically investigate the historical contexts an power relations that inform
contemporary oil discourse.
Huber 2011 (Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of Geography – Clark
University, “Oil, Life, and the Fetishism of Geopolitics, Capitalism Nature
Socialism, Vol.2 22, No. 3, 32-48, 2011, azp)
Within this framework, where natural resources are envisioned as mere
‘‘things’’ with peculiar capacities, oil fetishism takes on a heightened role. The
danger, of course, lies in explaining violence and war not through an analysis
of power relations and uneven development, but rather, as Klare does, as
natural outcomes of resource scarcity. As Timothy Mitchell (2009, 400) points out,
a geopolitical fixation on the site of extraction represents a ‘‘[failure] to follow
the oil itself.’’ By ‘‘following the oil,’’ he means tracing the webs of relations
and cultural meanings through which oil is imagined as a ‘‘vital’’ and
‘‘strategic’’ resource in the first place. Rather than assuming oil’s centrality to
U.S. capitalism and hegemony, it requires asking deeper questions about how
this centrality was historically and geographically produced. Thus, following
the oil itself requires understanding the natural resource known as oil as not merely
a thing, but a set of social relations. As David Harvey (1974, 265) put it long ago:
‘‘[R]esources’’ can be defined only in relationship to the mode of production which
seeks to make use of them and which simultaneously ‘‘produces’’ them through both
the physical and mental activity of the users. There is, therefore, no such thing as a
resource in abstract or a resource which exists as a ‘‘thing-in-itself.’’ Thus, oil
‘‘in itself’’ cannot explain much of anything. The task is to reveal the historical
contexts and power relations that produce oil as a seemingly powerful thing-initself. As David Harvey goes on to argue, such a perspective on natural resources
requires a dialectical perspective that eschews any notion of independent causality
(e.g., oil causes war). Dialectical thinking seeks not to isolate or fix determinant
causes, but to explicate the indeterminate processes and shifting relationships that
overdetermine any object of inquiry. Such relations and processes are the
content underlying the commonsense appearances of empirical life. Dialectics
reflects a commitment to relational and processual thinking, which refuses to
accept commonplace discourse asserting oil as a self-evident thing with
mystical powers (e.g., Ollman 1976). While dialectics is often discussed purely in
temporal terms* process, permanence, contradiction, and transformation*Henri
Lefebvre (1991, 331) explicitly asserted that ‘‘there is a connection between space
and the dialectic’’ (see also, Sheppard 2008; Jameson 2009, 6670). Any
understanding of material resource geographies requires a spatial analytic
that links producers to consumers and, moreover, the global circulation of
cultural meanings that shape resource use and distribution.
A2: Realism
This thought experiment is a necessary prerequisite to overcoming systematic
error replication inherent to the realist geopolitical imaginary
Brincat, 2k9 (Shannon, U of Queensland, “Reclaiming the Utopian imaginary in
IR theory”, Review of International Studies (2009), 35, 581-609)
However, this should not be taken to mean that realism possesses no barrier to the re-invocation of
utopianism in IR theory. Ironically, it is the idealism that permeates the realist tradition – its
immutability thesis that assumes world politics will be the same thousands of years hence – that
functions as the tangible impediment to utopian theory.94 And on this point Carr and Morgenthau
each provide a powerful supportive role for the preservation of the status quo by contributing to the
perception that the world is unchangeable, either through the constraints imposed by the ‘irresistible
strength’ of existing forces in world politics (Carr) or the defects in ‘human nature’ (Morgenthau).
The litany of realist arguments convey the notion that either state-interests, human nature, or the
systemic reproduction of the world order are immutable features that apocryphally preclude all
emancipatory approaches. In this way, the realist tradition sets very clear bounds around the kinds
of ideas which it deems are reasonable to contemplate.95 Yet such arguments are not diametrically
opposed to utopianism but are reflections of its inversion; they embody an idealism of stasis rather
than progress, and instead of Eutopia, the ‘good place’, they promise Kakotopia, the ‘bad place’, where
war, suffering and inequality are endemic features in a self-perpetuating international system.
Ultimately, what underlies the realist critique of utopianism is the exclamation that ‘ought does not
entail is’.96 Yet the problem with this foundational argument is that while realism may not be able to
deduce an is from an ought, neither can it derive a should not from a can not. And this distinction is
fundamental. For even if we think we cannot change towards betterment, this is not an a priori
ground for concluding that we can never do so. Nor does it parry the normative commitment to
change, the belief that we should do so. Under the dominance of the realist mantra however, IR
theory has become preoccupied with system reproduction – problem-solving theory in Cox’s
parlance97 – rather than the possibilities of social transformation. However, to remain idle against the
inequity within contemporary global conditions because they are deemed to pervade in a ‘realm of
recurrence and repetition’98 merely invites complacency without justification. Such realist attitudes
must be labelled immoral because what they indicate can be given up is ultimately rejected in order
to preserve the existing states system with all its failings. This realist paradigm has become the
accepted knowledge boundary of IR and hence we see even the critical traditions responding to its
agenda within the parameters that realism itself has set. The result has been the rejection of the
utopian imagination within both realist and critical ontologies. The question to be asked however is
why does realism compel us to act and think in ways that are politically apathetic and alienating, in
order to pacify us, to blind our vision to the ‘city on the hill.’ Why does realist IR theory wish for the
wishes of the weak to be weak?99
A2: Inevitability
Inevitability claims deny the will and create a ahistorical politics that become SELFPropelling—this arbitrary moment of rejection is CRUCIAL to reclaiming ethics
and the political
Brincat, 2k9
(Shannon, U of Queensland, “Reclaiming the Utopian imaginary in IR theory”, Review of International
Studies (2009), 35, 581-609)
Mannheim does not, of course, explicitly implicate realism as part of the dominant ideology as his work
was not concerned with the field of IR theory specifically. However, by showing that those forms of
thought that support thestatus quo and which tend to denigrate as ‘utopian’ any ideas that seek to alter
it are ‘ideologies’, the logical inference can be drawn that realism constitutes such an ‘ideology’
within Mannheim’s typology – a position which the arguments of Cox, Ashley and others in the Third
Great Debate support.40 For Mannheim, what is touted as ‘utopian’ is that which is judged so by
those ‘representatives of the given order’ and whether they consider the idea to be unrealisable.41 So
while ideology and utopia are both clearly incongruous with reality, the point to take from Mannheim
is that it is the representatives of the given order who serve the privileged function of determining
what is considered utopian and ipso facto possible or impossible in world politics. We can see part of
this role being assumed subsequently by specific realist and neo-realist theorists in the discipline –
the aptly named ‘doorkeepers’ to borrow from Blieker42 – who alone determine what approaches
are to be labelled as utopian in the pejorative sense, to be thus excluded from the agenda of IR
‘proper’. Mannheim clearly warned us of the dangers of the dominance of ideologies. For him, such
domination would mean the complete disappearance of all ‘reality transcending doctrines’ from
political study and ultimately lead to a ‘matter-offactness’, a ‘decay of the human will’ and a ‘static
state of affairs’. The paradox would result that while humanity would have achieved a high degree of
‘rational mastery’ in the world, it would be left without any ideals or the will to ‘shape history’.43
Nevertheless, Mannheim held out hope for the capacity of humanity to become aware of ‘the
necessity of wilfully choosing our course’ and emphasised the need for ‘an imperative (a utopia) to
drive us onward.’ For him, it is only when we know what our ‘interests’ are and make a transition
towards them, that we are in a position to inquire into ‘the possibilities of the present situation, and
thus to gain our first insight into history’.44
A2: Oil Shocks/Oil DA
Oil shocks are periods of anxiety and questioning – breaks in oil flow serve as
critical nodes of resistance against the project of petro-capitalism. Exposing
the fragility of automobility makes the regime vulnerable to disruption, and to
the reconfiguration of what we conceive of as “possible” in the domain of
mobility.
Böhm et al 2006 (Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Chris Land, Mat Paterson,
Steffen Böhm is Professor in Management and Sustainability at the University
of Essex, The Sociological Review, Vol. 54, Issue supplement s1, pp 1-16,
October 2006, “Part One Conceptualizing Automobility: Introduction:
Impossibilities of automobility,” azp)
In our view, reforming automobility is not enough. In order radically to
change the way automobility works today, it is not sufficient to expose the
particular antagonisms of the regime and make it once again, temporarily,
‘possible’ by introducing new techniques of government. Instead, what is
needed is a broadening awareness of the fragility of the entire regime of
automobility. When in the year 2000 protests against high fuel prices brought most
of the UK almost to a standstill, this fragility of the regime was made clear by a
relatively small number of people within a few days: as almost the entirety of
social life of the developed world depends on the steady flow of oil, a break of
this flow has radical consequences for the normal maintenance of the regime of
automobility. Such breaks in the normal flows of automobility, even if they
intended to achieve the opposite, expose the fragility of the regime. It is an act of
subversion that has the potential to put into question the entire ‘goings-on’ of
automobility. Such acts do not only aim to engage with a particular antagonism of
automobility but to redefine the grounds on which automobility can be thought.
Such acts are therefore radically unaccountable; one can never fully foresee
their consequences. In our view, this is the task of today: radically to put into
question the universality of automobility and engender a space that imagines
not only different automobilities that cannot yet be foreseen, but also a social
form which recognizes the necessity of disentangling its twin conceptual bases
– to delink autonomy from mobility and to put both in context. In this sense, we
are proposing interventions that quite literally propose to reconfigure the very
co-ordinates of what is perceived as ‘possible’. Faced with an antagonistic and
impossible regime of automobility, we hope that the essays collected in this
volume contribute to the recognition of that impossibility and to the collective
possibility of moving beyond it.
A2 Micro Politics Fails
The automobility regime is the result of the coalescence of many discursive
variable—even small acts of resistance can ‘provoke a shift’ to a new paradigm.
Urry 2004, (John, Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, “The 'System' of
Automobility,” Theory, Culture & Society, Oct 1, 2004, p. 27,
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/21/4-5/25.full.pdf+html).
This system of automobility stemmed from the path-dependent pattern laid
down from the end of the 19th century. Once economies and societies were
‘locked in’ to what I conceptualize as the steel-and-petroleum car, then huge
increasing returns resulted for those producing and selling the car and its
associated infrastructure, products and services (see Arthur, 1994, on increasing
returns). Social life more generally was irreversibly locked in to the mode of
mobility that automobility generates and presupposes. This mode of mobility is
neither socially necessary nor inevitable but has seemed impossible to break
from (but see below). From relatively small causes an irreversible pattern was
laid down and this ensured the preconditions for automobility’s selfexpansion over the past astonishing century, surely, if we want to give it a name,
the ‘century of the car’.
I now examine automobility’s exceptional power to remake time-space, especially
because of its peculiar combination of flexibility and coercion. It is this remaking
that has ensured the preconditions for its own selfexpansion.
But I consider in the following section some small changes that might tip the car
system into a different direction, changes that through their dynamic
interdependence could provoke a shift beyond automobility, beyond the steeland-petroleum car, towards a new system of mobility. I term this potentially
emergent system the ‘post-car’. I employ the language of path-dependence,
increasing returns, emergence and tipping points to examine these complex system
changes.1
A2: T-active transportation
We are T
Rails to Trails, 08
Rails to Trails Conservatory: Active Transportation for America.
http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/documents/whatwedo/atfa/ATFA_20081020.pdf. 2008. DA- 07/03/2012.
In this era of traffic congestion, high gas prices, climate change, an obesity epidemic, and fiscal constraints,
federal transportation funding has reached a critical crossroads. Decades of
car-centered transportation policies have dead-ended in chronic congestion,
crippling gas bills, and a highly inefficient transportation system that offers
only one answer to most of our mobility needs—the car. Investment now in a
more diverse transportation system—one that provides viable choices to walk
and bike, and use public transportation in addition to driving—will lead to a
far more efficient use of transportation resources. Active transportation is the
missing piece in our transportation system.
A2 Russia Impacts
The construction of Russia as a threat cannot be separated from its historical
position as a projection of national anxiety
Jæger 2k (Øyvind, PEACE AND CONFLICT STUDIES, 7-2) MAH The Russian war on Chechnya is one event that was widely
interpreted in the Baltic as a ominous sign of what Russia has in store for the Baltic states (see Rebas 1996: 27; Nekrasas 1996:
58; Tarand 1996: 24; cf. Haab 1997).
of association with post-Soviet political structures is
indicative of a threat perception that confuses Soviet and post-Soviet, conflating Russia with
the USSR and casting everything Russian as a threat through what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
(1985) call a discursive "chain of equivalence". In this the value of one side in a binary
opposition is reiterated in other denotations of the same binary opposition. Thus, the value
"Russia" in a Russia/Europe-opposition is also denoted by "instability", "Asia", "invasion",
"chaos", "incitement of ethnic minorities", "unpredictability", "imperialism", "slander
campaign", "migration", and so forth. The opposite value of these markers ("stability", "Europe", "defence",
"order", and so on) would then denote the Self and thus conjure up an identity. When identity is precarious, this
discursive practice intensifies by shifting onto a security mode, treating the oppositions as if
they were questions of political existence, sovereignty, and survival. Identity is
(re)produced more effectively when the oppositions are employed in a discourse of in
security and danger, that is, made into questions of national security and thus securitised in
the Wæverian sense. In the Baltic cases, especially the Lithuanian National Security
Concept is knitting a chain of equivalence in a ferocious discourse of danger. Not only does
it establish "[t]hat the defence of Lithuania is total and unconditional," and that "[s]hould
there be no higher command, self-controlled combat actions of armed units and citizens
shall be considered legal." (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 1, 2) It also posits that [t]he
power of civic resistance is constituted of the Nation’s Will and self-determination to fight
for own freedom, of everyone citizen’s resolution to resist to [an] assailant or invader by all
possible ways, despite citizen’s age and [or] profession, of taking part in Lithuania’s defence (National Security
Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 4). When this is added to the identifying of the objects of national
security as "human and citizen rights, fundamental freedoms and personal security; state
The constitutional ban in all three states on any kind
sovereignty; rights of the nation, prerequisites for a free development; the state independence; the constitutional order; state
territory and its integrity, and; cultural heritage," and the subjects as "the state, the armed forces and other institutions
thereof; the citizens and their associations, and; non governmental organisations,"(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 2,
Sc. 1, 2) one approaches
a conception of security in which the distinction between state and
nation has disappeared in all-encompassing securitisation. Everyone is expected to defend
everything with every possible means. And when the list of identified threats to national
security that follows range from "overt (military) aggression", via "personal insecurity", to
"ignoring of national values,"(National Security Concept,Lithuania, Ch. 10) the National Security
Concept of Lithuania has become a totalising one taking everything to be a question of
national security. The chain of equivalence is established when the very introduction of
the National Security Conceptis devoted to a denotation of Lithuania’s century-old
sameness to "Europe" and resistance to "occupation and subjugation" (see quotation below),
whereby Russia is depicted and installed as the first link in the discursive chain that follows.
In much the same way the "enemy within" came about in Estonia and Latvia. As the independence-memory was ritualised and
added to the sense of insecurity – already fed by confusion in state administration, legislation and government policy
grappling not only with what to do but also how to do it given the inexperience of state institutions or their absence – unity
behind the overarching objective of independence receded for partial politics and the construction of the enemy within. This is
what David Campbell (1992) points
out when he sees the practices of security as being about
securing a precarious state identity. One way of going about it is to cast elements on the state inside resisting the
privileged identity as the subversive errand boys of the prime external enemy.
A2 Marx/Capitalism
Capitalism is a mere derivative of a more fundamental will to technology—aff is a prerequisite
Joronen, 2k10
(Mikko, Dept of Geography and Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, U of Turku, The Age of Planetary Space: On
Heidegger, Being, and Metaphysics of Globalization, pg 217)
As Michel Haar and Hubert Dreyfus have pointed out, it was Heidegger’s wrestling with Nietzsche that sharpened his understanding
about the power of machination not being a mere objectification of beings through a subject-centred power of command, but above
all flexibly growing ordering and self-strengthening circulation (Dreyfus 2000; Haar 2000; Heidegger 1973e:95). In particular,
Heidegger’s recovery of Nietzsche’s ‘unthought’, the prerequisite ‘will to will’ under Nietzsche’s notions of ‘will to power’ and ‘the
eternal recurrence of the same’, pave the way for an understanding about the circular functioning of planetary-wide systems of
orderings. As a ‘will to will’ machination signifies a circular, self-strengthening, and heightening power
emerging as a planetary-wide
expansion. These self-strengthening and heightening characters then
reveal the operative intelligibility of machination to circularly increase and expand its orderings ;
that is, the machination of the will that wills more of its own power and thus dynamically returns into its own preserved domain of
control and ordering. Altogether, machination names a self-overcoming force, a drive that knows no limits: it organizes things for the
sake of more organizing, produces accumulation for the sake of itself, and calculates efficiency for the sake of more efficient
handling of things. This self-overcoming power of machination, however, does not just signify a mere
ambition towards greater order, but equally an increasing drive to consume all things, from
nature to culture, as useable products (on this in more details see Castree 2003; Dickens 2001; Domosh 2009, Roberts
2008; Robertson 2000). For Heidegger, then, it is not the “rampant subjectivism”, from which Žižek
charges Heidegger for not blaming the logic of capitalism (Brockelman 2008a:26, 43–44), but the
function of the omnipotent power of machination (empowering ad infinitum its own power) that conditions
the rise of the contemporary global capitalism, the ‘will to profit’ one may say. The selfstrengthening and self-overcoming circulation of the ordering power of machination signifies an
onto-historical framework implicitly indicated by the endlessly heightening drive towards the
spatial expansion and accumulation of the capital. The rise of the contemporary global
capitalism, the drive towards total capture of things as a planetary-wide reserve for the expanding operations of capital, is
nothing but a herald of total representation of the earth as orderable globe set ready for the
operations of circularly strengthening power and the ‘gigantic’ calculability.
Focus on capitalism tradesoff with a focus on Being—only the aff challenges technology
Joronen, 2k10
(Mikko, Dept of Geography and Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, U of Turku, The Age of Planetary Space: On
Heidegger, Being, and Metaphysics of Globalization, pg 217)
As it has become evident, the rise of the planetary domain of ordering over the earth works as a fundamental point of separation here.
Even though it holds true, as Peter Sloterdijk writes, that “the fundamental fact of modernity is not that the earth orbits the sun, but
rather that money circumnavigates the earth” (2009:33), in Heideggerean reading such “new Copernican turn” should be understood
as an outgrowth of the emergence of the coercive and flexible systems of orderings operative in terms of the power of machination.
In Heideggerean reading the historical process of globalization and thus global capitalism are
the determined and grounded property, not the determining ground. From such a stance, the refusal of
the grounding dimension of machination – the total unfolding that grounds the age of planetary
space – would be an uncritical affirmation of the worst kind: oblivion of the fundamental
condition of possibility underneath the globalization of capital. Although this oblivion would
equally hide the systemic-ontological violence underpinning its own constitution, this is not to
undervalue the significance of ontic tragedies and violence in favour of ontological ones, but to
pinpoint the potential for a radical resistance free of manipulative and violent power of
machination and its concrete consequences.
Critical theory is necessary to account for the virtualization of production in the age of globalization—materialism alone fails
Kroker, 2k3
(Arthur, canada research chair in technology, culture and theory at U of victoria, "the will to technology and the culture of nihilism:
heidegger, nietzsche and marx"cynical data, streamed capitalism and hyper-nihilism )
Marx's theory of the commodity-form finally released from its staging area in political economy, projects itself into the future as the
trace of virtuality present in speed capitalism. When Marx's Capital is upgraded by digitality, the commodity-
form finally accelerates beyond the laws of the old economy, throws off the nostalgia surrounding
class relations determined by the socialization of production, and goes over to the consumption of virtuality. In
uneasy terms, the commodity-form lets us know that it was never all that invested in the material
outcomes of the process of capitalist production, that it never really wanted to come out of the cycle of circulation,
that capital never rested easy with its specific historical representations in the myth of production.
Emancipated by the termination of the link between Marxist theory and the now debunked state
project of official socialism, Marx is emancipated to be understood for what he always was: the
preparatory theorist of virtual capital. Read Capital, then, not as a now historically superceded theory of industrial
capitalism, but as a profoundly insightful vision of the disappearance of capital itself into virtuality.
Today, just because the theory of "dead labor" has been replaced by the irreality of "dead capital," Marx can triumphantly
return as the first and best of the digital futurists. What Heidegger describes as the culture of "completed
metaphysics," and what Nietzsche laments as the "will to power," Marx patiently deconstructs. The theorist par excellence of the
legacy codes of capitalism, Marx's critical vision first grasps the axiomatic of virtual capitalism: the disappearance of the circulating
commodity into the pure speed of circulation; the transformation of labor from a "factor of production" to the production of 'factored
labor;' the ascendancy of the 'knowledge' theory of value; the rise of the virtual class as the historical objectification of "value
valorizing itself;" and the relentless disciplining of capital by the will to technicity. In Marx's vision of the dynamic
transformation of capitalism from a theatre of representation to virtuality, the new capitalist
axiomatic stands revealed as the mirror of velocity. A metaphysician most of all, Marx wrote
about the technology of harvesting laboring bodies, when the alienation of labor was already in the process of being
replaced by the virtual labor of alienation, where the capitalist axiomatic refused its necessary connection to the logic of accumulation,
going over to the virtual side of radical disaccumulation. When Heidegger rehearsed in his writings the contemporary fate of
subjectivity as "being held out into the void," he might well have been reflecting on the metaphysics of contemporary capitalism.
Stripped of its illusions about the necessity of capitalist accumulation, turning its back on the stolid model of production, substituting
the digitalization of dead knowledge for living labor, Marx's Capital is the essential nihilist. Held out into the
void, simultaneously its own goal and the guarantee of its own stability, Capital is "weakened in
its ground." It has no necessary aim since its only necessity is to be aimless. It has no essential
ground because its destiny is to instrumentalize the question of essence, to mutate materialism
itself into a process of increasingly virtual means. It can never really be secure about being the guarantee of its own
stability because as a process of instrumental means, its only guarantee of survival is to continuously destabilize itself. Consequently,
the fate of Capital is to turn on itself, to transform the once-hoarded contents of capital
accumulation into the excremental representations of the disappearance of capital. Sick of itself,
Capital wants to be rid of itself. It has become weary of the referential weight of products. It
desperately desires to be post-human, to liberate itself from the regime of the signs of capitalist accumulation in favor of
capitalism as a regime of virtualites. It wants to escape the weight of time, to illuminate its future with the lightness of virtual
exchange. Growing increasingly resentful, Capital turns inward. It is meditative in its desolation. It turns darkly. It
turns viciously. It is the animal of economic cruelty. It drifts. It eats. It incorporates. It vomits. It calls its spew advertisements. Here, it
dresses up properly to be put on stage-managed displays as a model of economic productivity for the commercially agnostic. There, it
falls sideways and upward and often even downward into its own emptiness. It is the quintessential expression of
Heidegger's concept of the "emptiness that bores". Capital is the dominant historical expression of
contemporary nihilism.
Capitalism is merely a derivative of the will to technology—aff is a prerequisite
Kroker, 2k3
(Arthur, canada research chair in technology, culture and theory at U of victoria, "the will to technology and the culture of nihilism:
heidegger, nietzsche and marx"cynical data, streamed capitalism and hyper-nihilism )
Heidegger is necessary to the project of overcoming Marx, incorporating Marx's historically
specific analysis of the commodity-form of capitalist production into a virtual analysis of the
productive mode of the digital commodity-form. Perhaps it has always been this way. Maybe in the ironic game of
thought the lasting contribution of Heidegger was always to be this: to be present at the stage of completed nihilism in order to
disclose Marx's Capital for what it was. Not simply a theorisation of capitalism as a definite form of political
economy, but of something much more ominous: capitalism as the essence of nihilism. In this sense,
Heidegger is the truth-sayer of Marx as sorcerer-priest. In the same way that Heidegger would often repeat that
technology cannot be understood technologically, so too Capital is not understandable exclusively
within the terms of political economy , but only as the latest expression of a much more mythic
drive in the human condition. Call it what you will, the "geist" of history, the drive to the "homogenous unitary state," the
"acquisitive" will, or perhaps the "will to technology ," capital is always a derivative historical form. It is
metaphysics masquerading as political economy. Capital is the metaphysics of the not-will, a will to
exhumation masking itself in the alibi of production. Consequently, Marx can draw out so vividly the speed of
circulation at the center of hyper-capitalism because Marx's thought is itself the essence of technological consciousness. Here, Marx's
thought analyzes the historical laws of movement of the commodity-form with such relentlessness, hovers around the "mystery" of
commodity-fetishism with such intensity, can be so spellbound by the speed of the cycle of circulation that Marx himself becomes the
leading prognosticator of hyper-capitalism. A prophet without a determinate country, a futurist of the past, a
theorist of political economy with such creative intensity that the 'object' of political economy the dialectical materialism underlying the system of capitalism - dissolves before his analysis,
revealing only the absent, indifferent movements of late capitalism which, having disappeared into
the cycle of circulation, refuses all production in favor of virtuality. Ironically, while Marx possessed full
critical consciousness of the material history of capitalism, he was necessarily forgetful of his own intellectual
legacy as the first and best prophet of the transformation of capitalism into technicity. That is, of
course, the Heidegger in Marx: that point where the capitalist axiomatic transcends the limitations of political
economy, finally making its appearance as the material history of completed nihilism.
The emphasis on the material aspects of history reproduces onto-theology—only remaining open to the mystery challenges the
technological enframing which is a prerequisite for the proper functioning of Capital
Joronen, 2k10
(Mikko, Dept of Geography and Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, U of Turku, The
Heidegger, Being, and Metaphysics of Globalization, pg 139-140)
Age of Planetary Space: On
Accordingly, although
for Heidegger the unfolding of being always takes place against the
necessary concealment of open be-ing, neither such original concealment nor its metaphysical
oblivion denote a false consciousness covering up the deeper structure of truth, such as the
unconscious libido or capitalist mode of production. As MacAvoy (2001), Gadamer (1984), and Palmer (1984)
have convincingly argued, Heidegger’s thinking does not follow what they call the “hermeneutics of
suspicion”-thesis posited, for instance, by thinkers such as Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Even though
Ereignis consists of uncovering the unnecessary oblivion of the necessary concealment, thus
fundamentally remembering and opening the structures and ontological limits disclosed by our
dwelling in the everyday practices and understanding (originally afforded by the happening of clearing we are
thrown into), such recovery only remembers what is fundamentally our own (See also Dreyfus 1984, 1991). In
short, the Andenken of Heidegger does not uncover the deeper truth covered by the psychologically or
ideologically motivated false consciousness, but reveals, interprets, and hence grasps on what is our own, that
is, what we already ontologically are. Being is thus a finite happening of ontological grounding
manifested and implicated in ontic realities of everyday dwelling, not a metaphysical structure masked by
(ideologically or psychologically) false consciousness. As Gadamer writes (1984:58), one can not at the same time follow the
intentions of the authors and suspiciously reveal the pretensions working against their intentions – it is either the “as-
structure” of inherent ontological implications or the “false-structure” covering up
metaphysically moulded autonomic structures of existence. As Taminiaux adds (1998:192–194), it is
precisely the thinking of what is ownmost to us that distinguishes being-historical thinking from
the onto-theological ones of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche: when the victory of limitless growth of
productive forces, for instance, seems to delight Marx, no more secrets are left to the innermost of
the unfolding of things, the openness of be-ing thus being replaced and covered by the perfect
intelligence and complete onto-theological measure of the metaphysical limits of unfolding.
However, at the same time such onto-theology of Marx (i.e. the ontology of work and the theology of productive
forces cast upon nature) does not present any form of false consciousness, which we can replace with
more proper ones. Marx rather correctly presented what is essential for the technological
metaphysics: its logic of self-intensifying enframing. What thus makes Marx interesting
remains implicit in his description of the logic of Capital; but what makes Marx a mere pawn in
the historical course of being is the constitutive oblivion of be-ing and its happening as
ontological difference. Although it is be-ing that remains unattainable for all metaphysical thinking, it is the same being,
which has let itself to be forgotten and withdrawn through the metaphysical guises it has donated. Accordingly, for Heidegger a
correct metaphysical expression of the nature of our age is not enough; one rather needs to question how such expressions rise out the
hermeneutic situation of our own finite epoch, of our own mode of oblivion of being and its difference through the limits of Gestell.
Only this way are the secret of inexhaustible abyss and plenitude of be-ing and the surprising
‘coming-over’ of the unfolding-gathering of things preserved in their innermost openness.
Perm solves best--The plan’s particular demand is critical to catalyze the
universal claim made by the negative
Zizek, (Slavoj, “A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 4)
1998
Let us begin with the question, What is politics proper?1 It is a phenomenon that appeared for the first time in
ancient Greece when the members of the demos (those with no firmly determined place in the
hierarchical social edifice) presented themselves as the representatives, the stand-ins, for the
whole of society, for the true universality ("we--the 'nothing,' not counted in the order--are the people, we are all, against others
who stand only for their particular privilieged interest"). Political conflict proper thus involves the tension
between the structured social body, where each part has its place, and the part of no-part, which
unsettles this order on account of the empty principle of universality, of the principled equality of all
men qua speaking beings, what Étienne Balibar calls égaliberté.2 Politics proper thus always involves a kind of
short circuit between the universal and the particular; it involves the paradox of a singular
that appears as a stand-in for the universal, destabilizing the "natural" functional order of
relation in the social body. The singulier universal is a group that, although without any
fixed place in the social ediface (or, at best, occupying a subordinated place), not only demands to be heard on equal
footing with the ruling oligarchy or aristocracy (that power) but, even more, presents itself as the immediate
embodiment of society as such, in its universality, against the particular power interests of
aristocracy or oligarchy. This identification of the nonpart with the whole, of the part of society with
no properly defined place (or which resists its allocated subordinated place) with the universal, is the elementary
gesture of politicization, discernable in all great democratic events, from the French Revolution (in which the Third Estate
proclaimed itself identical to the nation as such against the aristocracy and clergy) to the demise of European socialism, in which groups
such as the Czech Civic Forum proclaimed themselves representative of the entire society against the party nomenklatura.
The political struggle proper is therefore never simply a rational debate between multiple interests but, simultaneously, the struggle for
one's voice to be heard and recognized as that of a legitimate partner. When
the excluded, from the Greek demos to Polish
workers, protested against the ruling elite (the aristocracy or nomenklatura), the true stakes were not
only their explicit demands (for higher wages, better working conditions, and so forth) but their very right to
be heard and recognized as an equal participant in the debate. In Poland, the nomenklatura) lost the moment it had to accept
Solidarity as an equal partner. In this precise sense, politics and democracy are synonymous: the basic aim of
antidemocratic politics always and by definition is and was depoliticization, that is, the unconditional demand that
things should return to the normal, with each individual doing his or her particular job. Jaques Rancière, of course,
emphasizes how the line of seperation between what he calls policing (in the broad sense of maintaining social order, the smooth
running of the social machine) and politics proper is always blurred and contested. In the Marxist tradition, for instance, proletariat can
be read as the subjectivization of the part of no-part that elevates its injustice into the ultimate test of universality and, simultaneously, as
the operator that will bring about the establishment of a postpolitical, rational society.
A2 Positivism/F/W
Reliance on positivism produces an academia devoid of ethics and sustains
militarism and patriarchy
Soreanu, 2k10 (Raluca, New York University and University College London,
“Metaphor in the Social Sciences: Creative Methodologies and Some Elements for
and Epistemological Reconstruction”, Sociologia, issue 1, Online)
But positivism is more than an idea: it is a regime of resonance with objects,
emerging from a historical alliance produced in the twentieth century between the
state, the military, and seventeenth century ideas of logical positivist continental
philosophers of science. This regime of resonance has had such longevity12 in the
social sciences precisely because it emerged from such strong "elective affinities"
(Wobbe, 1996; Klein, 1971; Steinmetz, 2005a, 2005b; Mirowski, 2005), Thus, the
current form of domination of positivism in the social sciences is intimately linked
with a political story in the US and with a particular institutional regime in the
organisation of science. As Philip Mirowski (2005) shows, the Operations Research
(OR) profession emerged in the Second World War as a practical response to the
problems of the military planning and organisation of science. Through the institution
of OR, scientists were co-opted for assisting the state in the generation of rational
strategies and tactics for battle; this resulted in applying abstract models of physics
on abstract agglomerations of war machines (Mirowski, 2005), What emerged from
here was a concept of a free-floating academic community , distinguished by its
possession of expertise rooted in the generic scientific method, and having a
considerable degree of autonomy. Thus, we see how a regime in the organisation of
sciences, with specific forms of funding and management, and marked particularly
by the domination of the military, was implicated in stabilising a vision of pure
science practiced by a scientist who observes and makes iterations while neatly
delineated and secured from the incursions of the actual research object. According to
Mirowski (2005) the Operations Research framework created the conditions for
scientists to stabilise a "delicate amalgam of engagement and aloofness" which
stands at the root of an autarkic model of the scientific community. Thus, positivism
is a regime of resonance with objects which emerged in a time of war, and while
seeking an efficient organisation of the war machine .13 There is a deep layer of
emotionality underlying this historical alliance, in which ideas and institutions become
resonant with each other, to produce further ideas and institutions. In order to
become entangled and sustain such amalgamations of resources, people must "feel"
the same, they must have important communalities in their dispositions towards
objects. Also, the longevity of this complex historical alliance and of the
amalgamations of resources It presupposes only work to further stabilise and confirm
some very particular emotional modalities as the "viable" ones. To follow Jaggar, we
can say that "in our present social context, the myth of dispassionate investigation is
a classist, racist, and especially masculinist myth " (Jaggar, 1998; 395). Under the
guise of detachment and value neutrality, we uncover precisely emotions, which are
mostly characteristic to men in certain historical periods (i.e. middleclass White men in
modern or late modern times), and which come to constitute modern epistemology.
Feminist theorists have reflected on such emotions, such as separation anxiety and
paranoia (Flax, 1983; Fox Keller, 1985; Bordo, 1987), or an obsession with control
and fear of contamination (Schott, 1988). Research objects are therefore not loved,
but inspected from afar, as if on a screen, so as to confirm the illusion of autonomy
of the observer Ultimately, positivism signals a profound problem with boundaries,
individuality, and the generation of personal meaning; it lacks a modality of
integrating in a mature way both separation and connection, both sameness and
difference. Positivism as emotional modality is anchored in a stylistics, as well. I
argue that positivist iterations employ metonymic forms; nothing is ever treated as a
whole; a whole will be negated, segmented, and replaced by its parts,14 Such
preference for metonymy among metaphors is wrapped up in an anti-rhetorical rhetoric;
positivist stories claim to be the fruit of some facticity, of the world as it is, and thus
they claim to be beyond the realm of persuasion . Positivist stylistics is most often
committed to "genre thickening1' which means "tightly coded descriptions" and
"semiotic denseness" [Brown, 1990; 57). This comes with a tendency to repeat what
we know already, and to submit to strict protocols of organising what we know. The
genre's rules of representation are thus never challenged, but always confirmed. It is
deeply concerning that in our times important publication outlets in sociology become
almost exclusive sites of genre thickening ; it is the case of the Americon Journal of
Sociology, where the ethics of coverage (i.e. proving the capacity to map out an entire
knowledge domain] and where the conformity to a tight sequence in the organisation of knowledge (i.e.from theory, to
methodology, tofindings)actually work to stifle both meaning and social critique. The creative alternative to genre thickening is "genre
stretching" (Brown, 1990). Here, we allow ourselves to rely on the polysemic properties of language, so as to put a domain (social, not
only linguistic) in a state of emergence. We purposefully collapse the imperatives of representation only to allow new meaning to
coagulate. To embrace genre thickening and metonymy as our main stylistic devices in the organisation of our knowledges is to
become invested in sustaining the impoverishing positivist emotionality and the positivist regime of resonance, which is the child of
times of war and calculated destruction. That positivism comes as a regime of resonance, with an associated emotional modality, and
just as fields of
knowledge have an emotional organisation, so do universities, departments, research
groups, or institutes. They too can become engrenages of people, objects, and resources
implicated in confirming and re-confirming the Name of the Father, in obstructing
with a stylistics, is only to alert us that it can and does arrive at powerful IOCQI manifestations*
rather than cultivating the circulation of knowledge (especially in intergenerational
relationships] as an expression of a deep fear that meaning might proliferate fluidly
and uncontrollably. Localities mobilised in sustaining positivist regimes of resonance
display Oedipal emotional configurations of rivalry; or Achillean configurations of
humiliation, where the scene in which men humiliate other men in hierarchically inferior
positions is central, and it also becomes a way of "rehearsing" acts which enable the
regime of domination over women.