Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Foucault
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LinkWar ......................................................................................................................................................................6
LinkHegemony ...........................................................................................................................................................7
LinkRealism ................................................................................................................................................................8
LinkCirculation ............................................................................................................................................................9
LinkCirculation ..........................................................................................................................................................10
LinkTransportation Infrastructure..............................................................................................................................11
LinkPublic Transportation .........................................................................................................................................12
LinkTraffic Safety ......................................................................................................................................................13
LinkHighways ...........................................................................................................................................................14
LinkTerrain ...............................................................................................................................................................15
LinkArctic Territory....................................................................................................................................................16
LinkArctic Territory....................................................................................................................................................17
LinkArctic War ..........................................................................................................................................................18
LinkTerrorism ...........................................................................................................................................................19
LinkTerrorism ...........................................................................................................................................................20
LinkEnvironmental Managerialism............................................................................................................................21
LinkEnvironmental Managerialism............................................................................................................................22
LinkEnvironmental Managerialism............................................................................................................................23
LinkEnvironmental Crises .........................................................................................................................................24
LinkEnvironmental Globalism/THE STATE ..............................................................................................................25
LinkTransportation Investment .................................................................................................................................26
LinkGas Tax .............................................................................................................................................................27
LinkEconomy ............................................................................................................................................................28
ImpactCapitalism ......................................................................................................................................................29
ImpactSecurity ..........................................................................................................................................................30
ImpactGovernmentality.............................................................................................................................................31
ImpactNormalization .................................................................................................................................................32
ImpactNormalization .................................................................................................................................................33
ImpactFreedom ........................................................................................................................................................34
Eco ImpactEnvironmental Destruction .....................................................................................................................35
AltMicropolitics..........................................................................................................................................................36
AltMicropolitics..........................................................................................................................................................37
AltMicropolitics..........................................................................................................................................................38
AltResistance ...........................................................................................................................................................39
AltCare of the Self ....................................................................................................................................................40
AltRefuse Distinctions...............................................................................................................................................41
AltRefuse Distinctions...............................................................................................................................................42
AltTerritory ................................................................................................................................................................43
AltEnvironment .........................................................................................................................................................44
AltEnvironment .........................................................................................................................................................45
AltPublic Ecology ......................................................................................................................................................46
AT: Perm ......................................................................................................................................................................47
AT: Perm ......................................................................................................................................................................48
AT: PermEnvironment specific .................................................................................................................................49
AT: Action/Reform Good ..............................................................................................................................................50
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Foucault
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Mobility is a disciplinary technique designed to normalize and re-code bodies to maximize
their integration in productive economies. The aff makes bodies docile within discursive
regimes of biopolitics.
Reid 8 Julian Reid, Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Foucault on
Politics, Security and War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2008, p. 68-70
The chapter of Discipline and Punish titled Docile Bodies carefully records the emergence of these techniques with attention to their specifically military remit. It was through the
technique of enclosure that men came to be assembled under one roof in the form of the barracks. This technique of enclosure
advent
of these new disciplinary techniques in the military sciences was, as Discipline and Punish shows, much concerned with the reordering of relations between bodies and space. Yet they were also as interested in the disciplining of relations
between time and bodily activity, or what Foucault called the temporal elaboration of the act (p. 151). He documents how modern military organisation was
predicated upon the creation of meticulously detailed programmes according to which the correct use of the body would be specified in order to allow for a correct use of time (p.
152). For example, between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century, ordinances developed to refine the movements across space and time of marching soldiers. While in the
seventeenth century marching was only vaguely regulated to assure conformity, by the eighteenth century ordinances specified distinctions between four different sorts of marching
step; the short step, the ordinary step, the double step and the marching step, each differentiated according to duration, extension and comportment (p. 151). As
disciplinary
power was concerned with the correct use of time so it was also concerned with what Foucault called the
instrumental coding of the body through the creation of a body-machine complex (p. 153). Foucault considered that traditional
forms of subjection involved only the extraction of the product of labour, the exploitation of bodies for their surpluses. Disciplinary
power, on the other hand, is about more than that. Its aim is to assure and regulate the correct procedure by which the body
carries out its labour as an end in itself. In this vein, Foucault focused again on innovations occurring in the domain of military organisation centrally on the
specifications made in the same late eighteenth-century military ordinances as to how to fire a weapon, which were meticulous in their detailing of how body and weapon interact (p.
153). All of these
new innovations, reflecting what Foucault identified as a new positive economy of time through which modern societies
changes that were occurring in the domain of
war. The mid-eighteenth century successes of Prussia enabled by the military systems of Frederick II were the harbinger of most of these developments (p. 154). Through the
development of these techniques with which to organise for and conduct war emerged a new object for the
organisation of power relations. That new object was as Foucault described, the natural body, the bearer of forces and the
seat of duration; it is the body susceptible to specified operations, which have their order, their stages, their internal
conditions, their constituent elements (p. 155).
attempted to intensify their use of time with increased speeds and increased efficiencies, resulted he argued from
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The dark side of power over life is the ability to put entire populations to death in the name
of the greater good
Foucault 78 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 1978, p.
136-137
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. " Deduction"
has tended to be no
longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor,
optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them,
rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a
tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is
now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they
have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their
own populations. But this formidable power of death -and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so
greatly expanded its limits -now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that
endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the
name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire
populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have
become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to
wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has
caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that
terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end
point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an
individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become
the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at
stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a
recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the
large-scale phenomena of population.
Julia H. Chryssostalis, lecturer at the Westminster school of law, The Critical Instance After The Critique of the
Subject, Law and Critique 16, 2005, pg. 16-21
So far, we have looked at some of the ways in which the question of the question is being re-situated in a philosophical terrain that has been radically _re-marked by the critical
discourses associated with the deconstruction of subjectivity in French contemporary thought. However, the critical instance involves not only questioning but also judgment as one of
its basic tropes. How? To begin with, judgment is found intimately implicated in the semantic economy of the critical: critique, criticism, criterion, critic; they all derive from krisis, the
Greek word for judgment; yet, in addition, and more importantly, the very operation of the critical instance seems dominated by judgmental figures, grammars and logics.78 After all, is
not the figure of the Tribunal of Reason at the centre of Kants critical project?79 And is not the
seem always to rely on the basic _logic of judgement: namely, the operation through which the particular is
subsumed (and thus also thought and known) under the rule of an already constituted category?86
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What is interesting to note about these judgemental grammars and logics organising the operation of the critical instance,87 is that the subjective forms they deploy involve two wellknown _types of the figure of the judge. On the one hand, there is the _judge as a sovereign figure whose
of the question of the limit, the limit as a question, is to be found in Foucaults two essays, _What Is Critique? 90 and _What is Enlightenment?91 Without going into the detail of the
argument developed there, I want to focus at a point in the Enlightenment essay, which I think is crucial. This is a point where, to begin with, Foucault affirms that _[c]riticism
indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits, thus seemingly locating himself within the basic parameters of the Kantian formulation of the
critical. Then, though, he continues: But if the Kantian question was that of knowing [savoir] what limits knowledge [connaissance] must renounce exceeding, it seems to me
that the critical question today must be turned back into a positive one: In what is given to us as universal, necessary,
obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? The
point in brief is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that
takes the form of a possible crossing over [franchissment].92 In other words, Foucaults re-working of the critical involves a
notion of the limit not as necessary limitation, as in the Kantian critical project, but as a point of _a possible crossing
over. For posing the question of the limits of our knowledge, or _showing the limits of the constitution of objectivity,93 involves also a
dimension of opening up, of transformation and becoming. As such the type of _work done at the limits of ourselves must, according to Foucault, _on
the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry, and on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality,
both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change
should take.94 In other words, the critical instance rethought in terms of the limit as question does not merely involve a negative moment of transgression. For at the
point of this work on the limits (of ourselves), the ethico-political promise/possibility of transformation opens up
which is also why, at this point, the critical instance, for Foucault, becomes intimately linked with virtue.95 Let us now turn to
the last gesture involved in the re-thinking of the critical: namely, the displacement of judgemental logics and the emergence of an ethics of encounter that is to say, an encounter with
the question of the limit. Let us move with caution, though. To begin with,
it is important to understand that one does not drive to the limits for a
thrill experience, or because limits are dangerous and sexy, or because it brings us into tintillating proximity with evil. One asks about the limits
of knowing because one has already run up against a crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives. The
categories by which social life is ordered produce a certain incoherence or entire realm of unspeakability. And it is
from this condition, the tear in the fabric of our epistemological field, that the practice of critique emerges, with the
awareness that no discourse is adequate here or that our reigning discourses have produced an impasse.96 Which is to say
that the critical instance, as the exposure of the _limits of the constitution of objectivity, also involves the experience of the dislocation of our sedimented positivities, in other words, the
experience of crisis. Such a
recognition is important here because it reinscribes crisis, which is actually another meaning of the Greek word krisis, into
is thus re-connected with the notion of negativity negativity in the ontological sense. This negativity, as Stavrakakis notes,
has both a disruptive dimension that _refers to the horizon of impossibility and unrepresentability, which punctuates the life of
linguistic creatures,97 and at the same time a productive one: _[b]y inscribing a lack in our dislocated positivities, it
fuels the desire for new social and political constructions.98 As such, this negativity is _neither an object nor its
negation: it is the condition of possibility/ impossibility of objects,99 of objectivity more generally, indeed of all
transformative action.100 And it is precisely here that an ethics of the encounter with the limit is located in that such an encounter is a moment, which ought to be
acknowledged rather than covered over by quickly _patching the cracks of our universe. It is a moment which should not be foreclosed or assimilated: For at stake in this
encounter with the limit, _is a matter of showing how the space of the possible is larger than the one we are assigned
that something else is possible, but not that everything is possible.101 And it is precisely here, at the moment when the site of the pre-thetic
the critical, which
and the pre-judicative is glimpsed, that the thrust and the promise of a _re-marked critical instance is to be found.
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LinkWar
Threats of nuclear war are used to justify militarization
Grondin 2004 ((Re)Writing the National Security State: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold War David
Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies Association Convention, March 1720, 2004, Montreal)
Much of the Cold War state apparatus and military infrastructure remained in place to meet the challenges and
threats of the post-Cold War era. If the attack on Pearl Harbor was the driving force of the postwar national security state apparatus (Stuart, 2003:
303), the 9/11 events have been used as a motive for resurrecting the national security discourse as a justification
against a new infamy, global terrorism.19 Although in this study I am calling into question the political practices that legitimized the very idea of a
national security state during the Cold War era, I find even more problematic the reproduction of a similar logic in the post-9/11 era
a rather different historical and socio-political context. As Simon Dalby highlights, Coupling fears of Soviet ambitions, of a
repeat of Pearl Harbor, and of nuclear war, these institutions formed the heart of a semipermanent military
mobilization to support the policies of containment militarism. If this context is no longer applicable, the case that the national security
state is not an appropriate mode for social organization in the future is in many ways compelling. If security is premised on violence, as securitydilemma and national-security literatures suggest (albeit often reluctantly), perhaps the necessity of rethinking global
politics requires abandoning the term and the conceptual strictures that go with it (Dalby, 1997: 21).
Invocations of a dangerous other threatening the stability of the West place discursive
control in the hands of a national security complex fixated on continual war
Grondin 2004 ((Re)Writing the National Security State: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold War David
Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies Association Convention, March 1720, 2004, Montreal)
The Cold War national security culture represented in realist discourses was constitutive of the American national
security state. There was certainly a conflation of theory and policy in the Cold War military-intellectual complex, which were observers of, and active
participants in, defining the meaning of the Cold War. They contributed to portray the enemy that both reflected and fueled
predominant ideological strains within the American body politic. As scholarly partners in the national security state, they were
instrumental in defining and disseminating a Cold War culture (Rubin, 2001: 15). This national security culture was a complex space
where various representations and representatives of the national security state compete to draw the boundaries and
dominate the murkier margins of international relations (Der Derian, 1992: 41). The same Cold War security culture has
been maintained by political practice (on the part of realist analysts and political leaders) through realist discourses in
the post-9/11 era and once again reproduces the idea of a national security state. This (implicit) state identification is neither
accidental nor inconsequential. From a poststructuralist vantage point, the identification process of the state and the nation is always a
negative process for it is achieved by exclusion, violence, and marginalization. Thus, a deconstruction of practices that constitute
and consolidate state identity is necessary: the writing of the state must be revealed through the analysis of the discourses that constitute it. The state and
the discourses that (re)constitute it thus frame its very identity and impose a fictitious national unity on society; it is
from this fictive and arbitrary creation of the modernist dichotomous discourses of inside/outside that the discourses
(re)constructing the state emerge. It is in the creation of a Self and an Other in which the state uses it monopolistic
power of legitimate violence a power socially constructed, following Max Webers work on the ethic of responsibility
to construct a threatening Other differentiated from the unified Self, the national society (the nation).16 It is through this
very practice of normative statecraft,17 which produces threatening Others, that the international sphere comes into being. David Campbell adds that it is by
constantly articulating danger through foreign policy that the states very conditions of existence are generated18.
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LinkHegemony
US hegemony establishes a global liberal order engaged in constant warthe world is
translated into a universal domestic realm in which continual American intervention is
necessitated
Louiza Odysseos, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex, Liberalisms War,
Liberalisms Order: Rethinking the Global Liberal Order as a Global Civil War paper prepared for Liberal
Internationalism, 17 March 2008, San Francisco
This echoes official voices of the new normalcy or the new normal, pronounced by Vice President Cheney the day
before the USA PATRIOT Act passed into law in October 2001: Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in
American life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy (Cheney
2001).9 The
new normalcy, encompassing as it does the biopolitical operations of the state of exception, and which
involves the defence of logistical societies (Reid 2006), points to a disruption of the relationship posited by Schmitt
between the rule and the exception, allowing Agamben to speak of its becoming the dominant paradigm of
government in contemporary politics (Agamben 2005: 2). When the state of exception becomes the (political) rule, we discern it more clearly as a space devoid of
law, in which the law is replaced by civil war and revolutionary violence, that is human action that has shed [deposto] every relation to law (ibid.: 59). 10 Since the state of exception
has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment, we
are faced with the advent of a global civil war in which the normative aspect
of the law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that while ignoring
international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally nevertheless still claims to be
applying the law (ibid.: 87) The emphasis placed on the fictitious (or willed) state of exception and on the analogy to Nazism, alongside the exposition of Benjamins call to
bring about a real state of exception with which to fight Fascism (1999: 248), might suggest that we are faced with a post-modern totalitarianism, which
normalises the state of exception and leads us to a global civil war. Yet this term refers, for Agamben, not so much to actual fighting or a specific
instance of conflict but, importantly, to a form of world ordering, pursued by (or which is) the global liberal order. The global liberal order, then, maybe be
preliminarily formally indicated as a war-order. As he explains in an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: By the rapid reduction of global politics to
the antitheses of state/terrorism, what once seemed a paradoxical and peripheral term has today become real and effective. By strategically linking the two
paradigms of the state of emergency and the civil war, the new American world order defines itself as a situation in
which the state of emergency [exception] can no longer be distinguished from the norm, and in which even
differentiating between war and peace - and between external and civil war - is impossible (Agamben 2003; brackets added).
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LinkRealism
Realist discourse keeps the US operating on Cold War logic, securitizes against the other
and prevents any alternative forms of thought from achieving legitimacy.
Grondin 2004 ((Re)Writing the National Security State: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold War David
Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies Association Convention, March 1720, 2004, Montreal)
As American historian of U.S. foreign relations Michael Hogan observes in his study on the rise of the national security state during the Truman administration,
the
national security ideology framed the Cold War discourse in a system of symbolic representation that defined
Americas national identity by reference to the un-American other, usually the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or some other totalitarian
power The very notion of state security as it is used in this literature is concerned with the relationship between state
and society where the state provides insurance against the impact of external contingencies (Mabee, 2003: 143). However,
as Bryan Mabee rightfully notes, this research area overlaps with the idea of the national security state, as conceptualized in the literature on the history of US
security policy, with particular reference to the early Cold War years, and the founding of the National Security Act in 1947 (Mabee, 2003: 148, note 15). In
addition, a feminist literature on
national security studies has emphasized how states, and not only the American state, act
as security states. For example, for Iris Marion Young, security states designate Hobbes Leviathan; they are authoritarian governments
acting as protector states asking total obedience from their society. The state grounds its patriarchal role of the
masculine protector in fear of threat and in the apparent desire for protection such fear generates (Young, 2003: 2). In light
of these different literatures, when using the concept of national security state, it is necessary to specify the context and the meaning with which it is associated.
Such a binary system made it difficult for any domestic dissent from U.S. policy to emerge it would have amounted
to an act of disloyalty (Hogan, 1998: 18).15 While Hogan distinguishes advocates from critics of the American national security state, his view takes for
granted that there is a given and fixed American political culture that differs from the new national security ideology. It posits an American way, produced by its
cultural, political, and historical experience. Although he stresses that differences between the two sides of the discourse are superficial, pertaining solely to the
means, rather than the ends of the national security state, Hogan sees the national security state as a finished and legitimate state:
an American state suited to the Cold War context of permanent war, while stopping short of a garrison state: Although
government would grow larger, taxes would go up, and budget deficits would become a matter of routine, none of these and other transformations would add up
to the crushing regime symbolized in the metaphor of the garrison state. The outcome instead would be an American national security state that was shaped as
much by the countrys democratic political culture as it was by the perceived military imperatives of the Cold War (Hogan, 1998: 22). I disagree with this
essentialist view of the state identity of the United States. The United States does not need to be a national security state. If it was
and is still constructed as such by many realist discourses, it is because these discourses serve some political
purpose. Moreover, in keeping with my poststructuralist inclinations, I maintain that identity need not be, and indeed never is, fixed. In a scheme in which to
say is to do, that is, from a perspective that accepts the performativity of language, culture becomes a relational site where identity politics happens rather than
being a substantive phenomenon. In this sense, culture is not simply a social context framing foreign policy decision-making. Culture is a signifying part of the
conditions of possibility for social being, [] the way in which culturalist arguments themselves secure the identity of subjects in whose name they speak
(Campbell, 1998: 221).
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Foucault
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LinkCirculation
Mobility infrastructure paradoxically imposes freedom of movement on the populace to
support security apparatuses
Didier Bigo, Professor of International Relations at Sciences-Po, Paris, Security: A Field Left Fallow, trans. J.E.
Dillon, Foucault on Politics, Security and War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New
York, 2008, p. 107-108
As we have seen, a major argument for Foucault is that a dispositif of security cannot exist without a regime of liberties, and in
particular without freedom of circulation. Security pre-supposes that one analyses mobilities, networks and margins instead
of the frontier and the isolation that goes with demarcation. Security is thus a dispositif of circulation within a life
environment and not a dispositif of disciplining bodies. A security dispositif does not isolate, it is built as a network. It does not
close off the social area but interweaves its aspects. It does not operate so as to watch and maintain surveillance, it lets things happen (as a
form of laissez-faire). Specialists on European institutions have to question themselves about this dimension where freedom of circulation produces a normality, a
security which destabilises disciplinary closures and sovereign logics, and thus creates unease about the lack of certainty (Apap, 2001; Gangster et al., 1997;
Huysmans, 2004a; Kelstrup and Williams, 2000). They are often unaware of the Foucaultian approach and its idea of centrifugal dynamic, and see the
phenomenon through the lenses of a spillover, but much research concerning the frontiers of Europe can profit from Foucaults lectures. What is often not
accepted is the effect this line of thought has on freedom. The
security is extended by displacing frontiers, pushing back controls on others, externalising discipline so as to maintain securitisation only in the name of the liberty
of the majority (Bigo and Guild, 2005; Valluy, 2005).
Production of greater and more efficient population movement justified through the
backdrop of images of terror is a strategy of population management
Diken and Laustsen 3 Blent Diken, lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, and Carsten Bagge Laustsen,
Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen, Zones of indistinction : security, terror and bare life, Territories,
Islands, camps and other states of utopia, 2003, p. 42-51, http://www.languageandcapitalism.info/wpcontent/uploads/2006/08/wot.pdf
Modern sovereignty does not only work according to the disciplinary logic of exclusion. Disciplinary confinement, and thus
exclusion and normalization constitute only one of the three spatial principles embodied in the camp. The camp is also a space of control
organized according to a science of flows, manifesting a biopolitical paradigm la Foucault. Control does not demand the
delimitation of movement but rather abstraction and speed. Significantly, the Nazi regime used the human instinct for
survival to make the Jews carry out their own destruction. The Nazi sought to destroy the Jews step by step, making
them opt for the least evil option each time, which paved the way for the greatest evil. In the camp, there was no
space for rest, reflection and comfort: work, finding something to eat and survival were parts of a daily battle, which
meant that the prisoners were in permanent movement. What interrupted their controlled flow was terror. In contrast to
discipline and control, which operate, respectively, in terms of enclosure and flow, terror functions against the background of fear related to
uncertainty, insecurity and unsafety. The prisoner could be hit, at any time, by the guards anger, the greatest terror
being the showers. Terror immobilizes through fear. It is thus disciplinary without the spatial confinement of
discipline and the functional regularity of flows. Let us now investigate these three paradigms discipline, control, and terror focusing on how
the attempts at escaping from one form of power sediment other, more advanced forms of power.
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LinkCirculation
Mobile subjectivity requires discipline and regulation from the state in the form of
increasingly effective transportation infrastructure to ensure that speed does not exceed
mechanisms of social control
Jeremy Packer, Assistant Professor of Communications at Penn State-University Park, Foucault, Cultural Studies,
and Governmentality, 2003, p. 139-140
Paul Virilios thesis in Speed and Politics (1986) is that the power of the State is primarily that of the police: the management of the public ways. He follows this
with a combative assertion on thinking about knowledge. Virilio states in his study, the related logic of knowing-power, or power-knowledge, is eliminated to the
benefit of moving-powerin other words the study of tendencies, of flows (p. 47). An examination of this statement will make it apparent that although Virilio
does provide impetus to think about the importance of mobility and its control, his dismissal of the relationship between power and knowledge not only weakens
his claims but forces his hand regarding notions of power and freedom. Foucault, according to Virilio, is the thinker of confinement and disciplinarity.
Power/knowledge according to Foucault describes the co-constitutive capacities of knowledge and power to produce apparatusses of control, regulation, and
production. The important insight that power/knowledge provides is that discourses such as science, medicine, or psychology, through
their monopoly on truth claims, exert the power to determine the relative face of reality. For instance, Foucault in Madness and
Civilization (1965) explains how, through the creation of the descriptive category of madness, a whole series of material effects were carried out upon those
deemed mad by medicine and psychology Knowledge
then is not simply descriptive, but productive. It produces, among other things,
normative categories, prescriptions for proper conduct, and relations of power: for instance the relationship of doctor-patient or
highway patrolman-driver. Virilio, by dismissing the power/knowledge thesis, demonstrates that his understanding of power is in line with traditional Marxism in
which power is wielded by the State and is exerted upon an unsuspecting proletariat, with negative effects.3 His discussion of freedom begins to reveal his notion
of the negative effects that the power of speed has, namely the loss of freedom. Freedom for Virilio is something innate to individuals rather than the product and
necessity of certain forms of government. Furthermore, speed is a correlate of freedom within conceptions of mobility: more speed is said to equal greater
freedom. In Foucault and Political Reason (1996), Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose critique this understanding of freedom and its relation to a
top-down conception of power. The following quote sums this up: Freedom is neither an ideological fiction of modern societies nor an existential feature of
existence within them; it must be
understood also and necessarily as a formula of rule. Foucaults concern here might be characterized as an
has become, in our socalled free societies, a resource for, and not merely a hindrance to, government. (p. 8) If we are to take Foucaults notion seriously we need not
simply look for instances in which something, in this instance speed, leads to a loss of freedom, but instead reveal the types of freedom produced
by speed, the types of regulations placed on speed and its purposes, and the necessity of freedom as a constitutive
element of the very notion of speed. Speed after all is always relative; it is measured against what is considered the
normative rate. Freedom and mobility, one of its material corollaries, must be understood then in their specificity and in their
necessity to current forms of governing, State and otherwise. This demands a recognition that as the potential for mobility is
increased, the subject of governing must change in accordance. A more free or at least more mobile citizen
becomes necessary to partake actively in a differently striated space. Thus the goal of governing is not to simply guard against
too much freedom, but to produce the type of freedom that accords with the expansive demands of culture and economy .
attempt to link the analysis of the constitution of freedom with that of the exercise of rule; that is, with the extent to which freedom
Governing at a distance across striated space takes the place of direct control. A proper deployment of power requires enabling and activating men and things
(Foucault 1991, p. 93) in a manner that allows them to and in fact demands that they move outside of confined and continuously surveyed arenas. It also means
striating space in such a fashion that rule can still be exercised. Depending upon what perspective drives ones analysis, one could view the directly surveyed
subject as far less dangerous to the State than the mobile subject, and thus more free, in that once it is surveyed, its perceived ability to do harm to the state is
minimal and thus not taken as seriously. Mobile
subjects, on the other hand, must be highly disciplined, because they are not under
continual surveillance, are not always within the immediate scope of state interaction, and are depended upon to
execute the goals of State and non-State institutions when the State per se is not present to do so. Thus, to be mobile
is to be free to govern oneself, across a vast territory, but it is always in accordance with governing in so far as it coincides with convenient ends (p.
93).
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LinkTransportation Infrastructure
Transportation infrastructure is designed to maximize the extraction of labor from the
populace and identify and quarantine social deviants and unproductive workers
Elden 8 Stuart Elden, Strategies for Waging Peace: Foucault as Collaborateur, Foucault on Politics, Security and
War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2008, p. 28-30
In sum, over a million francs was projected for this work, worth about 773,000 euros today, 13 enough to support a fairly large team for a few years. 14 Various outputs came from this
work, culminating in the book Les quipements du pouvoir which was originally published as a special issue of the journal Recherches in 1973, and then reissued in 1976. 15
Recherches was the house journal of CERFI, and although all the projects clearly influenced the work, this is very much based on Fourquets research project. 16 The
equipments of power analysed in this book are the three items in the subtitle: towns, territories and collective equipments quipements
collectifs. By these Fourquet and Murard mean something akin to public amenities or the infrastructure of society. These are tools or utensils that are utilised
collectively roads, transportation and communication networks, and the more static apparatus of towns. Circulation necessarily plays a
crucial role, with the flux and flow of people, goods and capital as money (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 35). For Fourquet and Murard,
these elements of infrastructure are means of production, or perhaps more accurately the means by which production can
be achieved (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 32). The town is in their terms a collective equipment, and the network [rseau] of
towns distribute capital across the whole of the national territory (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 35). Foucault himself takes place in two dialogues
in the book, after the outlining of various ideas by Fourquet and Murard. 17 In the English translation of the dialogues the order is reversed, and the accompanying material left aside.
This makes for a peculiarly decontextualised discussion. Fourquet and Murard note that the three key terms that they are interested in thinking through are power, territory and
production, particularly in their interrelation (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 7). The stress on power and territory within a broadly Marxist analysis allows for a displacement rather than
a revision or critique (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 8). This context is supplemented by an interest in Deleuze and Guattaris work Anti-Oedipus, and earlier texts which the authors
received while working on this, and an interest in Foucaults work on madness and the clinic (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 10). The original title of the work, Gnalogie des
quipements collectives (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 9) perhaps betrays this Foucaultian influence a Foucault then engaging with Nietzsches ideas in detail. Indeed in the
extended introduction, Fourquet and Murard acknowledge Deleuze and Foucaults readings of Nietzsche, as well as the pioneering work of Bataille and Klossowski (Fourquet and
Murard, 1976: p. 17). All sorts of Foucaultian themes are found in this work the use of the panopticon, relations of power and knowledge, surveillance, control of population and
normalisation of individuals and so on. The dating of the material to the early 1970s shows that this relation was not solely a one-way influence. Murard and Fourquet utilise Foucaults
research on madness, medicine and other issues, but the bulk of the material predates Discipline and Punish, although there is some editing between the 1973 journal article and the
1976 book. Some of Foucaults ideas about the division of space in schools and the control of childrens bodies and medical plans for towns are discussed in this work (see Fourquet
and Murard, 1976: pp. 1978, 210). A range of other contemporary thinkers are utilised, including those of a more obviously Marxist perspective such as Lefebvre (Fourquet and
Murard, 1976: pp. 556) and Castells. The ideas of normalisation are explicitly related to Canguilhem, just as Foucault does in his Les Anormaux lectures (Fourquet and Murard, 1976:
p. 155, see 7). But the other key role is played by Fernand Braudel, who is mentioned in a number of places (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 7, 10). The book is organised on the
following plan: La ville-ordinateur the town-machine La ville-mtaphore the town-metaphor Les territoires territories Formation des quipements collectives formation of
collective equipments or facilities Le discours du plan the discourse of the plan conomie politique sans famille political economy without the family. In the second dialogue
Foucault takes the example of a road, and suggests that it plays three strategic functions: to produce production, to
produce demand, and to normalise. While the first two are unsurprising from a Marxist perspective, the third is perhaps most interesting. Production
requires transport, the movement of goods and labour, and the levies or tithes of state power and tax collector. The
bandit is an antithetical person in these relations. Demand requires the market, merchandise, buyers and sellers, it creates a whole
system of coded places of business, regulates prices and goods sold. The inspector, controller or customs agent face-to-face with the smuggler
of contraband, the peddler (Foucault, 1996: p. 106; Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 21516). Both production and demand are the subject of the
procedure of normalisation, in the adjusting and regulation of these two domains. Foucault talks about the amnagement du territoire, the control and planning of the
land or territory of the state that the road allows. The role of engineers is important both as a product of normalising power their education and authentic knowledge and as its
privileged agent. In
opposition to them are those who do not fit the allowed circuits the vagabond or the sedentary: in both
cases, abnormal (Foucault, 1996: p. 216; Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 107). Foucault stresses that this is merely one example of the kind of collective equipment that
Fourquet and Murard are analysing. He suggests that the chronology of the industrial and the disciplinary state we should note that it is of the state, not society, that he is speaking
do not match up, although they are correlatives. Education produces producers, it produces those who demand and at the same time, it normalises, classes, divides, imposes rules and
indicates the limit of the pathological (Foucault, 1996: p. 107; Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 21718). Deleuze
(Foucault, 1996: p. 108; Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 21820). Murard and Fourquet give their own examples, of hospitals that act as means of production in terms of producing the
healthy workforce required by capital.
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LinkPublic Transportation
Efficient public transportation fulfills the biopolitical necessity of increasing population
movement and labor extraction while regulating movement and social interactions
Jeremy Packer, Assistant Professor of Communications at Penn State-University Park, Foucault, Cultural Studies,
and Governmentality, 2003, p. 145-46
The first technique of docility dealt with by Foucault is the art of distributions, mentioned earlier in the discussion of the naval hospital. It entails the distribution
of individuals in space provided through the enclosure of populations, the partitioning of individuals within that space,
the creation of specialized spaces in which only singular activities took place, and the rank of arrangements through
which individuals move. This last point is particularly important in that individuals are never given a fixed location, but rather their
purposefulness is dependent upon the relative location that they occupy at any given moment. This allows for
mobility, yet only in a very predetermined fashion. For instance, there are very particular places in which one can operate motor vehicles: primarily the road
system, with some ever-decreasing number of off-road areas. The roads themselves only connect certain places, and the quickest routes
generally only connect places of political and economic importance. Furthermore, only certain types of vehicles and modes of transportation are
allowable in these spaces. The second technique is the control of activity, which primarily depends upon the allocation of time and the efficient connection of actor and tools, through
the use of time-tables, the standardization of time allowed for actions, the partitioning of actions, and exhaustive use of time. The control of activities on the road can in a simple way be
understood as the rules of the road: one-way streets, stop signs, turn signal use, speed limits, and so forth. In
the Highway Commission is constantly under pressure to produce more proficient drivers through the use of traffic engineering. Whether automobiles or other forms of public
transportation are involved, the often divergent goals of personal mobility and population mobilization frequently derail any plans to satisfy both desires with one system as Bruno Latour
(1996) notes. The last technique described by Foucault is the
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LinkTraffic Safety
Purging transportation of its attendant dangers is a tool to solidify social control through
the ordering of mobility
Jeremy Packer, Assistant Professor of Communications at Penn State-University Park, Foucault, Cultural Studies,
and Governmentality, 2003, p. 135-136
In his Governmentality lecture, Michel Foucault (1991) pinpoints Guillaume de La Perriers statement in Mirror Politique, one of the first anti-Machiavellian
treatises on government, government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end (Foucault, 1991, p. 93), as the demarcator of
the shift from sovereignty to governmentality. According to de La Perrier, and Foucault by extension, ruling was no longer consumed by the task of simply
retaining sovereignty. Rather, it became the responsibility of rulers to employ tactics that would benefit the population as well
as the State. In place of the goal simply to maintain territory and loyalty, men and territory were seen as a means to an ends, assuming
they were properly disposed. According to Foucault, the metaphor often used to illustrate this point, in the governing manuals of the eighteenth century, was the
governance of a ship (p. 93). This metaphor speaks to a concern with not only the men on the ship and the potential gain produced by successful shipping, but,
importantly, the avoidance of catastrophes that could befall such an enterprise. It is the choice of this metaphor that I want to elucidate in this essay. It bears
further elaboration because it points out the importance of mobility in the formation of thought concerning governing. In an increasingly mobile world,
governing mobility consumes greater and greater amounts of mental and physical resources. A vast literature explains the
structural organization, political and economic advantages, and general importance of transportation and communication systems that crisscross the globe. But
personal mobility is
achieved through the brute materiality of cars, trucks, buses, trains, motorcycles, and airplanes. This form of mobility
plays a vital role in how individuals organize, rationalize, and inhabit their world. It is at this intersection of
governance and governed (increasingly self-governed) in the realm of the microphysics of power, that the following analysis
of the politics of mobility is located. Quite literally, individuals are the vehicles of power (Foucault 1980, p. 98). Personal mobility must therefore be seen as an act of power. An examination of the net like-organisation (p. 98) that binds individual aims and governmental
more specifically, the disposition of these resources takes place not only on a global or national scale. In contemporary America,
primarily
aims can illuminate the important ways that our individual mobile conduct is implicated in, guided by, and resistant to seemingly detached political, economic, and
cultural trends. The relative importance ascribed to Foucaults work is often based on his analysis of large-scale processes such as power, discourse, or, more
recently, government. The critical orientation that such generalities provide for current and friture intellectual enterprises is certainly important. However, it needs
to remain clear that the specificity of Foucaults research was often the microphysics of power and close discursive investigation of key texts that oriented thought
at critical moments. Furthermore, thinking about mobility, like thinking about incarceration or madness, demands detours into discursive territory that is not
necessarily obvious at first. In the case of this essay the
notion of safety has oriented my road map for investigating how personal mobility is
linked to governing. As the ship metaphor makes explicit, an important part of governing in general and mobility specifically is
the avoidance of catastrophe. It is this avoidancebeing safethat comes to construct thought and ultimately selfreflection about mobility. As Foucault explains, in order for something to be governed, or imagined as governable, it needs to be problematized (1990b).
This is to say that an activity to be governed needs to be thought of in terms of a problem to be overcome. In this regard,
mobility, like communication (Mattelart, 1996, p. xvi), has historically been seen as an economic, cultural, and political good, but it has been
problematized according to the dangers that it posed. The idea of safety serves then as the solution and provides a
normative orientation for mobility. Once this orientation solidifies, as I will argue it has, it disperses into a vast array of
normative contexts, thereby legitimating forms of governance and self-governance that have little relation to any specific
problematization.
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LinkHighways
Highway expansion fortifies class divisions within populations by stratifying social
privileges through the criteria of automobility
Campbell 5 ,David The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3, Legal Borderlands: Law
and the Construction of American Borders (Sep., 2005), pp. 943- JSTOR BSH
Although constructed as a means to achieve the unification of social life, the
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LinkTerrain
Identifying zones of land as sites for sovereign struggle and competition converts land into
militaristic terrainthis supports and extends the violence essential to modern statecraft
Stuart Elden, Durham University, Land, terrain, territory, Progress in Human Geography 34 (6), 2010, p. 799-817
The conflict over land indicated by Anderson is significant. Property is important as an indicator, but conflict over land is twofold: both over its possession and conducted on its terrain.
Land is both the site and stake of struggle. In this it differs from conflict over other resources. Strategic-military reasons thus become significant. As well as
seeking to maximize the possession of land as a scarce resource, feudal lords and nascent states were also concerned with security, management and administration. Defensible
borders, homogeneity and the promotion of territorial cohesion offer a range of examples examples that straddle the
strategic issues and link closely to the development of a range of techniques of state practice. France, for example, following the
Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, began a process of mapping and surveying its land, employing technical specialists both to map and to reinforce its so-called natural frontiers. A
related term to that of land is therefore terrain. This is land that has a strategic, political, military sense. The English territory, the
French territoire and related terms in other languages derive from quite a specific sense of the Latin territorium. Territorium is an extremely rare term in classical Latin that becomes
common in the Middle Ages. The standard definition is the land belonging to a town or another entity such as a religious order. It is used, for instance, by Cicero (1858: volume IV, 522)
for the agricultural lands of a colony, and in phrases such as that describing the birthplace of the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical history. Bede (Colgrave and Mynors, 1969: v, 24)
is described as being born in territorio eiusdem monasterii, in lands belonging to the monastery. This monastery was Jarrow in northeast England. In Alfred the Greats Anglo-Saxon
translation, Bede was born on sundorlonde of the monastery, outlying lands, lands sundered from the estate itself, but under its possession, and thus it has been claimed that this is
the basis for the name of the town Sunderland, although it is not clear that it was this sundorlonde (Brown, 1855: 277, 280; Colgrave, 1969: xix). As a number of writers have discussed,
the etymology of territorium is disputed, with the meaning of the place around a town supplemented by that of a place from which people are warned or frightened (see, for example,
Connolly, 1995; Neocleous, 2003; Hindess, 2006). The Latin terrere is to frighten, deriving from the Greek trein meaning to flee from fear, to be afraid, and the Sanskrit, trasati, meaning
he trembles, is afraid. This means that the term territory has an association with fear and violence, an association that is more compelling in history than etymology. As argued
elsewhere, creating
a bounded space is already a violent act of exclusion and inclusion; maintaining it as such requires
constant vigilance and the mobilization of threat; and challenging it necessarily entails a transgression (Elden, 2009: xxx).
Terrain is of course a term used by physical geographers and geologists. Yet all too often the term terrain is used in a very vague sense. Evans (1998: 119), for instance, notes that to
some of us, terrain analysis means, especially, quantitative analysis of terrain, thus seeing a greater need to qualify the mode, rather than object, of analysis. Terrain is seen as land
form, rather than process (Lane et al., 1998; see also Lawrence et al., 1993; Wilson and Gallant, 2000). It is also a term used by military strategists. Yet there is a relation as well as a
separation, with knowledge of battlefield terrain essential to military success. There are a number of important studies of different military campaigns and the question of terrain, but little
conceptual precision (see, for example, Parry, 1984; Winters, 1998; Rose and Nathanail, 2000; Doyle and Bennett, 2002a).10 For Doyle and Bennett (2002b: 1), terrain encompasses
both the physical aspects of earths surface, as well as the human interaction with them. At times terrain seems to be landscape devoid of life, as it is when targeting of cities is
discussed without reference to those living within it, or it is reduced from a concrete materiality to a level of virtuality. Max Webers analysis of the historical development of the state,
and Michael Manns study of the changing dynamics of power (Mann, 1986; 1993), where they do discuss territory, could be seen to be operating in a way that sees territory as terrain,
a political-strategic relation. In his interview with the geographers of the H erodote journal, Foucault deflects their inquiry about his use of spatial categories, suggesting that they are
not primarily geographical, but instead shot through with power. As he declares, territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but its first of all a juridico-political one: the area controlled
by a certain kind of power (Foucault, 2007: 176). As his interviewers respond, certain spatial metaphors are equally geographical and strategic, which is only natural since geography
grew up in the shadow of the military (p. 177). They make the explicit linkage between the region of geographers and the commanded region, fromregere; the conquered territory of a
province, from vincere; and the field as battlefield. Foucault then notes how the
possession of the entire planet. A founding violence, and continuous creation by violence (by fire and blood, in Bismarcks phrase) such are the
hallmarks of the state. (Lefebvre, 1974: 32233; 1991: 280) What is central in Lefebvres reading is the relation between accumulation, violence and the unitary, logistical, operational
and quantifying rationality. For Lefebvre this highlights the limitations of a political-economic reading of territory as land: Neither Marx and Engels nor Hegel clearly perceived the
violence at the core of the accumulation process . . . and thus its role in the production of a politico-economic space. This space was of course the birthplace and cradle of the modern
state (Lefebvre, 1974: 322; 1991: 279; see also pp. 413/358).
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LinkArctic Territory
The primary issue underlying Arctic concerns is a question of territory and borders. What
is at stake is a method of delineating an inside and outside to feed a desire for security
Klaus Dodds, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Flag planting and finger pointing:
The Law of the Sea, the Arctic and the political geographies of the outer continental shelf, Political Geography, Vol.
29, Issue 2, February 2010, p. 63-73, Elsevier
The ongoing claims to OCS and maritime resources, alongside with debates about the trans-continental accessibility
of the Arctic, has attracted considerable popular and formal geopolitical speculation. According to some commentators, the Arctic
is on the threshold of a political and environmental state-change (e.g. Berkman & Young, 2009). Sea ice thinning in particular is held to be
primarily responsible for stimulating renewed interest in the Arctic as a resource rich space awaiting further
development and exploitation. Moreover, as a consequence of these potential shifts, it is claimed that we are witnessing the
prospect of further schisms emerging over maritime claims to the Arctic Ocean. As Berkman and Young (2009: 339) warn, The
Arctic could slide into a new era featuring jurisdictional conflicts, increasingly severe clashes over the extraction of natural resources, and the emergence of a
new great game among the global powers. Claims
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LinkArctic Territory
Exploring and opening the Arctic is intimately linked with the governmental practice of
bordering and identifying domestic spaces which must be protected from foreign threats, as
well as a colonial mythology of economic expansion
Klaus Dodds, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Flag planting and finger pointing:
The Law of the Sea, the Arctic and the political geographies of the outer continental shelf, Political Geography, Vol.
29, Issue 2, February 2010, p. 63-73, Elsevier
The inscription of Arctic territory including remote areas of the seabed by coastal states and international bodies such as the CLCS makes it
both more legible and accessible although in this case accessibility is unusual in the sense that it is likely to only apply to scientists and their
logistical sponsors including civilian and military agencies such as the US Coast Guard. Access to these territories will, because of their
remoteness, inevitably be conditioned by variable sea ice/weather. The CLCS requested that the Russian authorities conduct further
oceanographic research in the central Arctic Ocean following their 2001 submission to this UN body. What has changed in the intervening period, however, was
this attempt to calculate subterranean territory was further heightened by a growing awareness of an Arctic being
changed by ice melting and debates over accessibility involving a range of parties including coastal and non-coastal
states. The establishment of calculable territory depends on underwater interventions and the travails of mini-submarines and survey vessels are
helping to create the conditions for further sovereign interventions. The map and the survey are one element of this
intervention but so are other kinds of activities and practices. In a speech to an audience in the Canadian Arctic, the Canadian
Prime Minister noted that: But you can't defend Arctic sovereignty with words aloneIt takes a Canadian presence on
the ground, in the air and on the sea and a Government that is internationally recognized for delivering on its
commitments. And I am here today to make it absolutely clear there is no question about Canada's Arctic borderAll along the border, our jurisdiction
extends outward 200 miles into the surrounding sea, just as it does along our Atlantic and Pacific coastlinesSome in the opposition dismiss our focus on
northern sovereignty as expensive and unnecessarySome have actually come to the North and suggested our plans here are a waste of money. To that I say,
government's first obligation is to defend the territorial integrity of its bordersThis is Nunavut Our Land just as Yukon and the
Northwest Territories and the entire Arctic Archipelago are Our Land (Harper, 2006). Notwithstanding the Prime Minister's extraordinary appropriation of the
Inuit term Nunavut, it does give an indication of the apparent stakes. Making
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LinkArctic War
Framing the Arctic as an anarchic site for security competition reinforces a militaryindustrial trajectory which builds and preys upon political anxiety to justify violence
Klaus Dodds, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Flag planting and finger pointing:
The Law of the Sea, the Arctic and the political geographies of the outer continental shelf, Political Geography, Vol.
29, Issue 2, February 2010, p. 63-73, Elsevier
This episode formed the backdrop to this paper, which was originally a wide-ranging lecture on the Polar Regions presented to the 2009 Nordic Geographers
Meeting, held in Finland. My concern here is to use this moment in 2007 as an exemplar of Arctic territorialities, which is then informed by recent discussions on
calculable territory, sovereignty and territorial legibility (for example, Agnew, 2005; [Blomley, 1994] and [Blomley, 2003]; [Clark et al., 2008] and [Crampton,
2006]; [Elden, 2007] and [Elden, 2009]; Hannah, 2009). This flagging incident seemed to me to present an opportunity to reflect on how Arctic territories are
being made legible and re-legible for the purpose of intervention and/or management. Legibility, as such, allows for all sorts of textual and visual interventions
(see Fig. 1). As a widely cited Foreign Affairs journal article noted in the aftermath of the 2007 Russian flagging, The situation is especially dangerous because
there are currently no overarching political and legal structures that can provide for the orderly development of the region or mediate political disagreements over
Arctic resources or sea-lanes (Borgerson, 2008: 71). Accordingly, a nightmarish neo-realist vision of international politics with the
central Arctic Ocean as an anarchic space, at the apparent mercy of the competing geopolitical imperatives of
coastal states and other interested parties, is brought to the fore (see also Baev, 2007). As a consequence of such a scenario,
the management of the Arctic emerges as a latter day Sisyphean challenge ( [Heininen, 2005] and [Heininen and Nicol, 2007];
Dodds, 2008; [Dalby, 2009] and [Rothwell, 2009]). Given the enduring legacies of Arctic militarization alongside the tangled
contours of the militaryindustrialacademic complex (Barnes, 2008), this framing of the Arctic, as a poorly regulated
space invested with considerable resource potential, is not inconsequential (for other analyses, [Chaturvedi, 1996], [Chaturvedi,
2000] and [Lackenbauer and Farish, 2007]). Growing evidence of material changes such as sea ice thinning (and with
consequences for seaborne accessibility via the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route) and new resource
assessments by state agencies such as the US Geological Survey (Bird et al., 2008) have added gist to the neo-realist mill. Maps of
biophysical changes, polar sea-lanes, actual and possible maritime claims and resource potential have also enriched a
particular sense of the Arctic as a site of intensifying geopolitical competition, and what Didier Bigo has termed, the
circulation of security unease (Bigo, 2002). As the Canadian scholar, Michael Byers informed his readers, An ice-free Northwest Passage could also
serve as an entry point for drugs, guns and illegal immigrants. In Canada and elsewhere including the United States, there is evidence of a kind of
domopolitics, which as Walters (2004: 241) has noted involves, [a] rationalization of series of security measures in the name of a
particular conception of home against a backdrop of anxiety about heightened mobility.
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LinkTerrorism
Claiming terrorist threats marks a homeland to be defended against the outside. This
simultaneously constructs foreign lands as dangerous and unpredictable, justifying
interventions through the War on Terror.
Mark Duffield, Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster, Carry on Killing: Global Governance,
Humanitarianism and Terror, Danish Institute for International Studies, 2004, http://www.diis.dk/graphics/Publications/WP2004/duffield_carry_on_killing.pdf
For Georgio Agamben (1998),3 rather
than emerging from a social contract, sovereignty is argued to reside in the power to
decide the exception. That is, to fix in language the boundary between who or what is included or excluded as valid life:
sovereign power is that which constitutes the other. In populating the space of the exception, sovereignty calls forth a particular form of subjectivity to bear the
consequences of exclusion. Agamben has given this subjectivity a generic name calling it bare or natural life. That is, an abandoned life that effectively exists
beyond the rights, conventions and moral restraints of secular and religious law. Deciding the exception constitutes a juridico-political
space where anything becomes possible; it is even permitted to kill without committing homicide (Ibid: 83 as orig.).4
Such life, however, is more than an abandoned subjectivity destined to bear sovereigntys ordering; it is constitutive of
political order itself. Bare life is an exclusion that is also an inclusion (Ibid: 18). While sovereignty decides the exception, it
simultaneously elects to protect society from the threat that it has itself identified. The war on terrorism is an example of this recurrent
sovereign design. During the 1990s, the leading homeland states, as it were, remapped the zone of exception in terms of a
global borderland of failed states, shadow networks, rogue states, and so on. Today, this new cartography of risk
encapsulates the terrorist threat (National Security Strategy 2002). At the same time, through emergency powers, the derogation of
international law and pre-emptive attack, homeland states seek to protect society and its values from the menace
their intelligence systems have identified. The global borderlands have once again become zones where anything
becomes possible; an open-range where you can kill without committing murder.
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LinkTerrorism
Enunciations of shadowy unidentifiable terrorist threats require necessary
reterritorialization of these threats in specific foreign nations to be invaded and controlled
Stuart Elden, International Boundaries Research Unit, Department of Geography, Durham University, Terror and
Territory, Antipode, Vol. 39, Issue 5, p. 821-845, November 2007, http://instituty.fsv.cuni.cz/~kozak/elden-terrorterritory.pdf
It did not take long after the events of September 11, 2001 for the US to work out who was going to pay. According to Antony
Seldon, British Prime Minister Tony Blairs biographer, when told that force could not be used purely for retribution, Bush said I dont care what the international
lawyers say, were going to kick some ass (Seldon 2005:490). Other commentators joined the chorus. Right-wing harridan Ann Coulter (2001) was particularly
animated: We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and
convert them to Christianity. We werent punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed
civilians. Thats war. And this is war. Bush too agreed that this action had to be more than pounding sand (Seldon 2005:490). This was a reference to the
Tomahawk Cruise Missile attacks of Clinton, particularly those launched at Sudan and Afghanistan on 21 August 1998 in the wake of the US embassy bombings
in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar as-Salaam, Tanzania. Despite the destruction of a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, and camps in Afghanistan this was not nearly
effective enough for Bush, who declared that when I take action, Im not going to fire a two million dollar missile at a ten dollar empty tent and hit a camel in the
butt. Its going to be decisive (cited in Roy 2001:140). As the novelist Arundhati Roy suggests: President Bush should know that there are no targets in
Afghanistan that will give his missiles their moneys worth. Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper
targets and cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world (2001:140). A number of moves were thus made. On 12 September Bush
said that the deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than
acts of terror. They were acts of war (2001b). The sovereignty of the US was profoundly challenged, and a
sovereign response , a decision, was needed . It was therefore important that this branding of the acts, and the
response, was as a war: either the war on terrorism or the war on terror (see Ross 2004:137138). This was not
the only option, but one that marked the political events that followed, and has regularly characterised US projections of
its power (see Badiou 2004:2627). Indeed, in the fumbling speech on the day of the attacks, Bush declared that he had directed the full resources of our
intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice, suggesting a rather different response. But the very next
words demonstrated how this was likely to proceed: we
will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts
and those who harbor them (2001a). As Bushs speechwriter David Frum suggested, with those words, Bush upgraded the war on
terror from metaphor to fact (2003:142). What this enabled was the move to target states . As Cheney expressed it, in
some ways the states were easier targets than the shadowy terrorists (reported in Woodward 2003:48). A putatively
deterritorialised threatthe network of networks of al-Qaeda (Burke 2004), or global Islamism (Roy 2004)3 was
reterritorialised in the sands of Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. For Benjamin Barber, among others, this was tortured logic: Like the drunk looking
on the wrong side of the street for the keys he dropped on the other side because the light is better over here the United States prefers the states it can locate
and vanquish to the terrorists it cannot even find (Barber 2004:126, see 124125). It was then a short step to position al-Qaeda in
Afghanistan, although There was an immediate struggle in the Bush administration as to whether this indeed should be the first target, or whether this
provided the opportunity for outstanding scores to be settled with Iraq (see Clarke 2004; Woodward 2003, 2004). In the short term, Afghanistan as target was to
win out, with an immediate demand that the Taliban shut down the terrorist training camps. Not working with this demand left the Taliban vulnerable as
harbourers. For Gregory, this entailed two peculiar cartographic performances. The first was a performance of sovereignty
through which the ruptured space of Afghanistan could be simulated as a coherent state . . . The second was a
performance of territory through which the fluid networks of al-Qaeda could be fixed in a bounded space. As Gregory
continues, this required the reterritorialisation of the supposedly non-territorial network. Similarly it required a rigid
territorialisation of the US as a national spaceclosing its airspace, sealing its borders, and contracting itself to the
homeland (Gregory 2004a:4950).
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LinkEnvironmental Managerialism
Identifying an environment separate from nature reduces it to an object to be managed and
manipulated for the good of human populations as interpreted through technicist discourse
Luke 95 On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary
Environmentalism Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II p.57-81
(Autumn,1995), Phttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1354445 Accessed: 13/07/2012 12:05 BSH
The separation of organisms from their environments is the primary epistemological divide cutting through reality in the
rhetorics of ecology. This discursive turn goes back to Haeckel's initial 1866 identification of ecology as the science that investigates all of the relations of
an organism to its organic and inorganic environments. Nonetheless, there are differences among ecologists over what these
"environments" might be. Because the expanse of the organic and inorganic environment is so broad, it often is defined in terms delimiting what it is by
looking at what it is not. In other words, it is the organism, or biotic community, or local ecosystem that ecologists place at the center
of their systems of study, while the environment is reduced to everything outside of the subject of analysis .
With these maneuvers ,
environment, as either the means of such activity or the product of these actions, now
might be read in a more suggestive manner. It is the encirclement, circumscription, or beleaguerment of places and persons in a strategic
disciplinary policing of space. An environmental act, in turn, is already a disciplining move, aimed at constructing some expanse
of space-a locale, a biome, a planet as biospherical space, or, on the other hand, some city, any region, the global economy in technospherical
territory-in a discursive envelope. Within these enclosures, environmental expertise can arm environmentalists who
stand watch over these surroundings, guarding the rings that include or exclude forces, agents, and ideas. If one thinks
about it, this original use of "the environment" is an accurate account of what is , in fact, happening in many environmental
practices today. Environmentalized places become sites of supervision, where environmentalists see from above and from without
through the enveloping designs of administratively delimited systems. Encircled by enclosures of alarm , environments can be disassembled,
recombined, and subjected to the disciplinary designs of expert management.
environments can be redirected to fulfill the ends of other economic scripts, managerial directives, and administrative writs. Environing,
then,
engenders "environmentality," which embeds instrumental rationalities in the policing of ecological spaces.
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LinkEnvironmental Managerialism
Teaching students in educational contexts like debate that nature is something external to
be used by humanity produces subjects concerned more with efficiency and instrumentality
than ecological health
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and Sustainability:
what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE Department of Political Science,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA, also he blew up the death star)
One vital site for generating, accumulating and then circulating such discursive knowledge about nature is the educational system of schools, colleges and
universities. As the primary institutions for credentialing individual learners and legitimating collective teachings, schools and universities do much to construct
our understanding of the natural world. Over
ecological vision put nature outside society, and humans then went out into nature to master
and transform its resources into `goods and `services 3 for society. Industrialising society saw nature s
environments as external, other and centred, because the progress of all in society over nature was allegedly the
internal, manifest and decentred goal of all. These two spheres for human thought and action thus were divorced,
and this split has created major conceptual and operational problems for environmental education and policy ever
since. In the ecological upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, some schools of the environment and colleges of natural resources went beyond this
conservationist project by beginning to train specialised experts in environmental science. This ill-de ned discipline, ranging in scope from ecotoxiology to
national park administration, was Education, Environment and Sustainability 189 needed to de ne, develop and deploy new varieties of knowledge for society
about nature in many practical dimensions of everyday work and play.4 The
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LinkEnvironmental Managerialism
Environmental discourse enfolds populaces into apparatuses of biopolitical control
Luke 95 On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and
Environments, Part II p.57-81 (Autumn,1995), Phttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1354445 Accessed: 13/07/2012 12:05 BSH
These reflections on "the environment" reframe its meanings in terms of the practices of power, allowing us to turn to Michel Foucault for additional insight. The bio-power formation
described by Foucault was not historically closely focused upon the role of Nature in the equations of biopolitics (Foucault, History of Sexuality I 138-42). For Foucault, the
whole
point of the controlled tactics of inserting human bodies into the machineries of industrial and agricultural production as part and
parcel of strategically adjusting the growth of human populations to the development of industrial capitalism was to bring "life
and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations," making the disciplines of knowledge and discourses of power into many
agencies as part of the "transformation of human life" (143). Once this threshold of biopower was crossed, human
economics, politics, and technologies continually placed all human beings' existence into question. Foucault notes that these
industrial transformations implicitly raised ecological issues as they disrupted and redistributed the understandings provided by the classical episteme of defining human interactions
with Nature. Living
became "environmentalized," as humans related to their history and biological life in new ways from
within growing artificial cities and mechanical modes of production, which positioned this new form of human being "at the same time outside
history, in its biological environment, and inside human historicity, penetrated by the latter's techniques of knowledge and power" (143). Here we can begin to locate the
emergence of "the environment" as a nexus for knowledge formation and as a cluster of power tactics. As human beings began to consciously wager
their life as a species on the outcomes of these biopolitical strategies and technological systems, it became clear that they also were wagering the lives of other (or all) species as well.
While Foucault regards this shift as one of many lacunae in his analysis, it is clear there is much more going on here than he realizes. Once
human power/knowledge
formations become the foundation of industrial society's economic development, they also become the basis for the
physical survival of all terrestrial life forms. Here, ecological analysis emerges as a productive power formation that
reinvests human bodies-their means of health, modes of subsistence, and styles of habitation integrating the whole space of existence with bio-historical
significance by framing them within their various bio-physical environments filled with various animal and plant
bodies.
Resource managerialism submits nature to the power of bureaucratic control and economic
manipulation, converting natural objects into usable goods
Luke 95 On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and
Environments, Part II p.57-81 (Autumn,1995), Phttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1354445 Accessed: 13/07/2012 12:05 BSH
The script of environmentality embedded in new notions like "the environment" is
conservation can be found in Europe early in the nineteenth century, the real establishment of this stance comes in the United States with the Second Industrial Revolution from the 1880s through the 1920s and the
closing of the Western Frontier in the 1890s (Noble). Whether one looks at John Muir's preservationist programs or Gifford Pinchot's conservationist codes, an awareness of modern industry's power to deplete
natural resources, and hence the need for systems of conservation, is well established by the early 1900s (Nash, Wilderness). President Theodore Roosevelt, for example, organized the Governor's Conference in
1907 to address this concern, inviting the participants to recognize that the natural endowments upon which "the welfare of this nation rests are becoming depleted, and in not a few cases, are already exhausted"
the fundamental premises of resource managerialism have not changed significantly. In fact, this
code of eco-knowledge has only become more formalized in bureaucratic applications and legal interpretations. Paralleling the managerial logic of the
Second Industrial Revolution, which empowered technical experts on the shop floor and professional managers in the main office, resource managerialism imposes
corporate administrative frameworks upon Nature in order to supply the economy and provision society through
centralized state guidance. These frameworks assume that the national economy, like the interacting capitalist firm and household, must avoid
both overproduction (excessive resource use coupled with inadequate demand) and underproduction (inefficient resource use in the face of excessive demand)
on the supply side as well as overconsumption (excessive resource exploitation with excessive demand) and underconsumption (inefficient resource exploitation coupled
with inadequate demand) on the demand side. To even construct the managerial problem in this fashion, Nature must be reduced-through the encirclement
of space and matter by national as well as global economies-to a cybernetic system of biophysical systems that can
be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled anew to produce "resources" efficiently and in adequate amounts when
and where needed in the modern market-place. In turn, Nature's energies, materials, and sites are redefined by the eco-knowledges of
resource managerialism as the source of "goods" for sizable numbers of some people, even though greater material and immaterial
"bads" also might be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people who do not reside in or benefit from the
advanced national economies that basically monopo-lize the use of world resources at a comparative handful of highly developed regional and municipal sites. Many of
(Jarrett 51). Over the past nine decades ,
these eco-knowledge assumptions and geo-power commitments can be seen at work in the discourses of the Worldwatch Institute as it develops its own unique vision of
environmentality for a global resource managerialism.
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LinkEnvironmental Crises
Environmental crisis frames policy solutions in terms of expert discourses and leads to
individual passivity
Frederick Buell, professor of English at Cornell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, 2003, p. 184-185
Elaborating crisis is thus not only hard to do but can also perhaps never really be done. Worse, even an actual occurrence of crisis, not just an elaboration of its
imminence, is no guarantee that people will fall in line with the analyses and prescriptions of environmentalists. Environmental
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Vandana Shiva, 98(a philosopher, environmental activist, author and eco feminist, The Geopolitics Reader,
Volume 1 pg. 231-232)
The global in the dominant discourse is the political space in which a particular dominant local seeks global control,
and frees itself of local, national and international restraints. The global does not represent the universal human
interest; it represents a particular local and parochial interest which has been globalized through the scope of its
reach. The seven most powerful countries, the G-7, dictate global affairs, but the interests that guide them remain narrow, local and parochial. The World Bank
is not really a Bank that serves the interests of all the worlds communities. It is a Bank where decisions are based on the voting power weighted by the economic
and political power of donors, and in this decision-making it is the communities who pay the real price and the real donors (such as the tribal of Narmada Valley
whose lives are being destroyed by a Bank financed mega-dam)but have no say. The global of today reflects modern version of the global reach of a handful of
British merchant adventurers who, as the East India Company, later the British Empire, raided and looted large areas of the world. Over the past 500
years of colonialism, whenever this global reach has been threatened by resistance, the language of opposition has
been co-opted, redefined and used to legitimize future control. The independence movement against colonialism had
revealed the poverty and deprivation caused by the economic drain from the colonies to the centers of economic
power. The post-war world order which saw the emergence of independent political states in the South, also saw the emergence of the Bretton Woods
institutions such as the World Bank and IMF which took over the language of underdevelopment and poverty, removed these independent political states history,
and made them the reason for a new bondage based on development financing and debt burdens. The
from the construction of all dams, such as Tehri and the Narmada Valley projects. Against the narrow and selfish
interest that had been elevated to the status of national interest, the collective effort of communities engaged in
resistance against large dams began to emerge as the real though subjugated national interest. In a similar way the World
Banks Tropical Forest Action Plan (TFAP) was projected as responding to a global concern about the destruction of tropical forests. When rainforest movements
formed a worldwide coalition under the World Rainforest Movement, however, it became clear that TFAP reflected the narrow commercial interests of the World
Bank and multinational forestry interests such as Shell, Jaako Poyry and others, and that the global community best equipped to save tropical
forests were forest dwellers themselves and farming communities dependent on forests.
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LinkTransportation Investment
Investments in transportation infrastructure feed the interests of major corporations in the
form of building contracts, which leaves uncontested the systems of exchange and social
relations that produce environmental degredation
Timothy W. Luke, 5 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative
politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech University,
THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM OR THE ADVENT OF PUBLIC ECOLOGY? Organization & Environment,
Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2005 489-490)
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Shackelford/Gannon/Stevenson
___ of ___
LinkGas Tax
Market-centered approaches to environmental crises replicates irresponsible practices of
consumption which reproduce disaster. Eco-progress cant come from systems premised
on greed and selfishness.
Timothy W. Luke, 5 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative
politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech University,
THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM OR THE ADVENT OF PUBLIC ECOLOGY? Organization & Environment,
Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2005 489-490)
The challenge today is not how to get back on the offensive (Shellenberger& Nordhaus, 2004, pp. 29-31) by only doing private conservative activists one better. Rather, it
is how to develop a truly public ecology with new organizations, institutions, and ideas whose material articulation
can balance the insights of scientific experts, the concerns of private property holders, the worries about social
inequity, and the need for ecological sustainability to support human and nonhuman life in the 21st century. A public
ecology merely accepts the truth of John Laws (1991) observations about contemporary life: All human ecologies on
Earth are a hybridized sociotechnical order. Dismissing technical realities, and then turning to private investments, as
Shellenberger and Nordhaus ask, will not change this increasingly artificial world, which, as Law suggests, pulls together systems
of humans and machines, animals and plants, economies and ecologies as our environment. Even global warming reaffirms
this rough reality, namely, what appears to be 490 ORGANIZATION & ENVIRONMENT / December 2005 social is partly technical. What we usually call technical is partly social. In
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LinkEconomy
Economic growth is an extension of the rich exploiting the political environment in order to
get ahead in society. This leads towards inequality and class distinctions.
Timothy W. Luke, 2001 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as
comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech
University, Globalization, Popular Resistance and Postmodernity, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2001, pg.
317-318)
Everything that exists now around the world could be otherwise. This realization is what fuels the increasingly restive
resistance against what global modernity has become from Seattle to London to Washington. Much of what persists
at this moment, whether one looks at advanced economic structures or modern political practices, expresses
enduring inequalities in wealth, power, and knowledge that benefit a few to the detriment of the many. These
oligarchical concentrations of authority and income, in turn, are undercutting the democratic promise of a more
universal popular empowerment and enrichment, which if it was realized would create more prosperity, greater
harmony, and better governance. Those benefits, however, are not being realized. And, most efforts to advance toward them are being thwarted by
entrenched elites intent upon preserving their position and privilege in latest expressions of modernity as the postmodern turn.1 Nonetheless, other
more democratic, equitable, and popular expressions of modernity are possible; and, this possibility is what many
new local, regional, and national resistances against globalized inequality and disempowerment hope to attain. The
modes of organization realized during the Industrial Revolution entailed a complex social contract between labor and capital, the rulers and the ruled, the lay
people and technical experts. In exchange for passive acceptance of expert decisions, enlightened rule, and enduring
Capitalism incorporates their new and fancy technology within its demand for increasing
efficiency and flexible accumulation
Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Reconstructing
Nature: How the New Informatics are Rewrighting the Environment and Society as Bitspace, Capitalism Nature
Society 12 (3), September 2001
This ceaseless search for performance and profit is the essence of todays postmodern condition. And, as Lyotard claims, such
capitalist restructuring continues to take place without leading to the realization of any of these dreams of
emancipation.18 With waning trust in narratives of truth, enlightenment or progress, Lyotard argues the supporters of science and technology working
behind big business fall under the sway of another language game, in which the goal is no longer truth, but
performativity that is, the best possible input/output equation.19 On another level, which Jameson struggles to outline, these mediations of
performativity begin generating a new social system beyond classical capitalism. 20 This system is inchoate, but it basically
boils down to whatever is proliferating throughout the world space of multinational capital.21 More specifically, as David Harvey
argues, this new multinational corporate regime began dismantling the old Fordist regime of industrial production,
capital accumulation, and state intervention patched together on a national basis during the 1930s through the 1970s by welfare states. In its place, new
arrangements for flexible accumulation, productive specialization, and public deregulation have surfaced since the 1970s along with the ideologies of neoliber-alism. Working within
these many loosely coupled transnational alliances, Harvey observes, flexible
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ImpactCapitalism
Biopolitics produces a neoliberal economic model that emphasizes corporate rights over
those of the people, collapsing democracy and exacerbating social inequality
Timothy W. Luke, 2001 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as
comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech
University, Globalization, Popular Resistance and Postmodernity, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2001, pg.
323-324)
Neoliberalism also brings a second contradiction tied to its deeply rooted fixation on the market. This endangers
democracy inasmuch as neoliberal doctrines of market expansion, free choice, and bureaucratic deregulation are
counterposed to what were once democratically enacted policiesaffirmed by the people at the ballot boxto
constrain markets (wage guarantee laws, workers rights legislation, social welfare provisions) and endorse regulation (occupational safety codes, food
inspection procedures, environmental protection legislation). The information revolution comes after the end of imperialism, and its
performativity agendas bring the domination of the global economy by a few hundred TNCs based to an
overwhelming extent in the same ex-imperialist countries. The professional managers who control them have the means to benefit the
world or to exploit it to their own benefit.24 The opening of American society to global market competition or foreign business
investment appears to be a race, not to the top of the worlds economic hierarchies, but instead to the bottom. For
neoliberal advocates, the US should no longer benchmark itself against the welfare states of Western Europe, because they too will change. Instead, America is
urged to emulate Chile, Hong Kong, Mexico, Singapore, or Brazil. While the successful fifth of Reichs symbolic analysts may benefit from such policies, the
unsuccessful four-fifths of nonsymbolic toilers suffer even more downward mobility. The magic of the marketplace should bring clean
outcomes, but it now often works many dirty tricks against most people in contemporary society. Globalization could
be resisted, and many in America do vote to follow anti-globalization paths in the republics public policies. Instead, they
find experts accelerating the agendas of globalization, and many see this outcome as selling America out to a nebulous New World Order by turning the US into
NAFTAland.25
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ImpactSecurity
Biopolitics engages in war on behalf of a population whose very identity is contingent upon
the other who must be eradicated
Mark Duffield, Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster,
Carry on Killing: Global Governance, Humanitarianism and Terror, Danish Institute for International Studies, 2004,
http://www.diis.dk/graphics/Publications/WP2004/duffield_carry_on_killing.pdf
Bio-politics, however, contains an intrinsic and fateful duality. As well as fostering and promoting life it also has the power to disallow it to the point of death
(Ibid: 138 orig. emph.). In making this bio-political distinction, racism plays a formative role (Foucault 2003; Stoler 1995). This not only includes its nineteenth and
early twentieth century biological forms, it also involves its contemporary cultural, value and civilisational re-inscriptions (Duffield 1984). Race and its modern
codings underpin the division between valid and invalid life and legitimates the measures deemed necessary to secure the former against the later. In this sense,
biopolitics is intrinsically connected with the security of populations, including global ones. This duality moreover underlies the
paradox of bio-politics: as states have assumed responsibility for maintaining and developing life, wars have become
increasingly more encompassing, devastating and genocidal for the populations concerned. The awesome power to unleash
limitless death presents itself as a cynical counterpart, of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply
it, subjecting it to all precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars
slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital (Ibid: 136). As the managers of species-life, since the end of the nineteenth century states
have been able to wage total wars that have pitched entire populations against each other in cataclysmic struggles to the death. What
is at stake in
modern war is the existence of society itself. Genocide consequently emerges as a strategy because power is
situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population (Ibid:
137). Although the ending of the Cold War raised hopes of a peace dividend, the diagrammatic form of biopower was to be re-inscribed in the new wars of the
1990s and confirmed with the declaration of war on terrorism. This re-inscription has taken in its stride the shift in the locus of threat from the Soviet Union, one of
the worlds largest and most centralized war economies, to its very opposite, that is, the new security cartography of failed states, shadow economies and
terrorist networks. However, as the Guardian columnist quoted above has grasped, despite
realist conception of power, the idea of global governance as a design of bio-power also breaks with the conventional view of what global governance is. That is,
as an essentially benign undertaking involving state and non-state actors in a collective pursuit of global security, an
open and inclusive economic system, effective legal and political institutions, global welfare and development, and a
shared commitment to conflict resolution (Biscop 2004). From this perspective, security threats are usually seen as emerging
independently of global governance and, indeed, despite its best intentions. It becomes an ethico-political response to preexisting or externally motivated threats. Global governance as a design of bio-power, however, rather than responding
out of the blue to external threats, directly fabricates its own security environment. In distinguishing between valid
and invalid global life, it creates its own other with all its specific deviancies, singular threats and instances of maldevelopment to which
it then responds and tries to change. Consequently, it also shapes the terrain over which the bio-political logic of
living through killing must operate. It is in relation to this constitutive function of global governance that the place of sovereignty within it can now be
examined.
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ImpactGovernmentality
Governmentality adopts any and all means necessary to ensure the health and safety of the
populationthis justifies authoritarian control and violent transgression of order for the
sake of its preservation
Louiza Odysseos, Liberalisms War, Liberalisms Order: Rethinking the Global Liberal Order as a Global Civil
War paper prepared for Liberal Internationalism, 17 March 2008, San Francisco
The sovereigns task, Foucault argued, was to remain sovereign, that is, in power; there was, in other words, a circularity to
sovereignty, in that its end was internal to itself (Foucault 2001: 211). Governmentality, on the contrary, is characterised by a
finality, directed towards the things it manages (ibid.) If the global liberal order is an order for which the political concern
is population, then its end is to manage that population in pursuit of the perfection and intensification of the
processes it directs (ibid.). Yet, one could argue, some remnant of circularity remains: to preserve the emphasis on life and population management is
also an end of a governmental economy of power. It is this, possibly, that allows Foucault to note that, whereas sovereign power has historically
created systems of exclusion by differentiating between those who submit to its power (perhaps, in a contractarian fashion),
and those who violate it (such as criminals), governmental power differentiates between those who behave in accordance
with the welfare of the population and those who conduct themselves in relation to the management of the populationas if they
were not part of the populationas if they put themselves out of it (Foucault 2007a: 43-44). Governmental violence, to use Agambens
term, might indeed be necessary to ensure that a distinction is drawn between those who resist the regulation of the
population, who try to elude the apparatus by which the population exists, is preserved, subsists, and subsists at an optimal level and the population; as
Foucault argues, this opposition is very important (ibid.: 44). What range of means or tactics might be necessary for this? Any tactic,
including the permanent suspension of the law, which allows this order to identify, criminalise, control, indeed, to police
those who stand outside the population and oppose the governmentalisation of the state. The tactic and operations of
governmental power as police activity is pertinent to the workings of the global liberal order as global civil war , as
discussed below, because it is exercised internally, i.e. within the population and reinforces the order and its governmental
violence (cf. Agamben 2000: 103-7).
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ImpactNormalization
Biopolitical regulation undertaken in the name of human productivity exposes the entire
population to death and totalitarian control
Reid 8 Julian Reid, Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Foucault on
Politics, Security and War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2008, p. 89-90
It is in turn in response to this reconceptualisation of war, a war in defence of the state rather than against the state, that we see the emergence of the discourse
of population and the development of the range of biopolitical techniques that guarantee the existence and proliferation of what George Ensor described
classically in 1818 as populousness (Ensor, 1967: p. 12). If state security is, according to Foucault, the object of war by the end of the eighteenth
century, it
is also more importantly the strategic object of war to secure the life of populations themselves. The species
life of populations becomes the battlefield on which these new forms of biopolitical war are to be waged. A war
conducted through the development of security mechanisms that act to establish an equilibrium, maintain an
average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general population ... so as to
optimise a state of life (Foucault, 2003b: p. 246). The commitment to state security is always by necessity a commitment to
the security of society which is also always a commitment to the security of a particular form of life. The development
of the range of normalising techniques, the constitution of populations around various discourses of the normal is in turn,
Foucault insists, a kind of continual race war. What in fact is racism? he asks. It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the
domain of life that is under powers control, the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance
within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain
races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the
field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population.
(Foucault, 2003b: pp. 2545) The constitution of species life itself as the referent object of the security practices of state power allows for the
specification of any and every form of life that can be held to install degenerative effects within the field of population as the
enemy upon which war must be waged. Not necessarily a war of the military type, but a war of quiet extermination, carried out with
the continual deployment of regulatory and normalising techniques. A war that rages at the heart of modern societies.
A war of the biological type (Foucault, 2003b: p. 255). At the same time, then, that we see wars of the military type addressed as a moral scandal and the major
political problematic of modernity, so we
see the legitimisation of new forms of warmaking as the right to kill becomes aligned in
proximity to the new necessity to make live (Foucault, 2003b: p. 256). In turn we see the emergence of new practices of
colonisation justified on racial grounds. Subsequently we witness the emergence of fascist states and societies in
which the power over life and death, adjudicated on explicitly racial criteria, is disseminated widely, to the point where
everyone has the power of life and death over his or her neighbours, if only because of the practice of informing,
which effectively means doing away with the people next door, or having them done away with. (Foucault, 2003b: p. 259)
Likewise the emergence of socialisms based on the pursuit of the elimination of class enemies within capitalist society emit, for Foucault, an essential form of
racism (Foucault, 2003b: pp. 2612). These strategies of states, as well as counter-state, counter-hegemonic struggles, are all fundamentally tied up with this
problem of the relations between war, life and security. Once politics is construed as the continuation of war, once
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ImpactNormalization
Attempting to normalize subjectivity leads to repression, assimilation, and eradication
Connolly 2 William Connolly, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University,
Identity/Difference, revised edition, 2002, pp. 88-90
To say that late-modern societies are, among many other things, normalizing societies is not simply to say that they bestow
institutional privilege on a restrictive set of identities and apply intensive institutional pressures to secure those
identities as norms against which a variety of modes of otherness are defined and excluded. It is also to say that
those who endorse these norms tout them as natural or intrinsically true standards. They claim that the self, the
group, the nation, and/or the world would endorse these standards once they acquired the experience of their
intrinsic truth. To translate such a naturalization of norms into the critical language of normalization is not to gesture toward an order in which no norms exist.
For the ethic I endorse, as we have already seen, accepts the importance of disciplines applied to the self and the group. Such disciplines, though, encourage
the self and the culture to come to terms more affirmatively with contingent, relational elements in established cultural identities and to cultivate a more generous
ethics of engagement between contending constituencies. A normalizing society treats the small set of identities it endorses as if they
were intrinsically true; this puts it under tremendous pressure to treat everything that differs from those intrinsic truths
to be fundamental threats, deviations, or failures in need of correction, reform, punishment, silencing, or liquidation.
To challenge such a perspective is to presume that every social identity is a constructed, relational formation that engenders human differences, resistances,
remainders, and surpluses through the very politics of its consolidation. It is, therefore, to resist the drive to translate all of those remainders into modes of
otherness in the futile pursuit of final redemption or completion. Contemporary
differences upon which it depends into modes of otherness to be opposed and condemned, doing so to a degree far
surpassing the requirements of living together when the presumptions of intrinsic identity are reciprocally resisted by
the parties involved. Such a politicization of dogmatic identities forms an essential prelude to the effort to devise creative ways through which a wider
variety of identities can negotiate less violent terms of coexistence. Everyone does not become the same in a normalizing society. The
opposite is more likely to occur. Nor is a normalizing society automatically mobilized against "the individual." It might, for instance, embody a
general conception of the normal individual against which every difference is appraised. A normalizing society resists
the proliferation of affirmative individualities and positive associational styles. It does so not by making everyone the
same, but by translating the cultural diversity that exists and struggles to exist into perversified diversities. It identifies
multiple deviations from the norms it endorses and then translates them into an impressive variety of intrinsic
perversities. There is thus plenty of variety in a normalizing society. The numerous groups and individuals who deviate are shuffled
into multifarious categories of abnormality, perversity, incapacity, irrationality, sickness, irresponsibility, personal
defect, and so on. These abnormalities vary across domains (e.g., medical practice and sexual customs), severity (e.g., eccentricity, a
sick sense of humor, madness), and perceived degree of threat to the identity of an entire civilization (e.g., welfare freeloaders, sexual
deviants, atheists, nihilists). A normalizing society, then, proliferates abnormalities, treating the broad array of types that
threaten its claim to correspond to the natural or divine order of things to be in themselves in need of help, love, selfcorrection, improvement, or punishment. Its consummate irony is that it fosters the world of antagonism, violence,
and fragmentation to which it purports to be the corrective.
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ImpactFreedom
Biopolitics deprives the subject of freedom by enfolding them within a proliferating web of
technicism and expertism
Timothy W. Luke, 2001 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as
comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech
University, Globalization, Popular Resistance and Postmodernity, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2001, pg.
322-323)
Moreover, these professionaltechnical experts derive power, prestige, and privilege in the collective quest for
greater performative results from their possession of specialized knowledge, based on education, competitive merit, and experience
on the jobin a word, on their human capital.19 As Lasch argues, they also constitute an essentially postmodern class that incarnates
neoliberalism in everything they do. Living without metanarratives, they are symbolic analysts, technical experts, and
managerial specialists. They also are deterritorialized souls, who live in a world of abstract concepts and symbols ,
ranging from stock market quotations to the visual images produced by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and who specialize in the interpretation and deployment
of symbolic information.20 As postmodern times become those focused on the work of nations, as Reich asserts, the silent
majorities of routine producers and inperson servers are now becoming very restive over losing both their
metanarrative meanings and most social control over their future to such abstract mobile minorities of systemsthinking symbolic analysts.21 Increasingly, the expert exponents of more global neoliberalism completely miss how much their
project contradicts and confounds democracy in the US. Liberal management by the state or firm may appear to
guarantee individual values, but these precepts might only be the values of neoliberal experts who believe they are
empowered to keep the people equal by impelling them to pursue individuality in an open society, to secure various
abstract enactments of individual rights, and to assist the needier elements of society. Such agendas of enlightened
managerialism from above and without frequently will conflict with those of more selfreliant people struggling to rule themselves as fully-functioning democrats in
fulfillment of goals chosen by/for/of the people, and not by liberal statists.22 Many local and regional movements ask a troubling question: who actually sets the
rules of governance, and for whom? Such
continue to intervene contra-democratically in their lives to force such statist policies down their throats as the right
freedoms that they must accept. As Beck observes, governments now try to reduce riskto themselves and their constituentsby reprocessing the
dangers of democratic governance into the more predictable certainties of expert rulings.23 Politics becomes sub-politics, insulating real
political choices from the democratic hurly-burly of popular elections or partisan wrangling, while empowering small
networks of experts to make decisions on the basis of their professionaltechnical disciplinary codes in polyarchies of
professionalized interest articulation/aggregation where more networks of other experts make/enforce and interpret
the rules. Hence, the main political conflict zones today are no longer necessarily those between labor and capital, left and right, persons of color and
WASPs, or women and men, but rather they are cut along new contours of control between those who know and those who do not, those who can and do
participate in elitist managerial decisiontaking and those who cannot, or those who intervene in the personal spheres of others and those who cannot.
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Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and Sustainability:
what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE Department of Political Science,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA, also he blew up the death star)
Commoner also presents these two worlds as being `at war . As humans in the technosphere disrupt the ecosphere, the ecosphere
responds with equally or more disruptive secondary effects in the technosphere. In some sense, the environment is `nature for
Commoner, but it is also `society , or, perhaps more accurately, a new composite of `nature-as-transformed-by-society . Commoner stresses this interpretation
in The Closing Circle when he claims `the environment is, so to speak, the house created on the earth by living things, for living things (Commoner, 1971, p. 32).
This representation of the environment as life s house, however, does little more than reduce it to a biophysical housing of all living things or, again, the setting
that surrounds organisms.Pesticides often are used to typify how environmental destruction happens in this conceptual
register. A chemical agent is applied by humans in the technosphere on something in the biosphere, like weeds or
animal pests. While this application was intended to eradicate only those plants or animals that destroyed crops,
carried disease and infested dwellings, its impact was much broader. Soon pesticides jumped the dualist chasm and
spread through everything in the ecosphere both human technosphere and non-human biosphere returning from
`out there in natural environments back into plant, animal and human bodies situated `in here , affecting those arti
cial environments with unintended, unanticipated and unwanted negative effects. This recognition begins with Carson (1962). Many
environmental educators accept this ontological momentum in ordinary Education 195 language use and allow the reductionist and dualist vision of the
environment to in ltrate their visions of human concern for the Earth s ecologies. Up to a point, this view works, but the limited advantage it provides culminate
in resource, risk and recreationist managerialism. When
the world is divisible into environment and society, nature and community,
ecology and economics, environmental education s charge is to enlighten everyone about how to mitigate the
damage caused by the latter on the former. Hence, various environmental protection agencies, built `in here by
society to safeguard what is `out there in nature, can mobilise agents and activities to reduce resource use, mitigate
risks, and contain recreational degradation in the environment. These approaches `work , but their workability is
short-term and limited. They overlook how resources are misused, risks are avoidable and recreations are mutable.
Paul Trenell, graduate student in international politics at the University of Wales, "The (Im)possibility of
'Environmental Security," dissertation submitted September 2006, accessed 11/30/09
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/410/2/trenellpaulipm0060.pdf
Before tracing the response to the emergence of environmental hazards it is necessary to say a word about the
causes of environmental degradation. By this I refer not to the scientific explanations of the process, but the deeply rooted societal and
philosophical developments that have allowed the process to continue. As Simon Dalby has detailed, environmental threats are the result of the
kind of society that the current global political economy produces. Industrial activity, agricultural monocultures, and
rampant individual consumption of disposable items (all of which are efforts to enhance some forms of human welfare through domination
and control of facets of nature) produce other forms of insecurity (1992a: 113). A large hand in the development of contemporary
environmental problems must be attributed to the enlightenment faith in human ability to know and conquer all. In the
quest for superiority and security, an erroneous division between humanity and nature emerged whereby the natural
world came to be seen as something to be tamed and conquered rather than something to be respected (Adorno &
Horkheimer, 1973). Over time, this false dichotomy has become accepted as given, and as a result humankind has lost sight of its own dependence on nature. It
is this separation which allows the continued abuse of planetary resources with such disregard for the long-term
implications. What is at stake in how we respond to environmental insecurity is the healing of this rift and, in turn, the preservation of human life into the
future. Any suggested solutions to environmental vulnerability must account for these concerns and provide a sound
basis for redressing the imbalance in the humanity-nature relationship.
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AltMicropolitics
Exposing contradictions within fields of discourse halts their reproduction and lets counterhegemonic modes of thinking emerge to contest normalizing practices. This is both
theoretical criticism and the basis for practical revolution.
Jutta Weldes, et al., lecturer in international relations at University of Bristol, Mark Laffey, independent scholar,
Hugh, Gusterson, professor of anthropology at MIT, Raymond Duvall, professor of political science at University of
Minnesota, George Marcus, professor of anthropology at Rice, Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the
Production of Danger, 1999, pg. 16-17
The fact that cultures are composed of multiple discourses or codes of intelligibility, and that the world therefore can be
and is represented in different, and often competing, ways, has significant implications. In particular, it means that any
representation can potentially be contested and so must actively be reproduced. Meanings are not given, static, or
final; rather, they are always in process and always provisional. The production of insecurities thus requires considerable social workof
production, of reproduction, and, possibly, of transformation. Dominant discourses must constantly reproduce themselves to answer
challenges to their constructions of the world and their identification of those insecurities worthy of a response.
Defining security and insecurity requires considerable ideological labor. Contesting discourses, in turn, attempt to
rearticulate insecurities in ways that challenge the dominant representations (see, for example, Ballinger, this volume). In addition,
discourses are themselves not perfectly coherent but always entail internal contradictions and lacunae. These
contradictions make possible both resistance to a dominant discourse and the transformation of discourses. It is in this
sense, then, that culture can be viewed as a field on which processes of discursive contestation are set. It should be noted that, in analyzing such constructive
processes, we are not examining mere rhetoric. It is in any case misleading to associate the notions of culture, of discourse, or of codes of intelligibiliry with the
merely linguistic. As Laclau and Mouffe have argued (1987: 8284), discourses are composed of linguistic and nonlinguistic (that is to say, material) practices,
both of which are indispensable to the production of worlds and of insecurity.17 After all, discursive articulations, including the construction of
insecurities, are
always materialized in concrete practices and rituals and operate through specific state [and other]
apparatuses (Hall, 1988: 46). Discourses and their codes of intelligibility have concrete, and significant, material effects.
They allocate social capacities and resources and make practices possible. We use the terms construction and production loosely to
maintain the distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic practices. Linguistically, discourses are the vehicle for the construction of categories (of difference, of
identity, of threat, etc.). Through both linguistic and nonlinguistic practices, they are the vehicle for the production of social facts (such as insecurities).
Andrew W. Neal, Cutting Off the Kings Head: Foucaults Society Must Be Defended and the Problem of
Sovereignty, Alternatives 29 (2004), p. 373-398
The critique of Foucault on sovereignty ultimately turns on Foucault's hypothesis that "politics is the continuation of war by other means."
Indeed, this hypothesis has been given great prominence; even the inside jacket of the new U.S. English-language edition exclaims: "Inverting Clausewitz's
famous formulation "War is the continuation of politics by other means," Foucault explores the notion that "politics is war by other means" in its relation to race,
class struggle, and, of course, power." This prominence can also be attributed to the fact that the first two chapters of the lecture series, in which he posits this
hypothesis, were available in English long before the translation of the entire lecture series.^^ Accordingly, then, Foucault provocatively
suggests
that we need an alternative to the "juridical model of sovereignty." (He would not make his claim about the need to "cut off the Ring's head" until the
following year, but the link is clear.) As Foucault writes: In order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, we must abandon
the juridical model of sovereignty. . . . [R]ather than looking for the single point from which all forms of power derive,
either by way of consequence or development, we must begin to let them operate in their multiplicity, their differences, their
specificity, and their reversibility; we must therefore study them as relations of force that intersect, refer to one
another, converge, or, on the contrary, come into conflict and strive to negate one another. . . . If we have to avoid reducing
the analysis of power to the schema proposed by the juridical constitution of sovereignty, and if we have to think of
power in terms of relations of force, do we therefore have to interpret it in terms of the general form of war? Can war
serve as an analyzer of power relations?16 We can see that the initial hypothesis that Foucault sets out to explore is indeed whether politics can
be alternatively understood as a tangled web of conquests, struggles, and wars; and this does indeed appear to be an inversion of Clausewitz's famous
aphorism.
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AltMicropolitics
Small points of resistance are key to analyze the mechanisms of power and escape from the
systems of juridical politics.
Foucault 78 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 1978, p.
94-97 BSH
Continuing this line of discussion, we can advance a certain number of propositions: -Power
something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power
mobile relations. -Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships,
sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which
occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in
superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play. -Power
comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power
relations, and serving as a general matrix -no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body. One
must suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in
families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole.
These then form a general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links them together; to be sure, they also bring about redistributions, realignments, homogenizations,
serial arrangements, and convergences of the force relations. Major
dominations are the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these confrontations.
-Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are the effect of another instance that "explains" them,
but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of
aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its
rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of
power that functions in a society (and makes it function); the
there is power,
there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Should it be
said that one is always "inside" power, there is no "escaping" it, there is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is subject
to the law in any case? Or that, history being the ruse of reason, power is the ruse of history, always emerging the winner? This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational
character of power relationships. Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations. These
points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network . Hence there is no single locus of great
Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary . Instead there is a plurality of resistances,
each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are
quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations. But this does not mean that they are only a reaction or rebound,
are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite. Hence they too are distributed in irregular fashion: the points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at
varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. Are there no great
radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more
individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds. Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a
dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and
individual unities. And it
is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible,
is in this sphere of force relations that we must
try to analyze the mechanisms of power. In this way we will escape from the system of Law-and-Sovereign which has
captivated political thought for such a long time. And if it is true that Machiavelli was among the few-and this no doubt was the scandal of his "cynicism"-who
conceived the power of the Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and
decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships.
somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships. It
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The alt seizes the debate as a site for resisting power by destabilizing dominant discourses
and opening political spaces outside of state bureaucracythis enables change both within
and beyond the state
David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing Security, 1998, pg. 204205
Even more important, his understanding of power emphasizes the ontology of freedom presupposed by the existence of disciplinary and normalizing practices.
Put simply, there cannot be relations of power unless subjects are in the first instance free: the need to institute negative and
constraining power practices
comes about only because without them freedom would abound. Were there no possibility of
freedom, subjects would not act in ways that required containment so as to effect order.37 Freedom, though, is not the
absence of power. On the contrary, because it is only through power that subjects exercise their agency, freedom and
power cannot be separated. As Foucault maintains: At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it,
are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it
would be better to speak of an agonism of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and
struggle; less of a face-to--face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.38 The political possibilities
enabled by this permanent provocation of power and freedom can be specified in more detail by thinking in terms of the predominance of the bio-power
discussed above. In this sense, because the governmental practices of biopolitics in Western nations have
testament to the strategic reversibility of power relations: if the terms of govern mental practices can be made into
focal points for resistances, then the history of government as the conduct of conduct is interwoven with the history
of dissenting counterconducts.39 Indeed, the emergence of the state as the major articulation of the political has involved an unceasing agonism between those in office and those they rule. State intervention in everyday life has long incited popular
collective action, the result of which has been both resistance to the state and new claims upon the state. In particular, the core of what we now call citizenship .
. . consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in the course of their struggles over the means of state action, especially the making of war.40
In more recent times, constituencies associated with womens, youth, ecological, and peace movements (among others)
have also issued claims on society.41 These resistances are evidence that the break with the discursive/nondiscursive
dichotomy central to the logic of interpretation undergirding this analysis is (to put it in conventional terms) not only
theoretically licensed; it is empirically warranted. Indeed, expanding the interpretive imagination so as to enlarge the
categories through which we understand the constitution of the political has been a necessary precondition for
making sense of Foreign Policys concern for the ethical borders of identity in America. Accordingly, there are manifest
political implications that flow from theorizing identity. As Judith Butler concluded: The deconstruction of identity is not the
deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated .42
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AltResistance
Questioning the legitimacy of the 1AC discourse is an act of resistance which questions the
very coordinates of power that have previously been assumed. Demonstrating the
possibility that things might be different is a radical political act.
Dan W. Butin, Assistant Professor of Education at Gettysburg College, June 2001, Educational Studies, Vol. 32,
No. 2
Foucault believed that resistance could make a positive and concrete difference in people's lives. It may , of course, make
the situation worse. But to not have the opportunity to attempt to change is the most dangerous of all positions. It is
against this that Foucault railed. His "hyper- and pessimistic activism" was thus both an enactment of his belief in how relations of power can be struggled
against, and an experiment in gauging the potential for transformation. In this light I would therefore like to offer three methodological correctives for the "Foucauldian fallacies" I
outlined previously. First, it must be acknowledged that individuals are neither simply passive nor radically autonomous agents. Foucault
forcefully argued that resistance is an inherent aspect of relations of power and thus predicated on the ability to act. Without
such a theoretical acknowledgment, Foucault's insights concerning power and domination collapse within a totalizing
and static perspective. In a sense, this is a simple acknowledgment based on over one hundred years of pragmatist research grounded in William James, John Dewey, and
George Herbert Mead. And in fact, some have argued for a more sympathetic relationship between Foucault and pragmatism (Maslan 1988). Second, and predicated on the first point,
"subjugated
knowledges" should be heard. "Subjugated knowledges" are, for Foucault, "a whole set of knowledges that
have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated" and include the voices "of the
psychiatric patient, of the ill person, of the nurse" (Foucault 1980, 82). For all of the theoretical sophistication of the four articles analyzed previously, none
cites the individuals affected by the practices described. Gang members, British academics who "spontaneously" consent, and administrators caught within disciplinary practices are left
unheard. Their voices
are assumed and spoken for. I am not suggesting that their voices are the final truth. Neither does Foucault. Rather, they must simply
be acknowledged. Michael Apple makes a similar point when he urges analyses of how subjects make meaning of the technologies of differentiation: "we should not assume
that teachers or students are totally unaware of what is happening. How do they understand these things? How do they possibly find the holes in these discourses and mechanisms in
creative ways so as to allow for spaces of resistance?" (Apple 1998, 424). Qualitative and ethnographic research, or the citation of it, is not a strong point of poststructuralist
researchers. It might behoove a closer look at Foucault's constant and consistent political engagement (Felski 1998). Third, educational researchers
must be willing to
experiment with new truths. One must always bear in mind and grapple with the fact that new "regimes of truth" may replace old
authoritarian principles; yet it should be realized that some forms of domination are more dangerous than others. To
capitulate to a radical relativism denies any potential to resist and thus precludes any means by which to modify or
reverse relations of power. Moreover, the questioning of the criteria of the experimental truth must be seen for what it is:
a tactical struggle to maintain a particular truth-claim. This is not to say such a truth-claim is invalid or unhelpful or nonliberating. Rather, it is simply to
realize that the truth-claims of the status quo attempt to ward off resistance in the same manner that new experimental
truths attempt to overturn them: by struggling to delegitimize their grounding to truth.
Hasana Sharp, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Spring 2002, Intertexts, Vol. 6, No. 1
Fraser's invocation of empirical validity could be misleading in that Foucault does not advocate imagining power in sovereign terms in any historical period, but, at the same time, claims
that the
move away from organizations of rule according to a model of state sovereignty nonetheless constitutes a
transformation in techniques of government. I would like to contend that, even in an absolutist regime, power operates
productively and is connected to everyday life and subjectivity, albeit in quite different forms. Understandings of
sociality according to sovereignty never adequately grasp the complexity of the social forces at play. What is interesting and
troubling about disciplinary and normalizing societies is that the pervasive quality of power makes it all the more necessary for it to conceal
itself through naturalizing discourses: "power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its
success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms" (HS1 86). Panopticism tends to be read as the most somber note in Discipline and
Punish, but the book ends with an invocation of battle and struggle, a reminder that the norms produced by discipline are contested and always subject to the vicissitudes of war.
Foucault writes, "And what
ultimately resides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary functioning of an apparatus or an institution, but the
necessity of combat and the rules of strategy ... we must hear the distant roar of battle" (308). While the "panopticon," itself a
dream of power, appears unitary to its subjects, its mode of appearing represents only the necessary myth of power's functioning. Power must appear
necessary where it is contingent. The logic of sovereignty is coextensive with the logic of necessity, of the seamless functioning of power. Such a logic betrays itself
as a symptom of power's insecurity. Beneath such desperate measures, we must apprehend what power seeks to
conceal: the power of the multitude, the antagonistic forces of the people, the omnipresence of struggle. (5)
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Hubert L. Dreyfus, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, Being and Power Revisited, Foucault and Heidegger:
Critical Encounters, 2003, p. 49-50
Like Heidegger abandoning talking of being, as Foucault works out his final ideas on how to resist bio-power, he becomes more interested in saving the self from
becoming a subject and less interested in power per se. Thus, in a typical retrospective reinterpretation, he begins his essay "The Subject and Power" by saying:
"I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to
elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings
are made subjects.1151 The moral seems to be that, when
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AltRefuse Distinctions
We should refuse the distinctions that sovereign power creates, as it leads to a relationship
of violence.
Jenny Edkins, Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and Vronique Pin-Fat,
Lecturer in International Relations in the Centre for International Politics at the University of Manchester, 2005,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1, p. 11-14
Against Connollys reading, we suggest that Agambens contribution provides an insight into ways in which sovereign power can be challenged and indeed its
logic or grammar refused. As we have pointed out, the possibility of resistance is in general not one which relies on an escape or
emancipation from power relations. Indeed, we have argued that such an escape leads us into the camps, which are
marked by such an absence of power relations. What we will call a challenge to or contestation of sovereign power, on the
contrary, entails a displacement of sovereign power and a return to properly political power relations: a life of power. A
challenge to sovereign powers creation of zones of indistinction (the concentration camp being the paradigmatic example) cannot consist of a call for a
reinstatement of classical politics, a reinstatement of the distinction between zoe and bios. Firstly, this is not a possibility because the
very distinction
itself, and the lines that it draws, is the fundamental activity of sovereign power.51 Secondly, the classical distinction requires that
bare life can only be included through an exclusion in the form of an exception. There cannot be a return to a politics that maintains the
distinction between zoe- and bios, or, in Agambens words: There is no return from the camps to classical politics. In
the camps, city and house became indistinguishable, and the possibility of differentiating between our biological body
and our political body between what is incommunicable and mute and what is communicable and sayable was
taken from us forever.52 Either way, whether through an emancipatory ideal or through a reinstatement of classical politics, we would all remain homines
sacri or bare life. However, challenge may be possible not through emancipation or nostalgic return, but, as we will argue, through either of two other strategies:
first, through a refusal to draw lines and second, through the assumption of bare life. We have argued that Agambens work demonstrates that
sovereign power is no longer a form of power relation in Foucauldian terms but a relationship of violence (as his
discussion of the camp shows). Since this is the case, however paradoxical it may seem, challenges to sovereign power take place
when there is a demand for a return to properly political power relations, and take the form of such a demand.
Agambens injunction is that we must find a completely new politics that is, a politics no longer founded on the exception of bare life.53 If the zone of
indistinction has extended beyond the camp to embrace much of the rest of the world, then what we have is an extension of bare life, and its lack of relationalities
of power: in other words, an impossibility of politics. The absence of a power relation is not desirable because there is then no
possibility of resistance. We have nothing but a form of servitude or slavery. So, rephrasing it in Foucauldian terms,
Agambens argument is that we have moved from a relation of power to a relationship of violence. Let us remind ourselves
how Foucault describes such a relationship and its contrast with a power relation: A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon
things; it forces, it bends, it breaks, it destroys, or it closes off all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be passivity,
and if it comes up against any resistance it has no other option but to try to break it down. A power relationship, on the
other hand, can only be articulated on the basis of two elements that are indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship:
that the other (the one over whom power is exercised) is recognised and maintained to the very end as a subject who acts; and
that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may
open up.54 In this context it then makes sense when Agamben argues that the question we should be addressing is not Is there any escape from power
relations? but, on the contrary, Is today a life of power available? Such a life of power would be a life of potentialities and possibilities, a life in the field of power
relations, resistance, and freedom: in other words, a political life. It
may well seem wholly unintelligible, entirely meaningless, outright inconceivable or even quaintly paradoxical when viewed from the framework of sovereign
power.56 We are indeed issuing a call to dispense with the very principle of order57 when it concerns an order founded on the sovereign ban. We do not deny
that the sovereign exception is constitutive of such an order;58 we do deny that sovereign power constitutes the only possible form of political life, and indeed
that it constitutes a political life at all. Since
sovereign power relies on two things first, the drawing of lines between forms of
life, and, second, the production thereby of a generalised bare life there are two ways the demand for a return to
politics can be articulated: the refusal of sovereign distinctions and the assumption of bare life. We elaborate what we mean
by this in the remainder of this article.
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AltRefuse Distinctions
The only way to contest sovereign power is to completely eliminate lines of distinction
drawn between people. We cannot simply change where the lines are drawn.
Jenny Edkins, Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and Vronique Pin-Fat,
Lecturer in International Relations in the Centre for International Politics at the University of Manchester, 2005,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1, p. 11-14
One potential form of challenge to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between zoe and bios,
inside and outside.59 As we have shown, sovereign power does not involve a power relation in Foucauldian terms. It is
more appropriately considered to have become a form of governance or technique of administration through
relationships of violence that reduce political subjects to mere bare or naked life. In asking for a refusal to draw lines as a possibility
of challenge, then, we are not asking for the elimination of power relations and consequently, we are not asking for the
erasure of the possibility of a mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks:
quite the opposite. Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw any lines at all between
forms of life (and indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power as a form of violence can be contested and a
properly political power relation (a life of power as potenza) reinstated. We could call this challenging the logic of sovereign power
through refusal. Our argument is that we can evade sovereign power and reinstate a form of power relation by contesting sovereign powers assumption of the
right to draw lines, that is, by contesting the sovereign ban. Any other challenge always inevitably remains within this relationship of violence. To move outside it
(and return to a power relation) we need not only to contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also to resist the call to draw any lines of the sort
sovereign power demands. The grammar of sovereign power cannot be resisted by challenging or fighting over where the
lines are drawn. Whilst, of course, this is a strategy that can be deployed, it is not a challenge to sovereign power per se as it still
tacitly or even explicitly accepts that lines must be drawn somewhere (and preferably more inclusively). Although such
strategies contest the violence of sovereign powers drawing of a particular line, they risk replicating such violence in
demanding the line be drawn differently. This is because such forms of challenge fail to refuse sovereign powers
line-drawing ethos, an ethos which, as Agamben points out, renders us all now homines sacri or bare life.
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AltTerritory
Questioning spatial assumptions of the 1AC generates an epistemic confusion which
provides the impetus for a discovery of new values and relations to others
Dalby 5 Simon Dalby, Carleton University, Ottowa, Political Space: Autonomy, Liberalism, and Empire,
formal political equality, the conditions of the global covenant, at least the US state under the Bush administration has no problem
arrogating to itself the right to intervene when and where it sees fit to preempt any threats to its preeminence. The
nonintervention clauses of the UN Charter are notably fraying, but still the return of the Bush administration to the United Nations, in the months after its invasion
in March 2003, to ask for help in pacifying Iraq suggests that even the prerogatives of empire do not allow that state to evade its political obligations to claim
legitimacy on the basis of more than brute force. In this sense, there remains a global "political space," albeit one that seems to have an impossible Newtonian
cartography. The converse of this argument is that political struggles that oppose the cavalier use of military force to ensure the
flows of resources from the periphery to fuel, literally in this case, the economies of the metropole, are also implicated in a politics
that transcends claims to sovereignty. Precisely the invocation of the rights to nonintervention on the part of activists in many places rely on a
nonterritorial strategies of publicity, internet "sites," and coordinated protests in many places, to invoke the "rights" to territorial nonintervention. This is not to
disparage the undoubted uses of territorial strategies in defence of many things; but it is to make clear that this is what is going on. It is also to insist on the
utility of raising explicitly the questions of who precisely writes cosmopolitan texts with many of the assumptions of
the "right" of mobility, travel, and transit anywhere on the planet.^^ In addition, the argument that the current occupation of Iraq is about a
war for the US way of life, and gas-guzzling SUVs in particular, makes it clear that this violence is a form of "shadow globalization" cast over the peripheries of
the world economy.^^ Progressive
politics cannot now be about the extension of these fossil-fueled urban liberties. It can be
about solidarities, which do not have an implicit spatiality to them, although these sometimes also use spatial metaphors to express
"horizontal" linkages. Above all else, this engagement with the political-space debate reinforces the argument that the
cartographies of modern administrative spaces are no longer an adequate basis on which to build either social sciences or
some form of progressive politics. To think differently is to try to think about politics as connection, as link, as network. As
Walker has repeatedly pointed out, this is immensely difficult to do given the constraints of the spatial languages that we have inherited from modern thinkers.^^
Obligations across boundaries and the possibilities of politics not constrained to geographical invocations of a we that
does politics are the questions for the moment. These questions are not well served by unreflective languages of political "space" or
geographical "scale" with assumptions of autonomy as their ontological starting point. Politics is a lot more complicated. The inclusion of so much of the world
directly into the circuits of the global economy has made the necessity of thinking much more carefully about the spatial metaphors of politics unavoidable.
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AltEnvironment
Reconsidering our relationship to the environment allows us to change the way we view
nature
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and Sustainability:
what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE Department of Political Science,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA, also he blew up the death star)
By reconsidering how educators and schools discursively construct `the environment , one can see, as Foucault suggests, the
way in which individuals or groups represent words to themselves, utilise their forms and meanings, compose real
discourse, reveal and conceal in it what they are thinking or saying, perhaps unknown to themselves, more or less
than they wish, but in any case leave a mass of verbal traces of those thoughts, which must be deciphered and
restored as far as possible to their representative vivacity.(Foucault, 1994, p. 353) There are many different alternatives to what prevails,
and changing ways of thought can revolutionise the practices of policy. In environmental education, the professional technical
articulations of teaching largely focus on resource/risk/recreation managerialism to establish and enforce `the right
disposition of things between humans and their environment through administering resource use, risk, de nition,
and recreation loads. When approached through these categories, the planet Earth does become, if only in terms of
environmental policy s operational assumptions, an immense planetary infrastructure. As the human races `ecological lifesupport system, it has `with only occasional localised failures provided `services upon which human society depends consistently and without charge (Cairns,
1995). As
the foundational infrastructure of brown spaces in society, the Earth generates `ecosystem services , or
those derivative products and functions of natural systems that human societies perceive as valuable (Westmen, 1978).
Human life will continue only if such survival-sustaining services continue, so this complex system of systems is what
must survive. These outputs include: the generation of soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients, capture of solar energy, conversion of solar energy into
biomass, accumulation/puri cation/ distribution of water, control of pests, provision of a genetic library, maintenance of breathable air, control of micro and
macro climates, pollination of plants, diversi cation of animal species, development of buffering mechanisms in catastrophes and aesthetic enrichment (Cairns,
1995). Because it is the terrestrial infrastructure of transnational enterprise, the planet s ecology requires very skilled and informed leadership to guide its
sustainable use. In turn, environmental experts will monitor, massage and manage those systems that produce these robust services. Just as the sustained use
of any technology `requires that it be maintained, updated and changed periodically , so too does the `sustainable use of the planet require that we not destroy
our ecological capital, such as old-growth forests, streams and rivers (with their associated biota), and other natural amenities (Cairns, 1995, p. 6). Systemic
survival of nature s green zones, then, becomes the central concern of these environmental education initiatives,
while the artificial ecologies of society s brown zones often are ignored.
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AltEnvironment
Rejecting the values of managerialism allows for the creation of a new society that refuses
to be rooted in expert control and capitalism.
Timothy W. Luke, 2001 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as
comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech
University, Globalization, Popular Resistance and Postmodernity, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2001, pg.
324-325)
It is the unanticipated costs incurred by society at large in serving such performative corporate goals that populists resist as antithetical to the larger agendas of
living well. By opposing these destructive tendencies with new alternative values, democratic populists push to renew
non-hierarchical social relations, technical simplicity, small-scale economies, political decentralization, reasonable
science, and cultural vitality within the free spaces of present-day national society. Unlike most expert programs for greater
corporate managerialism, many democratic populists and critical social theorists favor mobilizing the immediate producers
and consumers to reconsider how crucial decisions about their relations to Nature can change rather than
surrendering this prerogative to state and corporate technocrats. This contestation of expert managerialism puts
ecology at the center of a new critical sensibility to revitalize political debates over the key issues of who decides,
who pays, and who benefits in the complex economic and technological l relations of people with Nature.26 A sense
of Nature, as ecologically constituted free sites for self-created being, promises to reorder the relations of the
individual l to the collective, of personality to society, and of these dual social relations to Nature. 27 This ecological
sensibility, then, also must reinvest individuals with the decision-making power to construct their material relations to the environment in smaller-scale, nonhierarchical, ecologically sound technical relations between independent producers in local and regional commonwealths. They know states and businesses will
not act responsibly in every instance. Therefore, democratic populism must reaffirm the responsibility of all individuals for preserving their ecological inheritance
and passing it on to future generations. To
confirm the virtues of self and social discipline in living within the renewable cycles of
natural reproduction, this ecological sensibility should point to the most promising paths out of the global
consumerism of transnational capitalism. 28 Rather than encouraging passivity, dependence and purposelessness, which corporate technocracy
fosters and perpetuates, the theory and praxis of democratic populism should presume greater social activity, personal autonomy, and reasonable balance to
preserve Nature. With these goals, the labor of competent, conscious communities could be guided to reconstitute ecologically their social, economic and political
mediations with each other by interacting reasonably with Nature.29 Furthermore, the successful establishment of new social relations
organized along these ecological lines will alter radically the social constructions of Nature in relation to society,
making it again into a subject not an object, an agency not an instrumentality, and a more than equal partner not a
dominated subaltern force. Rather than viewing environmental disasters as isolated incidents of untidy waste disposal or inefficient management of
natural processes, making Nature an equal partner with people would recast such events as tragedies of unreasoning abuse. The living and inorganic
constituents of Nature could be entitled to rights and privileges as worthy of defense as any human rights and social
privileges.30 Guarantees of ecological security should ramify, in turn, into greater freedom, dignity and reasonability
for the human beings whose own autonomy suffers in Natures abusive indenturement to corporate enterprises
instrumental rationality.31
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AltPublic Ecology
A public ecology attuned to the social realities of today is most capable of responding to
the problems of commodification and nature. This entails critical redeployment of scientific
and social discourses through a prior framework which refuses any reductive or selfinterested approaches to the environment.
Timothy W. Luke, 5 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative
politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech University,
THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM OR THE ADVENT OF PUBLIC ECOLOGY? Organization & Environment,
Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2005 492-493)
Oddly, Shellenberger and Nordhauss (2004) endorsement of a new Apollo Project could make moves toward a public ecology because it could aim at
undercutting todays allegedly special interest environmentalism by using big, new investments for national energy independence centered on building a
coalition of environmental, labor, business, and community allied who share a common vision for a future and a
common set of values (p. 26). Even though this would be a laudable goal, Shellenberger and Nordhaus ironically get caught here in almost laughable
performative contradictions inasmuch as they try to legitimize their new strategy by noting the Apollo vision was endorsed by 17 of the countrys leading labor
unions and environmental groups ranging from the NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council] to the Rainforest Action Network, as if this lineup actually is a
sincere attempt to undermine the assumptions of special interest environmentalism (p. 26). This strategic miscalculation fails their own test of intellectual
viability, namely, that the strength of any given political proposal turns more on its visions for the future and the values its carries within it than on its technical
policy specifications (p. 27). Lining up new coalitions of different special interests from old environmental and labor groups neither expresses a new vision for the
future nor a fresh set of values. It is Shellenberger and Nordhauss blindness to
Although the urban is perhaps somewhat abstract, its fields of force still remain the main public focus of human
ecological actionin cities and country sides alike. Consequently, the material impulse of capitalist globalism to remake the
world in commodified forms through markets must be countered by dense webs of social movements and systemic
materialities embedded in public ecology to reimagine the urban revolutions inequitable and inefficient reconstitution
of the worlds environments and their inhabitants. By pushing beyond exhausted conceptual divisions in naturalized environmental sciences
into the more social sciencefocused environmental studies, public ecology also could fuse insights from life science, physical
science, social science, applied humanities, and public policy into a cohesive conceptual complex that anticipates
and avoids ecological surprises (King, 1995). Today, the Earth is a res publica, and it must be cared for with caution, through collective deliberation,
and quite openly (Luke, 1999). Public ecology could preserve but also look far beyond conventional regimes for environmental problem detection/monitoring/
regulation such as those in the United Statess federal bureaucracy. Public ecology must show how private ecologies have turned the
worlds built and un -built environments into a formation that exploits those mental divides as it degrades the overall
civic life of society. Although privileged millions still benefit from the international misery of billions, Shellenberger and Nordhauss anti global warming
politics cannot help us find a post environmental world by simply endorsing other more preferred networks for privativistic special interest politics. Indeed, their
frantic faith in just doing what right-wing activists have done for decades, only now with a different progressive spin and broader coalition, could only resurrect the
non-environmentalism all suffered through during the Gilded Age prior to rise of the first conservation movements in the United States.
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AT: Perm
The 1AC cannot be severed from its entrenchment in an outdated model of power relations
which mistakenly centralizes power in the federal government. Only the alt engages new
modes of disciplinary power present throughout society.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, Being and Power Revisited, Foucault and Heidegger:
Critical Encounters, 2003, p. 44-45
This seeming problem is cleared up, I think, if we remember Heidegger's account of onto-theology. Like the understanding of being, power always, in fact,
"comes from everywhere," in that it is embodied in the style of everyday practices. But what
is bottom-up in a new and dangerously totalizing way, so that understanding power on the model
of the power of the king or the state (the equivalent of ontotheology) now covers up an important change in how our practices
are working.
David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing Security, 1998, pg. 202
Furthermore, Foucault argues that from the eighteenth century onward, security becomes the central dynamic in governmental rationality, so that (as discussed in chapter 6) we live today, not in a narrowly defined and overtly repressive disciplinary society, but in a society of security, in
which practices of national security and practices of social security structure intensive and extensive power relations, and constitute
the ethical boundaries and territorial borders of inside/outside, normal/pathological, civilized/barbaric, and so on23 The
theory of police and the shift from a sovereigns war to a populations war thus not only changed the nature of man and war, it
constituted the identity of man in the idea of the population, and articulated the dangers that might pose a threat to
security. The major implication of this argument is that the state is understood as having no essence, no ontological status that exists prior to and is served by
either police or war. Instead, the state is the mobile effect of a multiple regime of governmentality, of which the practices
of police, war, and foreign policy/Foreign Policy are all a part.34 Rethinking security and government in these terms is
one of the preconditions necessary to suggest some of the political implications of this study. Specifically, it has been the
purpose of this book to argue that we can interpret the cold war as an important moment in the production and reproduction of American identity in ways
consonant with the logic of a society of security To
this end, the analysis of the texts of Foreign Policy in chapter 1, the consideration of
the examination of the interpretation of danger surrounding the war on drugs in chapter 7,
demonstrated that even when these issues are represented in terms of national security and territorial boundaries, and even when these issues are
written in the depoliticizing mode of policy discourse, they all constitute the ensemble of the population in terms of
social security and ethical borders. Likewise, Foucaults argument underpins the fact that these developments are not peculiar to the postWorld
Eisenhowers security policies in chapter 6, and
War II period.
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AT: Perm
1AC securitization overwhelms alt solvency because the nature of security politics
footnotes all other concerns as secondary to the survival and health of the homeland
Jeff Huysmans, Lecturer in politics at the department of government at Open University, Alternatives Defining
Social Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative Dilemma of Writing Security Feb 2002 p. 45-47
For understanding the meaning of security, the discursive formation is crucial because it defines the specificity of security practices. The rules of
the security formation link different themes, theories, and practices together as security themes, security theories, security practices. The formation is not a security utterance itself, but
it makes it possible for these themes, theories, and practices to appear. Here
constitutive or generic register where security questions are brought into existence. Wawer has briefly defined some major aspects of the dominant Western security formation. He
defines the rules, or logic, constituting the meaning of security through the logic of war, which he reads through the lens of national security. National security is the name of an ongoing
debate, a tradition, an established set of practices and, as such, the concept has a rather formalized referent.17 Looked at through this lens, a
security problem is
something that challenges the survival of the political order. As a result, it alters the premises for all other questions.
They are subjugated to the security question because if the political unit does not succeed in successfully dealing with the security
problem it will cease to exist as a self-determined political unit. The other questions will have become irrelevant at that stage
since the unit does not exist anymore as a political unit. Security concentrates everything at this one point where the political units confront a test of will in which the ability to
fend off a challenge is the criterion for forcing the others to acknowledge its sovereignty and identity as a state.18 This
logic of security can be replayed metaphorically and extended to other sectors. If this happens, the other sectors are structured according to a security logic.19 The normative dilemma
receives its full weight from the combination of the performative logic and a generic understanding of language. Security
health care?) The policy also has to decide the level of security that is aspired to; for example: will it be minimum security or maximum security? But this normative awareness does
not capture the fundamental normativity of security enunciations that social constructivists face. Social-constructivist authors face not only the two questions formulated by Wolfers, they
also have to answer a question that in a sense precedes Wolferss remarks. They have to decide whether they want to write security in a particular area. In other words, security
enunciations not only implicitly or explicitly assume the level of priority they give to security and the level of security they aspire to; they first determine if one should approach an issue
from a security perspective at all. Normative questions are thus inescapably present in the very heart of security analysis.
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Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and Sustainability:
what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE Department of Political Science,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA, also he blew up the death star)
To serve this end, schools are invited to prepare their students to master the `ins-and-outs of resource managerialism,
risk assessment and/or recreationist management in the environment. In fact, resources, risks and recreationists become `the three Rs
of higher environmental education. This gives students and faculty some very specific new foci for their studies and grants a
specialised managerial power to experts in either the government or big business to control. Because acting on the
behalf of nature has shifted from the avocational register of belle-letteristic naturalist writings into the professional
technical knowledge codes of environmental science, larger public discourses about ecological degradation, resource
waste or environmental remediation also have changed significantly. On the one hand, many see this shift as progressive: scienti c
personnel with positivistic technical knowledge allegedly now can identify ecological problems objectively as well as design ef cient solutions for the most
pressing ones. On the other hand, this change is regarded by others with suspicion: a spirit of `shallowness occludes the enchantments of nature in the dark
shadows of anthropocentrism, capitalism and statism, leaving
Environmental costs cannot just be regulated and postponed, they must be solved utterly
and completely
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Deep
Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, Organization & Environment, Vol. 15 No. 2, June 2002, p. 178-186, Sage
Reform environmentalism and radical ecology both focus on the unintended social costs of economic growth,
complexity, scale, and productivity (Luke, 1997). Yet reform environmentalists treat them as minor problems that can
be dealt with by the public and not-for-profit sector with essentially minor technocratic modifications by government
regulation or market-driven incentives for the private sector (Devall, 1979, pp. 129-155). Many radical ecologists, on
the other hand, see the modern states approach to these unintended costs as forgotten costs that business,
society, and government have always known about but purposely suppressed (Best, 1998). Such costs never can be
eradicated entirely because an industrial economy presumes their recurring charges as externalities. Regulating
them only postpones the final reckoningby hiding some costs elsewhere. A foundational change in thinking is needed
to attack the most basic problemsuntrammeled economic growth, instrumental rationality, and the reification of
natureimplicit in capitalist industrialism (Luke, 1999; Salleh, 1993). Hence, deep ecologists turn to repressed,
ignored, or forgotten visions of ecological living, which persist beneath, behind, or beyond the existing structures of
industrial society.
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(expressing the full force of its partiality) the totality of power and the hierarchy that maintains it. This is surely evident in prisons: the smallest and most insignificant of the prisoners'
demands can puncture Pleven's pseudoreform (5). If
the protests of children were heard in kindergarten, if their questions were attended to, it would
be enough to explode the entire educational system. There is no denying that our social system is totally without tolerance; this accounts for its extreme
fragility in all its aspects and also its need for a global form of repression. In my opinion, you were the first-in your books and in the practical sphere-to teach us something absolutely
fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others. We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this "theoretical" conversion-to
appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf. DELEUZE: Yes, and the reverse is equally true. Not only are
prisoners treated like children, but children are treated like prisoners. Children are submitted to an infantilisation which is alien to them. On this basis, it is undeniable that schools
resemble prisons and that factories are its closest approximation. Look at the entrance to a Renault plant, or anywhere else for that matter: three tickets to get into the washroom during
the day. You found an eighteenth-century text by Jeremy Bentham proposing prison reforms; in the name of this exalted reform, he establishes
a circular system
where the renovated prison serves as a model and where the individual passes imperceptibly from school to the
factory, from the factory to prison and vice versa. This is the essence of the reforming impulse, of reformed
representation. On the contrary, when people begin to speak and act on their own behalf, they do not oppose their
representation (even as its reversal) to another; they do not oppose a new representativity to the false representativity of
power. For example, I remember your saying that there is no popular justice against justice; the reckoning takes place at another level. FOUCAULT: I think that it is not simply the
idea of better and more equitable forms of justice that underlies the people's hatred of the judicial system, of judges, courts, and prisons, but-aside from this and before anything elsethe singular perception that power is always exercised at the expense of the people. The anti-judicial struggle is a struggle against power and I don't think that it is a struggle against
injustice, against the injustice of the judicial system, or a struggle for improving the efficiency of its institutions. It is particularly striking that in outbreaks of rioting and revolt or in
seditious movements the judicial system has been as compelling a target as the financial structure, the army, and other forms of power. My hypothesis -but it is merely an hypothesis- is
that popular courts, such as those found in the Revolution, were a means for the lower middle class, who were allied with the masses, to salvage and recapture the initiative in the
struggle against the judicial system. To achieve this, they proposed a court system based on the possibility of equitable justice, where a judge might render a just verdict. The
identifiable form of the court of law belongs to the bourgeois ideology of justice. DELEUZE: On
these forms in the reaction to May '68, but more appropriately, in the concerted preparation and organisation of the near future, French capitalism now relies on a "margin" of
unemployment and has abandoned the liberal and paternal mask that promised full employment. In this perspective, we begin to see the unity of the forms of repression: restrictions on
immigration, once it is acknowledged that the most difficult and thankless jobs go to immigrant workers-repression in the factories, because the French must reacquire the "taste" for
increasingly harder work; the struggle against youth and the repression of the educational system, because police repression is more active when there is less need for young people in
the work force. A wide range of professionals (teachers, psychiatrists, educators of all kinds, etc.) will be called upon to exercise functions that have traditionally belonged to the police.
This is something you predicted long ago, and it was thought impossible at the time: the reinforcement of all the structures of confinement. Against
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exploring this problem: under the ancient theme of meaning, of the signifier and the signified, etc., you have developed the question of power, of the inequality of powers and their
struggles. Each struggle develops around a particular source of power (any of the countless, tiny sources- a small-time boss, the manager of "H.L.M.,"' a prison warden, a judge, a
union representative, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper). And if pointing out these sources-denouncing and speaking out-is to be a part of the struggle, it is not because they were
previously unknown. Rather, it is because to speak on this subject, to force the institutionalised networks of information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusation, to
find targets, is the first step in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power. If the discourse of inmates or prison doctors constitutes a form of
struggle, it is because they confiscate, at least temporarily, the power to speak on prison conditions-at present, the exclusive property of prison administrators and their cronies in reform
groups. The discourse of struggle is not opposed to the unconscious, but to the secretive. It may not seem like much; but what if it turned out to be more than we expected? A whole
series of misunderstandings relates to things that are "bidden," "repressed," and "unsaid"; and they permit the cheap "psychoanalysis" of the proper objects of struggle. It is perhaps
more difficult to unearth a secret than the unconscious. The two themes frequently encountered in the recent past, that "writing gives rise to repressed elements" and that "writing is
necessarily a subversive activity," seem to betray a number of operations that deserve to be severely denounced. DELEUZE: With respect to the problem you posed: it is clear who
exploits, who profits, and who governs, but power nevertheless remains something more diffuse. I would venture the following hypothesis: the thrust of Marxism was to define the
problem essentially in terms of interests (power is held by a ruling class defined by its interests). The question immediately arises :
Perhaps, this is because in terms of investments, whether economic or unconscious, interest is not the final answer; there are investments of desire that function in a more profound
and diffuse manner than our interests dictate. But of course, we never desire against our interests, because interest always follows and finds itself where desire has placed it. We
cannot shut out the scream of Reich: the
masses were not deceived; at a particular time, they actually wanted a fascist regime!
There are investments of desire that mould and distribute power, that make it the property of the policeman as much
as of the prime minister; in this context, there is no qualitative difference between the power wielded by the
policeman and the prime minister. The nature of these investments of desire in a social group explains why political
parties or unions, which might have or should have revolutionary investments in the name of class interests, are so often reform
oriented or absolutely reactionary on the level of desire.
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including actors and non-state organisations that realism would regard as merely the external auxiliaries, servants or
sub-contractors of the powerful. Power is the ability to change the behaviour and attitudes of others and, in the
process, of ourselves as well (Dean 1999). As such, even lifes bit-players have the ability to stage independent, innovative and often surprising
effects. Power relations are everywhere in the classroom, the doctors surgery, the family, the NGO project, and so on. Such relations are productive and shape
the comportment of their authoring agents as well as those subject to them.1 Without
enabled, for example, concentration camp functionaries to frame their defence in terms of just following orders of an
external power. It also enables humanitarian agencies, in the interests of neutrality, to either remain silent in relation to power
so conceived, or else, through recourse to international law, codes of conduct or technical standards, to erect
legalistic barriers and professional boundaries to distance themselves from an external power (Leader 1999). An exclusive
and amassed view of power also shapes what humanitarian agencies understand by politics. That is, those various strategies and techniques relating to the
augmentation or deployment of external power (Weiss 1999).
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Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and Sustainability:
what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE Department of Political Science,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA, also he blew up the death star)
The fundamental premise of resource managerialism in environmental education has not changed significantly over
the past nine decades. At best, it only has become more formalised in its bureaucratic applications and legal
interpretations. Keying off of the managerial logic of the Second Industrial Revolution, which empowered technical experts, or engineers and scientists, on
the shop oor and professional managers, or corporate executives and finnancial officers, in the main office, resource managerialism imposes
corporate frameworks upon nature in order to supply the economy and provision society through centralised expert
guidance (Noble, 1977). These frameworks assume that the national economy, like the interacting capitalist firm and
household, must avoid both overproduction (excessive resource use coupled with inadequate demand) and
underproduction (inefficient resource use coming with excessive demand) on the supply-side as well as overconsumption (excessive resource exploitation coming with excessive demand) and under-consumption (inefficient
resource exploitation coupled with inadequate demand) on the demand side. To imagine the managerial problem in
this manner, nature is reduced through the encirclement of space and matter by national as well as global
economies to an elaborate system that can be dismantled, redesigned and assembled anew on demand to produce
`resources efficiently and when and where needed in the modern marketplace. As a cybernetic system of biophysical systems,
nature s energies, materials and sites are rede ned by the eco-knowledge of resource managerialism as manageable resources. With them, environmental
education teaches that human beings can realise great material `goods for sizeable numbers of some people, even though greater material and immaterial
`bads also might be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people, who do not reside in or bene t from the advanced national economies that essentially
monopolise the use of world resources at a comparative handful of highly developed regional and municipal sites. As Beck suggests, risk managerialism is now
an integral part of the self-critical production and reproduction of globally thinking, but locally acting, capitalism.7 Environmental
educators train
students to conceptually contain, actuarially assess and cautiously calculate various dimensions of ecological risk in
their eco-toxicology, environmental assessment, or eco-remediation courses. Risk management presumes its
calculations are based on a (spatially, temporally and socially circumscribed) accident definition or that its analyses truly do
`estimate 192 T. W. Luke and legitimate the potential for catastrophe of modern large-scale technologies and industries
.8 Superfund site after supertanker spill after superstack bubble, however, suggest that this degree of managerial knowledge is precisely
what the risk management sciences at schools of environmental studies fail to produce, `and so they are
falsifications, and can be criticised and reformed in accordance with their own claims to rationality (Beck, 1996).
Nonetheless, this trend toward developing fully self-conscious risk managerialism grounded in economistic trade-offs is taking over many
curricula for higher environmental education, because such risk assessment methods can produce models of most
social and political factors that bureaucratic experience believes to be true to effective resource management.
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idea
behind national parks or protected areas is to park a number of unique sites or undeveloped domains outside of the
continuous turnover of industrial exploitation for primary products or agricultural produce, and then the recreational
pursuits of getting to, using and appreciating such ecological assets can be mass produced there through highly
organised sets of practices. These goals for the green zones of nature are crucial. The pressures of living in the brown zones of
society are such that many of cial studies suggest tourism will be the world s largest industry by 2000. Hence,
environmental education must pitch managerial knowledge at those sectors of the tourism industry that depend upon
valuable natural resources whether they are `park and recreation concessionaires, adventure and tour guide
companies, private campgrounds and hunting/ shing preserves, destination resorts, ecotourism establishments,
and tourism development boards and advertising companies (Department of Natural Resource, Recreation and Tourism, Colorado State
University, Fort Collins, 1996, p. 1) to prepare students for these private sector pursuits. As these guideposts for contemporary environmental education indicate,
its discursive practices frequently have a shallow/instrumental/managerialist understanding of `the environment . Yet, from these curricula and their professional
degree granting capabilities, the
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Barnett, Fellow in the School of Social and Environmental Enquiry at University of Melbourne, 2001 (Jon, and a
New Zealand Sci and Tech Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Canterbury and serves on the editorial boards of
several scholarly journals, May 4, The Meaning of Environmental Security: Ecological Politics and Policy in the New
Security Era, pg. 88 p4 pg. 89 p1)
Another failing of the threat discourse is that it focuses attention on issues 'only when crises are imminent, by which
time it is often too late for effective interventions and corrective measures' (Dabelko and Simmons 1997: 142). This is another
example of what Prins calls the environmental Catch-22: by the time environmental problems are unambiguously overt it
is too late to rectify them; on the other hand, unless the problems at immediately pressing there is insufficient
motivation to result in action by mainstream political institutions (Prins 1990). Thus the particular state- and military-centred interpretation
of environmental security by the US policy community ignores a telling implication of environmental problems for politics: that long-term and
fundamental reforms are required to address the underlying structural causes of environmental degradation.This
presentation of environmental problems as threats rests on a recurrent conflation of threat with risk. Environmental
security in this sense represents the state's particular highly politicised assessment of risk rather than any scientific
account of the actual risks. There is little correlation between the two; most often the way states respond to environmental problems is conditioned by political factors more than informed risk assessments. Certainly the US government's
assessment of risks is fat less a matter of credible scientific assessment and far more a Matter of the', politics of identity and
Otherness. The challenge, according to Hay, is to continue to provide informed risk assessments, and 'to expose the distortions imposed by the state's own
consequence-risk calculus' (Hay 1994: 226). This chapter has sought to expose such distortions in US policy.
Broda-Bahm 99 (Kenneth T, Assistant Professor in the Mass Communication and Communication Studies
Department at Towson University, Finding Protection in Definitions: The Quest for Environmental Security
Argumentation & Advocacy, 10511431, Spring99, Vol. 35, Issue 4)
Another motive for speaking of environmental degradation as a threat to national security is rhetorical: to make people respond to environmental threats with a
sense of urgency. But before harnessing the old horse of national security to pull the heavy new environmental wagon, one must examine its temperament... If
the emotional appeals of national security can somehow be connected to environmental issues, then it is also
possible that other, less benign associations may be transferred. Yet the national security mentality engenders an enviable sense of
urgency, and a corresponding willingness to accept great personal sacrifice. Unfortunately, these emotions may be difficult to sustain. Crises
call for resolution, and the patience of a mobilized populace is rarely long. A cycle of arousal and somnolence is
unlikely to establish permanent patterns of environmentally sound behavior, and `crash' solutions are often bad ones.
(pp. 24-25)
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Environmental education is one place that shows how power and knowledge work in unison out in the open as the expertise sets needed by ruling, owing,
knowing, or controlling elites. At the same time, the power agendas required to define, implement or reproduce such knowledge and their truth systems quickly
get adopted through environmental educators programmes of study and research.9 Such discursive frames and conceptual definitions for a
common theoretical concern, like `the environment , `environmental studies , or `environmental sciences , have not
entirely failed to safeguard nature. Nonetheless, they also cannot fully succeed by simply zoning nature off into the
green spaces of `the environment , while most environmental education systematically ignores the economics,
politics and technics of social ecologies in the brown zones that threaten nature from without. Whether one looks at
K-12 classrooms or colleges of natural resources, the dualistic misconstruction of nature and society as green and
brown zones, separate and apart, is a major intellectual distortion in most environmental education.
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FWDiscourse
Power comes from everywhere and permeates all relationsinstitutions and social groups
are all constellated through convergences and conflicts of power. Locating analysis at this
level reveals linkages between power and knowledge and produces the best strategies for
change.
Foucault 78 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 1978, p.
92-93
body. The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given
at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes. It seems to me that power must be understood in the first
instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute
their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the
support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions
which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the
state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. Power's
it comes from everywhere . And "Power," insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect
that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement. One needs to be
nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name
that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. Should we turn the expression around, then,
and say that politics is war pursued by other means? If we still wish to maintain a separation between war and politics,
perhaps we should postulate rather that this multiplicity of force relations can be coded-in part but never totally-either in the form of
"war," or in the form of "politics"; this would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch into the other) for integrating these
unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, and tense force relations.
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FWDiscourse
Governmentality is dispersed through policy discussions that accept dominant terms of
debate without critically interrogating them. Discursive analysis demonstrates the
contingent and arbitrary nature of the 1AC assumptions.
Larner and Walter 4 Wendy Larner, School of Geographical Sciences, Unviersity of Bristol, and William Walters,
Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Globalization as Governmentality, Alternatives 29 (2004), 495514
Jessop is right to observe that the idea of a zero-sum opposition between globalization and the state is not helpful. He argues that "states help to constitute the
economy as an object of regulation and the extent to which even economic globalization continues to depend on politics. "^^ But it is not states that do this. To
frame it in this way is to imply they would never destroy themselves. Rather, attention
capacities, and seek out new opportunities. Moreover, the response to global uncertainty is not to withdraw but rather to engage more deeply, to adapt, and
become more compatible with the new global terrain. In this regard, we can see how globalization is both a description and a normative account. Governmentality
encourages us to ask questions such as: Through
what techniques are such global entities known? How are the relationships
between them understood? Once attention is paid to such questions, it becomes possible to better distinguish
between concepts like civilization, modernization, and globalization. How does each of these formulations imagine
places and populations? How do they divide and rule? And what of other series? Religions, nation-states, networks? Finally, we
could think about how the governmentalities of globalization are articulated with other forms of rule (for example,
authoritarianism) .59
Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies Association Convention, March 1720, 2004, Montreal)
Given my poststructuralist inclinations, I do not subscribe to the positivistic social scientific enterprise which aspires
to test hypotheses against the real world. I therefore reject epistemological empiricism. Since epistemology is
closely intertwined with methodology, especially with positivism, I eschew naturalism as a methodology. I study discourses
and discursive practices that take shape in texts. This does not mean that there is no material world as such, only
that it must be understood as mediated by language, which in the end means that it is always interpreted once
framed by discourse (through the spoken word or in written form).2 A discourse, then, is not a way of learning about something out there in the real
world; it is rather a way of producing that something as real, as identifiable, classifiable, knowable, and therefore,
meaningful. Discourse creates the conditions of knowing (Klein quoted in George, 1994: 30). We consider real what we
consider significant: a discourse is always an interpretation, a narrative of multiple realities inscribed in a specific social or symbolic order.
Discursive representation is therefore not neutral; individuals in power are those who are authorized to produce reality, and
therefore, knowledge. In this context, power is knowledge and the ability to produce that which is considered true. A realist
discourse will produce the sociolinguistic conditions that will allow it to correspond, in theory as in practice, to
reality. Evidently, this reality will be nothing but the realist discourse that one has constituted oneself. This is why,
from a poststructuralist perspective, discourse may be considered as ontology3.
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FWDiscourseEnvironment specific
Be skeptical of their truth claimsthey are determined by a statist discourse of the
environment which evaluates truth and creates meaning through techniques of control
Luke 95 On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary
Environmentalism Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II p.57-81
(Autumn,1995), JSTOR Accessed: 13/07/2012 12:05 BSH
Foucault invites social theorists not to reduce all ensembles of modernizing development to the "statalization" of society wherein "the state" becomes an
expansive set of managerial functions, dis-charging its effects in the development of productive forces, the reproduction of relations of production,
or the organization of ideological superstructures. Instead he argues in favor of investigating the "governmentalization" of the economy and society whereby
individuals and groups are enmeshed within the tactics and strategies of a complex form of power whose institutions, procedures, analyses, and techniques
loosely manage mass popula-tions and their surroundings in a highly politicized symbolic and material economy (103). Because governmental
techniques are the central focus of political struggle and contestation, the interactions of populations with their natural
surroundings in highly politi-cized economies compel states constantly to redefine what is within their competence
throughout the modernizing process. To survive after the 1960s in a world marked by decolonization, global industrialization, and nuclear military
confrontation, it is not enough for states merely to maintain legal jurisdiction over their allegedly sovereign territories . As
ecological limits to growth are either dis-covered or defined, states are forced to guarantee their populations' fecundity and
productivity in the total setting of the glo-bal political economy by becoming "environmental protection agencies."
Governmental discourses methodically mobilize particular assumptions, codes, and procedures in enforcing specific under-standings about the economy and
society. As a result, they
generate "truths" or "knowledges" that also constitute forms of power with significant reserves of
legitimacy and effectiveness. Inasmuch as they classify, organize, and vet larger understandings of reality, such discourses can authorize or
invalidate the possibilities for con-structing particular institutions, practices, or concepts in society at large . They simultaneously
frame the emergence of collective subjectivities (nations as dynamic populations) and collections of subjects (individuals) as units in such nations. Individual
subjects as well as collective subjects can be reevaluated as "the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain
type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise
to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power" (Foucault, Discipline
and Punish 29). Therefore, an environmentalizing regime must advance ecoknowledges to activate its com-mand over geopower as well as to re-operationalize many of its notions of governmentality as environmentality. Like governmen-tality, the disciplinary
articulations of environmentality must cen-ter upon establishing and enforcing "the right disposition of things."
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FWTerritory
Territory is a prior question to the plan because it shapes how we encounter and interact
with the politicalwe cannot work within the state without understanding its spatial
dimensions
Stuart Elden, Durham University, Land, terrain, territory, Progress in Human Geography 34 (6), 2010, p. 799-817
It would be unusual or reductive to see the political-economic, political-strategic, political-legal or political-technical in strict isolation. Political-economic accounts often indicate a strategic relation; strategic work
recognizes the importance of law and the dependence on measure and calculation. Yet it is only in seeing these elements together, and in privileging the legal and the technical, that an understanding of the
a political-legal category and what kinds of techniques are at work? Two qualifications to this analysis are necessary. The first is that this is an approach derived from, and directed toward, western political thought.
The problematic term west is of course open to question, but it is intended here to be read in relation to a chronology of thought that can be traced from Ancient Greece, to Roman appropriations and late medieval
Latin rediscoveries, providing the conceptual frame within which the emergence of the modern state and its territory occurred.15 Other traditions would have very different histories, geographies and conceptual
lineages. The specificity of the analysis begun here militates against generalization and pretensions to universalism. Nonetheless, it is hoped that this historical conceptual approach would be useful in other such
analyses, even if it would need to be supplemented, developed and critiqued. The second qualification is that while this work seeks to utilize an expanded understanding of territory that goes beyond narrowly
economic or strategic accounts, but which is also attentive to the specificity of the notion, its approach is necessarily partial. As Valerie November (2002: 17) notes, the notion of territory is at the same time juridical,
political, economic, social and cultural, and even affective. Here, the social, cultural, and affective elements have been underplayed in order to emphasize the political in a broad sense. This is not to suggest that
those other elements are unimportant, but rather that they have been discussed elsewhere in some detail. The literature on the nation, on attachment to homeland, and identity politics, for instance, can profitably be
read from a territorial perspective (see Winichakul, 1994; Paasi, 1996; Yiftachel, 2006). Folding the insights of those analyses into the outline offered here would be a necessary step for any account which aimed to
be comprehensive. Three interlinked propositions thus provide an agenda for future work; a project which seeks to grasp the history of the state of territory: (1) Territory must be approached as a topic in itself; rather
than through territoriality. Indeed, it may well be the case that the notion of territoriality with regard to humans can only be appropriately understood through a notion of territory. In other words, while particular
strategies or practices produce territory, there is a need to understand territory to grasp what territoriality, as a condition of territory, is concerned with. (2) Territory can be understood as a bounded space only if
boundaries and space are taken as terms worthy of investigation in their own right as a preliminary step. These terms require conceptual and historical work themselves, rather than being sufficient for an
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FWTerritoryArctic spec.
Arctic politics are bound within constructions of self and othersecurity discourse is
deployed to produce and reinforce identifications of the ever-expanding homeland against
foreign dangers.
Mathieu Landriault, School of Political Studies, University of Ottowa, Securitizing the north in Canada:
Observations on Continuity and Transformation: A Reply to Nicol and Heininens Networking the North, Southern
Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011), google scholar
There is no doubt than the international agenda has been modified near the end of and after the Cold War. I am not questioning this factual point presented by
Nicol and Heininen, but rather the authors argument that it is clear that this international North, stemming from an environmental and scientific understanding
of regionalism, resulted in a new way of structuring policies within the North.5 On the contrary, I would argue that, by taking discursive practices seriously and by
attributing to them a performative nature in which discourses can frame and represent in a specific way, we come to see the stability, constancy, and
permanency of Canadian foreign policy (CFP) in the Arctic instead of postulating that a rupture in CFP occurred at the end of the Cold War. By doing so,
foreign policy can exist as a site for the construction of significations and differences between the inside of the state
(a Self) and an external world (Others). In turn, the Self will be defined in contrast with the external world and thus
establish the differences that are considered meaningful.6 This process of differentiation can be positive or negative,
but it stands on the projection of identity which, in the case of foreign policy, will favour one component (the Self, Canada)
over the Other(s). This discursive practice shapes the elaboration and implementation of the policies by bringing forth
a system of acceptable norms, conventions, and signs. This context will contribute afterwards to the stability and
permanency of the established practices and discourses. Foreign policy discourses actively construct how the
foreign world beyond the border might look to insiders, especially after the Cold war given that it sparked an
interest for initiating new reactions to novel issues and that these initiatives had to be explained to multiple
audiences.7 To better illustrate my point, I shall comment on The Northern Dimension of Canadas Foreign Policy
document, and how the threats affecting Northern populations are conceptualized within it, as this represents a key
component of the document itself. This exercise of defining the threats is centred on external phenomenon,
particularly globalisation, climate change and transboundary pollution issues.8 The performative function of the
foreign policy discourse is evident here as the threats to the integrity and the security of the communities all come from
the exterior (the Others). This situation has the advantage of concealing the fact that many past, present and future threats
are direct consequences of the activities emanating from the Southern populations in Canada and that Canada has been
idle on many issues (climate change being the most notable example of this inactivity). A passage of this document is particularly important in order to
grasp the identity-building nature of foreign policy: A clearly defined Northern Dimension of Canadas Foreign Policy will establish a framework to promote the
extension of Canadian interests and values (P.2). The Canadian government policy toward the North is thus taking the very common
path of the diffusion and exportation of Canadian values to construct communities to its image. A relevant example of this type
of practice in the circumpolar world would be the investment coming from the Canadian government for governance and democratic reform projects in Northern
Russia. These initiatives helped Canada and Russias Nordic communities connect, but if a new way of structuring policies in the North can be identified, I think
we must pay attention to the transfer of responsibilities from governmental agencies to organizations of the third sector, the oft-cited concept of civil society.
However, we must understand though that this new neo-liberal way of conducting business results in an overstretch for these
organizations because these new tasks of providing services and implementing the practical implications of policies
on a daily basis come with a price, which is a reduction in the advocacy capability of these organizations9. Furthermore,
as many critical voices in Canadian foreign policy had outlined (see Sandra Whitworth or Mark Neufeld), the democratisation of CFP has not created a structural
change in the formulation and application of CFP. As a former Foreign Affairs minister reminded us, governments still control international processes even
though NGOs can influence and stimulate cooperation. On another note, the inclusion of Canadian NGOs in international forum in the 1990s have been made by
the Canadian government with the underlying assumption that these NGOs would largely support official Canadian positions and interests.10 On a related front,
the divide is clearly delineated and the differentiation is established, positive or negative depending on your normative standpoint (it is not the purpose of this
article to postulate one) with this key fragment of the Northern dimension of Canadas Foreign Policy, since foreign policy has the goal first and foremost to
enhance the security and prosperity of Canadians (P.10). This necessity appears in the majority of official foreign policy documents linked to Canadian foreign
policy. We do not want to judge the intentions or the instrumentality of such a discursive practice but rather underline the existence of its basic function performed
by foreign policy, which is to reify the insideoutside demarcation point.
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FWSpatialityTerrorism spec.
Space is crucial to understanding the war on terrorism. Governmental manipulation of
spatial imaginaries which paint Al-Qaeda as spaceless enables comparably global violence
Stuart Elden, International Boundaries Research Unit, Department of Geography, Durham University, Terror and
Territory, Antipode, Vol. 39, Issue 5, p. 821-845, November 2007, http://instituty.fsv.cuni.cz/~kozak/elden-terrorterritory.pdf
The events of September 11, 2001 in New York City, Washington DC, and the field in Pennsylvania are a political, spatial and temporal marker. The lazy
shorthand of September 11 or, worse, 9/11, masks the spatial context of the events in favour of a temporal indication (see Gregory 2004a:19), one that is
reduced to a number in calendar time, and seeks a privileging of the date for American grief, occluding other events on that day in this and other years.1 As
some have been quick to remind us, more than twice as many children died of diarrhoea on this same day than died in the more publicised events (United
Nations Development Report figures from http://www.undp.org; see Pilger 2002:1). President George W Bush himself has now put a figure to part of the
consequences, suggesting that at least 30,000 people have died in Iraq since the invasion (2005), while others have put the figures much higher. And yet, such
mere enumerations risk losing sightand losing siteof the problem in their numerical accounts; accountancy in place of grief. Unlike
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Memory, Practice: selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, recorded March 4,
1972, http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze
GILLES DELEUZE: Possibly we're in the process of experiencing a new relationship between theory and practice. At one time,
practice was considered an application of theory, a consequence; at other times, it had an opposite sense and it was thought to inspire theory, to be
indispensable for the creation of future theoretical forms. In any event, their relationship was understood in terms of a process of
totalisation. For us, however, the question is seen in a different light. The relationships between theory and practice are
far more partial and fragmentary. On one side, a theory is always local and related to a limited field, and it is applied in another
sphere, more or less distant from it. The relationship which holds in the application of a theory is never one of resemblance. Moreover, from the moment a
theory moves into its proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles, walls, and blockages which require its relay by
another type of discourse (it is through this other discourse that it eventually passes to a different domain). Practice is a set of relays from
one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually
encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall. For example, your work began in the theoretical analysis of the context of
confinement, specifically with respect to the psychiatric asylum within a capitalist society in the nineteenth century. Then you became aware of the necessity for
confined individuals to speak for themselves, to create a relay (it's possible, on the contrary, that your function was already that of a relay in relation to them); and
this group is found in prisons -- these individuals are imprisoned. It was on this basis that you organised the information group for prisons (G.I.P.)(1), the object
being to create conditions that permit the prisoners themselves to speak. It would be absolutely false to say, as the Maoist implied, that in
moving to this practice you were applying your theories. This was not an application; nor was it a project for initiating reforms or an enquiry in
the traditional sense. The emphasis was altogether different: a system of relays within a larger sphere, within a multiplicity
of parts that are both theoretical and practical. A theorising intellectual, for us, is no longer a subject, a representing or representative
consciousness. Those who act and struggle are no longer represented, either by a group or a union that appropriates the right to stand as their conscience.
Who speaks and acts? It is always a multiplicity, even within the person who speaks and acts. All of us are "groupuscules."(2)
Representation no longer exists; there's only action-theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks. FOUCAULT: It
seems to me that the political involvement of the intellectual was traditionally the product of two different aspects of his
activity: his position as an intellectual in bourgeois society, in the system of capitalist production and within the ideology it produces or imposes
(his exploitation, poverty, rejection, persecution, the accusations of subversive activity, immorality, etc); and his proper discourse to the extent that
it revealed a particular truth, that it disclosed political relationships where they were unsuspected. These two forms of politicisation did not
exclude each other, but, being of a different order, neither did they coincide. Some were classed as "outcasts" and others as "socialists."
During moments of violent reaction on the part of the authorities, these two positions were readily fused: after 1848, after the Commune, after 1940. The
intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was
forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes. The intellectual spoke the truth to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who were
forbidden to speak the truth: he was conscience, consciousness, and eloquence. In the most recent upheaval (3) the intellectual discovered that the masses no
longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing
themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge,
a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. Intellectuals are
themselves agents of this system of power-the idea of their responsibility for "consciousness" and discourse forms part of the system. The
intellectual's
role is no longer to place himself "somewhat ahead and to the side" in order to express the stifled truth of the
collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of "knowledge," "truth,"
"consciousness," and "discourse. "(4) In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and
regional, as you said, and not totalising. This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and
undermining powe r where it is most invisible and insidious . It is not to "awaken consciousness"
been aware for some time that consciousness is a form of knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a prerogative of the bourgeoisie),
but
alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a
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AFFPredictions Good
Predictions good, accepting uncertainty doesnt mean you shouldnt try and predict the
future .
Kurasawa 4 Fuyuki Kurasawa, Associate Professor of Sociology at York University, Cautionary Tales,
rather than
embarking upon grandiose speculation about what may occur, we should adopt a pragmatism that abandons itself to
the twists and turns of history; let us be content to formulate ad hoc responses to emergencies as they arise. While this
argument has the merit of underscoring the fallibilistic nature of all predictive schemes, it conflates the necessary recognition of the contingency of history with
unwarranted assertions about the latters total opacity and indeterminacy.
must be ever more vigilant for warning signs of disaster and for responses that provoke unintended or unexpected consequences (a point to which I will return in
the final section of this paper). In addition, from a normative point of view, the acceptance of historical contingency and of the self-limiting character of
farsightedness places the duty of preventing catastrophe squarely on the shoulders of present generations. The
remain only beliefs and premises, rather than rational judgements. Even at their best, such decisions are
likely to be poorly understood by the organisations charged with their implementation. At their worst, such decisions
may be poorly understood by the decision-makers themselves.
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Operating through political spheres is the only way to produce change
Lawrence Grossburg, University of Illinois, We Gotta Get Outta This Place, 1992, p. 391-393
The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance, understanding that such institutions
are the mediating structures by which power is actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions that power
can be challenged. The Left has assumed from some time now that, since it has so little access to the apparatuses of
agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The Left does in fact need more
visibility, but it also needs greater access to the entire range of apparatuses of decision making and power. Otherwise,
the Left has nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have produced starvation and the other social disgraces of our
world, although it is individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they must act within organizations, and
within the system of organizations which in fact have the capacity (as well as the moral responsibility) to fight them.
Without such organizations, the only models of political commitment are self-interest and charity. Charity suggests that we act on behalf of others who cannot act
on their own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the circuits of global capitalism, and everyones position is increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will
not take much to change the position of any individual in the United States, as the experience of many of the homeless, the elderly and the fallen middle class
demonstrates. Nor are there any guarantees about the future of any single nation. We
Resistance is always a local struggle, even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to
connect into its global structures of articulation: Think globally, act locally. Opposition is predicated precisely on locating the points of
articulation between them, the points at which the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto the global. Since the meaning of these terms has to be
understood in the context of any particular struggle, one is always acting both globally and locally: Think globally, act appropriately!
is based on the hope, perhaps even the illusion, that such things
are possible. The construction of an affective commonality attempts to mobilize people in a common struggle, despite
the fact that they have no common identity or character, recognizing that they are the only force capable of providing
a new historical and oppositional agency. It strives to organize minorities into a new majority.
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AFFReform Good
Slow but steady revolutions allows us to bring about change.
Bradley 9 Robert Bradley, PhD in Political Economy, M.A. in Economics, Capitalism at Work: Business,
Government and Energy, pg. 103
There are good revolutions and bad ones. There must be continual improvement, or incrementalism, between sea
changes. Often, if not quite always, revolution comes by steps, not bounds. Business thinker Jim Collins enriched the SchumpeterDrucker-Hamel view by noting how good-to-great companies were disciplined change makers whose entrepreneurship was less about revolutionary moments
than revolutionary process. In his words: Good-to-great
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politicizing the supposedly non-political neither guides emancipatory action nor guards it against demagoguery. At
best, dissident IR sanctions a detached criticality rooted (ironically) in Western modernity. Michael Shapiro, for instance, advises
the dissident theorist to take a critical distance or position offshore from which to see the possibility of change. But what becomes of those
who know they are burning in the hells of exploitation, racism, sexism, starvation, civil war, and the like
while the esoteric dissident observes critically from offshore ? What hope do they have of overthrowing these shackles of
sovereignty? In not answering these questions, dissident IR ends up reproducing despite avowals to the contrary, the
sovereign outcome of discourse divorced from practice, analysis from policy, deconstruction from reconstruction,
particulars from universals, and critical theory from problem-solving.
OCallaghan 2 Terry O'Callaghan, lecturer in the school of International Relations at the University of South
Australia, International Relations and the third debate, ed: Jarvis, 2002, p. 80
There are also a host of technological and logistical questions that plague George's scheme and make problematic his recommendations. For example, through
what medium are those on the fringes of the international system going to speak to the world? Although it may be true that the third world has now been
integrated into the global polity via the advent of technological innovations in communications, allowing for remote access to information sources and the Internet,
it also remains true that the
majority of those on the fringes continue to be disenfranchised from such mediums, whether as
a result of a lack of economic resources, the prevalence of illiteracy, or social, cultural and political circumstances
that systemically exclude, women (among others) from economic resources and certain political and social freedoms.
Need we remind George that social, political, and individual autonomy is at a minimum in these parts of the world,
and an intellectual approach as controversial as postmodernism is not likely to achieve the sorts of goals that George
optimistically foreshadows. Indeed, on practical questions such as these, matters otherwise central to the success of postmodern visions, George
prefers to be vague, suggesting instead that the intricacies of such details will somehow work themselves out in a
manner satisfactory to all. Such a position reveals George's latent idealism and underscores how George's schema is an intellectual one: a theory of
international politics written for other theorists of international politics. George's audience is thus a very limited and elite audience and
begs the question of whether a senior, middle-class scholar in the intellectual heartland of Australia can do anything
of real substance to aid the truly marginalized and oppressed. How is it possible to put oneself in the shoes of the
"other," to advocate on his or her behalf, when such is done from a position of affluence, unrelated to and far
removed from the experiences of those whom George otherwise champions? Ideals are all good and well, but it is hard to
imagine that the computer keyboard is mightier than the sword, and hard to see how a small, elite, affluent
assortment of intellectuals is going to generate the type of political momentum necessary to allow those on the
fringes to speak and be heard! 1 .
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George's desire to move to a new "space beyond International Relations" smacks of wishful idealism, ignoring the
current configuration of global political relations and power distribution; of the incessant ideological power of
hyperindividualism, consumerism, advertising, Hollywood images, and fashion icons; and of the innate power
bestowed on the (institutional) barons of global finance, trade, and transnational production. George seems to have little
appreciation of the structural impediments such institutions pose for radical change of the type he so fiercely advocates. Revolutionary change of the kind desired by
George ignores that fact that many individuals are not disposed to concerns beyond their family, friends, and daily work
lives. And institutional, structural transformation requires organized effort, mass popular support, and dogged singlemindedness if societal norms are to be challenged, institutional reform enacted, consumer tastes altered, and political
sensibilities reformed. Convincing Nike that there is something intrinsically wrong with paying Indonesian workers a few dollars a week to manufacture shoes for the global
market requires considerably more effort than postmodern platitudes and/or moral indignation. The cycle of wealth creation and distribution that sees Michael Jordan receive multimillion
dollar contracts to inspire demand for Nike products, while the foot soldiers in the factory eke out a meager existence producing these same products is not easily, or realistically,
challenged by pronouncements of moving beyond International Relations to a new, nicer, gentler nirvana.
Alt fails, apathy doesnt translate to action, no real plan for enacting the alternative means
nothing gets done.
OCallaghan 2 Terry O'Callaghan, lecturer in the school of International Relations at the University of South
Australia, International Relations and the third debate, ed: Jarvis, 2002, p. 81-82
More generally, of course, what George fails to consider is the problem of apathy and of how we get people to care about the plight
of others. What do we with the CEOs of multinational corporations, stockbrokers, accountants, factory workers, and the unemployed, who, by and large, fail to consider the
homeless and destitute in their own countries, let alone in places they have never isited and are never likely to visit? Moral indignation rarely translates into
action, and apathy about the plight of others is a structural impediment as strong any idea, theory, or writing. What
George's treatise thus fails to consider is how we overcome this, and how we get others to listen. He needs to explain how the social, political,
psychological, and moral structures that define the parameters of existence for the many millions of ordinary citizens
in the first world, and that deflects attention from the marginalized and the oppressed can be broken down. Unfortunately,
there is little to indicate that George has thought much about this, suggesting that his commitment to postmodern theory is not likely to make much difference. In fact, in the
academy the postmodern light is already beginning to dim in certain quarters, having registered scarcely a glimmer in
the broader polity, where, if change was to ensue, it needed to burn brightly. Even among those versed in the nomenclature of scholarly
debate, theorists of international politics remain skeptical of the value of postmodern discourse, by and large rejecting it. This does not portend well for postmodern visionaries and the
future of postmodern discourse. But can George really be surprised by this? After all, his
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As I have already signalled, I wish to unsettle this common interpretation of Foucault on sovereignty. Certainly, the methods and approaches that Foucault posits
will be familiar to readers from diverse intellectual fields as being extremely sharp, productive, potent, and original. However, these moves do not
"solve," "escape," or even "destroy" the problem of sovereignty. Foucault does not succeed in "cutting off the King's
head," at least not in this way. Moves into resistant forms of subjectivity, historicism, or war do not help us to leave behind
the problem of sovereignty; in fact, they only compound it. It is true that the genealogical method of historicizing the ahistorical forms of
political theory and pluralizing "universal" forms of history is devastating to those models. But although Foucault may indeed succeed in cutting
off the head of modern juridical state sovereignty in this way, he does not succeed in cutting of the head of sovereignty
altogether. Foucault does not simply give us a methodological toolbox, but an armory of discursive weapons. If we go down the road of "politics
as the continuation of war by other means," wedded to a relentless historicism to reveal war and confrontation as an underlying
"reality," Foucault risks becoming a cipher for just about any political position. The critical weapons themselves are
politically ambiguous; they could just as much be used by states, the far Right or left-leaning political theorists.
Undermining modern state sovereignty through these means does not rid us of the problem of sovereignty; it makes
it even more pressing. We are faced with the problem of how to justify alternative forms of political authority with neither the recourse to "ancient" rights,
to Hobbesian state reason, nor to the "blackmail" of the Enlightenment. If we "cut off the King's head," perhaps another, possibly even
nastier, bead will sprout elsewhere. In his determined regicidal project, Foucault risks becoming the Lady Macbeth of
political thought.
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will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they
will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why
could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed? It is often said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth
century, no longer have a Left. Since nobody denies the existence of what I have called the cultural Left, this
amounts to an admission that that Left is unable to engage in national politics. It is not the sort of Left which can be asked to deal
with the consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the present cultural Left would
have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions. It
would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma. I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. The first
is that the Left should put a moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the Left
should try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans. It should ask the public to consider how the country of Lincoln and
Whitman might be achieved. In support of my first suggestion, let me cite a passage from Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy in which he expresses his
exasperation with the sort of sterile debate now going on under the rubric of "individualism versus communitarianism." Dewey thought that all discussions which
took this dichotomy seriously suffer from a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general notions under which specific situations are to be
brought. What we want is light upon this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. For
such a logic of inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationships with one another.
Dewey was right to be exasperated by sociopolitical theory conducted at this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this
level is typically a rightist maneuver, one which supplies "the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the established order. "9 For such ascents are now more
common on the Left than on the Right. The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction,
the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus,
the more radical your critique. When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been "inadequately theorized," you can be pretty
certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism.
Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan's impossible object of
desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by "problematizing familiar concepts." Recent attempts to subvert
social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent
scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly "subversive" books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost
impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political
strategy. Even though what these authors "theorize" is often something very concrete and near at hand-a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandalthey offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable. These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what
happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement
from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book
Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called
"power." This is the name of what Edmundson calls Foucault's "haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a
resourceful spook."10
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AFFViolence UQ
Global violence at its lowest point in history now, impacts of the kritik are exaggerated
Pinker 11 Steven Pinker, experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science author, and
Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard, Violence Vanquished, Wall Street
Journal, 9/24/2011,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopSto
ries
Believe it or not, the world of the past was much worse. Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we
may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth. It has not brought violence down to
zero, and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children. This claim, I know, invites
We tend to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which we can recall
examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than
footage of people dying of old age. There will always be enough violent deaths to fill the evening news, so people's impressions of violence will be disconnected from its actual likelihood.
Evidence of our bloody history is not hard to find. Consider the genocides in the Old Testament and the crucifixions in the New, the gory mutilations in Shakespeare's
tragedies and Grimm's fairy tales, the British monarchs who beheaded their relatives and the American founders who dueled with their rivals. Today the decline in these brutal practices can be quantified. A look
at the numbers shows that over the course of our history, humankind has been blessed with six major declines of
violence. The first was a process of pacification: the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering and
horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations, with cities and governments, starting about 5,000 years
ago. For centuries, social theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau speculated from their armchairs about what life was like in a "state of nature." Nowadays we can do better. Forensic archeologya kind of "CSI:
skepticism, incredulity, and sometimes anger.
Paleolithic"can estimate rates of violence from the proportion of skeletons in ancient sites with bashed-in skulls, decapitations or arrowheads embedded in bones. And ethnographers can tally the causes of death
in tribal peoples that have recently lived outside of state control. These investigations show that, on average, about 15% of people in prestate eras died violently, compared to about 3% of the citizens of the earliest
states. Tribal violence commonly subsides when a state or empire imposes control over a territory, leading to the various "paxes" (Romana, Islamica, Brittanica and so on) that are familiar to readers of history. It's not
that the first kings had a benevolent interest in the welfare of their citizens. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his livestock from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and
feuding. From his point of view, such squabbling is a dead lossforgone opportunities to extract taxes, tributes, soldiers and slaves. The second decline of violence was a civilizing process that is best documented in
Europe. Historical records show that between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a 10- to 50-fold decline in their rates of homicide. The numbers are consistent with narrative histories
of the brutality of life in the Middle Ages, when highwaymen made travel a risk to life and limb and dinners were commonly enlivened by dagger attacks. So many people had their noses cut off that medieval medical
textbooks speculated about techniques for growing them back. Historians attribute this decline to the consolidation of a patchwork of feudal territories into large kingdoms with centralized authority and an
infrastructure of commerce. Criminal justice was nationalized, and zero-sum plunder gave way to positive-sum trade. People increasingly controlled their impulses and sought to cooperate with their neighbors. The
third transition, sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, took off with the Enlightenment. Governments and churches had long maintained order by punishing nonconformists with mutilation, torture and
gruesome forms of execution, such as burning, breaking, disembowelment, impalement and sawing in half. The 18th century saw the widespread abolition of judicial torture, including the famous prohibition of "cruel
and unusual punishment" in the eighth amendment of the U.S. Constitution. At the same time, many nations began to whittle down their list of capital crimes from the hundreds (including poaching, sodomy, witchcraft
calculates violent deaths as a proportion of the world's population). Though it's tempting to attribute the Long Peace to nuclear deterrence, non-nuclear developed states have stopped fighting each other as well.
Political scientists point instead to the growth of democracy, trade and international organizationsall of which, the statistical evidence shows, reduce the likelihood of conflict. They also credit the rising valuation of
The fifth trend, which I call the New Peace, involves war in the world as a
whole, including developing nations. Since 1946, several organizations have tracked the number of armed conflicts
and their human toll world-wide. The bad news is that for several decades, the decline of interstate wars was accompanied by a bulge of civil wars, as newly independent countries were led
by inept governments, challenged by insurgencies and armed by the cold war superpowers. The less bad news is that civil wars tend to kill far fewer people than wars
between states. And the best news is that, since the peak of the cold war in the 1970s and '80s, organized conflicts
of all kindscivil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, terrorist attackshave declined throughout
the world, and their death tolls have declined even more precipitously. The rate of documented direct deaths from political violence (war, terrorism, genocide
human life over national grandeura hard-won lesson of two world wars.
and warlord militias) in the past decade is an unprecedented few hundredths of a percentage point. Even if we multiplied that rate to account for unrecorded deaths and the victims of war-caused disease and famine,
it would not exceed 1%. The most immediate cause of this New Peace was the demise of communism, which ended the proxy wars in the developing world stoked by the superpowers and also discredited genocidal
ideologies that had justified the sacrifice of vast numbers of eggs to make a utopian omelet. Another contributor was the expansion of international peacekeeping forces, which really do keep the peacenot always,
physical and sexual abuse. And the campaign for gay rights has forced governments in the developed world to repeal laws criminalizing homosexuality and has had some success in reducing hate crimes against gay
people.
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AFFNo Impact
Democracy checks the impact to the kritik
Rosemary OKane, professor of comparative political theory at the University of Keele, Modernity, the Holocaust
and politics, Economy and Society 26:1, 1997, pp. 58-59
Modern bureaucracy is not 'intrinsically capable of genocidal action' (Bauman 1989: 106). Centralized state coercion has no
natural move to terror. In the explanation of modern genocides it is chosen policies which play the greatest part, whether in effecting bureaucratic
secrecy, organizing forced labour, implementing a system of terror, harnessing science and technology or introducing extermination policies, as means and as
ends. As Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR have shown, furthermore, those chosen policies of genocidal government turned away from and not towards
modernity. The choosing of policies, however, is not independent of circumstances. An analysis of the history of each case plays an important part in explaining
where and how genocidal governments come to power and analysis of political institutions and structures also helps towards an understanding of the factors
which act as obstacles to modern genocide. But it is not just political factors which stand in the way of another Holocaust in modern society. Modern
societies have not only pluralist democratic political systems but also economic pluralism where workers are free to
change jobs and bargain wages and where independent firms, each with their own independent bureaucracies, exist
in competition with state-controlled enterprises. In modern societies this economic pluralism both promotes and is served
by the open scientific method. By ignoring competition and the capacity for people to move between organizations
whether economic, political, scientific or social, Bauman overlooks crucial but also very 'ordinary and common'
attributes of truly modern societies. It is these very ordinary and common attributes of modernity which stand in the
way of modern genocides.
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approach brings
rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this
book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism,
gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars outbreaks and outcomes.
Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices.9 So,if you want peace, work for peace. Indeed, if you want justice
strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but
(gender and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs
downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military may be the most important way to reverse womens oppression. The dilemma is that peace
work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this books
evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.
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No root cause of war, root cause claims offer no solutions to preventing war.
Kalevi Jaakko Holsti, professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, "On The Study Of War,"
Peace And War: Armed Conflicts And International Order, 1648-1989, 1991, p. 3
Investigators of conflict, crises, and war reached a consensus years ago that monocausal explanations are
theoretically and empirically deficient. Kenneth Waltz (1957) classic typology of war explanations convincingly demonstrated various problems
arising from diagnoses that locate war causation exclusively at the individual, state attribute, or systemic levels. He also illustrated how prescriptions
based on faulty diagnoses offer no solution to the problem. Even Rousseaus powerful exploration of the consequences of
anarchy, updated by Waltz (1979), remains full of insights, but it only specifies why wars recur (there is nothing to prevent them) and
offers few clues that help to predict when, where, and over what issues. Blainey (1973), in another telling attack on monocausal
theories, continues where Waltz left off. He offers, on the basis of rich historical illustrations, both logical and anecdotal rebuttals of facile explanations of war that
dot academic and philosophical thought on the subject. But rebuttals of the obvious are not sufficient. We presently have myriads of theories of
war, emphasizing all sorts of factors that can help explain its etiology. As Carroll and Fink (1975) note, there are if anything
too many theories, and even too many typologies of theories. Quoting Timascheff approvingly, they point out that
anything might lead to war, but nothing will certainly lead to war.
Competing ideologies have different ideas of root cause claims, no one true root cause of
violence.
Dr. John Monahan, psychologist and professor of law at University of Virginia-Charlottesville, "The Causes of
Violence," FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 1 January 1994
I have been asked to summarize everything that we really know about the biological, sociological, and psychological causes of violencein 20 minutes or less.
Unfortunately, I think I can do it. But, I warn you in advance what
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AFFAT: Discourse FW
Discourse is overrated; focusing on it prevents discussion on other aspects of political
decisions.
Gearoid O Tuathail, Department of Geography at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, The patterned
mess of history and the writing of critical geopolitics: a reply to Dalby, Political Geography Vol 15 No 6/7, 1996,
CIAO
While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse and concerns of foreign-policy decision- makers are quite
different, so different that they constitute a distinctive problem- solving, theory-averse, policy-making subculture. There is a danger that academics
assume that the discourses they engage are more significant in the practice of foreign policy and the exercise of
power than they really are. This is not, however, to minimize the obvious importance of academia as a general
institutional structure among many that sustain certain epistemic communities in particular states. In general, I do not
disagree with Dalbys fourth point about politics and discourse except to note that his statement-Precisely because reality could be represented in
particular ways political decisions could be taken, troops and material moved and war fought-evades the important
question of agency that I noted in my review essay. The assumption that it is representations that make action possible is
inadequate by itself. Political, military and economic structures, institutions, discursive networks and leadership are
all crucial in explaining social action and should be theorized together with representational practices. Both here and
earlier, Dalbys reasoning inclines towards a form of idealism. In response to Dalbys fifth point (with its three subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book is
about the CPD, not the Reagan administration. He analyzes certain CPD discourses, root the geographical reasoning practices of the Reagan administration nor
its public-policy reasoning on national security. Dalbys book is narrowly textual; the general contextuality of the Reagan administration is not dealt with. Second,
let me simply note that I find that the distinction between critical theorists and post- structuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn by Dalby and others.
Third, Dalbys interpretation of the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced by dissident peace researchers in Europe is highly
idealist, an interpretation that ignores the structural and ideological crises facing the Soviet elite at that time. Gorbachevs reforms and his new security
discourse were also strongly self- interested, an ultimately futile attempt to save the Communist Party and a discredited regime of power from disintegration.
The issues raised by Simon Dalby in his comment are important ones for all those interested in the practice of critical geopolitics. While I agree with Dalby that
questions of discourse are extremely important ones for political geographers to engage, there is a danger of fetishizing this concern with
discourse so that we neglect the institutional and the sociological, the materialist and the cultural, the political and
the geographical contexts within which particular discursive strategies become significant. Critical geopolitics, in
other words, should not be a prisoner of the sweeping ahistorical cant that sometimes accompanies
poststructuralism nor convenient reading strategies like the identity politics narrative; it needs to always be open to
the patterned mess that is human history.
Discourse framing widens gaps between people based on languages spoken, prevents
social change.
McNally 97 David McNally, professor of political science at York University, In Defense of History: Marxism and the
Postmodern Agenda, 1997, p. 26-27
We are witnessing today a new idealism, infecting large sections of the intellectual left, which has turned language not merely into an independent realm, but into an all pervasive realm,
a sphere so omnipresent, so dominant, as virtually to extinguish human agency. Everything is discourse, you see; and discourse is everything. Because human begins are linguistic
creatures, because the world in which we act is a world we know and describe through language, it allegedly follows that there is nothing outside language. Our
language, or
discourse, or text the jargon varies but not the message defines and limits what we know, what we can
imagine, what we can do. There is a political theory here too. Oppression is said to be rooted ultimately in the way in
which we and others are defined linguistically, the way in which we are positioned by words in relation to other words,
or by codes which are said to be structured like a language. Our very being, our identities and subjectivities, are constituted through language. As
one trendy literary theorist puts it in David Lodges novel Nice Work, it is not merely that you are what you speak; no, according to the new idealism, you are what speaks you.
Language is thus the final prison-house. Our confinement there is beyond resistance; it is impossible to escape
from that which makes us what we are. This new idealism corresponds to a profound collapse of political horizons. It is the pseudoradicalism of a period of retreat
for the left, a verbal radicalism of the word without deed, or, rather, of the word as deed. In response to actual structures and practices of oppression and exploitation, it offers the
rhetorical gesture, the ironic turn of phrase. It comes as little surprise, then, when one of the chief philosophers of the new idealism, Jacques Derrida, tells us that he would hesitate to
use such terms as liberation 1 Imprisoned within language, we may play with words; but we can never hope to liberate ourselves from immutable structures of oppression rooted in
language, itself. The
new idealism and the politics it entails are not simply harmless curiosities; they are an abdication of
political responsibility, especially at a time of ferocious capitalist restructuring, of widening gaps between rich and
poor, of ruling class offensives against social programs. They are also an obstacle to the rebuilding of mass
movements of protest and resistance.
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Epistemological kritiks require a large lack of information, doesnt preclude doing things
like the plan.
Tyler Cowen, Department of Economics at George Mason University, "The Epistemic Problem Does Not Refute
Consequentialism," 2 November 2004, http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/Epistemic2.pdf, p. 14-15)
The epistemic critique relies heavily on a complete lack of information about initial circumstances. This is not a plausible
general assumption, although it may sometimes be true. The critique may give the impression of relying more heavily on a more
plausible assumption, namely a high variance for the probability distribution of our estimates concerning the future.
But simply increasing the level of variance or uncertainty does not add much force to the epistemic argument. To see
this more clearly, consider another case of a high upfront benefit. Assume that the United States has been hit with a bioterror attack
and one million children have contracted smallpox. We also have two new experimental remedies, both of which offer
some chance of curing smallpox and restoring the children to perfect health. If we know for sure which remedy works,
obviously we should apply that remedy. But imagine now that we are uncertain as to which remedy works. The
uncertainty is so extreme that each remedy may cure somewhere between three hundred thousand and six hundred thousand children. Nonetheless we have
a slight idea that one remedy is better than the other. That is, one remedy is slightly more likely to cure more children, with no other apparent
offsetting negative effects or considerations. Despite the greater uncertainty, we still have the intuition that we should try to save as many children as possible.
We should apply the remedy that is more likely to cure more children. We do not say: We are now so uncertain
about what will happen. We should pursue some goal other than trying to cure as many children as possible. Nor would
we cite greater uncertainty about longer-run events as an argument against curing the children. We have a definite good in the present (more cured children),
balanced against a radical remixing of the future on both sides of the equation. The
difficult-to-forecast possibilities). That still would not diminish the force of our reason for saving more children. The variance of forecast becomes larger on both
sides of the equation whether we save the children or not and the value of the upfront lives remains. A higher variance of forecast might increase the required
size of the upfront benefit (to overcome the Principle of Roughness), but it would not refute the relevance of consequences more generally. We could
increase the uncertainty more, but consequentialism still will not appear counterintuitive. The remedies, rather than curing
somewhere in the range of three to six hundred thousand children, might cure in the broader range of zero to all one million of the children. By all classical
statistical standards, this new cure scenario involves more uncertainty than the previous case, such as by having a higher variance of possible outcomes. Yet this
higher uncertainty lends little support for the view that curing the children becomes less important. We still have an imperative to apply the remedy that appears
best, and is expected the cure the greater number of children. This example may appear excessively simple, but it points our attention to the non-generality of the
epistemic critique.
The critique appears strongest only when we have absolutely no idea about the future; this is a special
rather than a general case. Simply boosting the degree of background generic uncertainty should not stop us from
pursuing large upfront benefits of obvious importance.
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Our knowledge doesnt have to be perfectthe aff still matters
Rudra Sil, assistant professor of Political Science at University of Pennsylvania. Against Epistemological
Absolutism: Toward a Pragmatic Center, in Beyond Boundries ed Sil and Eileen M. Doherty 2000 p160-161
An even stronger case is made by Paul Feyerabend who attacks the very idea that a paradigm might provide some conceptual coherence to a body of theoretical
literature; rather, the problem of incommensurable meanings in each and every theory, in each and every case, makes it impossible to generate shared
paradigms. Thus, Feyerabends relativistic epistemology provides no criteria whatsoever for the acceptance or refutation of
theories, leaving social scientists with a growing body of inconsistent and incommensurable theories.~~ Feyerabends
position is implicitly accepted by many interpretive theorists as well as postmodernists. For relativists, it is not simply the methodological immaturity of the social
sciences that produces debates over the relative merits of theories; the very nature of social inquiry makes it impossible to achieve a uniform set of methods or
criteria for the evaluation of theory.56 Posrmodernists even make a virtue out of this criterionless social science where anything goes. Some
of the less
skeptical posrmodernists proceed to emphasize intuition and empathy as substitutes for positivist method, but the
most extreme relativists can do no more than deconstruct texts to reveal hidden biases and challenge hidden
assumptions. In both cases, there is no basis for determining when an insightful narrative or an act of deconstruction
yields anything of significance to anyone other than author. Is there a position between Feyera bends relativism, on the one hand, and
Popperian conventionalism or Lakatoss sophisticated falsificationism on the other? To most social scientists in their everyday work, the latter seems unfeasible
and the former unthinkable. Instead, some have responded to the challenge of absolute relativism by calling for the use of
compelling arguments and empirical findings not to test or falsify theories but to modestly engage in the rational
persuasion of a given audience; thus, they posit a bounded notion of rationality, stripped of its absolute
universalism and consistent with socially constructed intersubjective realities.57 Others suggest that theories may initially be
incommensurable, but that they can be translated so as to enable at least a tentative comparison and evaluation on the basis of the same kind of empirical
tests.s8 In these approaches, the result will not be definitive and theories will never become laws, but instead of crirerionless narratives, scholars can at
least make an effort to persuade audiences by appealing to their own common-sense version of reason by relating
theories to compelling empirical observations. In the end, there may be no alternative to relying on the judgment of
other human beings, and this judgment is difficult to form in the absence of empirical findings. However, instead of
clinging to the elusive idea of a uniform standard for the empirical validation of theories, it is possible to simply
present a set of observational statementswhether we call it data or narrativefor the modest purpose of
rendering an explanation or interpretation more plausible than the audience would allow at the outset. In practice, this is
precisely what the most committed positivists and interprerivists have been doing anyway; the presentation of logically consistent hypotheses supported by
data and the ordering of facts in a thick narrative are both ultimately designed to convince scholars that a particular proposition should be taken more seriously
than others. Social
analysis is not about final truths or objective realities, but nor does it have to be a meaningless world
of incommensurable theories where anything goes. Instead, it can be an ongoing collective endeavor to develop,
evaluate, and refine general inferencesbe they in the form of models, partial explanations, descriptive inferences,
or interpretationsin order to render them more sensible or plausible to a particular audience. In the absence of a
consensus on the possibility and desirability of a full-blown explanatory science of international and social life, it is
important to keep as many doors open as possible. This does not require us to accept each and every claim without some sort of validation,
but perhaps the community of scholars can be more tolerant about the kinds of empirical referents and logical
propositions that are employed in validating propositions by scholars embracing all but the most extreme
epistemological positions.
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Ontological questions arent a reason to exclude certain arguments
Wendt 2 Alexander Wendt, professor of international security at political science at Ohio State, with James Fearon,
Handbook of International Relations, ed Carlsnaes, 2002, p. 53
It is important to understand these ontological issues, since failure to do so can lead to analytical tools or frameworks becoming tacit ontologies (Ruggie, 1983:
285), foreclosing potentially interesting lines of argument without justification. However, we do not believe this framing of the rationalist
constructivist debate is the most useful, for three reasons. First, the issues are by definition philosophical, and as
such not likely to be settled soon, if ever, and almost certainly not by IR scholars. Second, although some rationalists
and constructivists may in fact have strong ontological commitments, others may not, since there is no inherent need
to commit to an ontology to work in these traditions. Just as quantum physicists can do their work without any idea how to interpret its
ontological implications, social scientists too can proceed pragmatically, remaining agnostic about what society is 'really' made of. Finally, it seems
doubtful that as a discipline we know so much about international life that we should rule out certain arguments a
priori on purely philosophical grounds. Thus, while recognizing the role that ontological issues play in structuring the
rationalist-constructivist debate, in this chapter we will largely avoid them, adopting a stance of ontological pluralism
instead.
gas chambers and death camps a kind of consent to the horror. And Cavell can characterize Nazis as those who have lost the capacity for being horrified by
what they do. Where was Heideggers horror? How could he have failed to know what he had consented to? Hannah Arendt associates Heidegger with Paul
Valerys aphorism, Les evenements ne sont que lecume des choses (Events are but the foam of things). I think one understands the
source of her intuition. The mass extermination of human beings, however, does not produce foam, but dust and
ashes; and it is here that questioning must stop.
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makes that being what it is. 6.If life gives value to life, than one of the parts of life is value. Put another way, value cannot
exist without life, so value is life and life is value. 7. If value is only relative, then saying life being valuable relative to life is the same as saying
life has worth relative to life. Anything that is relative to itself is an unconditional part of itself and therefore has
"inherentness". 8.THEREFORE, anyway you look at it, life is value and value is life - and life has inherent value.
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AFFBiopower Good
Democratic biopower is designed to protect the rights of its citizens.
Dickinson 4 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, Biopolitics, Fascism,
Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148)
In the Weimar model, then, the rights of the individual, guaranteed formally by the constitution and substantively by the welfare system, were the central element
of the dominant program for the management of social problems. Almost no one in this period advocated expanding social provision out of the goodness of their
hearts. This was a strategy of social management, of social engineering. The
Nazis aimed, instead, to give the state the wherewithal to do with every citizen what it willed. And where Weimar welfare advocates understood themselves to be
constructing a system of knowledge and institutions that would manage social problems, the Nazis fundamentally sought to abolish just that
actually not very compatible with exclusionary and coercive policies; it relied too heavily on the cooperation of its targets and of armies of volunteers, it was too
embedded in a democratic institutional structure and civil society, it lacked powerful legal and institutional instruments of coercion, and its rhetorical structure was
too heavily slanted toward inclusion and tolerance.
cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce health, such a system can and historically does create compulsory programs to enforce
it. But again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist
Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian
or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear,
historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a logic or
imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the
unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet
clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of
autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to
conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a
condition of liberty, just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least,
totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic
of social engineering.
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AFFBiopower Good
Modern Biopower does not stifle ideas, but opens up a forum for many different ideas to be
expressed
Dickinson 4 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, Biopolitics, Fascism,
Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148)
This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of
power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not opposites, in the sense that they are
two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept power should not be read
as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are
grey, are essentially or effectively the same. Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have
varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive elements
(like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare
state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The
Democratic biopower has greatly increased the rights and resources of citizens under
interventionist regimes.
Dickinson 4 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, Biopolitics, Fascism,
Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148)
At its simplest, this view of the politics of expertise and professionalization is certainly plausible. Historically speaking, however, the further conjecture that this
micropolitical dynamic creates authoritarian, totalitarian, or homicidal potentials at the level of the state does not
seem very tenable. Historically, it appears that the greatest advocates of political democracy in Germany left
liberals and Social Democrats have been also the greatest advocates of every kind of biopolitical social
engineering, from public health and welfare programs through social insurance to city planning and, yes, even
eugenics.102 The state they built has intervened in social relations to an (until recently) ever-growing degree; professionalization has run ever more rampant
in Western societies; the production of scientistic and technocratic expert knowledge has proceeded at an ever more frenetic pace. And yet, from the
perspective of the first years of the millennium, the second half of the twentieth century appears to be the great age
of democracy in precisely those societies where these processes have been most in evidence. What is more, the
interventionist state has steadily expanded both the rights and the resources of virtually every citizen including those
who were stigmatized and persecuted as biologically defective under National Socialism. Perhaps these processes have created an ever more restrictive iron
cage of rationality in European societies. But if so, it seems clear that there is no necessary correlation between rationalization and
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threats are seen as coming mainly from the actors' own fears, or from what happens when the fears
of individuals turn into paranoid political action. In my view, this emphasis on the subjective is a misleading conception of
threat, in that it discounts an independent existence for what- ever is perceived as a threat. Granted, political life is often
marked by misperceptions, mistakes, pure imaginations, ghosts, or mirages, but such phenomena do not occur simultaneously to large numbers of politicians,
and hardly most of the time. During the Cold War, threats - in the sense of plausible possibilities of danger - referred to 'real'
phenomena, and they refer to 'real' phenomena now. The objects referred to are often not the same, but that is a different matter. Threats
have to be dealt with both n terms of perceptions and in terms of the phenomena which are perceived to be threatening. The point of Waevers concept
of security is not the potential existence of danger somewhere but the use of the word itself by political elites. In his 1997
PhD dissertation, he writes, One can View security as that which is in language theory called a speech act: it is not interesting as a sign referring to something
more real - it is the utterance itself that is the act.24 The deliberate disregard of objective factors is even more explicitly stated in Buzan & WaeVers joint article
of the same year. As a consequence, the phenomenon of threat is reduced to a matter of pure domestic politics.
security conception, because a convincing sense of urgency has been the chief culprit behind the abuse of 'security' and the consequent politics of panic', as
Waever aptly calls it. Now, here - in the case of urgency - another baby is thrown out with the Waeverian bathwater. When real situations of urgency
arise, those situations are challenges to democracy; they are actually at the core of the problematic arising with the
process of making security policy in parliamentary democracy. But in Waevers world, threats are merely more or less
persuasive, and the claim of urgency is just another argument. I hold that instead of 'abolishing' threatening phenomena
out there by reconceptualizing them, as Waever does, we should continue paying attention to them, because situations with a
credible claim to urgency will keep coming back and then we need to know more about how they work in the interrelations of groups and states (such as civil
wars, for instance), not least to find adequate democratic procedures for dealing with them.
Barry Buzan, Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and
honorary professor at the University of Copenhagen, Security, the State, the New World Order, and Beyond, On
Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, 1998, CIAO
One assumption underlying this chapter is that differences in internal construction have a substantial impact on how states
define threats and vulnerabilities, and therefore on the whole construction of the security problematique. Given their fundamental character, all states (or
at least all of those that are embedded in an international system--and it is only these that will be discussed here) will share bottom line security
concerns about the maintenance of their territorial base and their political autonomy. If the threat is of external armed
attack aimed at seizing territory or resources, or overthrowing the government, then, within the limits of resources,
conceptions of security will tend to be similar in all states, and the effect of internal differences will be pushed into the
background. Beyond that bottom line, however, internal differences can have radical effects on the construction of security, affecting both the breadth of the
security agenda (what kinds of actions--military, political, economic, societal, environmental--are perceived as threats), and the definition of priorities for security
policy.
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knowledge, or the constitution of the subjects and objects of struggle, and (2) ethics, or the moral
incitement of people to political action. I will show how this perspective can illuminate how anti-SIS activists
developed an effective discourse to kill this crucial nuclear weapons program. A critical evaluation of this campaign
can contribute to peace in at least three ways: it can celebrate the artful practices these activists engaged in to
achieve their political objectives; it can add a case study of a victorious campaign to the emerging literature on the
tactics of nonviolent action; and finally, it can contribute to the current debate about the future of the peace
movement in a post-cold war world. The anti-SIS campaign involved an alliance of environmental and peace groups, which suggests one possible political strategy
for future peace actions. POLITICAL MOVEMENTS AS VICTIMAGE RITUALS Political activists must engage in discourse to fight and win power
struggles with their adversaries. In political battles, such as the anti-SIS campaign, words are weapons with tactical
functions. Michel Foucault clearly articulates this perspective: Indeed, it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together. And for this reason, we must conceive
discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable ... as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various
strategies. It is this distribution that we must reconstruct ... according to who is speaking, his position of power, the institutional context in which he happens to be situated ... with the
shifts and reutilizations of identical formulas for contrary objectives.(n4) A power strategy refers to all means, including discursive practices, put into play by an actor in a particular
power relationship to influence the actions of others. The
rhetorical practice is tactical in the sense that it is designed to generate intense anger and moral
outrage at what has, is, or could be happening to the values of those who identify with it. These people can then be
mobilized in a campaign to fight the villain. This effect is intensified by emphasizing the negative features of the
actions of the agents and agencies responsible for the violation. Once implanted, this knowledge exerts an ethical incitement to
activism. Activists, this model suggests, must develop a discourse that does two things: vilify and activate. These two functions correspond to two mom ents in a melodramatic
victimage ritual. These two moments of identification are (1) acts of violation or vilification and (2) acts of redemptive or heroic action. Movement leaders must construct images of both
villains and activists fighting villains. They
must convince us that acts of violation have occurred or will happen, and then they must
goad us into doing something about it. This analysis suggests that a movement discourse is a rhetorical system
composed of two elements working in tandem. One of the main features of motive in victimage ritual is the aim to destroy the destroyer. In the anti- SIS
campaign, as we shall see, the objective was to kill a Department of Energy (DOE) program to build a nuclear weapons plant. One means of accomplishing that objective was to vilify its
proponents. The second element in a movement discourse is redemptive or ethical. Once leaders succeed in convincing their followers that there is a real threat, they must then incite
those convinced to act. To accomplish these objectives, peace activists have assembled a discourse charged with peril and power--a knowledge of the scene they confront and an ethic
of political activism. They have constituted a "knowledge" of the dangers posed by the nuclear arms race and nuclear war that is infused with a redemptive ethic of political activism.
Activists use this knowledge and ethic to goad people into campaigns to achieve antinuclear objectives. For example, activists have invoked the term power in two distinct ethical
senses. There is the "bad" power of the agents of the nuclear arms race (politicians such as Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher; agencies such as the U.S. government, NATO, or
the Department of Energy). And there is the "good" power that activists produce by their concerted political actions, including a subjective effect called "empowerment." Activists
empower themselves by "taking personal responsibility for the fate of the earth," sacrificing time, energy, and money
to the cause. By engaging in political activism, peace activists say they transcend psychological despair and obtain a
sense of personal power.(n6)
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The postmodern argument also poses challenges for anyone concerned with environmental protection. Environmentalism is fundamentally about conserving and
preserving nature. Whether one worries about climate change, loss of biological diversity, dwindling resources, or overall degradation of the earth's air, water,
soil, and species, the nonhuman world is the backdrop of concern. What happens when critics call this backdrop into question? What happens when they claim
that one understanding of "nature" is at odds with another and that there is no definitive way to judge which one is better? How can a movement dedicated to
protecting nature operate if the very identity of its concern is in doubt? These may seem like academic questions, but they go to the heart of environmentalism
and have begun to worry even the most committed environmentalists. After scholars such as William Cronon, Timothy Luke, and J. Baird Callicott
introduced "eco-criticism" to the scholarly and popular publics, various environmental activists and thinkers have
struggled to articulate a response. Their inability to do so in a decisive and persuasive manner has further damaged the environmentalist position.
Even more troubling, now that the critique is out of the bag, it is being co-opted by people on the right. Antienvironmentalists such as Charles Rubin and Alston Chase, for example, now claim that, if there is no such thing as
"real" nature, we need not treat the nonhuman world with unqualified respect. If we think it is in our interest, we can freely choose to
pave the rainforest, wipe out the last panda bear, or pump high levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What is critical to notice in both cases
is that criticisms of "nature," whether they come from the left or are co-opted by the right, are playing an increasing
role in structuring the confrontation between anti- and pro-environmentalists. And they are re-setting the fault lines
within the environmental movement itself.
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Paul Wapner, associate professor and director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at American University.
Leftist Criticism of "Nature" Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age, Dissent Winter 2003
The third response to eco-criticism would require critics to acknowledge the ways in which they themselves silence
nature and then to respect the sheer otherness of the nonhuman world. Postmodernism prides itself on criticizing the urge toward
mastery that characterizes modernity. But isn't mastery exactly what postmodernism is exerting as it captures the nonhuman world within its own conceptual
domain? Doesn't postmodern cultural criticism deepen the modernist urge toward mastery by eliminating the ontological weight of the nonhuman world? What
else could it mean to assert that there is no such thing as nature? I have already suggested the postmodernist response: yes, recognizing the social construction
of "nature" does deny the self-expression of the nonhuman world, but how would we know what such self-expression means? Indeed, nature doesn't speak;
rather, some person always speaks on nature's behalf, and whatever that person says is, as we all know, a social construction. All attempts to listen to nature
are social constructions-except one. Even the most radical postmodernist must acknowledge the distinction between physical existence and non-existence. As I
have said, postmodernists accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world even if they argue about
the different meanings we ascribe to it. This acknowledgment of physical existence is crucial. We can't ascribe meaning to that which doesn't
appear. What doesn't exist can manifest no character. Put differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about
interpreting nature's expressions. And all of us should be wary of those who claim to speak on nature's behalf
(including environmentalists who do that). But we need not doubt the simple idea that a prerequisite of expression is
existence. This in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse embodiments-must be seen by ecocritics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of environmental preservation.
Postmodernists reject the idea of a universal good. They rightly acknowledge the difficulty of identifying a common value given the multiple contexts of our valueproducing activity. In fact, if there is one thing they vehemently scorn, it is the idea that there can be a value that stands above the individual contexts of human
experience. Such a value would present itself as a metanarrative and, as Jean-Franois Lyotard has explained, postmodernism is characterized fundamentally
by its "incredulity toward meta-narratives." Nonetheless, I can't
see how postmodern critics can do otherwise than accept the value
of preserving the nonhuman world. The nonhuman is the extreme "other"; it stands in contradistinction to humans as
a species. In understanding the constructed quality of human experience and the dangers of reification,
postmodernism inherently advances an ethic of respecting the "other." At the very least, respect must involve ensuring that the "other"
actually continues to exist. In our day and age, this requires us to take responsibility for protecting the actuality of the nonhuman.
Instead, however, we are running roughshod over the earth's diversity of plants, animals, and ecosystems. Postmodern
critics should find this particularly disturbing. If they don't, they deny their own intellectual insights and compromise their fundamental moral commitment. Now,
what does this mean for politics and policy, and the future of the environmental movement? Society is constantly being asked to address questions of
environmental quality for which there are no easy answers. As we wrestle with challenges of global climate change, ozone depletion, loss of biological diversity,
and so forth, we need to consider the economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic values at stake. These considerations have traditionally
marked the politics of environmental protection. A sensitivity to eco-criticism requires that we go further and include
an ethic of otherness in our deliberations. That is, we need to be moved by our concern to make room for the "other"
and hence fold a commitment to the nonhuman world into our policy discussions. I don't mean that this argument should drive all
our actions or that respect for the "other" should always carry the day. But it must be a central part of our reflections and calculations. For example, as we
estimate the number of people that a certain area can sustain, consider what to do about climate change, debate restrictions on ocean fishing, or otherwise
assess the effects of a particular course of action, we must think about the lives of other creatures on the earth-and also the continued existence of the nonliving
physical world. We
must do so not because we wish to maintain what is "natural" but because we wish to act in a morally
respectable manner. I have been using postmodern cultural criticism against itself. Yes, the postmodernists are right: we can do what we want with the
nonhuman world. There is nothing essential about the realm of rocks, trees, fish, and climate that calls for a certain type of action. But postmodernists are also
right that the only ethical way to act in a world that is socially constructed is to respect the voices of the others-of those with whom we share the planet but with
whom we may not share a common language or outlook. There is, in other words, a limit or guiding principle to our actions. As political theorist Leslie Thiele puts
it, "One can't argue for the diversity of views of "nature" without taking a stand for the diversity of nature."
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have thus described at length how contemporary society has turned its
eyes away from the future, its people focusing on immediate consumption and ephemeral fashions, its politicians on
the next election and its industrial leaders on the next annual report. To take global warming seriously involves
asking the kinds of questions about future directions that most sociologists believe they have now put behind them.
Preoccupied with analysing these social facts, sociologists are unwilling to be disturbed by the voices of natural
scientists, reporting from inaccessible upper atmospheres, ancient ice cores or deep oceans, where no social facts
exist. Unable themselves to judge the validity of the evidence, and increasingly uncomfortable with predictions and
teleologies, they prefer to avoid the subject. For the classics (Marx, Weber, Durkheim), as for most sociologists since, nature, for practical purposes, was an
unproblematic, stable background constant, increasingly understood and controlled by science and technology. The role of sociology was to study social processes, trends and
contradictions independently from the natural sciences. Such an insulation of society from nature has, indeed, become a major subject of debate between realists and social
constructivists within environmental sociology, since Catton and Dunlap first counterposed their New Ecological Paradigm to what they called the Human Exemptionalist Paradigm in
the late 1970s (Dunlap, 2002; Yearley, 2002). Since then, environmental sociologists have worked out an accommodation, enabling them to take seriously the findings of natural
scientists. See, for example, Mol and Spaagarens (2000: 27) claim that What is conceived of as social . . . cannot be explained without reference to the natural. Mainstream
sociologists, on the other hand, have remained much closer to the social constructivist paradigm of nature. At best a middle road could be claimed for the idea that science and society
are partially independent levels, but this led to the same conclusion as constructivism: that knowledge of science is rarely relevant for sociologists (Lidskog, 2001). Such a partial
independence of the levels is, however, dramatically called into question by the time convergence that has become manifest in the last decades. Social processes that impact on nature
in unintended ways, such as emissions caused by economic growth and the destruction of carbon sink forests, have been speeding up exponentially since the industrial revolution. The
result has been an unexpected and unprecedented speeding up also of changes in natural processes .
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we are not ourselves competent to evaluate the debate between climatologists and sceptics,
we have no option but to accept the professional authority and integrity of the accredited experts, on questions of
natural processes, as a basis for our own analyses of social causes, consequences and choices. The alternative is
irrelevance or worse an effective complicity with the vested interests of fossil fuel corporations.
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AFFScience Good
Science is helps empower people, increases conditions of living all over the world.
Stephen Eric Bronner, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, 2004, Reclaiming the Enlightenment:
Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, p. 21-23
Something will always be missing: freedom will never become fully manifest in reality. The relation between them is asymptotic. Therefore, most philosophes
understood progress as a regulative ideal, or as a postulate,13 rather than as an absolute or the expression of some divine plane or the foundation for a
system.4 Even in scientific terms, progress retained a critical dimension insofar as it implied the need to question established certainties. In this vein, it is
misleading simply to equate scientific reason with the domination of man and nature.15 All the great figures of the scientific revolution Bacon,
Boyle, Newtonwere concerned with liberating humanity from what seemed the power of seemingly intractable forces.
Swamps were everywhere; roads were few; forests remained to be cleared; illness was rampant; food was scarce; most people would never leave their village.
What it implied not to understand the existence of bacteria or the nature of electricity, just to use very simple examples, is today simply inconceivable.
Enlightenment figures like Benjamin Franklin, the complete philosophe,6 became famous for a reason: they not only freed people from
some of their fears but through inventions like the stove and the lightning rod they also raised new possibilities for making
peoples lives more livable. Critical theorists and postmodernists miss the point when they view Enlightenment
intellectuals in general and scientists in particular as simple apostles of reification. They actually constituted its most consistent enemy. The philosophes may not have grasped the commodity form, but they empowered people by challenging
superstitions and dogmas that left them mute and helpless against the whims of nature and the injunctions of
tradition. Enlightenment thinkers were justified in understanding knowledge as inherently improving humanity. Infused with a sense of furthering the public
good, liberating the individual from the clutches of the invisible and inexplicable, the Enlightenment idea of progress required what the young Marx later termed
the ruthless critique of everything existing. This regulative notion of progress was never inimical to subjectivity. Quite the
contrary: progress became meaningful only with reference to real living individuals.
bourgeois science is meaningful only with criteria for verification or falsification that are rigorous, demonstrable,
and open to public scrutiny. Without such criteria, the critical enterprise turns into a caricature of itself: creationism becomes as scientific as evolution,
astrology as instructive as astronomy, prayer as legitimate a way of dealing with disease as medicine, and the promise of Krishna to help the righteous a way of
justifying the explosion of a nuclear device by India.10 Striking is how the emphasis on local knowledgea stance in which all science is seen as ethno-science
with standards rooted in a particular culture1 withdraws objectivity, turns the abdication of judgment into a principle of judgment, and recalls what was once a
right-wing preoccupation with Jewish physics, Italian mathematics, and the like. Forgotten is that those who do physics or biology or
mathematics all do it the same way or, better, allow for open scrutiny of their own way of doing it. The validity of
science does not rest on its ability to secure an absolute philosophical grounding, but rather on its universality and
its salience in dealing with practical problems. There is a difference between the immanent method of science and
the external context in which it was forged. The sociology of science is a completely legitimate endeavor. It only makes sense to consider, for
example, how an emerging capitalist production process with imperialistic aspirations provided the external context in which modern science arose. But it is
illegitimate to reduce science to that context or judge its immanent workings from the standpoint of what externally inspired its development.12 Too much
time has already been wasted on deconstructing the scientific method for what Foucault termed its dogmatic
approach and its supposedly hermetic character. That is the case not simply because the scientific revolution was
directed against a scholastic view of nature that constrained the possibilities of inquiry or because the Enlightenment
spirit influenced many nontraditional notions of science like homeopathy. It is primarily because, in political terms, the issue is not the
method of science but the type of scientific research that demands funding and, ultimately, the ends to which science is put. Again defined by what they
oppose, ironically, those principally concerned with the scientific method reflect the establishmentarian tendency to isolate science from politics. Whatever the
connection between this method and metaphysics, or the status of its original commitment to benefit humanity, there is no reason to believe that science in the
age of globalization has lost its ability to question previous claims or established authority: neither from the standpoint of science nor ethics is it legitimate to
maintain that the enlightenment has lost any trace of its own self-consciousness. 13
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AFFEco-Pragmatism Good
Eco pragmatism allows us to avoid getting bogged down in different viewpoints, allows for
avenues of change to happen
Reitan 98 Eric Reitan (Seattle University Writer for the Electronic Green Journal) Pragmatism, Environmental World
Views, and Sustainability. December 1998
With the urgency of the current environmental crisis, we cannot afford to get bogged down in theoretic disputes that mask a
common mission and get in the way of making the practical changes that are so pressing. Pragmatic Mediation of Deep Ecology
and Christian Stewardship The example I have chosen to discuss is the theoretic debate between two environmental philosophies that have emerged in the last
few decades: the philosophy of stewardship that has evolved in Christian communities, and the philosophy of deep ecology. I choose these two not on the basis
of any special status they have, but rather because they are the two environmental perspectives with which I have the most personal acquaintance, and because
the nature of the debate between them usefully illustrates the value of using pragmatic principles to guide theoretic environmental discourse. Before
applying pragmatic principles to this example, some preliminary comments may be helpful. First, it is important to
keep in mind that complex worldviews or philosophical systems may impact more than one domain of human life, and
that they may have radically opposing pragmatic implications in one or more of those domains while implying
substantially the same behaviors in the domain of the human-nature relationship. In such a case, we can say that while the
worldviews do not have the same pragmatic meaning overall, they have the same environmental meaning. As such, it is important not to let the real differences in
other areas mask the genuine agreement in the environmental domain. Second, it is worth noting that there is almost certainly more than one human social
arrangement that harmonizes sustainable with the natural environment. Put another way, there is more than one set of human practices that works in terms of
promoting a healthy human-natural system. And it follows from this observation that more than one worldview can be
pragmatically true: while two worldviews may imply environmental behaviors that are different, and hence have a
different pragmatic meaning, insofar as they both promote sustainable behaviors they are both true from a pragmatic
standpoint. Pragmatic truth is not monistic, but pluralistic. Given the urgent pragmatic goals of environmental philosophy, sustained
theoretic debates about meaning differences of this sort appear to be unwarranted, and should be put aside in favor
of the task of finding practical ways of integrating and accommodating those alternative social arrangements which
serve the common goal of sustainable human-natural systems.
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